Globalizing flows of Aid in Haiti

            Just over a year has passed since a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit near the town of Léogâne, twenty-five kilometers west of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. The results have been devastating: estimates range from 100,000 to 300,000 people dead (over 10% of the city’s population), over a million individuals living in tent cities, and massive destruction of public identities, including electricity and, more importantly, fresh water (The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2010). Due to the mass contamination of water, from both the devastation of the earthquake as well as the mishandling of the water from local streams, cholera swept across the region, using river streams for transport and breaching water infrastructures, further compromising the sanitation and the trouble in Haiti.

            At the same time that darkness engulfed Haiti, it became the spotlight of international media attention. Humanitarian aid and news broadcasting turned wide-eyed to see the events that were to follow in Haiti in the next couple months. However, as much of the mainstream telecommunications systems were destroyed in the earthquake and tremors, external media sources relied on social and digital media users who lived in Haiti. Facebook and Twitter users as well as bloggers provided first hand eyewitness updates as to what was happening on ground zero (Brainard 2010). Thus social media was successful in garnering initial worldwide attention and focusing it in on the problems Haiti faced. Humanitarian aid was one of the first private sectors on ground zero, providing roughly $1.4 billion dollars from 200 organizations all across the world. “Hope for Haiti Now”, for example, a live album featuring famous artists such as Taylor Swift, Coldplay, Dave Matthews, and Neil Young vied to send all its proceeds to relief efforts in Haiti.

            However, like all news, the thrill of breaking headlines, of people dying tragic deaths, become all too familiar with the world and the story loses popularity. As Haiti began to hunker down to begin large-scale economic changes, the spotlight shifted away from the constant struggles of daily Haitian life that to the media was a thing of the past (as we know, clearly it is not), to more sensational news concerning the present implying a future, a model characteristic of media broadcasters (Vansina). This unspoken future of the news is something that is often not covered by the media, and lost in the masses of analysis. Yet this money that we have donated in the present implies something will be done in the future. Then where has all this aid gone, the money that we have donated to ‘save Haiti’? Yes, it has left my pockets and gone into the hands of aid agencies like Oxfam or World Vision who have allotted it accordingly, but what has the money been actually used for? A report published by the Disaster Accountability Project (2011)– a non-profit organization aimed at improving disaster management systems and ensuring transparency in the occurrences on ground zero of the disaster – attempted to see how much of the roughly $1.4 billion in aid was being disbursed and how it was used by each organization. First of all, the Disaster Accountability Project found that only approximately $750,000, roughly half of the total aid received has been dispensed. There is a large amount of money that is sitting in banks and not being used for directly for rebuilding infrastructure and getting fresh water supplies to halt the spread of cholera. Secondly, and even more pressing, of the 197 organizations that actively solicited money for the purposes of relief in Haiti, only six had publicly available factual guidelines as to what would be done with the money while 128 organizations had little to no public reports stating what the donations would have been used for (Disaster Accountability Project). In theory, this money could be diverted for any number of reasons for any number of causes to any number of people, not for the causes that the donor wished it to. Often, as Gourevitch (2010) argues is the case in Biafra, financial aid can be taken by these humanitarian organizations and dispensed to journalists to report on the catastrophe. Instead of working for objective news agencies, these journalists work under these international organizations, often unconsciously ascribing to the companies’ ideologies. They are in a bind, attempting to “present themselves as objective outsiders [but] suddenly become the disciples of aid workers. They accept uncritically the humanitarian aid agencies’ claims to neutrality, elevating the trustworthiness and expertise of aid workers above journalistic skepticism” (Gourevitch). Thus, the journalists’ fall victim to the subjective positions of the humanitarian agencies, losing their critical analytical objective edge.

            Furthermore, in humanitarians’ cries for aid, they have turned the heads of those at the World Bank, currently assessing Haiti to see how they can ‘help’. As Jamaica suffered the wrath of the World Bank-imposed structural adjustment policies in the early 1980s, it will be no surprise that Haiti’s already and increasingly suffering economy – due to widespread malnourishment, HIV/AIDS epidemic, and relatively high tuberculosis rates supplemented by the outbreak of cholera and mass economic destruction – will be pushed even farther away from its pre-2010 position. Ultimately, I argue that the media can only do so much. By garnering immediate worldwide attention to the devastation is the media’s duty. Their efforts in soliciting aid, drawing out the facts as they come in, and recommending suggestions to government officials have been beneficial. However, much is out of the media’s realm of possibility. It is and will be ultimately up to the government to create jobs out of cleaning up and rebuilding the economy, installing efficient water systems to begin the sanitation effort, and figure out an efficient way of distributing the gridlocked aid where it is needed. No media source or news network is capable in fixing these problems.

References

Brainard, Curtis

2010  “New” Media Crucial in Aftermath of Haitian Earthquake. The News Frontier, The Observatory,  January 13^th. http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/new_media_crucial_in_aftermath.php, accessed January 28^th, 2011)

Disaster Accountability Project

2011  One Year Follow Up Report on The Transparency of Relief Organizations Responding to the 2010 Haiti Earthquake. http://www.scribd.com/doc/46320380/OneYear-Followup-Report-Transparency-of-Relief-Organizations-Responding-to-2010-Haiti-Earthquake, accessed January 28^th, 2011.

Gourevitch, Philip

2010  Alms Dealers. New Yorker, October. 11^th. 102-109.

Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation

2010  U.S. Global Health Policy: Health in Haiti and the U.S. Government Involvement. http://www.kff.org/globalhealth/upload/8053.pdf, accessed January 28^th, 2011)

Vansina, Jan

1985  Oral Tradition as Process. In Oral Tradition as History. University of Wisconsin, Pp. 3-32.