My good friend, Nichole, a Foreign Service officer stationed now in Jamaica, reflects. A most excellent piece!
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| Scenes from Haiti... |
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| Haiti 2 |
Stephanie’s blog has once again inspired and awed me at her
world, her work, her passion, and her courage.
She is experiencing adventures in a part of the world most Americans
will never visit let alone know much about.
It is hard to believe that I was there just a few years ago, in the very
village where she is living. I was
working with a development organization after the 30-some year war had ended as
we helped the feeble transition of war-torn communities along, carrying out healing ceremonies, rebuilding communities, and
shutting down some of the internally displaced camps. I had run into some social workers who said
those communities were some of the most traumatized they had seen. This was mostly because Joseph Kony, head of
the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) who was terrorizing communities in Northern
Uganda during the long war, made his child soldiers carry out atrocious acts,
so traumatizing that the children would feel they could never reintegrate into
normal society again (and thus never try and return to their families). The stories I heard were almost too horrific
to believe, and yet as the Acholi people began to move out of the camps and put
their lives back together, I only saw beautiful communities coming together to
help one another, mourn the dead, and tentatively hope for lasting peace. The townships had been so ravaged by war and
poverty, some of the poorest places I had seen, and yet people were taking
pride in their mud huts, keeping them clean and living with a sense of dignity
that had not been afforded them for so many years.
Flash a few years later, and I find myself in
Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a year after the terrible earthquake of January
2010. Again, a place that looked like it
had been through a war with slow rebuilding taking place. I was to spend the next two years in this
capital city, but it only took a few months to start to see the organized chaos
that makes up the daily lives of most Haitians.
And it wasn’t so much the suffering that struck me, but the lack of
dignity in the way Haitians in PaP were living in such filth, garbage all
around, no regard for the environment, burning tires and trash piles in the
street.
Ghandi said that a nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest
members, but if that is the case of Haiti Haiti
are similar to Northern Uganda , the quality of
life between the two cannot be compared.
Why does one society do so much with the little it has while
the other throws away so much of what it is given? Do Haitians really care enough to want to
improve their situation, and if not, how does one get them to feel a sense of
ownership about their country and problems?
The natural richness of the island and the amount of international money
and remittances that have gone into Haiti far outweigh the odds that Northern
Uganda has been up against, and yet one society lives in beauty while the other
lives in trash. Is it history,
colonization, governance, culture, donor involvement, or a combination of all
of these? These are questions that I’m
still trying to figure out in such complex and complicated societies. We may never reach an answer that gives us
any kind of solution to the problem, and is it even our place to try and figure
out their solutions.
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| As opposed to Uganda .. |
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| Uganda 2 |
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