Pathfinder
Editor, Senior Moderator
April 25, 2010
Haiti hell continues months after earthquake
The dust has settled, the news crews have gone, and gangs are seizing the aid. Do Haitians have any hope left?
Excerpt:
"The first wave of disaster relief has departed, and with it the news crews. I can find only a desk man for AFP diligently trying to rustle up a story a day, and a camera crew from Al Jazeera. Contrarily, and without apparent irony, the preferred story in a natural catastrophe is a good-news one: miraculous rescues and escapes, acts of heroism and bravery, selfless rescue workers from Rotherham, sniffer dogs from Barking, saintly surgeons from Surbiton. As the hope of more wide-eyed victims being plucked from the grave diminishes, as the disaster medics wrap up their kit and go, so too do the 24-hour rolling-news teams. This is very expensive stuff, and nobody has the budget or the audience for the grim, dull depression of resurrection.
The emergency hospitals are no longer dealing with trauma. They have to see to the grind of exacerbated poverty, the infantile diarrhoea, the constant respiratory problems, the infections and sores. In the makeshift hospital run by the Swiss, the most common complaint they?re treating is Mups ? Multiple, Unexplained Physical Symptoms. Aka grief. Or the need for a bed. Or the yearning for some attention, or the hope of a pill that might make it all right.
<!--#include file="m63-article-related-attachements.html"--><!-- BEGIN: Module - M63 - Article Related Attachements --><SCRIPT src="/tol/js/picture-gallery.js" type=text/javascript></SCRIPT><SCRIPT type=text/javascript>function slideshowPopUp(url){pictureGalleryPopupPic(url);return false;}</SCRIPT><!-- BEGIN: Comment Teaser Module --><!-- END: Comment Teaser Module --><!-- BEGIN: Module - M63 - Article Related Package --><!-- END: Module - M63 - Article Related Package -->
A young doctor, eyes bright with messianic ire, tells me about the initial response to the crisis:
?We are finding people in the shanty slums with the metal armatures, the rods, the broken legs still in place. People holding their medical notes who were treated and dumped. There is a woman we found living in a plastic-bag tent. She had fourth-stage breast cancer. In the West it would be considered too far gone to operate, but someone flew her to the Dominican Republic, gave her a mastectomy, stitched her with metal staples and somehow brought her back and left her in Port-au-Prince. She has a CD with her medical records. A CD. Her wound is infected ? we don?t have the equipment to remove the staples. She is still dying. Who could do that?
And the people the Americans took away ? the ones with crush injuries, the respiratory trauma, who needed breathing tubes. They went to the aircraft carrier. Where is it? Gone. Where are the patients??
There was so much haphazard, arbitrary emergency medicine, so many children flown around the globe towing film crews. Surgeons and doctors from rich, first-world hospitals took pride in giving first-world treatment, began long courses of drugs and procedures that nobody can afford, from pharmacies that don?t exist. There was an assumption that someone else would arrive in their wake and turn this into a real, functioning country.
There are hundreds and hundreds of amputees. The most common injury among survivors is the guillotining of an arm or a leg, severed by a wall or a ceiling. There are many children without feet or hands. The amputations were done quickly; victims had often been lying for hours or days, crushed. Now that they have to be given prosthetics, the long process of rehabilitation, of exercising atrophied muscles, must start. A lot of stumps were left raw and weak. The victims have to have their legs re-amputated. A woman wails beside a bed, waving her hands, imploring God.
Her husband and sons are dead. She is with her daughter, who lost a leg and now must have it cut again. Is there no end to the pain, to the disappointment? She cries hopelessly.
But medicine is no longer the most pressing concern. There is a boiling, unreported problem with logistics. It?s getting practical aid to the millions who live under plastic. This is the second wave of the disaster. If they drive a truck full of tents, or buckets, or beans ? just about anything ? into a refugee camp, there is a riot. The charity workers are bullied and beaten, the goods are fought over, destroyed, stolen, to reappear again on the black market. There is no infrastructure, no order, no way to distribute aid. The government has no power. The NGOs are young volunteers who can?t police themselves; the UN and the Americans have no mandate or desire to get physical; and the victims, struggling every day without practical help, grow angrier. They know that huge amounts of money have been given for their relief, they know that third-rate pop stars and reality-show contestants are covering saccharine power ballads for their benefit, that stand-up comedians and over-the-hill soap-opera actors are running marathons on their behalf, but they?re not seeing it.
What they see are streets jammed with 4x4s in the branded logos of charity, driven by white kids. This is a country that has only ever existed as a kleptocracy ? a masterclass in corruption. Everyone knows that the money, the goods must have been stolen by businessmen, by charities, by American Christians, and they?re being sold. So people are beginning to take desperate measures ? they have started kidnapping white aid workers as a lever to get back what should be theirs. This is also kept unreported.
M?decins Sans Fronti?res (MSF), whom I travelled with, have just had two nurses kidnapped. They were freed after a few days, unharmed. MSF say no ransom was paid ? they never pay. The police say someone paid.
There are rumours about other NGOs; nobody wants to make this public, but executed bodies have appeared, and it changes the whole shape of the problem ? makes everything much, much more fraught, much harder, more cautious, and slower."
Much more at:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7105524.ece
Haiti hell continues months after earthquake
The dust has settled, the news crews have gone, and gangs are seizing the aid. Do Haitians have any hope left?
Excerpt:
"The first wave of disaster relief has departed, and with it the news crews. I can find only a desk man for AFP diligently trying to rustle up a story a day, and a camera crew from Al Jazeera. Contrarily, and without apparent irony, the preferred story in a natural catastrophe is a good-news one: miraculous rescues and escapes, acts of heroism and bravery, selfless rescue workers from Rotherham, sniffer dogs from Barking, saintly surgeons from Surbiton. As the hope of more wide-eyed victims being plucked from the grave diminishes, as the disaster medics wrap up their kit and go, so too do the 24-hour rolling-news teams. This is very expensive stuff, and nobody has the budget or the audience for the grim, dull depression of resurrection.
The emergency hospitals are no longer dealing with trauma. They have to see to the grind of exacerbated poverty, the infantile diarrhoea, the constant respiratory problems, the infections and sores. In the makeshift hospital run by the Swiss, the most common complaint they?re treating is Mups ? Multiple, Unexplained Physical Symptoms. Aka grief. Or the need for a bed. Or the yearning for some attention, or the hope of a pill that might make it all right.
<!--#include file="m63-article-related-attachements.html"--><!-- BEGIN: Module - M63 - Article Related Attachements --><SCRIPT src="/tol/js/picture-gallery.js" type=text/javascript></SCRIPT><SCRIPT type=text/javascript>function slideshowPopUp(url){pictureGalleryPopupPic(url);return false;}</SCRIPT><!-- BEGIN: Comment Teaser Module --><!-- END: Comment Teaser Module --><!-- BEGIN: Module - M63 - Article Related Package --><!-- END: Module - M63 - Article Related Package -->
A young doctor, eyes bright with messianic ire, tells me about the initial response to the crisis:
?We are finding people in the shanty slums with the metal armatures, the rods, the broken legs still in place. People holding their medical notes who were treated and dumped. There is a woman we found living in a plastic-bag tent. She had fourth-stage breast cancer. In the West it would be considered too far gone to operate, but someone flew her to the Dominican Republic, gave her a mastectomy, stitched her with metal staples and somehow brought her back and left her in Port-au-Prince. She has a CD with her medical records. A CD. Her wound is infected ? we don?t have the equipment to remove the staples. She is still dying. Who could do that?
And the people the Americans took away ? the ones with crush injuries, the respiratory trauma, who needed breathing tubes. They went to the aircraft carrier. Where is it? Gone. Where are the patients??
There was so much haphazard, arbitrary emergency medicine, so many children flown around the globe towing film crews. Surgeons and doctors from rich, first-world hospitals took pride in giving first-world treatment, began long courses of drugs and procedures that nobody can afford, from pharmacies that don?t exist. There was an assumption that someone else would arrive in their wake and turn this into a real, functioning country.
There are hundreds and hundreds of amputees. The most common injury among survivors is the guillotining of an arm or a leg, severed by a wall or a ceiling. There are many children without feet or hands. The amputations were done quickly; victims had often been lying for hours or days, crushed. Now that they have to be given prosthetics, the long process of rehabilitation, of exercising atrophied muscles, must start. A lot of stumps were left raw and weak. The victims have to have their legs re-amputated. A woman wails beside a bed, waving her hands, imploring God.
Her husband and sons are dead. She is with her daughter, who lost a leg and now must have it cut again. Is there no end to the pain, to the disappointment? She cries hopelessly.
But medicine is no longer the most pressing concern. There is a boiling, unreported problem with logistics. It?s getting practical aid to the millions who live under plastic. This is the second wave of the disaster. If they drive a truck full of tents, or buckets, or beans ? just about anything ? into a refugee camp, there is a riot. The charity workers are bullied and beaten, the goods are fought over, destroyed, stolen, to reappear again on the black market. There is no infrastructure, no order, no way to distribute aid. The government has no power. The NGOs are young volunteers who can?t police themselves; the UN and the Americans have no mandate or desire to get physical; and the victims, struggling every day without practical help, grow angrier. They know that huge amounts of money have been given for their relief, they know that third-rate pop stars and reality-show contestants are covering saccharine power ballads for their benefit, that stand-up comedians and over-the-hill soap-opera actors are running marathons on their behalf, but they?re not seeing it.
What they see are streets jammed with 4x4s in the branded logos of charity, driven by white kids. This is a country that has only ever existed as a kleptocracy ? a masterclass in corruption. Everyone knows that the money, the goods must have been stolen by businessmen, by charities, by American Christians, and they?re being sold. So people are beginning to take desperate measures ? they have started kidnapping white aid workers as a lever to get back what should be theirs. This is also kept unreported.
M?decins Sans Fronti?res (MSF), whom I travelled with, have just had two nurses kidnapped. They were freed after a few days, unharmed. MSF say no ransom was paid ? they never pay. The police say someone paid.
There are rumours about other NGOs; nobody wants to make this public, but executed bodies have appeared, and it changes the whole shape of the problem ? makes everything much, much more fraught, much harder, more cautious, and slower."
Much more at:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7105524.ece