a panic .. people (3)

since i will mostly be considering haiti here some of you may wonder what this has to do with panic.

for historical reference, the 12th of januar at 16:53 (about) local time the capital of haiti, a shodden build capital in one of the poorest nations, was struck by a 7 magnitude earthquake and utterly devastated, current counts point at between 100 and 200000 people killed. burried beneath rubble.

at first the 13th and aproximately 24 hours after the incident, no clear news was let through to the major channels, after that it did and slowly a picture of the devastation was allowed to arrive.. no panic people..

i have the impression even the internet channels that people use to vent their own impressions had been limited to express only greetings, regards and messages of those who were still alive.
(i remember one guy that proudly wrote i am on this tv, i am on taht tv, some 10 times, however it was all he wrote)

24 hours is definitly enough to acces damages and even deathtoll in a realistic (altho nowhere precise ofcourse ) manner. such didnt happen. only after some 30 hours the news began to show that the disaster was of ultimately huge proportions.

of course people now react as if it just happened, you see a lot of focus on the searching, and after 4 days, with unknown but rather huge numbers of search and rescue teams that are still flown in, one would suspect more to get professional exercise then to still find survivors.

the first 24 hours after a huge earthquake are critical, anyone that got burried alive still has a chance for salvation in that time..

but like i explained, the first 24 hours nothing happened except a thorough control of the media.
so i apologise for my cynism but i think it need be said aid was send suspectably late.

at the very moment media attention partly focusses on the few survivors (after 3-4 days usually children), that still get pulled alive from beneath the ruins, actually it is a huge part of the reporting, no matter that beneath this rubble just very few would still be alive, and the stricken people on the streets, are still in need for medical care. and because it concerns millions, food.

water was not mentioned today so the city's water supply system has been put to use to distribute water by now. that is not very bad, also in the rescue of a little boy i saw that the procedure now encompasses cars to drive people to hospitals (ofcourse miracle survivors might get this extra attention) so the roads are to some extend clear in port au prince. that means distribution of water should no longer be a problem.

it's not solved but with the right kind of exercise noone needs to die from thirst. food is still a problem , millions of people on the street, and about 90% of them with no financial means, and nothing of an income left with the city largely (some 90%) destroyed, will be in dire need for food for weeks to come.

everyone (or almost all) with a foreign passport is leaving in a great hurry, and part of the population started drifting towards the country side of day one. yet some 2 million people remain in the area (thats an estimate) and they will need support.

a lot of questions start to rise, for example about the usian army, will they leave again? the whole haiti is very close to usia, the thought comes up how can you let your neighbour live in such poverty, but now donations are rolling in, and ofcourse expenses, on militairy planes and personnel are rising, i can't help but wonder where this aid will all end up, with a yearly average income of 256$ or so , obviously even the 50 or so million now collected could hire a lot of labour.

but i fear the overhead, since for years i have seen little control or accounting for what aid really arrived. for what it's worth i am quite distrustfull about the european overhead, so the whites way to cope with such money. i just wish some control in that sense will be put in place, because i think it is terribly bitter that money that is actually donated to victims of a major disaster can hardly be traced after it arrives at it's collectors.

that besides , how is it spend, obviously port au prince , that will just like every other disaster strucken poor nation city be rebuild at the exact spot of the disaster most probably, needs a better water supply system and decent building regulations. i am not intimate to the details of the seismic fault, and perhaps it would be a life long experience to predict anything definite about it, but another quake will take place in 40-50 and at most 100 years, and since earthquakes are notoriously hard to predict perhaps also much sooner.

the haitians themselves can't pay for this, their nation has been logged, being some 90% enclosed by sea they apparently have no fishing industry worth mentioning, and beside rampant erosion i know not yet of a major agricultural produce, a few projects i hears of offer people 5$ a day, of wich they then spend two on transport, but the ones with that luxurious kind of income are little.

so there is actually nothing, that is no news, if you look at the history of haiti, a majorly black nation (except the ruling class) the thought it is institutional racism that kept them so poor is striking early. why don't they have an income of mining or even oil, there must be some, who catches their fish? why wasnt reforesting required after logging? and was the destruction of a native agriculture (through erosion but i suspect also through population politics , sending the people to just this city) coincedentual?

it's all in the mist of banking secrets, someone gets payed for that fish, someone got payed for the wood. its now said its been used for charcoal, but i still remember how i recently read it was logging that did it for the most.

that besides, why is it not industrially developed in any sense. an aid organisation factory or two that pay 5$ a day i wouldn't call development.

i think because of institutional racism over the past two century's.

what has it ado with panic? firstly they did keep it obscure in the news for 24 hours, so as not to panic people, but i think also to get their publicity prepared, to have standard distracting formulations ready, so that the sour points that would move (panic) people don't get into the open easily. (logging versus charcoal eg.)

i end this story with expressing the hopes haiti will now be treated as a nation of humans, that development and not further exploitation will be the result of this quake and the interference that necessarily follows. that it will be reforested, get's it's fishing right's, a profit of it's own resources, and that agriculture will be stimulated. haiti is on an island split in two through colonial history and like in those cases most often i do, i think it may be that it would be better of if it fused with the dominican republic, but i don't expect it.

haiti is to aware of the racism in that republic to have high hopes of such a fusion, and unfortunately through knowing some of the history, i must admit i agree with that. racism has been the deciding factor in the (un) development of haiti, and that racism is shared by neighbouring hispaniola's in the dominican republic.

a next problem is with the local government, from now i must guess, because i don;'t know the details here, but after a violent power take over the un send a "peacekeeping" mission, that supported the new rulers and it is still there to police the populace. a populace that through century's of racism may indeed have become restless.

the luxurious presidential palace of wich i wonder it wasn't build since, collapsed. a former president wants to return, i fear to a rebuild palace..