Haiti (Catch all)

[Tom Kratman]

Or, even worse, adopting a "dual personality" depending on which country they were in . If they return, then that will diminish the countries hard currency, so that could be a problem.

What does make an amount of sense is having "twinned" NGOs with an office in Haiti and, say, Montreal. However, really good aid / development work operates best at the small, local level with a lot of "local" input and control. I've seen some of that in the DR, and it can be quite effective even though the problem set in the DR is quite different.

Tom, you were telling that story about the charcoal briquette idea and that got me to thinking about how it could be sustained. One possible way would be to use the tailings piles as the initial source while, at the same time, hitting up some of the environmentalist groups about tree planting. What I'm specifically thinking about is what's sometimes call "mixed" plantings of both long growth trees (aid in soil fixing and, later, selective, high value, harvesting) and very short growth trees that are pretty much "junk wood" (e.g. poplar). Use the latter for the raw material for charcoal after the tailings have been cleaned out. Obviously, needs work, but...

They'd never let the saplings last long enough to become trees. They couldn't; they must eat today.

Which reminds me of something. In Korea, once upon a time, the Army had to hire Koreans to guard our supply dumps. Why? Because our troops wouldn't shoot starving civilians while the Koreans _would_. Now picture for just a minute trying to guard the trees. Our troops are going to shoot? Not on your life. Neither would the Brazilians, and they're considerably more rough and ready than we are about such things. So we hire locals to guard them. And we can even enter the realm of fantasy for a moment and imagine they do, rather than selling the wood themselves. How long does funding for that particular program last? Until the Five O'Clock news, maybe?