Chile

July 6 – Haiti and Chile – Lessons Learned

Posted on July 6, 2010. Filed under: All Posts, Chile, CTF - A Community, CTF Network, From the Field - Relevant News, Haiti |

Earthquake devastation – Lessons learned from Haiti and Chile.

The Daily Star [Dhaka, Bangladesh] – “But if we look at the recent earthquakes in Chile and Haiti, the Richter scale magnitude appears as not the major factor that contributed to the damages. Chile earthquake was far stronger (8.8 magnitude) than the Haiti earthquake (7.0 magnitude) yet the death toll and other damages in Haiti happened to be higher than Chile. What was the reason behind ?” 

Fr. Scott

Comment: An interesting article with much information and an important point – in case you ever wondered: it was the social factors more than the geological that caused the damages from the earthquake in Haiti to be so much greater. That was despite the fact that the earthquake in Chile was 1,000  times more powerful! 

We now know what factors are correlated the most with damages after an earthquake. That is good news, right? or is it bad? Both, I guess – the good news is that it may help to prevent problems in the future in Haiti and elsewhere  if we can alter the social factors before the fact. The bad news is: the Haitian government reported that an estimated 230,000 people had died, 300,000 had been injured and 1,000,000 made homeless making it one of the worst natural disasters in modern history. 

I have been in Haiti now for almost 6 months. Today I drove downtown to get some water and to buy some food for our new community. The devastation and the exacerbation of the poverty wrought by the earthquake were still everywhere apparent. While I believe there is a light at the end of the tunnel, at least in the short-term I think it might be an oncoming train. It has rained 2 of the last 3 nights and the hurricane season just started. Things could get worse. Imagine that.

Social factors? I saw them as we drove through the rubble in Port au Prince and the ladies accosted us from all sides trying to sell their goods and telling us they were hungry. “Please, buy my pineapples..I am hungry and I need money to eat.”

“Social factors are the economy of a country, compliance of building codes, per capita number of seismologists and earthquake engineers, evacuation plan, presence of integrated management system and previous experience of handling earthquake catastrophes”. Guess what….

Economies don’t become robust overnight nor  do they fail in a similar amount of time, although the decline is ostensibly more precipitous. Economy?

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican Secretary of State, recently noted that Pope Benedict the XVI’s recent encyclical “Caritas in Veritate” calls for the economy to be understood as “human activity that accords with the integral development of peoples”. He warned that making the economy an absolute will end up “subverting the order between ends and means.”

Ends and means? If you know anything about Catholic morality, you remember the basic principle that a good end does not justify an evil means. Tell that to the US government and its attitude towards Haiti over the last several hundred years -at least as far as I read Dr. Paul Farmer in his book The Uses of Haiti. 

In an interview of the author we read ”in 1994 Dr. Farmer wrote The Uses of Haiti, a sweeping history that reveals the consistent role of foreign powers, especially the United States [emphasis mine], in the exploitation and oppression of the Haitian people… The book rips apart the myth, so often repeated in the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets, that Haiti is a world apart, inexplicably the “poorest country in the Western hemisphere.” Farmer shows that Haiti has always been enmeshed in a global system of imperialist competition, its resources and people ruthlessly exploited for profit, its repeated struggles for liberation brutally suppressed. As Noam Chomsky wrote in the 1994 introduction, the book “tells the truth about what has been happening in Haiti, and the U.S. role [emphasis mine] in its bitter fate.”‘ So much for an economic system that produces integral human development as called for in Caritatis in Veritate. 

Pope John Paul II, in his book Love and Responsibility [see a summary] , points out that the opposite of love is….wait, guess……what do you think? …. guess? Do you give up? ……use! Yes, the opposite of love is not hate (I bet that is what you guessed) but use! Using someone is about trying to reach a good end through an evil means.

The Uses of Haiti points out how over the last several hundred years largely  imperialist powers – read the US - have used Haiti for their own ends: profit…yes proft. An evil means for a good end. The betterment of the US economy through the exploitation of Haitians – cheap labor, etc.

So if the major reasons for the damages that result from any earthquakes are primarily social in nature and a poor economy and all of the manifestations thereof are first among those reasons; and the use of Haiti by the US over the years is one if not the major factor in the country’s arguably deplorable state before the earthquake, then the United States is in no small part responsable for what happened to Haiti on January 12. The logic utilized here may not be exactly that of an Aristotelian syllogism, but the conclusion does seem to follow from the premises. 

And if that conclusion is correct let us hope that the US recognizes the error of its ways and makes amends for its past. And if it will not do that, maybe those in authority who can help Haiti could at least read Pope John Paul II’s book Love and Responsibility . Ok, it is a bit long. Maybe they could read Benedict’s encyclical Caritatis in Veritate. I am expecting too much you say. Ok, let’s settle for those in authority reading Cardinal Bertone’s pithy remarks.  That would seem to be a good use of their time: a good means for a good end.