Haiti

As the bad news continues to pour out of Haiti, I’m compelled to write as my thoughts drift to the people that are suffering so much now and the toll that disasters take.

Many of you probably don’t know, but over the last two weeks there was serious flooding here north of Tirana. The problem was caused by heavy rains and ineptitude at a large hydroelectric dam. Engineers didn’t release the side gates to regulate the water level, and by the time they did it, there was a significant fear that the built up pressure would be so great that the entire dam would collapse. Luckily that didn’t happen, but it did leave large parts of the Lezha and Shkoder regions covered in a meter of water. Had the dam gone completely, it would have flooded Tirana as well. The four volunteers living in those regions were evacuated following Peace Corps safety procedures and spent a week in Tirana before returning home. Aid came from a few other countries, but the cleanup process will take some time and money. What could have been a huge disaster has become only a small one.

Haiti, on the other hand, has consumed every newspaper (or should I say “internet news site,” since who reads newspapers?) this week. We thought we had seen the worst of it with the tsunami, or Katrina, or the earthquake in China, and then this. The accounts are unbelievable. I read that one man who worked for the United Nations said he had been thrown around the room during the earthquake. Something about that stuck into my mind. I thought about the kind of force that would be required to knock someone from their feet like that.

It’s hard to even look at the statistics and logistics of the disaster. The 50,000 estimated dead may end up at 200,000. One and a half million people are homeless. Thirty some aftershocks at 4.5. Aid can’t even be properly distributed because of the bad roads. Disease will soon set in amongst all the bodies. Where do aid workers and locals even start?

This article talks about what I imagine is the hardest part: the bodies. Unfortunately, there is no way to even process the bodies. They are placed in mass graves, without being identified, and are even burned in some cities. In all of the chaos, how will people ever get the closure of being able to identify their loved ones? What about having a burial ceremony? And what about the loneliness of bodies that aren’t ever going to be claimed, because there is no one to claim them? After the disaster has been cleaned up and the building process begins but people’s family members don’t return home, are they just supposed to assume that their relatives died? A friend and I were discussing these points and she mentioned the people killed during September 11th, which is a similar situation in terms of bodies.

Besides the spread of disease, the biggest problem is social unrest. The longer it takes to get proper aid, the more unstable the situation will get. Already there are reports of men armed with machetes roaming the street and the federal government has relocated its headquarters to the airport. Figure in an estimated 6,000 inmates that have been given spontaneous freedom with the collapse of jails. How will the government be able to enforce order and law in such a devastated area?