by Yvonne Donlon

Created on: November 02, 2010

In January, just after the magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti, and devastated its people, the prominent headlines read something like this: “Who Can Ignore Haiti Now?”

Well, nine months later, the answer is pretty clear. Billions of dollars were donated and apportioned to Haiti through global governments, non-profit aid organizations, and individuals all over the globe. Less than 15% of that has been used to clean-up, rebuild and restore Haiti’s people to even the extreme level of poverty in which they already lived. It is apparent that the 15% used of all those billions of dollars had served only to keep the million plus people rendered homeless fed from day to day, without a plan for rebuilding and restoring.

Once again, the compassion of the people of the planet was displayed in our immediate and universal giving. We wrote checks to foundations, we donated to events and fundraisers.  We gave with love and compassion. And then we went about our daily lives, trusting that our money would be used to get Haiti on its feet. And, once again, we are shocked when we discover that very little has been done with all that money. But we are off the hook. After all, we did what we could. We gave. Billions of dollars is surely enough to help out those poor people, right?

Meanwhile, nine months later, many hundreds of bodies still lay disregarded under the rubble, over a million people are still homeless and living in tent cities all around the desecrated remains of their former lives and their lost family members. And an outbreak of cholera has begun. Yes, begun. Without a clear plan to help the people of Haiti, cholera will not be its last rub against disease as a result of January’s earthquake and the abhorrent and inadequate conditions of life as an average Haitian even before the earthquake.

Poverty has abounded in Haiti as long as anyone can remember. Even before the earthquake 80% of its 10 million person population lived in poverty, 54% in abject poverty. In October of 2009, as reported by the Catholic Reporter, “according to the CIA World Factbook, [Haiti] can be an unrelenting misery tour, one scene of chaos and gut-wrenching poverty worse than the last. If there is creativity somewhere in the mix, it seems to be in the multiple expressions of poverty - from the land itself, denuded of trees turned into cooking charcoal; to the shantytowns that have open sewerage, no running water, and that keep heaving themselves higher up

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