Promises, Promises—What It Will Take to Rebuild Haiti

“In the streets and resettlement camps of Port-au-Prince, the promises and rhetoric were greeted with a healthy dose of skepticism,” writes Partners In Health’s (PIH) Medical Director Dr. Joia Mukherjee in an April 7 editorial, “Promises, Promise—What It Will Take to Rebuild Haiti.” The piece was published on the online news site The Huffington Post.

The editorial addresses promises made at last week’s International Donors’ Conference Towards a New Future for Haiti, hosted by the UN at its headquarters in New York City. The conference demonstrated an international commitment to Haiti’s short and long-term recovery and yielded pledges totaling more than $9.9 billion USD for Haiti’s reconstruction, governance, and broad-based sustainable development.

“The amounts pledged to support relief and reconstruction at the March 31 International Donors’ Conference for Haiti were impressive,” writes Joia, “So was much of the accompanying rhetoric about recognizing Haitian leadership and empowering the Haitian people.”

“Nearly three months after the January 12 quake, the scene remains grim. An impoverished city of three million people—long without adequate building codes, sanitation or waste management—has been reduced to a patchwork of ruins and fetid shanty settlements. As the first torrents of the rainy season pour down and the hurricane season looms, hundreds of thousands of people live in makeshift shelters with little or no access to sanitation, many on slopes where they could be swept away by mudslides, others on patches of low-lying ground that will inevitably become a toxic stew of mud, garbage, and human waste. Children remain out of school and the medical infrastructure of Port-au-Prince lies in ruins.”

To read Joia’s perspective on what it will take for Haiti to win the struggle for dignity, and what changes need to occur before Haiti’s people can rebuild their country, click here.