Haiti (Catch all)

[marct]

Hi Tom,

I'm really not using the US or the frozen north as a measure. If I could see some way for Haiti to achieve, oh, I dunno, maybe a quarter or so of what the Dominican Republic has going for it, then I could see some hope. Haiti is probably stuck at the level where hope means, "Maybe things won't get worse so quickly that I can reasonably expect not to starve to death this year. Maybe." That, however, is a measure of "hope" stripped of any positive attributes, which is to say, no hope at all.

I'd be ecstatic to see it at a quarter of the DR . May be, in about 20 years with a lot of work.

True story: About 5-6 years ago I had lunch with the mayor of Delmas, a subdivision of Port au Prince. The mayor was a nice guy, a bright guy, well educated and caring. I had the impression - rarity of rarities - that he was the honest sort, too. He and this retired colonel who was working for a Haiti-oriented NGO had a scheme to take the charcoal tailings that dotted the country and turn them into briquets, seeling them at cost. I listened to their little presentation and at the end had to ask, "What have you got when the tailings run out? Besides even more Haitians, who need more charcoal, and have no more trees than they had when you started mining the tailings? What's your end game? How does this temporary partial fix make anything better?"

You know, for most of our history as a species, we've relied on temporary, partial fixes. The trick is always trying to figure out before hand what problems those fixes will cause and whether the long term problems will be worth the short term gain (if any). The example i use up here is income tax which, in Canada, was brought in as a temporary tax to cover the debt from the first world war; I'm pretty sure that's been paid off, but.....

Of course, it didn't. There was no end game. There was no realistic plan of improving anything, however much they cared and however hard they tried. Everything, as so often, boiled down to saving people from starving this year so that even more of them could starve next year.

One of the things that can work, Botswana is a decent example, is using very limited temporary fixes and requiring that part of that "fix" include plans for identifying currently unidentified problems and having a cash reserve for dealing with them.

As for police actually doing what police are supposed to do...you can still color me skeptical. As you pointed out early on, anything but watching out for number one in a place that like is insane. Since none of the cops were reported as foaming at the mouth, I am inclined to think that, whatever they were doing, they had a purely self-interested, and probably short term self-interested, motive for. I would be terriby unsurprised to discover that some NGO, or consortium thereof, was paying them to act the part, because it is easier to collect money when one can show the suckers something that _looks_ like grounds for hope.

Possible, but there are some interesting implications of the way Haiti is currently organized 9or disorganized if you prefer). One of them is that if you rely on outside sources for support, like a pay check, you tend to not want to have that endangered. I'd be really interested to see which police units "worked" and which didn't and if there was any correlation between that and the training / funding coming from the RCMP, etc.

BTW, I saw a really interesting example of this type of thinking at work in the DR amongst the beach vendors in Cabarete. Organizationally, they have elements of both the Patron system and a medieval guild; highly self and area policing in a very informal way, and quite open about their views on enlightened self interest (keep the tourists coming, keep them happy, establish personal relationships with them, etc.).