Faculty Member, Dr. Henry Perry, Reflects on Haiti

Six months following the earthquake in Haiti, which led to an estimated 230,000 deaths, 300,000 injured, and more than 1 million people homeless, many fear widespread childhood manultrition, especially for those living in tent cities. The massive humanitarian aid continues to address acute medical and physical needs of the people, but central issues of today are: will the earthquake change the social and political structure of the country sufficiently to improve the lives of the poorest members of Haitian society? What can be done to empower people to enable them to build a better future?

Faculty member of the Future Generations Graduate School, Dr. Henry Perry, who lived and worked in Haiti from 1999 to 2003 as the Director of the Hospital Albert Schweitzer (HAS) and whose wife Mirlene is a nurse from Haiti, shares his reflections on the earthquake, how it affected his family, and the questions it raises for achieving sustainable social development.

For five days following the earthquake, Mirlene Perry did not know if her family living in Port-au-Prince, at the epicenter of the earthquake, were alive or dead. Mirlene is Haitian and her sister and her family were living in Port-au-Prince at the time.

Fortunately, Mirlene’s family escaped unharmed, but many of their neighbors perished in the tragedy, and they spent 5 days without access to food and water. As soon as they could, they (along with some 1 million other Haitians) left the city for the countryside, where they stayed with relatives and were able to find food and water. After almost three months, they returned back to their rented home in Port-au-Prince to try to resume their day-to-day lives, especially school for the children, who are 6 and 12 years of age.

Now, at least for Mirlene’s family, life has gained some sense of normalcy,  though they are still afraid to stay inside the house overnight and sleep in a tent on the street in front of the house. The children now attend school in a tent, which is poorly ventilated and therefore they have to suffer in intense heat.

Although, the earthquake damage in most of rural Haiti was minimal, the entire country was deeply affected. In the case of Hospital Albert Schweitzer (HAS), one of Haiti’s renowned NGOs that has been working in the rural Artibonite valley since 1956 to provide hospital care as well as community-based primary health care services, the hospital was overwhelmed with injured patients. Today, the district that HAS serves has doubled in population as a result of out-migration from Port-au-Prince, leading to much greater patient care demands.

The earthquake was an unparalleld acute catastrophe that called global attention to a long-term tragedy of sub-human poverty. I have been convinced that one of the key reasons for Haiti’s lack of progress prior to the earthquake has been the stranglehold that a small wealthy elite and a small number of high-level political and governmental officials have had on the political, economic, and social life of the country. For instance, the two weakest public primary school systems in the world are in Haiti and North Korea. Only about 10% of Haitian children attend a public primary school. How can a country develop when those with political and economic power allow such a situation to continue?

One of the early positive outcomes of the earthquake appears to be a decentralization of the government. Prior to the earthquake, all major and minor political and bureacratic decisions were taken in Port-au-Prince. Although authority has been decentralized to a certain degree, the political and economic elite will have obvious opportunities to milk the flow of aid for their own personal aggrandizement. Reports are now beginning to surface that this is in fact beginning to happen. The degree to which international aid  reaches the people without getting siphoned off through corruption, high overheads, or high salaries remains to be seen.

Is there a role for Future Generations in Haiti now or in the near future? Last year, one outstanding Haitian applied to our master’s degree program and was accepted, but she was unable to matriculate because of a lack of funds. Even before the earthquake, we had considered the possibility of taking on an entire class of Haitians for the master’s degree program to give them the inspiration and tools for leadership of community-led development. This would have had to have taken place in Haiti with instructors who were fluent in Haitian Creole. Future Generations has the kind of help and support that Haiti now needs for its long-term just and lasting development.