January 22, 2010 | Read Time: 4 minutes
President Obama announced last week that the United States will commit $100-million to relief efforts for Haiti in the wake of last week’s devastating earthquake. The outpouring of support from individual American citizens from coast to coast has been even more remarkable.
As a development officer at American Jewish World Service, I have spent this week answering phone calls from Americans from all walks of life wishing to make donations – large and small – to assist with relief efforts in Haiti.
As a human-rights organization that has been supporting grass-roots groups in Haiti for more than 10 years, American Jewish World Service partners are at the forefront of relief efforts in rural areas cut off from large-scale aid programs in the capital. It can feel overwhelming to try to respond to disasters of this magnitude, but the people I spoke to this week have given me hope.
I spoke to Malka, a 92-year-old woman in Brookline, Mass., who donated $18 because “anyone who can watch those images on TV and doesn’t make a gift is simply not human.”
I received a call from Matt, in Reno, Nev., a deaf and unemployed man who spoke to me through a sign-language interpreter. Matt’s Jewish friends told him about our support of community-based organizations across the developing world. His $25 gift will make things a little tighter for him next month, but it will ensure that one more person in rural Jacmel has clean water.
I was also humbled to receive a call from my 81-year-old grandmother in Lithia, Fla., asking me to transfer $20 from her savings account and give it to “the babies in Haiti who can’t find their mothers.”
My colleagues have received gifts upwards of $50,000 and $100,000 from concerned families drawn by our efforts to assist communities that, as of this writing, have yet to receive relief supplies from the capital.
Tragedies of this magnitude are opportunities not only for generosity and solidarity, but also for education and reflection. Like Hurricane Katrina, this catastrophe is not simply a natural disaster, but also the product of the extreme poverty caused in part by misguided policies and their unintended consequences. In addition to helping Haiti in its time of need, this is an opportunity to raise important questions about these policies.
Starting in the 1970s, Haitian agriculture was reshaped by the U.S. government’s development and economic policies. The American-led eradication of the indigenous Creole pig to preempt an outbreak of African swine fever in the early 1980s had disastrous social and economic consequences on the livelihoods of people in rural Haiti.
Over the next few decades, the push for trade and economic liberalization commonly known in policy circles as the “Washington consensus” led to the dumping of foreign surplus agricultural products, especially rice, onto Haitian markets, decimating local agricultural economies and the nation’s ability to produce enough food to be self-sufficient.
Those policies by the American government were key factors in causing small-scale local farmers who could no longer survive off of their land to migrate to Port-au-Prince. The city has since become more and more crowded. Urban slums expanded as shoddily constructed shacks were built to accommodate the influx of rural migrants looking for jobs. It is poverty, not choice, that drove so many Haitians to live in risk-prone areas.
After this protracted, bitter history of good intentions gone sour in Haiti, I am heartened to see that the United States is genuinely looking to build partnerships with Haitians to rebuild the country’s infrastructure. I hope we will remember the lessons of the past as we look ahead to Haiti’s future, not just now during the first phase of the emergency, but as we begin to examine how American development and trade policies can be crafted to truly combat the poverty that has made the earthquake’s impact worse.
For their part, organizations like American Jewish World Service are sending financial support directly to community-based groups in rural areas so they can articulate and carry out their own plans for development.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. After my conversations with donors this week and the immediate, urgent response from our government, I am confident that the Obama administration and American citizens are heeding Dr. King’s call to action.
Courtney Lobel is a development officer at American Jewish World Service, in New York.
