After Haiti earthquake, we must say never again

As someone who was born and raised in the Dominican Republic, the country that shares an island with Haiti, I feel a deep sadness and magnified sense of responsibility towards my homeland’s neighbor.

I grew up around Haitians in the northern countryside of my country. Many worked on my family’s lands, others served as domestic workers, and many toiled in the sugarcane fields that dominated the landscape in our part of the country.

Those are the typical low-wage jobs that Haitian immigrants have access to in Dominican Republic, a country that has had a sordid and hypocritical relationship with Haitians. For many decades, hundreds of thousands of Haitians have crossed the mountainous border to make a life for themselves and their families doing backbreaking work in my homeland.

The tenuous existence many Haitians endure in my home country — living undocumented and invisible their entire lives, their Dominican-born children denied citizenship and access to basic social services, subsisting like unwanted squatters in deplorable shantytowns — reflects the hemisphere’s general attitude towards Haiti.

The country exists in a nether region in our collective periphery, rotting from political corruption (after decades of dictatorships, repeated coups resulted in a shallow political system); agonizing from widespread health crises (nearly 60 percent of children under 5 are anemic, according to the U.N.’s World Food Program); and slowly fading away from the world’s consciousness (more than half of Haiti’s 10 million people live on less than $1 a day).

But the massive earthquake that hit Haiti — the poorest country in the hemisphere — changed that forever. The destruction is staggering, with half the capital city of Port-au-Prince in rubbles. At press time, the latest estimate of fatalities was 72,000, according to the Haitian prime minister.

When the earthquake hit, there were 45,000 Americans in Haiti. Undoubtedly, many were naturalized citizens and multigenerational Americans who had returned to their motherland for family visits or to retire after living in the United States. Still, many others were aid workers, volunteers, businessmen and missionaries, there to alleviate the needs of a population all but abandoned by its government. It’s a testament to the generosity of the human spirit that so many Americans and other foreigners were there doing such humbling work.

But the real work of rebuilding — physically and otherwise — must be undertaken not by charitable individuals and philanthropic entities, but by world governments that possess the resources and the mandates to effect real, meaningful and lasting change.

The United States must take the lead in this effort, and commandeer others to do the same, pledging capital, talent, materials and technical know-how.

Money is a good place to start. Before the disaster, foreign aid added up to 30 percent-40 percent of the Haitian national government’s budget. So far, the United States has pledged $100 million in relief aid, and other governments have pledged a few hundred million more.

The earthquake is the hemisphere’s Katrina. And Haiti is our New Orleans.

We must not allow ourselves to turn a blind eye to the continued degradation of an entire country. We must not permit millions of our brothers and sisters to live without a real measure of dignity. We must never again sustain such depraved indifference.

Juleyka Lantigua-Williams is a writer whose work has appeared in books, magazines and newspapers around the country. She can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.

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