What Happened After the 2010 Haiti Earthquake?

Welcome back to Things That Keep Me Up at Night where they human rights are made up and the laws don’t matter. Such has been the theme here for quite some time, so it should be no surprise that, even when I tried to make my episode about a natural disaster, we’re diving into corporate corruption and human rights violation and death. You brought this on yourself, really.

You Know We Just Want to Hear the Sads, Right?

You’re no fun.

Today, I got to finally unleash the thing that’s been haunting me for a week and talk about something rather near and dear to my heart. It was the first international disaster I was ever aware of personally, so it was kind of my introduction to activism. Good thing I was ignorant and 13, or else I would’ve been really bummed out by what happened in reality. Buckle up, folks, it’s time to talk about the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

Oh, Hey, I Remember That

I’ll bet you do. You probably remember the news media inundating us with pictures of the horrific damage in the major cities in Haiti. Kids standing on collapsed buildings, injured folks being pulled out of the rubble, you get the idea. 

I think it’s important to note that Haiti is much more than the news portrayed. Yes, the photos were evocative and helped spur people into donating money, time, food, etc., but they were also complicit in giving the first world a kind of savior complex about Haiti. It caricatured a very complex people with a rich (and disturbing) history. Rather than showing them as they are - a very community-based people with rich culture and complex social and structural systems (you know, like every country has), the media capitalized on the poverty and turned it into a kind of circus where white folks jacked themselves off to the idea of saving an entire population. Best case scenario, this resulted in donations and aid. Worst case scenarios, children with living parents who had been separated from their families were put up for expedited adoption as an act of charity. Yikes.

Yes, Haiti is the most impoverished country in the western hemisphere by most public understandings. But it’s also important to stress that this poverty didn’t come out of a vacuum, and it certainly wasn’t just a matter of poor spending habits. Haiti’s poverty is a direct result of colonialism and systemic international racism.

Uh Oh.

Isn’t it always racism?

To put it in a nutshell as quickly as is humanly possible without skipping the main points, the Taino people were exterminated by Spanish settlers (smallpox, violence, you know the drill) in the 16th century. But long after that, the French decided it was their turn to commit atrocities and brought a whole slew of ships filled with African people to use for slavery on their new sugar plantations. By the 18th century, the slaves on what is now known as Haiti outnumbered the slave owner French 10:1. They figured that out and revolted, ultimately resulting in their independence from French oppression. They began their fledgling country, but neither the U.S. (who had their own slave trade to think of) nor France would acknowledge their sovereignty. They - along with Great Britain - placed a trade embargo on Haiti that lasted for decades. Of course, with all trade halted, Haiti’s economy suffered until France offered to recognize Haiti as a country. For the paltry sum of 150 million gold francs, eventually reduced to 80 million. 

This might seem insane, and that’s because it is. The French argued that they had suffered loss of life and equipment equal to their demand, and Haiti had no choice but to accept the offer to gain their trade options. To pay their oppressors, Haiti took out high-interest loans and used 80% of their annual budget to pay those loans back. Those loans weren’t paid off until 1947 - over a hundred years of using 20% of their budget to create a fledgling country. As would be expected, the Haitian government didn’t exactly have the funds for the most sound infrastructure. Thus, they suffered.

To make matters worse, the U.S. eventually decided that Haiti was an excellent bargaining chip and did what it does best: inserted itself into foreign affairs under the guise of being helpful. The marines occupied Haiti for 20 years and controlled almost every aspect of the nation’s security and finances, enforced racial segregation, mandated force labor (AKA slavery), and deposed movements and individuals who disagreed with their occupation, going so far as to kill 15,000 Haitians during a rebellion. After 20 years, the marines closed up shop and left the Haitians to their own devices, having accomplished none of what former-President Wilson claimed to want by occupying the country. 

After a series of unfortunate and unstable governments, two dictators, one democratically-elected president, and two military coups (turns out the military doesn’t like being told to follow the law), Haiti’s economic, political, and social positions were unsteady, to say the least. 

And Then…

Yup. And then, on January 12, 2010 at 4:53pm, approximately 16 miles (or 25 kilometers for everyone whose system makes sense) from Haiti’s capital, a 7.0, 30-second long earthquake decimated the country. Within two hours, the US Geological survey recorded 8 aftershocks, all with magnitudes between 4.3 and 5.9. Within two weeks, 52 aftershocks had been recorded.

In the episode, I read a few first hand accounts of the wreckage and terror these people experienced. You can read them for yourself here. It goes without saying, but the earthquake hit the most densely-populated part of the country. It was difficult to understand the gravity of the losses they suffered, since most of the victims were covered in rubble, but by February the Haitian government estimates were that about 230,000 people had died in the quake, aftershocks, and tsunami that followed. Estimates from independent reviewers vary, but CNN puts it at anywhere between 220 and 300,000 people. The bottom line is that we will most likely never know the truth because the quake had damaged the structural integrity of morgues in the cities, and the influx of bodies forced them to dig mass graves to stave off piling rotten bodies in the street. Which still happened.

After the quake, millions of people were left without access to medical care, food, water, or electricity as the already-unreliable power system failed. Roads were completely blocked by debris. The Prime Minister’s estimate was that about 250,000 residences and 30,000 commercial properties were either severely damaged or had collapsed entirely. The city of Leo-jeune had to be completely rebuilt. Nearly half the nation’s primary and secondary schools had been destroyed or severely damaged. The civil prison in the nation’s capital was also destroyed, releasing around 4,000 inmates onto the streets in the midst of the chaos. 

The widespread destruction, of course, meant that the infrastructure that would have been required to adequately respond to a catastrophe of this magnitude was simply destroyed and not available. Hospitals, coms systems including the nation’s phone system, and organizational structures were just leveled.

Didn’t Anyone Help?

Of course! Or, rather, they tried. The Dominican Republic prepared for an influx of people, but quickly realized that they weren’t equipped to handle the sheer numbers that surged to their border. The hospitals ran out of vital supplies within days, and the government was forced to put limits on how long patients could stay. They urged the rest of the world to lend their aid. 

And thus the international outpouring began. Within a few weeks, several countries had pledged aid in the form of money, food and water, medical supplies, humanitarian effort, etc. The American Red Cross actually set a record for donations by raising $7 million in 24 hours after launching a text-to-donate campaign. Also, while we’re on the subject, I have to correct something that sounded misleading: I made it sound like Haiti received aid in one form or another from only the United States, Senegal, Canada, Cuba, Israel, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and Italy. In reality, dozens of countries pledged aid - too many to list here but you can read the breakdown for yourself. The total monetary aid came out to around $3.5 billion.

This is objectively a good thing. Countries banding together to help others in times of crisis is heartwarming to see, and it probably could have been a lot worse for Haiti if no aid had come in at all. 

I Sense a “But” Coming

But…

“Good” isn’t always “good enough.” I think that, after a year or so went by, people just assumed that the problem had sorted itself out. The media moved on, so people weren’t being exposed to Haiti’s everyday reality. I don’t blame them, necessarily (who among us can say they keep track of every global crisis?). But the situation continued to be dire long after the rest of the world moved on. 

After a year, only 5% of the rubble had been cleared and 15% of temporary housing had been built. Bureaucratic legalisms all but halted the flow of aid from the US. Almost none of the countries who provided aid made good on all their promises, and for years it went on this way, with weird stagnation and controversy coming out of Haiti while the world absolved itself of responsibility for their commitments. 

Even worse, In 2015 the American Red Cross was investigated for $500 million that seemed to vanish from the Haiti relief fund. According to the NPR investigation, it appears that the American Red Cross actually spent a portion of that money - about a quarter of it, in fact - on internal expenses. The rest of the money had been sent to other nonprofits to do the groundwork for them, and each of those organizations took their cut of the fund as well (sometimes as high as 11% of the money).The American Red Cross was purposefully misleading to those conducting the report, and they never got a full picture of where the money actually went. All we know is that it went into a catch-all category for “management.”

Even worse-worse, after the influx of new people to an already-unsanitary and destroyed country, a group of Nepalese peacekeepers unintentionally exposed Haitians to cholera, which started an endemic that is actually still influencing them today. As of now, their incidence rate is around 0.03%, but between 2010 and today the WHO estimates over 812,000 cases and 9,600 deaths from the outbreak. As you can imagine, this wasn’t exactly ideal for their economy nor the direction of foreign aid. 

So Where Does That Leave Haiti Today?

In October the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) reported that 3.67 million people still need urgent food assistance, inflation sits at a staggering 20%, and poor families have been all but crippled by currency depreciation. International organizations continue to prove that private interests take priority over public welfare, and the people of Haiti are suffering for it. We got a taste of this with Hurricane Matthew in 2016, but Haiti can absolutely not take another disaster of this magnitude. It would be devastating to the point of just levelling the country both physically and societally.

I have no good news for Haiti or us. My only advice is to do what the Haitians do: take care of each other. Practice empathy for those we don’t know. Allow yourself to feel the gravity and grief of tragedies like this, but don’t let that stop you from moving forward to try and ensure it doesn’t happen again. The world needs more people who care. 

We love ya. Thanks for listening to our gloomy little show.