While most coffee shop talk around here has been focused on the Olympics, proroguing Parliament, and how the team is doing, some of it is turning to how to help a country devastated by one of the strongest earthquakes in its history. The death toll in Haiti is climbing by the hour and some say it may end up exceeding that caused by the tsunami in southeast Asia five years ago.
Haiti covers the eastern third of the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean and is one of the poorest countries in the world. The vast majority of its approximately nine million people live below the poverty line.
If there were a single word to describe Haiti, it would be instability. This is true not only politically, economically and socially, but geologically.
Hispaniola sits on the boundary of the North American tectonic plate and the Caribbean plate, and is crossed by two major fault lines. The plates are grinding against each other in a way that is similar to the San Andreas Fault; earthquakes are common in both areas but Haiti’s political instability has hampered study of the geologic processes at work on the island.
Extreme poverty makes people especially vulnerable to disasters of any kind, be it man made or natural. An earthquake anywhere that measures 7.0 is going to cause severe damage, but when tinder-block walls and shoddy construction are the rule, a city of a million people can be flattened in seconds. This is exactly what happened in Port-au-Prince, only 25 kilometres from the earthquake’s epicenter.
We know Haiti will need to be rebuilt from the ground up; the need for help was desperate even before the earthquake hit. When the poorest country in our hemisphere sits on the doorstep of what is, in essence, the winter playground of a lot of Canadians, we owe it to the people of that beleaguered nation to share what we can.
People who know Haiti well are suggesting the best way to ensure aid gets to where it is needed most, is to make a cash donation through a major organization like the Red Cross, Salvation Army, Oxfam, World Vision, Save the Children, or the Mennonite Central Committee, one that already has people in the country.
And we can thank our lucky stars we live in a country where government, however annoying, is effective, infrastructure (physical and political) is stable, food and water are plentiful, and the ground rarely shakes.
— from the Listowel Banner