This is the Justice, Not Charity! Haiti book diary. Allie123 and I are writing these book diaries because we became shocked by the truth of Haiti’s history and what really is needed to help the Haitians after the earthquake.
"It's as if Aristide was put in charge of a house that was falling apart and was expected to fix it. But then his enemies start setting fire to the back door, they send people with guns to attack the front door, and when these people finally manage to break in they said 'Look! He didn't wash the dishes in the sink! He never repaired the leak in the roof!' They made him spend all his time trying to put out the fire and to protect the door, and then once they got rid of him they said he was pushed out because he'd failed to repair the house." (Damming The Flood,
p 131.)
"Travesty in Haiti" by Timothy Schwartz is the third book that allie123 and I have been going through in detail. The three books so far cover different territory in different ways, so I thought a quick recap would be useful.
"Mountains Beyond Mountains" by Tracy Kidder told the story of a successful aid project that grew beyond Haiti by focusing on Dr. Paul Farmer, one of the founders of Partners in Health. The dangerous hills of Haiti were a very visible backdrop to the story, and the pattern of political events was an almost invisible backdrop. It was a strong, uncomplicated narrative, and made a good starting place for getting into reading about Haiti.
"Damming the Flood" by Peter Hallward was told from a more distant standpoint, a foreign, political, historical eye. It was crammed with details and filled with references in the endnotes, and was a more slow, difficult read for me. It briefly reviewed the history of Haiti, but focused on the short periods when Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Fanmi Lavalas (the flood of the title) gave real help to the poor majority of Haiti. It also covered in detail how they've been beaten back (so far) by Haiti's morally repugnant elite backed by foreign powers, especially the United States and France. Both Republican and Democratic administrations come off badly in this story. W definitely comes in first for worst, but Bill Clinton should blush for shame for what he did to Haiti.
Our latest book, "Travesty in Haiti" by Timothy Schwartz, goes back to a single-person focus on events in Haiti, and is a first-person narrative. Schwartz comes across as a rather difficult person and has understandable trouble making friends. Yet he is also an honest idealist, and this comes bursting out of him at inopportune moments, making his own life difficult.
Chapter One - Death, destruction, and development
The story opens with the murder of five Haitian men by a mob. They were members of a Catholic development project funded by the church and a Swiss charity. Schwartz returns in a later chapter to what they were doing and why they were murdered. In Chapter One, the major significance is that most aid workers fled. They were soon replaced by a wave of new aid workers and new projects, and Schwartz came to Haiti in the third year of this new wave. Aid projects were in full swing but accomplishing curiously little. This fact led Timothy Schwartz to state his reason for writing this book.
What I hope to do is call attention to the need for accountability for I believe that the disaster we call foreign aid - 'disaster', at least, in the case of Haiti - comes from the near total absence of control over the distribution of money donated to help impoverished people in the country.
At the level of individuals and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the lack of fiscal accountability is manifest in the enrichment of the custodians of the money - pastors and directors of NGOs, schools, and orphanages - and the redirection of charity toward middle and upper class Haitians for whom it was not intended. At the level of governments, the absence of accountability invites subversion of a different sort: Charity is manipulated to serve political ends.