Haiti disaster

I've actually been unable to write about the disaster in Haiti thus far.

It's too personal, too excrutiating, too deeply painful to write about.

I lived in a small rural community Haiti for a year when I was just out of high school, volunteering in a youth service and learning opportunity with Mennonite Central Committee. It is difficult to describe the impact that this had on me as a young adult, confronted with both the challenges and the resilience of the Haitian people. It gave me an opportunity to see with my own eyes what it meant to live in a failed state; inadequate police protection, overuse of force when the police were present, and terrible human rights violations because of these two things.

It also gave me a first-hand view into why the pursuit of human security is so essential; pursuing human security is the recognition that true peace is more than the absence of war. Without adequate food, without clean water, wihtout basic freedom from arbitrary arrest-- the population lives in fear and disruption that threatens at any moment to erupt into civil unrest.

This is the context for the disaster in Haiti. Already, people did not have enough to eat. Already, the majority of the population did not have access to clean drinking water. Already, the health care system was straining and threatening to crumble. And then- this. This disaster that left more than a million people homeless and more than two hundred thousand dead.

Why so many deaths? Why so many homeless in such a small country? Surely the Asian Tsunami of 2004 was, according to scientific analysis, a larger-scale natural disaster?

These are the questions in Haitians minds, and in the minds of Canadians as well.

Unfortunately, this question has an answer.

The disaster in Haiti was so wide spread percisely because of those pre-existing conditions I described. And especially, it was so wide-spread because of the inadequate, crumbling, and dilapitated homes (if people were lucky enough to have a home and not a shack built out of scraps).

I honestly saw houses that were built out of cardboard and not even taped together. The different pieces of the scraps of materials people found simply leaned together.

There was no way Haiti was equipped to deal with this earthquake.

Let's continue to respond in every way we can.