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Conclusion. Killing with Kindness?
- Rutgers University Press
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Conclusion Killing with Kindness? NGOs are such a force multiplier for us, such an important part of our combat team. —U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, September 2001 Wednesday, January 12, 2011 4:53 p.m. It is a year—to the minute—since the earthquake that killed at least 230,000 people. A wave of silence has passed through the city. Like the immediate leadup to the coup, the streets are empty. Roosters crowing in the distance are the only sound. It seemed that even the dogs, following the lead of their human caretakers, are honoring the moment of silence. This is how people chose to commemorate the loss of their loved ones: at home or at church, with their families, quietly and dignified. I had to move out of my house because although it is still standing, a crack several inches wide traverses an entire wall on the first floor. My immediate neighbors like Lise weren’t so lucky. Except for a small two-room wing carefully rescued and restored, the house collapsed on top of her father. Lise had to pull her father out from the rubble. Up the hill, Samuel lost both his parents as his house collapsed. Pascal lost his daughter. Julie lost her “best” son. “He was going to school, always studying when the other neighbor boys were playing football. He always told me that he would become a doctor and support his mother, to move us into a real house,” Julie said, for the first time since the goudougoudou (what people call the earthquake, mimicking the sound of the earth shaking, not wanting to actually say the word, tranblemanntè a) able to shed a little tear in front of me and her neighbors. The two houses on top of the hill were totally destroyed, killing all members of both families. My street has become a katye popilè (low-income neighborhood) because in addition to these deaths, nearly all the middle-class survivors like Lise abandoned their damaged homes. Despite this quiet reflection, foreigners marked the first anniversary of the quake with much fanfare: media-staged events, celebrations, crusades, protests, 171 press conferences, and annual reports being sent on the Internet as either press releases or as “news,” since many humanitarian actors have become bloggers. Despite its sixty thousand residents, a far-flung camp called Kanaran did not officially exist according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and as such very little NGO aid arrived. In this abandoned, dusty, windswept camp, there is not one but two camp committees. In one “turf” was the camp’s only water supply and toilets. On the other sat an empty and ripped UNICEF tent, on which graffiti denouncing the other committee representative was written. In the neutral zone, dwarfing everything around it, including the tents, toilets, and the wood structures that were to replace a makeshift school made on one side of the camp, people were building a soundstage using professional building materials. “We’re going to have a big crusade,” boasted this committee member. While not wanting to be too direct, I asked who was going to come. He said that international organizations, the government, and NGOs were going to be there to commemorate their work. Of course journalists were invited, he said, probably thinking I was one. A barber whose shop sat across from the sound stage said what was inevitably on many minds: “Instead of spending thousands of dollars driving people here, building the stage, renting the equipment and all this, they could just give us food. We’re starving.” This morning, thousands of faithful were bused to Channmas, where tens of thousands of people lived among the ruins of the National Palace, to attend a “crusade” led by a foreign pastor. Because of the stand built, he was positioned higher than the statues of Haitian revolutionary heroes. Echoing Pat Robertson, and bolstered by a year of a veritable invasion by mission groups and Protestant NGOs doling out food aid, this pastor said to the crowd, in English, “You used to think playing with witchcraft was just a game. Now you know after January 12 that this is serious.” A much smaller demonstration of people living under tents and grassroots organizations to accompany them, who had put aside their differences over Aristide that ripped the country apart in 2004, snaked through the plaza, protesting the many injustices still faced by what the IOM declared to be 810,000 people living in internally...