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Six months later—why is it still this bad? We went to Haiti to find out.

The following is the cover story from the current issue of RELEVANT. Click here to subscribe

“We Need Help”

It’s a simple phrase, even an obvious one.

Simple because of its directness and obvious because, well, it’s spray-painted on a pile of rubble in the middle of Port-au-Prince. This one and countless other messages like it were painted throughout the city in the aftermath of the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake—one of the largest natural disasters to ever affect the Western Hemisphere. We need help. But how? How can we even begin to help? How did it get this bad? And, perhaps most pressingly, where is God in all this?

Standing on a hillside overlooking Haiti’s nearly destroyed capital city, that spray-painted phrase feels as accurate now, six months after the earthquake, as it did then. Even though money poured in from all sides (remember the $10 donation to the Red Cross via text message? The telethon with every celebrity ever known?), it seems like nothing has happened—as if this tiny half-island nation has somehow become a hope-free zone.

No one can prepare you for Haiti. Sure, as the buzz cause of the year, there’s certainly no shortage of articles to read, organizations to interview and experts to analyze. But to try to understand Haiti, to try to understand why it’s still this bad after so much time and, perhaps most difficult of all, to try to find hope in the entire mess, you have to make sense of a nation with a brutal history, a country that was a mess of corruption and poverty before a 7.0 earthquake destroyed its capital city. To understand what’s being done, where money is going, what the outlook of the country is—well, you need to go back to the beginning.

Crippled from the start

“I want you to remember three dates so we can really make sense of 2010,” says Edouard Lassegue, a native Haitian and vice president of the Latin American and Caribbean region for Compassion International. “The first date of Haitian history is 1804—the date of our independence in Haiti.”

To go so far back may seem unnecessary. Surely, more recent events—like the U.S. occupancy in the 20th century, the Duvalier revolution or Aristide’s rise to power in the 1990s—are what affect Haiti today. But Lassegue is insistent. On that date, “after 300 years of slavery and 10 years of war, finally, the slaves got their independence from France.”

The second date is in 1825, the day Haiti signed a contract with France for their independence. After spending more than 20 years defending their freedom and preparing themselves for a renewed attack from the French, Haiti agreed to purchase its independence from France. The Haitian leaders signed a contract to pay 150 million francs (later reduced to 90 million) to guarantee its continued freedom. It was an amount based on France’s calculated financial losses during the war for independence—including the loss of their slaves.

“The next date to remember is 1947,” Lassegue says. “That’s when the last penny of the debt of independence was paid. So it took Haiti 122 years to pay back that debt. The Haitian government had to close all schools and stop all investments in public infrastructure in order to make the first payment and all the payments thereafter. My parents still remember standing in line as schoolchildren to bring their pennies and their few dollars into the collection baskets because there was that motivation, ‘Let us pay the debt of independence.’ That was just over 60 years ago, so one cannot say, ‘Haiti has been independent for so many years, how come there has never been change in the country?’ We have been crippled from the beginning.”

The politics

When you consider Haiti’s lack of infrastructure—there are no public schools, very little access to health care, no real sanitation system—in light of this history, it makes more sense. And it partially explains why everything still, even six months later, seems to be in such bad shape.

Of course, Haiti’s challenges are not limited to those created by distant history. A cycle of political unrest and government corruption has plagued Haiti since its inception.

In its 200-year history, Haiti has suffered 32 coups, several foreign occupations and an extremely tenuous and occasionally violent relationship with its neighbor on the island, the Dominican Republic. Haiti’s current president, René Préval, took office in 2006 following an interim president and the 2004 Haitian rebellion, in which the divisive two-time president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted and sent into exile. Préval, though occasionally demonstrated against, is expected to be one of the first democratically elected presidents to go full-term in Haiti. Elections are set for November of this year.

“Haiti has come very far,” says Dr. Dianne Jean-Francois, Haiti director for the Catholic Medical Mission Board. “We have been independent since 1804, but our leadership was never good. People were selfish, they were thinking only about themselves.”

This lack of forward-thinking is perhaps no more obvious than in the bald mountains surrounding Port-au-Prince—ones that were once covered in lush trees and vegetation.
“One of the issues you have in Haiti is severe deforestation,” says Russell Porter, the USAID deputy coordinator for the Haiti Task Team. “And that’s come about over years and years of a lack of a sufficient energy supply.”

Very little has been done to regulate the forests in Haiti, and with a very complicated system of land rights, no one has taken ownership over making sure Haiti’s trees are regulated and replenished.

“I don’t think they truly understand the lasting consequences,” says Kevin Rose, the Haiti director for Convoy of Hope, a faith-based nutrition distribution and disaster relief organization. “Haitians don’t live for down the road, they live for today. ‘I need to feed my family today. I need charcoal today to cook my food. I’m not going to think about cutting this tree down that’s not going to grow back, and the consequences.’ It’s easy on paper to think about that stuff, but you’re changing a culture, you’re changing a mindset. People have always done it this way.”

Deforestation is but one example of Haiti’s existing development struggles. “Haiti has been a country of instability,” Lassegue says. “In the past we’ve seen governments come and go, and people have been used to that unfortunately. There’s a sense that nothing is going to change­—it’s only going to get worse. It’s very difficult to get a sense of hope back into the country.”