To Haiti, 10 Years Later, With Love
The earthquake of 10 years ago was a disaster that played a profound, life-altering role for a lot of Haitians. There’s no other way to go about it. However, it’s far from our only disaster and disasters are far from the only thing Haitian culture cares about, when living in a place where human rights violations occur at least once every second.
Haiti has always been subject to gross simplification by outsiders looking for easy answers but there aren’t any. Haiti is the only nation on Earth born out of a successful slave revolt. Meaning, in 1804, that generation of Haitians changed everything.
An army of blacks beat Napoleon, and God smiled before government did.
Since then, brutal and self-serving foreign intervention and political corruption has afflicted the poorest country in the Northern Hemisphere. Haiti’s poverty is it’s distinction and it’s the Haitian cross to bear. But not only poverty, but corruption.
According to the US 2019 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, Haitians also suffer from unnecessary and prolonged pretrial detention; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; a judiciary subject to corruption and outside influence.
In February, Haiti’s two armed institutions faced off in a six-hour gun battle that left a soldier and protester dead, and more than a dozen others, including police officers and two soldiers, wounded. The Miami Herald asks “How did a country, whose army was abolished in 1995 after a turbulent history of corruption, coups and some of the hemisphere’s worst human-rights violations, end up with its cops and soldiers shooting at each other?”
The report also states that physical attacks on journalists; widespread corruption and impunity; crimes involving violence or threats of violence targeting persons with physical, mental, and developmental disabilities, and sexual and gender-based violence and discrimination were also credibly noted.
No disappearances were reported in the past year. So if the person you sleep next to goes missing, they are effectively gone, with no effort to find them. Fear, prevalent and clear as it is for Haitians today, has never been and cannot be the story of Haiti.
History aside, because it is a long-winded and complicated story told by it’s victors… Haiti has been lacking its 21st century flowers. The seeds never took root.
Ten years ago, on January 12, 2010, when Haiti was hit by its worst natural disaster in more than a century, the country didn’t have much but everything to lose. Ten years ago, I was 12 years old, in science class using the motherland to explain tectonic plates. Few people around me understood what that was like. My island shook and exploded and crushed itself underneath rubble. It was the first time my ancestor’s grief racked my tiny body over ground they used to walk on, and I was filled with the wails of 11 million people who knew bloodshed, who knew dictator, who knew dirt. Although even today, there is no agreed-upon count, 250,000 people with eyes and hair like mine and my family died. And I was in school, like it was a regular Tuesday.
Last month, according to the Pulitizer Center and the Miami Herald, Haiti’s biggest hospital is still not built 10 years after quake after 6 years of construction, and even if it were built, there isn’t enough money to pay any doctors. Scientists say extreme weather events like hurricanes, floods and droughts will become worse as the planet warms. Island nations are expected to be among the hardest hit. Haiti’s 10 earthquake monitors can’t stay in the building that houses the earthquake surveillance unit overnight because the building itself is not earthquake resistant, and even if it were, there isn’t enough money to pay anyone to spend the night. There are some parts of the country untouched by recovery, laying in ruins, standing still in time. This past year, Haitian protests got deadlier and deadlier with President Jovenel Moïse, being accused of embezzling millions in public funds and refusing to step down. There’s currently over 9,000 soldiers protecting the Dominican Republic’s border with Haiti, deporting and conducting daily immigration raids to weed out the hundreds of Haitians trying to flee chaos.
Back in 2010, The New York Times blamed Haiti for it’s own death toll, citing political corruption, Vodou, and corporal punishment for shaping a “progress-resistant culture”, even though the US and the UN both fund its police force.
The irony of calling the first free black republic progress resistant is not lost here.
Haiti has neither a mother nor a father. But she has daughters, sons, poets, and friends. She has a diaspora. I don’t want to make it another decade where I allow broken systems to fail her, her children, and her children’s children, again and again and again. Especially in the wake of a global pandemic, it is funny to see how the poor responses by the UK and the US reflect extreme privilege. According to the Miami Herald, panic had ignited in the country after Haitians learned that 16 individuals, who arrived from a Dominican bus port where there are five confirmed COVID-19 cases, were placed in quarantine in a hotel in the city of Tabarre. In response, some threw stones at the building.
Not only has Haiti been plagued by corrupt governing bodies and natural disasters but plagued by disease. In Haiti, the body is constantly at war.
So, ten years later, with love. The Haitian Times suspects that the diaspora has yet to organize around a common agenda with increasing political power and has failed to translate into greater national focus on Haiti — and subsequent US policy toward it. With the election cycle coming to a close, democracy is on trial everyday. I don’t have it all figured out, but I know I’m not supposed to. With the Earth unable to spin the way it has been for years, the questions still remain hanging in the balance. And hanging they will remain.
In this digital age, it is easy to feel like seeing the constant suffering of others worldwide and feeling death by a thousand cuts and confusing that for doing something because at the end of the day, it is not. Intention does not matter the same weight as impact. It seems, we live in a paralysis of choice, marked by fear.
But we have to do something. Whether it is fight back in Town Square or write a Tony-award winning Broadway musical. Donate to a nonprofit, an orphanage, a church, a community center, a scholarship or an arts opportunity. Foster or adopt. Always do something.
No matter the struggle, Haitians across the globe have to tell the people where we are in life and where we are going. To imagine a Haiti where all of these human rights violations are impossible, one where the motherland knows that we can help get the rock off of her arm or the knife out of her back. Just knowing we would do something. Love is a revolving door.
It’s a small world after all.
