Wonder why the two are equated? Well, consider getting up in the morning. Are you looking forward to a coffee, getting out the cereal, to a jog, to checking on the kids? Are you going to the bathroom? Do you notice the sound of the toilet flushing?
Well, what if you push that handle down and it doesn’t flush? Now, you call your partner if you have one. What to do next? You have to think of how to contain the stink until someone fixes it, unless you know how to do that. But you have to go to the kitchen, get the water in the kettle, take things out of the refrigerator. You go, turn the tap and nothing comes out. You open the fridge door and everything is dark. You check the clock on the microwave and see it has stopped. There is no water and no electricity.
Hey, many of us have gone through that the past year, some for incredible periods of time, a week, even two or three, but, finally, for the vast majority, the water flowed, and the fridge came back with its comforting sound.
But what if the water had not come on or only come on once in a while and the same thing was true for the purr of the fridge? Of course, the rich would not feel it, bringing water in by trucks and getting electricity with generators and solar panels. They would still get up to a normal preparations and breakfast routine.
Now another basic thing — garbage. People were complaining in my town that refuse collections were not on time, that things were accumulating on the sidewalks. Of course, the trucks finally came around and machines and people picked up things. However, what if little or no sanitation work was carried out? This is certainly the case in so many places including Haiti. Of course, the rich would not feel it again. They could hire their own garbage collectors and trucks.
Finally, for this very simple picture, what if we had no police? I know we are having all kinds of challenges with policing, but what if we had no one to call, no one to turn to if a shooting started or an accident happened on the road, with the injured bleeding and honking, snarled traffic? Of course, the rich would have their own guards, so the first of the two scenarios would be taken care of. The only one where they might have a problem is the second one.
What if we were faced with all four on a daily basis? It is what the majority of Haitians and, of course, others in the world face. But let us consider Haiti.
The many articles that are written today invariably go back to the giant efforts starting in 1995 and costing billions over the quarter of a century since then to improve the situation in this, the poorest and most desolate country in the Western Hemisphere. The efforts, a combined US and international endeavor, tried to work on the country’s innumerable challenges, including health, literacy, employment, governance, etc. However, the results are far from spectacular, as literacy, hovering at about two thirds of the population is far below the average of over ninety percent in the rest of the Americas and insufficient calorie intake in the country puts it in the bottom fifteen nations in the world. On the other hand, the country’s few rich and powerful feel none of that. Given that is the assassination of a president really unexpected?
But why didn’t all the efforts work? Part of it is that those four simple, basic needs were not taken care of for the majority of the people.
Our modern world depends quite a bit on real basics such as water, electricity, sanitation, and security. A successful model for that is to found in China. However much one may dislike the regime that heads it, one only has to read Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth to see how far China and the Chinese have come. And look, those four little basics are there. The vast majority of Chinese have running water, electricity, sanitation and security. Yes, there are floods, but local organized first aid can be seen there almost immediately. Yes, covid started there but hospitals were set up overnight and people quarantined to prevent its spread. Yes, the last was sometimes done most roughly, but it worked as comparatively few were either infected and even fewer died.
Though in private quite a few Chinese may grumble, their parents and grandparents will remind them again and again how far they have come. It is only when those generations are gone and memories of that past are no longer part of the national psyche, that new generations will expect different attitudes and things.
The basics were inculcated in me when I had the incredible chance of going to Haiti with Ambassador Paul Marc Henry, the co-founder of the United Nations Development Program. It was 1991 and Aristide had just been elected President after the country had ousted its last ‘dictator’, Duvalier’s son. Retired and almost my age at present, seventy-two, Paul Marc was asked to go there by the Secretary General of the United Nations to see what could be done to help the new government in its first crucial months.
Instead of spending most of the time in government offices and wonderful soirees among the rich and educated, the powerful, Paul Marc had us crisscross the country, walking on denuded hills, riding donkeys up and down hills, noting leaking and broken water pipes, facing tons of garbage, listening to how the police and military were simply taking food but also learning that they, meant to provide security, had not been paid. One of the worst moments was when we were in the best hospital in Port au Prince and saw with our own eyes an operating room being cleaned using buckets of water because the water pressure was too low for any normal spraying mechanism.
Our report was simple and called ‘Presser, Presser’. It requested twenty four million US dollars over six months to repair or put in some essential water pipes so that Port au Prince, built on a slope, would have a better water supply, money to pay sanitation workers to remove the worst of the garbage in the cities, and salaries for the police and the military. Done that spring it would give the new government a chance until the General Assembly of the United Nations met in the fall and a larger program with appropriate funding put together.
Donor countries met in June but gave less than half of the requested sum. A military coup took place in October. The military and police had not been paid. Conditions only worsened. Four years later the giant mission started. Thirty years after Paul Marc’s mission, the people in the country are still reeling, their basic needs far from met.
And for those of you who wonder why Paul Marc and I did not include electricity in our recommendations for Haiti, well, that is very simple: it was a problem, but we were to present a simple restrained list dealing with the worst problems and entailing the least expenditure.
We will never know whether speedy action following our mission would have made any difference, but to his death in 1998 Paul Marc was sure that things would have been different. Honoring his memory and what he taught me, I knew that it was time to at least bring it up.
