The Disconnect Between Need and Giving After the Earthquake in Haiti
Dr. Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health, gives a presentation called “Catalyzing Collaboration: Our Humanity at Stake” at the opening plenary of the 2010 Skoll World Forum in April. During his talk, he shows a video about the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, called “No words can describe what happened that day.” He later says that the images of the ill in the video were taken recently, three months after the earthquake, asking “What is the disconnect between great need on the one hand, and unstinting giving on the other?”
With: Paul Farmer
Thank you very much. Thank you. It's a great honor, and somewhat intimidating, to address even such a kindly crowd from this rostrum. Jeff, I want to thank you especially for calling me, and Bill, there you are, Bill Drayton: rock stars. Those of you who know Bill Drayton would describe him in similar ways, owlish and bespectacled like me, and we're really more of a hip-hop kind of group actually.
But truth be told, I'm not so much intimidated as I am overwhelmed, to tell some of the stories of the January earthquake in Haiti, that I am tempted to tell tonight. They are difficult, for me at least, to recount, and I am not a reserved contained Englishman. This is in part because of the magnitude of the disaster, as Sally said, unprecedented in scope and scale in modern times, but it is really more to do with the rank familiarity of death and suffering in a place that is so dear to me.
So I will preface my comments with the words of some of our patients, and the images and interviews and translations that you will hear were recorded by two of my former medical students, who are now colleagues, who have served in Haiti for over a decade. As Sally suggests, 99 percent of our co-workers are Haitians.
These are two Americans whose voices you hear, along with the Haitians. It is difficult to watch but brief.
My name is Evan Lyon. I'm a volunteer doctor with Partners in Health and I have been working on health in Haiti for over a decade. You know as we first walked in, that first day, into the hospital, it was an incredible scene--there was very little going on in terms of medical care. There were two make shift operating rooms in the corner of the building that was left undamaged. There were hundreds of people lying around with big injuries, bad injuries: broken legs, broken arms, compounded fractures where part of the bone comes out of the skin. And so we went to work and have been working ever since, and have been watching things change, and watching things get a little bit better day after day. I think one of the biggest issues in terms of losing the chance to help people was our electricity: we didn't have enough electricity to work 24 hours a day so that cut our time in half, and we had less opportunity to work and potentially save peoples' lives. I wasn't here to see the many thousands or tens of thousands who died immediately after the earthquake. We know from our work and from driving through the city that tens of--hundreds of thousands of people are out of their homes and by the time this all settles there'll be hundreds of thousands more.
We have nowhere to stay. We were here in a tent and every time they tell us it's time to go, we become terrified. We went to a second tent, we were next to the hospital courtyard, when
they told us it was time to go again, we had no idea what to do, we have no were to go.
Since the earthquake on the 12th, we've been homeless.
The Haitian staff has been incredibly strong, incredibly dedicated to helping their hospital get back up on it's feet. The Haitian staff has also been incredibly traumatized, and it's a very few number that have been able to come back to work, after losing their homes and losing their loved ones. We don't even know how many people from the hospital staff have died, there've been--we don't even know. Can't put a number to it.
The
government needs to do something for everyone. The international community has to do something for everyone who has been affected, absolutely everyone. Everyone is a victim. If the Haitian government or the international community doesn't help the Haitian people, after a few months there will be an outbreak of menta illness.
So many people will suffer mental illness, from the rich to the poor. Everyone has been affected, and everyone is at risk.
The major next step I'm worried about just as a human being is all these people who are left out of their homes; they have to be given the basics of shelter, food, water, healthcare.
My foot has been amputated, and I know I can't work. And I wasn't raised to be a person to always be asking, "Please, can I borrow 50 gourdes, please, can I borrow 25 gourdes," if that's how I'm going to end up, if I have to ask for every meal or depend on the charity of others, I would have asked God to have taken my life. He just should have taken my life during the earthquake. I never want to be on the street begging, having to ask, "Give me 25 gourdes, please give me 50 gourdes."
This time everybody in the whole country has been affected. I think people around the world and people in the United States need to think about Haiti as a whole place that needs schools and water systems, needs the land to be rehabilitated so that trees can grow and food can grow. I'm a medical person and I care about healthcare but that's a very small piece of a puzzle compared to what really needs to happen.
All this stuff needed to happen before the disaster. All this stuff for those of us to care about Haiti, all this stuff was urgent before this catastrophe and now its even more urgent.
Now if that those images do
not square with what Sally described, that's because these are not, that is not the hospital, the hospitals in which we have worked. We have done what was recommended by our colleague from Zambia. We have worked with the government to build or rebuild a string of a dozen hospitals stretching from the Dominican boarder to the coast. And I think it is fair to say that we're very grateful that we did that, because that was what was standing between many people who fled north and to the west--were functioning hospitals. Some of the images you'll see here, which I hope you will agree are clean even though they will be crowded, are those in which we have spent 25 years trying to rebuild public sector facilities that serve the Haitian poor as a right. This is my 3rd visit to Oxford as a member of the Skoll family, and never has the notion of family meant more to me. Each year we're given the theme to help organize our reflections. All of them have been useful in my view, but our curent injunction to contemplate catalyzing collaborations has been especially apt as my own reflections, here or elsewhere, are jerked back to Haiti and what is happening there.
The word catalysis has a couple of common usages, including that learned by students of chemistry, like myself decades ago: the triggering or accelerating of a chemical change by the addition of a catalyst. A second and more common usage here at Skoll is an action between two or more persons or forces, initiated by an agent that itself remains unaffected by the action. But in truth this definition is misleading since no agent really remains unaffected by his or her actions, not in the realms in which we work. And then there is the definition laid out, fittingly enough in this city, in that unimpeachable source called the OED, which notes a rare 17th century meaning for catalysis taken directly from the Greek: dissolution, destruction, ruin.
Which definition will prove apposite to the coming hard years in Haiti is an anxious topic for me. But allow me to draw on the optimism native to the Skoll family, both because I confess I need it, and because there is so much we can do if we push ourselves to add up
to more that the sum of our parts. Every speech or paper or book begins with an empty screen. So did this one for me a few days ago in Haiti. Even if I had not been in Port au Prince. Even if I had not gone that morning to a meeting within sight of the ruined national palace and pancaked public buildings, I knew then what I know now: These days we project on all empty screens the same set of images. These are glimpses of what we have seen in Haiti the past few months. They are harrowing as you have all seen. Into any pause also come unbidden images of failure, for what do we make of a place like Parc JeanMarie Vincent where 48,000 souls are packed into a tiny space--a public park--named after a Haitian priest who I happen to know martyred for his role in helping to organize the poor in Haiti's parched north-west. And there are hundreds of such settlements by the way. Yes, there are some successes to claim: a regular tent clinic run by my colleagues including doctors who themselves lost their homes on January 12th and who now live in makeshift shelter. The slow transformation of these shelters from dun-colored to blue as cardboard is replaced by plastic sheeting. A score or so new latrines. A couple of new tent schools. Some minor improvements in lighting, requested by women's groups deploring the sexual predation fostered by the pitch-black dark into which the city was plunged on the nights following the quake. But, isn't it failure when the vast humanitarian machine cannot move quickly to move the internally displaced to higher ground. To make sure they have enough food to eat, and clean water to drink. Humanitarians are working as hard as they can, it's true, but none of us deserves high marks as we contemplate our failure to deliver enough clean water, food, and especially, safe shelter to those who needed it yesterday.
Here is the first of the challenges I will lay before you tonight: how can a gathering of social entrepreneurs like ours complement the efforts of the Haitian people and their government and the humanitarians who seek
to 'build back better', in the words of President Clinton. Time is running out, catalysis in the best sense of the word is an urgent task. In addition to the intrusive images of what has already happened, what will come all too soon is not hard to conceive.
I have only to close my eyes for a second to imagine strong winds, and driving rain, such as always arrived in late Spring in Haiti, that will tear from the battered and valiant people of Haiti, their tarps and tents and sheets, blowing these scanty coverings into the sea, and leaving the Haitians standing, assuming they are left standing, on acres of mud and waste.
Although I've seen this haunting picture mostly in dreams, it should not be hard to conjure up in your own minds, wind, and driving rain, assailing a million people in makeshift shelter, in a steep seaside city, that has faced mudslides and worse during every rainy season. What is the value here in comfortable and secure Oxford, the city of dreaming spires, of such a thought exercise?
Nil, a cynic might say, but I believe otherwise. In addition to the astounding fifty percent of all American households that donated something or other to earthquake relief in Haiti, households and governments in the United Kingdom, generous Ireland, and across Europe, and Latin America, have responded with significant sums.
For now Port-au-Prince is thick with NGOs and UN vehicles, and humanitarians of every stripe. Just as no previous natural disaster has been documented to cause such havoc in such a crowded place, so too has none yet prompted such an outpouring of solidarity and mercy. In light of this generosity, it may come as a shock to know, that some of the images projected tonight, were taken in recent days, three months after the earthquake leveled every single federal building in Port au Prince. So what is the disconnect between great need on the one hand and unstinting giving on the other? Why don't the NGOs and social entrepreneurs work better together with governments and humanitarians? Who and what are the catalysts needed to spark a reaction that will lead from mercy and pity and empathy, to their desired outcomes, which are safe housing, clean water, good school and healthcare, food security, and the dignity that comes from being liberated from the noxious cycle that some describe as under development, and others as structured dependence. The liberty that comes from generative and good jobs. Although our being here tonight indicates that we share largely similar definitions of catalysis, which definition will emerge from this rubble? Adding up to more than the sum of our parts, or still more dissolution, destruction, and ruin.
This matter of adding up, this question of sums, is not trivial.
Lets consider the 9.9 billion dollars pledged to Haiti at the recent donor conference in New York.
Many of us worked hard to bring together representatives of over a hundred countries, to pledge pragmatic solidarity with the people of Haiti. This sum represents $1,100 for each survivor of the disaster, a generous allowance to be sure. Why then would so many Haitians cast a cynical eye on these pledges? First there is the matter of both promises broken and threats honored. In a previous donors conference, in April 2009, close to $400 million--this was after hurricanes struck in 2008--was pledged to help build back better after an estimated 16% of Haiti's GDP was wiped out by these storms. President Clinton asked some of us to track the pledges to see how much, how many had been honored. We discovered that almost a year later, on the eve of the earthquake, only 12% of these pledges have been fulfilled. It is important, then to acknowledge that what we term the international community has failed Haiti.
We have been failing Haiti for two centuries. From the time Haiti and the United States were the sole independent nations in the western hemisphere, we've been at odds. Now is our chance to draw on all the resources here present to change the way we do business with Haiti. We need to build back better, it's true, but don't we also need to rebuild the way we do aid? Don't we need to rebuild humanitarian machine? Don't we need to create sound investments to end poverty in Haiti? Don't we need to rethink on how we might draw on social entrepreneurs who could and should help respond to the greatest natural or semi-natural disaster of our times? Many have called for the erasing of Haiti's debt, but don't we in fact owe huge death to Haiti?
All modern human rights movements,
traced their origins to the fight to end the slave trade and slavery itself.
Britains proudly claim that this fight began here when Thomas Clarkson and a small group that included Wilburforce--and I'm sorry he did go to Cambridge but you'll forgive me they both did I believe--that included Clarkson and Wilburforce used moral suasion and legal and political means to end the slave trade. But in truth the decisive blow against slavery was struck not in England but in Haiti in 1791.
A fourteen year long struggle culminating in the defeat of Napoleon's vast army, in the hills and plains of Haiti. For those who doubt the grand aspirations of the Victoria's former slaves to establish an independent republic free from slavery, we have only to consult the historical record. The discovery, just weeks ago, of the only surviving copy of Haiti's 1804 declaration of independence right here in the British national archives.
Haiti's military leaders founded the legitimacy of the first independent nation in Latin America on the fight against slavery, and used rights language unstintingly. Thus spoke Jean-Jacques Dessalines,
Haiti's first president, born a slave to the survivors.
So many cups to choose from.
This is really marked PF, so I assume thats me. I'm gonna use the Ambassador's, he speaks better.
Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and you a people so long without good fortune.
Witness, witness to the oath we take. Remember that I counted on your constancy and courage when I threw myself into the carrier fight the despotism and tyranny you have struggled against for fourteen years remember that I sacrificed everything to rally to your defense, family, children, fortune.
And now I am rich only with your liberty. My name has become a horror to all those who want slavery. Despots and tyrants curse the day when I was born. If ever you refuse or grumbled while receiving those laws that the spirit guarding your fate dictates to me for your own good, you would deserve the fate of an ungrateful people. But I reject that awful idea. You will sustain the liberty that you cherish and support the leader who commands you. Therefore vow before me to live free and independent and prefer death to anything that will try to place you back in chains.
Swear finally to pursue forever the traitors and enemies of your independence.
The Haitians payed a steep
price for this freedom. Dessalines was killed in a power struggle within a couple years, of years of these stirring words and his former masters soon orchestrated the first of many embargoes, against the troubled young nation.
In 1825, the French supported by other colonial powers and even the new republic to the north, my own country, demanded the Haiti pay France one hundred and fifty million Germinal francs, not only for the loss of the plantation but for the loss of their slaves. In other words the Haitians paid by force of arms and again by attempting to buy diplomatic recognition as the nation they had become.
They reimbursed the French for themselves. Never-before or since has a victorious nation indemnified the defeated in this manor. Despite the unjustified character of this indemnity and it's scandalous routing of money from the poor to the rich the Haitians paid this debt for over a century, well into the nineteen fifties.
Many adverse events and processes ensued: coups, invasions, military occupations, dictatorships, epidemics and no doubt Haiti was nudged over the edge from difficulty into crisis by the unavailability of public funds which were being shipped across the ocean. The nagging sense that nascent Haiti paid dearly for achieving the goals of liberty, fraternity and quality lives on to this day.
But some of the architects of this misery are today spared blame while others may receive too much. The Haitian anthropologist Jean Price-Mars, writing in 1953, blames the elites of his country for caving in to the extortion of the 19th century international community, arguing that, and I quote, "From a country who's expenditures and receipts were until then balanced the incompetence frivolity of the men in power had made a nation burdened with debts and entangled in a web of impossible financial obligations."
Some recent exercises seeking to arrive at a value for these transfers, including interest, have estimated this extortion at $20 billion. Divide that figure by 9 million citizens, and we see that were it to be returned today, each Haitian would be owed $2,222. What does all this bitter history have to do with catalyzing collaboration? To seek to heal those wounds and improve our world. Aren't social entrepreneurs supposed to be looking forward rather than back? Many of those who seek to respond to the earthquake insist that we stop dwelling on the past and focus on the unprecedentedly generous pledges made two weeks ago. Most speak these days of the need for new social pact, one that would allow us to draw rapidly on these commitments, to rebuild housing stock, clinical facilities, schools, and infrastructures both physical and social.
I am here to ask tonight: What novel technologies might help us to deliver on such pledges? I stand before you and answer with humility, I do not know, but collectively, we know. Not merely the we gathered here today but the broad we of humanity sharing the planet in 2010. One of the exciting things about the catalysis here at Skoll, the good catalysis not the bad, is that people come together to think of new ways to solve problems. Two years ago, drawing on the words of Paul Hawkin I argued in the closing session that we needed to bring together the environmental justice movement, bring it in to this broader social justice movement, so that concern for our wounded planet would be built on concern for our fellow human beings, particularly those living on less than 2 dollars a day.
In another words for my patients and their families. Does the devastation of Haiti, leveled by earthquakes, stripped of its trees, over crowded, always on the edge of risk, suggests that we will not succeed. Thomas Murden once said that we, humans are a body of broken bones, a powerful image, but let me describe a recent experience in a courtyard filled with people who were just that, bodies of broken bones. When we brought in orthopedists, and trauma surgeons, and physical therapists, and the tools of modern medicine, we were able to assuage a great deal of suffering.
In a place where a quarter of a million people were killed in the space of a few hours, a place where all of the government's buildings and a third of the houses were leveled.
Ours is relief on a modest scale. Many of you in this room have supported it in fact one of your students, I might add, from the business school has just sent us 500 wheelchairs, but the vision is to bring the fruits of science and innovation and the power of effective management to bear on the greatest natural disaster of modern times.
That modest effort can be multiplied. 100 fold 1000 fold to meet the need. Adopted by the Skoll family, let me make a humble plea: Let us elevate the definition of catalysis we now need desperately, in Haiti and in the world. An action between two or more persons or forces initiated by agents of change, bearing novel technologies. Some of these agents of change are gone now. So our allies such as Walt Ratterman who between last year's Skoll and this one had taken several of our hospitals to solar power and who perished in Port-au-Prince on January 12th.
Our doctors such as Mario Pagenel who died in his home as he prepared a PowerPoint presentation for Partners in Health, the entire second year nursing school class and their faculty. Many others we tried and failed to save, let us honor their memory, and the memories of the quarter million more who need us to rally in order to build back better.
Let us pledge that no matter where we work that we will fight hard to render obsolete the ancient definition of catalysis as dissolution, destruction, and ruin. If I may be so brazen, let me give you the beginnings of a shopping list, Jeff and Sally. I look to you when I say shopping list, because between and among us lie the skills, the resources, the tools to support the people and government of Haiti, as they attempt to rebuild their country.
Already, the efforts and support of many partners, Skoll awardees among them, have strengthened our response. But a great deal more is needed. You have what we need, or can find it, make it, or figure out how to get it. We need money, sure, but we need to use it wisely and justly. We need smart ways to reforest Haiti, we need better technologies for safe drinking water and more of it.
We need to help create a proper disability rights movement, not simply for those who have lost limbs but for all those handicapped in any way. We need better shelter, seismically rated, hurricane resistant, safe and dignified. We need to reduce the risk of future disasters and mitigate their impact. We need new ways to cook that don't destroy trees, pollute the air, and sicken the people breathing smoke.
We need better means of delivering comprehensive primary care services and insurance systems that do not penalize the sick. We need a new scheme of education that is inclusive and truly available to all students especially to girls. We need technologies, programs and training to support small hold farmers to process what they grow and bring it to a market based on fair trade.
We need thousands of new businesses and hundreds of thousands of good jobs, green jobs, jobs with protection for workers. We need, above all, to honor the heroism of the Haitian people which is rooted in their long struggle for basic rights. As Steven Stole wrote recently in the Atlantic, "It's high time to give Haiti a chance to recover the best part of its history and to stun the world again with the genius of its freedom."
Thank you very much for including me.
But truth be told, I'm not so much intimidated as I am overwhelmed, to tell some of the stories of the January earthquake in Haiti, that I am tempted to tell tonight. They are difficult, for me at least, to recount, and I am not a reserved contained Englishman. This is in part because of the magnitude of the disaster, as Sally said, unprecedented in scope and scale in modern times, but it is really more to do with the rank familiarity of death and suffering in a place that is so dear to me.
So I will preface my comments with the words of some of our patients, and the images and interviews and translations that you will hear were recorded by two of my former medical students, who are now colleagues, who have served in Haiti for over a decade. As Sally suggests, 99 percent of our co-workers are Haitians.
These are two Americans whose voices you hear, along with the Haitians. It is difficult to watch but brief.
My name is Evan Lyon. I'm a volunteer doctor with Partners in Health and I have been working on health in Haiti for over a decade. You know as we first walked in, that first day, into the hospital, it was an incredible scene--there was very little going on in terms of medical care. There were two make shift operating rooms in the corner of the building that was left undamaged. There were hundreds of people lying around with big injuries, bad injuries: broken legs, broken arms, compounded fractures where part of the bone comes out of the skin. And so we went to work and have been working ever since, and have been watching things change, and watching things get a little bit better day after day. I think one of the biggest issues in terms of losing the chance to help people was our electricity: we didn't have enough electricity to work 24 hours a day so that cut our time in half, and we had less opportunity to work and potentially save peoples' lives. I wasn't here to see the many thousands or tens of thousands who died immediately after the earthquake. We know from our work and from driving through the city that tens of--hundreds of thousands of people are out of their homes and by the time this all settles there'll be hundreds of thousands more.
We have nowhere to stay. We were here in a tent and every time they tell us it's time to go, we become terrified. We went to a second tent, we were next to the hospital courtyard, when
they told us it was time to go again, we had no idea what to do, we have no were to go.
Since the earthquake on the 12th, we've been homeless.
The Haitian staff has been incredibly strong, incredibly dedicated to helping their hospital get back up on it's feet. The Haitian staff has also been incredibly traumatized, and it's a very few number that have been able to come back to work, after losing their homes and losing their loved ones. We don't even know how many people from the hospital staff have died, there've been--we don't even know. Can't put a number to it.
The
government needs to do something for everyone. The international community has to do something for everyone who has been affected, absolutely everyone. Everyone is a victim. If the Haitian government or the international community doesn't help the Haitian people, after a few months there will be an outbreak of menta illness.
So many people will suffer mental illness, from the rich to the poor. Everyone has been affected, and everyone is at risk.
The major next step I'm worried about just as a human being is all these people who are left out of their homes; they have to be given the basics of shelter, food, water, healthcare.
My foot has been amputated, and I know I can't work. And I wasn't raised to be a person to always be asking, "Please, can I borrow 50 gourdes, please, can I borrow 25 gourdes," if that's how I'm going to end up, if I have to ask for every meal or depend on the charity of others, I would have asked God to have taken my life. He just should have taken my life during the earthquake. I never want to be on the street begging, having to ask, "Give me 25 gourdes, please give me 50 gourdes."
This time everybody in the whole country has been affected. I think people around the world and people in the United States need to think about Haiti as a whole place that needs schools and water systems, needs the land to be rehabilitated so that trees can grow and food can grow. I'm a medical person and I care about healthcare but that's a very small piece of a puzzle compared to what really needs to happen.
All this stuff needed to happen before the disaster. All this stuff for those of us to care about Haiti, all this stuff was urgent before this catastrophe and now its even more urgent.
Now if that those images do
not square with what Sally described, that's because these are not, that is not the hospital, the hospitals in which we have worked. We have done what was recommended by our colleague from Zambia. We have worked with the government to build or rebuild a string of a dozen hospitals stretching from the Dominican boarder to the coast. And I think it is fair to say that we're very grateful that we did that, because that was what was standing between many people who fled north and to the west--were functioning hospitals. Some of the images you'll see here, which I hope you will agree are clean even though they will be crowded, are those in which we have spent 25 years trying to rebuild public sector facilities that serve the Haitian poor as a right. This is my 3rd visit to Oxford as a member of the Skoll family, and never has the notion of family meant more to me. Each year we're given the theme to help organize our reflections. All of them have been useful in my view, but our curent injunction to contemplate catalyzing collaborations has been especially apt as my own reflections, here or elsewhere, are jerked back to Haiti and what is happening there.
The word catalysis has a couple of common usages, including that learned by students of chemistry, like myself decades ago: the triggering or accelerating of a chemical change by the addition of a catalyst. A second and more common usage here at Skoll is an action between two or more persons or forces, initiated by an agent that itself remains unaffected by the action. But in truth this definition is misleading since no agent really remains unaffected by his or her actions, not in the realms in which we work. And then there is the definition laid out, fittingly enough in this city, in that unimpeachable source called the OED, which notes a rare 17th century meaning for catalysis taken directly from the Greek: dissolution, destruction, ruin.
Which definition will prove apposite to the coming hard years in Haiti is an anxious topic for me. But allow me to draw on the optimism native to the Skoll family, both because I confess I need it, and because there is so much we can do if we push ourselves to add up
to more that the sum of our parts. Every speech or paper or book begins with an empty screen. So did this one for me a few days ago in Haiti. Even if I had not been in Port au Prince. Even if I had not gone that morning to a meeting within sight of the ruined national palace and pancaked public buildings, I knew then what I know now: These days we project on all empty screens the same set of images. These are glimpses of what we have seen in Haiti the past few months. They are harrowing as you have all seen. Into any pause also come unbidden images of failure, for what do we make of a place like Parc JeanMarie Vincent where 48,000 souls are packed into a tiny space--a public park--named after a Haitian priest who I happen to know martyred for his role in helping to organize the poor in Haiti's parched north-west. And there are hundreds of such settlements by the way. Yes, there are some successes to claim: a regular tent clinic run by my colleagues including doctors who themselves lost their homes on January 12th and who now live in makeshift shelter. The slow transformation of these shelters from dun-colored to blue as cardboard is replaced by plastic sheeting. A score or so new latrines. A couple of new tent schools. Some minor improvements in lighting, requested by women's groups deploring the sexual predation fostered by the pitch-black dark into which the city was plunged on the nights following the quake. But, isn't it failure when the vast humanitarian machine cannot move quickly to move the internally displaced to higher ground. To make sure they have enough food to eat, and clean water to drink. Humanitarians are working as hard as they can, it's true, but none of us deserves high marks as we contemplate our failure to deliver enough clean water, food, and especially, safe shelter to those who needed it yesterday.
Here is the first of the challenges I will lay before you tonight: how can a gathering of social entrepreneurs like ours complement the efforts of the Haitian people and their government and the humanitarians who seek
to 'build back better', in the words of President Clinton. Time is running out, catalysis in the best sense of the word is an urgent task. In addition to the intrusive images of what has already happened, what will come all too soon is not hard to conceive.
I have only to close my eyes for a second to imagine strong winds, and driving rain, such as always arrived in late Spring in Haiti, that will tear from the battered and valiant people of Haiti, their tarps and tents and sheets, blowing these scanty coverings into the sea, and leaving the Haitians standing, assuming they are left standing, on acres of mud and waste.
Although I've seen this haunting picture mostly in dreams, it should not be hard to conjure up in your own minds, wind, and driving rain, assailing a million people in makeshift shelter, in a steep seaside city, that has faced mudslides and worse during every rainy season. What is the value here in comfortable and secure Oxford, the city of dreaming spires, of such a thought exercise?
Nil, a cynic might say, but I believe otherwise. In addition to the astounding fifty percent of all American households that donated something or other to earthquake relief in Haiti, households and governments in the United Kingdom, generous Ireland, and across Europe, and Latin America, have responded with significant sums.
For now Port-au-Prince is thick with NGOs and UN vehicles, and humanitarians of every stripe. Just as no previous natural disaster has been documented to cause such havoc in such a crowded place, so too has none yet prompted such an outpouring of solidarity and mercy. In light of this generosity, it may come as a shock to know, that some of the images projected tonight, were taken in recent days, three months after the earthquake leveled every single federal building in Port au Prince. So what is the disconnect between great need on the one hand and unstinting giving on the other? Why don't the NGOs and social entrepreneurs work better together with governments and humanitarians? Who and what are the catalysts needed to spark a reaction that will lead from mercy and pity and empathy, to their desired outcomes, which are safe housing, clean water, good school and healthcare, food security, and the dignity that comes from being liberated from the noxious cycle that some describe as under development, and others as structured dependence. The liberty that comes from generative and good jobs. Although our being here tonight indicates that we share largely similar definitions of catalysis, which definition will emerge from this rubble? Adding up to more than the sum of our parts, or still more dissolution, destruction, and ruin.
This matter of adding up, this question of sums, is not trivial.
Lets consider the 9.9 billion dollars pledged to Haiti at the recent donor conference in New York.
Many of us worked hard to bring together representatives of over a hundred countries, to pledge pragmatic solidarity with the people of Haiti. This sum represents $1,100 for each survivor of the disaster, a generous allowance to be sure. Why then would so many Haitians cast a cynical eye on these pledges? First there is the matter of both promises broken and threats honored. In a previous donors conference, in April 2009, close to $400 million--this was after hurricanes struck in 2008--was pledged to help build back better after an estimated 16% of Haiti's GDP was wiped out by these storms. President Clinton asked some of us to track the pledges to see how much, how many had been honored. We discovered that almost a year later, on the eve of the earthquake, only 12% of these pledges have been fulfilled. It is important, then to acknowledge that what we term the international community has failed Haiti.
We have been failing Haiti for two centuries. From the time Haiti and the United States were the sole independent nations in the western hemisphere, we've been at odds. Now is our chance to draw on all the resources here present to change the way we do business with Haiti. We need to build back better, it's true, but don't we also need to rebuild the way we do aid? Don't we need to rebuild humanitarian machine? Don't we need to create sound investments to end poverty in Haiti? Don't we need to rethink on how we might draw on social entrepreneurs who could and should help respond to the greatest natural or semi-natural disaster of our times? Many have called for the erasing of Haiti's debt, but don't we in fact owe huge death to Haiti?
All modern human rights movements,
traced their origins to the fight to end the slave trade and slavery itself.
Britains proudly claim that this fight began here when Thomas Clarkson and a small group that included Wilburforce--and I'm sorry he did go to Cambridge but you'll forgive me they both did I believe--that included Clarkson and Wilburforce used moral suasion and legal and political means to end the slave trade. But in truth the decisive blow against slavery was struck not in England but in Haiti in 1791.
A fourteen year long struggle culminating in the defeat of Napoleon's vast army, in the hills and plains of Haiti. For those who doubt the grand aspirations of the Victoria's former slaves to establish an independent republic free from slavery, we have only to consult the historical record. The discovery, just weeks ago, of the only surviving copy of Haiti's 1804 declaration of independence right here in the British national archives.
Haiti's military leaders founded the legitimacy of the first independent nation in Latin America on the fight against slavery, and used rights language unstintingly. Thus spoke Jean-Jacques Dessalines,
Haiti's first president, born a slave to the survivors.
So many cups to choose from.
This is really marked PF, so I assume thats me. I'm gonna use the Ambassador's, he speaks better.
Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and you a people so long without good fortune.
Witness, witness to the oath we take. Remember that I counted on your constancy and courage when I threw myself into the carrier fight the despotism and tyranny you have struggled against for fourteen years remember that I sacrificed everything to rally to your defense, family, children, fortune.
And now I am rich only with your liberty. My name has become a horror to all those who want slavery. Despots and tyrants curse the day when I was born. If ever you refuse or grumbled while receiving those laws that the spirit guarding your fate dictates to me for your own good, you would deserve the fate of an ungrateful people. But I reject that awful idea. You will sustain the liberty that you cherish and support the leader who commands you. Therefore vow before me to live free and independent and prefer death to anything that will try to place you back in chains.
Swear finally to pursue forever the traitors and enemies of your independence.
The Haitians payed a steep
price for this freedom. Dessalines was killed in a power struggle within a couple years, of years of these stirring words and his former masters soon orchestrated the first of many embargoes, against the troubled young nation.
In 1825, the French supported by other colonial powers and even the new republic to the north, my own country, demanded the Haiti pay France one hundred and fifty million Germinal francs, not only for the loss of the plantation but for the loss of their slaves. In other words the Haitians paid by force of arms and again by attempting to buy diplomatic recognition as the nation they had become.
They reimbursed the French for themselves. Never-before or since has a victorious nation indemnified the defeated in this manor. Despite the unjustified character of this indemnity and it's scandalous routing of money from the poor to the rich the Haitians paid this debt for over a century, well into the nineteen fifties.
Many adverse events and processes ensued: coups, invasions, military occupations, dictatorships, epidemics and no doubt Haiti was nudged over the edge from difficulty into crisis by the unavailability of public funds which were being shipped across the ocean. The nagging sense that nascent Haiti paid dearly for achieving the goals of liberty, fraternity and quality lives on to this day.
But some of the architects of this misery are today spared blame while others may receive too much. The Haitian anthropologist Jean Price-Mars, writing in 1953, blames the elites of his country for caving in to the extortion of the 19th century international community, arguing that, and I quote, "From a country who's expenditures and receipts were until then balanced the incompetence frivolity of the men in power had made a nation burdened with debts and entangled in a web of impossible financial obligations."
Some recent exercises seeking to arrive at a value for these transfers, including interest, have estimated this extortion at $20 billion. Divide that figure by 9 million citizens, and we see that were it to be returned today, each Haitian would be owed $2,222. What does all this bitter history have to do with catalyzing collaboration? To seek to heal those wounds and improve our world. Aren't social entrepreneurs supposed to be looking forward rather than back? Many of those who seek to respond to the earthquake insist that we stop dwelling on the past and focus on the unprecedentedly generous pledges made two weeks ago. Most speak these days of the need for new social pact, one that would allow us to draw rapidly on these commitments, to rebuild housing stock, clinical facilities, schools, and infrastructures both physical and social.
I am here to ask tonight: What novel technologies might help us to deliver on such pledges? I stand before you and answer with humility, I do not know, but collectively, we know. Not merely the we gathered here today but the broad we of humanity sharing the planet in 2010. One of the exciting things about the catalysis here at Skoll, the good catalysis not the bad, is that people come together to think of new ways to solve problems. Two years ago, drawing on the words of Paul Hawkin I argued in the closing session that we needed to bring together the environmental justice movement, bring it in to this broader social justice movement, so that concern for our wounded planet would be built on concern for our fellow human beings, particularly those living on less than 2 dollars a day.
In another words for my patients and their families. Does the devastation of Haiti, leveled by earthquakes, stripped of its trees, over crowded, always on the edge of risk, suggests that we will not succeed. Thomas Murden once said that we, humans are a body of broken bones, a powerful image, but let me describe a recent experience in a courtyard filled with people who were just that, bodies of broken bones. When we brought in orthopedists, and trauma surgeons, and physical therapists, and the tools of modern medicine, we were able to assuage a great deal of suffering.
In a place where a quarter of a million people were killed in the space of a few hours, a place where all of the government's buildings and a third of the houses were leveled.
Ours is relief on a modest scale. Many of you in this room have supported it in fact one of your students, I might add, from the business school has just sent us 500 wheelchairs, but the vision is to bring the fruits of science and innovation and the power of effective management to bear on the greatest natural disaster of modern times.
That modest effort can be multiplied. 100 fold 1000 fold to meet the need. Adopted by the Skoll family, let me make a humble plea: Let us elevate the definition of catalysis we now need desperately, in Haiti and in the world. An action between two or more persons or forces initiated by agents of change, bearing novel technologies. Some of these agents of change are gone now. So our allies such as Walt Ratterman who between last year's Skoll and this one had taken several of our hospitals to solar power and who perished in Port-au-Prince on January 12th.
Our doctors such as Mario Pagenel who died in his home as he prepared a PowerPoint presentation for Partners in Health, the entire second year nursing school class and their faculty. Many others we tried and failed to save, let us honor their memory, and the memories of the quarter million more who need us to rally in order to build back better.
Let us pledge that no matter where we work that we will fight hard to render obsolete the ancient definition of catalysis as dissolution, destruction, and ruin. If I may be so brazen, let me give you the beginnings of a shopping list, Jeff and Sally. I look to you when I say shopping list, because between and among us lie the skills, the resources, the tools to support the people and government of Haiti, as they attempt to rebuild their country.
Already, the efforts and support of many partners, Skoll awardees among them, have strengthened our response. But a great deal more is needed. You have what we need, or can find it, make it, or figure out how to get it. We need money, sure, but we need to use it wisely and justly. We need smart ways to reforest Haiti, we need better technologies for safe drinking water and more of it.
We need to help create a proper disability rights movement, not simply for those who have lost limbs but for all those handicapped in any way. We need better shelter, seismically rated, hurricane resistant, safe and dignified. We need to reduce the risk of future disasters and mitigate their impact. We need new ways to cook that don't destroy trees, pollute the air, and sicken the people breathing smoke.
We need better means of delivering comprehensive primary care services and insurance systems that do not penalize the sick. We need a new scheme of education that is inclusive and truly available to all students especially to girls. We need technologies, programs and training to support small hold farmers to process what they grow and bring it to a market based on fair trade.
We need thousands of new businesses and hundreds of thousands of good jobs, green jobs, jobs with protection for workers. We need, above all, to honor the heroism of the Haitian people which is rooted in their long struggle for basic rights. As Steven Stole wrote recently in the Atlantic, "It's high time to give Haiti a chance to recover the best part of its history and to stun the world again with the genius of its freedom."
Thank you very much for including me.
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