Haiti Quake: Thoughts On Humanity

UPDATE: 23 January 2010

CityCare, a non-profit non-religious organisation from Singapore has sent up two medical teams to Port-au-Prince to administer medical aid to quake victims. You can do your part in two ways:

1. If you have medical training and are keen to volunteer on one of CityCare’s upcoming trips to Haiti, email haitirelief@citycare.org.sg to sign up. The organisation is looking for doctors and nurses, and people who have been trained as army medics. (CityCare prefers males as the conditions are challenging).

2. If you wish to support Haiti relief efforts financially through sponsorship, contact CityCare during office hours at 6535-6733 or email info@citycare.org.sg.

Nanz Inc.Com’s creative head Theresa Tan (also founder of non-profit group Women Make a Difference) shares her thoughts about the prevalence of natural disasters hitting poverty-stricken countries, and what we can each do about it.

Last year I wrote in an editorial that every year, we should expect a certain number of natural disasters. To the end, every individual living in an affluent society should set aside a “Natural Disaster Giving Fund” in their yearly financial plan. This year our “giving fund” is being tapped early with the Haiti earthquake that happened this week.

I’m not being glib. This is a reality, albeit a horrifying one. The earth can expect to expect earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, typhoons every year. If you haven’t yet watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, you must. It explains in one short movie why we are seeing so many calamities: melting polar ice caps, flooding, freaky weather, dying species. Basically, we are reaping the results of our poor care of our planet.

When I started Women Make A Difference, a non-profit fundraising body for women and children in need, in 2004, it was born out of the rising exploits of child sex traffickers who had taken boats into Indonesia just days after the Boxing Day Tsunami. They were not there to help. They were there to harvest all the orphans whose parents had died in the disaster, or who had been separated from their families. They were going to scoop up these disaster-stricken children, bring them to a foreign country under the pretext of putting them in orphanages, and then sell them into the child sex trade.

There are two types of people in this world: those who will help themselves at the expense of others, and those who will help others at the expense of themselves.

I know if you are on our site and reading this, it is likely you are the second of these.

Two days ago Haiti experienced a devastating earthquake that has, reportedly, taken over 100,000 lives. Many homes in Haiti are poorly built with barely any foundation — the residential houses crumbled like a proverbial house of cards once the earthquake hit.

Haiti seems to be a disaster magnet. In 2008 four tropical storms killed 800 people — Haiti hasn’t even recovered from these yet. And this tiny country experienced devastating floors in 2007, 2006 and twice in 2003. When the epidemic of HIV/Aids first became a fearsome force, Haiti was one of the countries worst-hit. It remains the Caribbean country with the highest HIV/Aids occurrences, caused in part by poverty, illiteracy and political instability.
The poor organization in the country is reportedly causing foreign aid to stall. A UN Representative calls the situation a “logistical nightmare”.
It is heartbreaking that the places that suffer the worst from natural disasters are the poorest countries in the world. It is frustrating that even when there are people willing to help, poor administration and geographical barriers keep help from coming in.

But the good news in all this is, it has become de rigeuer to help another country that has experienced disaster. Perhaps it didn’t use to occur so frequently, but it seems to me now that people around the world do see themselves more and more as global citizens. Now, they would extend help instantly and without hesitation — it’s become a natural reaction to natural disasters anywhere in the world.

In a sense, these disasters serve as batting practice for humanity’s evolution to the next level. We have learned to join together in a global fight. We may not be fighting everything yet – WMD is just one organization in the battle against abuse of women and children, particularly in the sex trade, but there our enemies are not nature, but other humans who will fight back to protect their “livelihood” — but at least we are united against catastrophes like the earthquake in Haiti.

What needs to be done? Right now, the burning need is to get in there to Port-au-Prince and administer relief aid. Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders are calling for financial aid — food and water supplies have to be purchased from nearby countries thanks to the difficulty of getting into Port-au-Prince itself.

But Haiti will get over this — no matter how terrible a disaster is, no matter how many lives are lost, time will still pass, and a number of months from now, Haiti will be back to some semblance of normality.

What is really the burning question is this: How can we help Haiti (or any other country that has suffered a natural disaster) to really get back on its feet? How can we help to stem the systemic poverty, improve the political situation, educate the illiterate? How can we teach them to build stronger buildings, to have earthquake warnings and evacuation and rescue measures ready for the next one? How can we help them to help themselves?

It’s an answer worth millions of dollars. It’s a solution worth thinking about.

Meantime, Singapore’s government has donated US$50,000 to world relief efforts. And you can do your part by donating financially towards rescue and relief efforts. Stars like Haitian music mogul Wyclef Jean, Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, and American idol Adam Lambert are rallying their fans to donate to bodies like UNICEF USA.