Haiti...When Helping Hurts

You know that question of giving man a fish or teaching him how to fish? Well, what if you’ve been taking the fish and making people pay to fish there and sell the fish to others? My mom and I were talking about how people were angry at aid workers in Haiti. She was surprised. I actually felt that anger, even at myself. Mark LeVine wraps up his article his article in al-Jazeera with reference to why they might be angry and how to help:

Haiti's complex and, from an American point of view, largely unpleasant and unedifying history must be acknowledged if there is to be any hope that the country's internationally financed reconstruction will not merely lay the groundwork for more poverty and disasters.

That history, the article describes, includes colonization and slavery, a US occupation and US corporation land bids, US support of the infamous Papa Doc and Baby Doc for two decades, and IMF/World Bank pressure for unpopular economic policies. Sometimes when we try to help, we end up hurting - that's dependency theory, that we create and even exploit relationships of dependency. Lots of reasons for anger there. But some times when we (the West) use our own example, we do help - that's modernization theory. We have done both, hurt and helped. We have to learn from our mistakes. We’ve got to use our heads, hearts and hands. Get the fish to Haiti, but make sure the people get the fish, and don't stop there. Make sure we're not killing or selling off any of their own fish. IMF and World Bank are MBA smarties, yet their program seems to do just that, being:

epitomised by the shift in agriculture from local production to export oriented crops and to the break-down of Haiti's rural economy with the import of heavily subsidised American products - exemplified by "faux-cheap" American rice with which the locally produced rice could not compete.

Fertile, third-world regions of the world have to import food staples because they are exporting so much. If we don’t start seeking out where Haiti already has fish and allowing them to protect those fish in trade, we hurt more than help. Fair trade is not just a slogan. Even America had protectionist economic polices when it was getting started; we still help our own farmers. If we really want to let them follow our own example, why can't Haiti do what we did? Obviously, economic policies didn't cause the earthquake. But now if we really want to help them, we need to be honest.

When Katrina happened, everybody wanted to help. Same thing with the tsunami. And now Haiti. Eventually Haiti's going to drop out of the news, like the others, and out of people's minds. When I say we have to get involved, I don't mean we must make Haiti our life mission, our bit of the world we'll save. I mean we've got to find a way to live that's fair, that helps more than it hurts. We want to help, but we're afraid to hurt ourselves in the process - there's so many causes competing for our time and money. If we divide our fish, they'll multiply, but we'll have less each, and have to deal with distribution. But if we help people raise their own fish - and only provide fish for emergency relief - the fish'll actually multiply, and we won't hurt anyone by trying to make ourselves into fishy sailor saviors.

At least, I think. Tell me what you think, about any of this. It's only thoughts, Give me yours. Haiti's hurting. We want to help. These guys seem to know how to do it:
- Paul Collier talks about the plan for Haiti that focuses on “jobs and communities and building institutions from scratch."
- iMedical workers and even the U.S. government are trying to meet the enormous medical needs of the rural people at the center of the quake.
- Countless NGOs in Haiti give an immersed account of what's hurting and how to help.
- The Haitian musician Wyclef Jean learns how to help from mistakes in his own charity.