A thousand trucks hauling full loads would need several years to clear away the wreckage left by the 7.3-magnitude earthquake that struck Port-au-Prince and sent shock waves from there throughout Haiti six months ago, on January 12, 2010. But not even 300 trucks are removing it at this moment.
As we’ve heard, 230,000 people died, and also more than 1.5 million people were made homeless by the earthquake. Officially, they are called “displaced people,” but even when they have been forced from their homes by the earthquake and can conceivably go back one day, displaced is still a government term for “homeless.” Over one million people are homeless.
Those are large numbers, and yet each large number is really one person times two-hundred-and-thirty thousand and one person times one-and-a-half million. Lumping tragic deaths into statistics that we can hold in our minds never much works for our hearts. It would take each of us a long time simply to count to 230,000 and even longer to count to 1,500,000, and what if each was a soul with a unique heartbeat. How long then?
Help has poured into the country of Haiti from loving people all over the world, devastated to sit in their easy chairs and watch the awful scenes in color on their television sets. So they got up and gave, or they got up and went to help. Or they got up and got the word out so others could add to their financial or material contributions.
Even so, only 28,000 homeless Haitians have been settled, if you can call it that, into temporary housing. Over one million Haitians are crammed into tents, praying to hold on to their sanity, each other, their health, their safety, and their few belongings, as the rains beat down. Rain has no spigot. It drums down on tents, promising malaria and typhoid. Its irrefutable, metallic wetness must taste like desperation to the Haitians huddling beneath dripping tents.
And six months in a news cycle is an oblivion. We search our crammed freezers for that excellent coffee someone gave us some months ago and are slightly frustrated when we can’t find it easily. Then we finally find it and are very happy to drink that very tasty coffee. We worry if our cars need a wash and some detailed cleaning work. We take our cars into car washes and do the detailed cleaning work, with a toothbrush. We focus on what we can purge from our homes and give to Goodwill, while new bought stuff keeps pouring in.
Can we even say where Haiti is? I know a fifth-grader could. To get to Haiti, all we have to do is go to Florida first. Drive past the lovely, round, and awkward-looking balletic manatees (that I so love), beyond Key West Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang-style, into the Straits of Florida, and cross over to Havana. Then follow the length of Cuba southeast, and once in Guatánamo (or Juaco), cross over to La Plateforme, and we’re there, in northern Haiti. To the west is Jamaica, to the east is the Dominican Republic, and to its east is, yes, Puerto Rico: Haiti.
From Miami, Port Au Prince is only a two-hour flight away, or 681 miles, which is about 1,097 kilometers.
And yet, Haiti is a world away from us. We could say a universe away.
And this is one of those times where, conversely, we turn to numbers to help us quantify concepts that are too large and too amorphous otherwise, always aware that these numbers, too, are pointing us to our brothers and sisters and their opportunities or lack of opportunities in this world.
In the “Human Development Report 2009: Overcoming Barriers, Human Development and Mobility,” which can be read online, we see the truth of America’s blessings in unflinching numbers. This helpful report describes for us a population’s life expectancy at birth (as an indicator of its health and longevity), its adult literacy rate and gross enrollment ratios of students in primary school through the university level (as an indicator of the country’s educational strengths and general knowledge), and the population’s standard of living (as an indicator of personal wealth or poverty). In other words, how long do Haitians live, how many go to school and for how long and how much do they learn while there, and what is their purchasing power?
If we look at the tables at the back of this Human Development Report, starting at page 143 and going on for many, many pages, we can see that those of us who live in America and can hunt for gifts of coffee in our over-full freezers are very fortunate indeed. On page 167, which is Table G, we see our affluence and its multiple benefits in the number thirteen. Out of the 182 countries ranked, the United States comes in at a very solid thirteen.
Now click over a few pages. Haiti is ranked 149 out of 182. That’s on page 169 of Table G.
Those numbers are astonishing, when we consider them concretely. America ranks in the top 7%, and Haiti falls into the bottom 18%. In other words, America is in the uppermost live-long-and-prosper-in-a-well-educated-manner category, with its under-10% ranking, while Haiti is in the bottommost category, with its over-80% ranking.
Put another way, we Americans enjoy a Human Development Index (HDI) number of 0.956, while Haitians have an HDI about half that, at 0.532. We live longer, we have more educational opportunities, and we have more power as consumers.
Jesus says, “The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want” (Mark 14:7). It sounds like an assumption. Christ assumes we will be out there loving those less fortunate than we are, wherever and whenever we meet them. It is a holy and practical assumption made by God, the way we assume that any worthwhile house has a sturdy foundation.
So what am I going to do with my abundance?
Carmen, thanks for the reminder. It really is heartbreaking, and we can’t afford not to give. Well done!!