We know Haiti. After the 2010 disaster, expats want a bigger role in earthquake assistance

Relief and recovery efforts after the earthquake that struck southwestern Haiti earlier this month are, in many ways, just beginning. Haitians – and Americans of Haitian descent – do not want to see the mistakes made after the 2010 earthquake repeated.

Many of the 2010 aid efforts are now considered a disaster: $13 billion in international aid did relatively little to pull Haiti out of a disaster that killed nearly 200,000 people. The American Red Cross, for example, got half a billion dollars – and built only six new homes in Haiti.

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One of the biggest complaints is that the Red Cross and other NGOs have kept themselves – and the Haitian diaspora – from the recovery process.

“They need to listen to people like me who know the culture, and we know the country,” said Haitian expat Evans Moreso of Miami.

“We don’t just pretend to know.”

Read more: Haiti 10 years after the earthquake: why has it made so little recovery in a decade?

Moreso, Miami-Dade County’s community liaison officer, chairs the nonprofit Haitian American Emergency Relief Committee. Along with Florida International University, I helped train Haitians in Haiti in the kind of rescue and relief work that is needed now — after this month’s earthquake killed more than 2,200 people and devastated entire towns in southwestern Haiti.

Moreso also helps lead a diaspora group called APREM Aids in his hometown of Moreso, Haiti. The town is just miles from the epicenter of the latest earthquake, and he says he has relatives who were injured there.

They were inside collapsed houses and in [path] “Landslides because the mountains are there in Moreso,” Moreso said.

Jose A. Iglesias

Myrtilla Zamore is using USAID fabrics for shelter after the August 14 earthquake that demolished the walls of her home in Bucan Noel, Haiti.

The diaspora sends more than $3 billion annually to Haiti and Moreso feels its members and organizations must be called upon and funded to complement international relief work – to be an important link between Haitians and aid organizations. They say they have a kind of access and understanding that only Haitians have.

“The diaspora can make direct contact with these people, go directly to the affected neighborhoods, and give them the support they need — not what you want to give them but what they really need,” Moreso said.

Tessa Petty, a Haitian American from Miami who heads the nonprofit Ayiti Toma, said that helps communities in Haiti — especially in the remote southwest — organize to solve development issues.

One of the necessary things that Haitian diaspora organizations will do that I don’t think international NGOs have done in 2010 is to involve Haitians themselves in the post-earthquake recovery.

Tessa Small

Petit stresses that Haitian Americans should not try to replace the “white savior” attitude that she says many foreign NGOs bring to Haiti with their own “diaspora savior” mentality. But she feels that Haitian-American-led organizations are ideally placed to help NGOs bring Haitians themselves to relief work.

The significance of that struck Betty when she lost her mother in the 2010 earthquake, after she scrambled to Port-au-Prince to locate her.

“It took about a week to find her remains,” Pettit recalls. “But it was Haitian volunteerism, not international NGOs, that helped us. Once those NGOs got in, I stopped seeing the volunteer community’s efforts. If Haitians hadn’t put some effort into… Something, it will be difficult for people to redevelop Haiti.”

water works

One example of the role an expat connection role can play is water, Petty and Moreso say.

The earthquake destroyed water infrastructure across southwestern Haiti. Haitians report that the waters in a large part of the Ravens de Sud River are now contaminated with the bodies of earthquake victims. Currently, survivors rely heavily on donated bottled water. More permanent alternatives, such as borehole pumps, must be built — and Pettit says Haitian groups, not NGO employees, should be commissioned and paid to do so.

“One thing is necessary [Ayiti Toma] It will, and I don’t know if an international NGO will, or not, involve Haitians in its installation.”

Courtesy Aite Toma

Members of the Haitian diaspora organization Aite Thoma work with Haitians to clear a road in southwest Haiti days after the August 14 earthquake.

Petty, who is also the director of operations for the nonprofit Florida Alliance for Immigrants in Miami, says diaspora organizations can help NGOs find Haitian suppliers for these water pumps — and help the local economy in the process.

These are things that NGOs rarely did back in 2010. In large part due to a lack of Haitian and Haitian American input, aid money has often been misappropriated.

Today, the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, has a website for the Center for International Disaster Information – CIDI.org – to help organizations and diaspora communities petition to participate in disaster recovery.

Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mallorcas met with Haitian-American community leaders in Little Haiti and, according to attendees, registered their requests to more meaningfully engage the diaspora in earthquake relief.

Haitian-American leaders like Daniel Eugene, Florida director of the Haitian American Diaspora Council, describe this as a welcome change since 2010.

“This time they need to understand that the diaspora is the best partner of the US government,” said Eugene, who is also a hospital nurse in Miami and a member of the Haitian American Nurses Association of Florida.

Eugene is heading out this week to do volunteer work in Les Cayes, one of the cities hardest hit by the earthquake – largely on his own dime. He says expatriates need better coordination as they approach the US government for funding. But he says diaspora brings another advantage.

Eugene said, “Haitian American organizations don’t have the overhead that NGOs are going to have. So imagine if they had more money to do that. That would go extra miles.”

Haitians here say they want to finally have the chance to go those extra miles to help Haiti recover.

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