Haiti

This hasn't been a very good week for the nation of Haiti.

Then again, it hasn't really been a very good century or two for them either.

Link here to charities providing aid and supplies.  Some of the phone lines allow you to send a Text request, it will bill you $10 or so depending on the charity straight to your phone bill, which people are finding easy to implement.

My knowledge of Haiti comes from my job and my studies in History.  My first full-time employment was at North Regional BCC Library where I was assigned collection development duties in the History/Travel section.  The library was joint-use with the community college and the students had a World History program that had them do term papers on a specific country.  Given the large expat population from the Caribbean, we had a huge demand on Jamaica and Haiti.  Maddeningly, there weren't a lot of books on Jamaica available for purchase at the time, but Haiti... ah, Haiti had hundreds, and I was able to broaden the collection on that topic.

Haiti's history has been, and is now, very messy and pretty heartbreaking.  The island and its population never really seem to get a fair shake once the Europeans show up.  Even when the slave population rose up in response to the American and French Revolutions, the European powers still attempted invasions and attempts to recapture the island.  By 1825, the French were able to force a treaty on Haiti that granted Haiti its independence but forced reparation payments that were so severe the country wasn't able to pay them off until somewhere in the 20th century.  Because of that, Haiti remained impoverished, and the nation began a long, painful cycle of coups that kept their government destabilized.  And because Haiti was so unstable, foreign nations - Britain, Spain, France again, Germany at a later point, and the United States - kept interfering, ostensibly to fix the government but - accidentally or intentionally - perpetuating the cycle of coups and adding to the amount of foreign debt to Haiti's bill.

After the U.S. occupation of 1915-34, Haiti had finally achieved some stability at great cost, and still a huge debt that siphoned funds to foreign creditors at the expense of improving the nation's economy.  The occupation also created a border dispute with the Dominican Republic that led that led to genocide and a violent discriminatory policy against Haitians.

And then in 1957, the Duvalier family took over.  Because of the ongoing Cold War and the rise of Communist Cuba that kept the United States wavering between concern and inaction for Haiti, and shady business interests that fed off the corruption, the likes of Papa Doc and Baby Doc were able to build their cults of personality and maintain their death squads and their insane destruction of their own nation.  By 1986, Baby Doc was driven out, but the damage done.  Subsequent attempts to rebuild led to more coups, more government instability, more American intervention that really hadn't ended yet.  And now, with the massive earthquake disaster this week, more instability... more suffering.

The people of Haiti have really suffered.  All of history... living as slaves... fighting for freedom... caught under waves of military takeovers and oppression... fiscally drained economies from corruption and foreign debt... natural disasters on a near-annual basis - all those hurricanes, never a chance to rebuild properly, and now this earthquake, ye Gods...

The people of Haiti need our help.