Truth About Haiti and How to Help

There is a great post on the Flourish Blog on the tragic history of Haiti and the need to help, by Joanna Pritchard, a community advocate with a research background in Haitian history and culture, and Rusty Pritchard, a natural resource economist and president of Flourish.

They write:

With so much talk in the environmental community about global warming, it is easy to forget that no matter what we do about it, all it means for poor countries is more of what they already experience–natural disasters that become social and economic disasters. Whether or not global warming is good science, whether or not we should cap-and-trade carbon pollution, we still should be ramping up our assistance to help poor countries. That doesn’t always mean more direct aid: it will also mean making economies more robust and less corrupt, less dependent on trade in commodities, encouraging private enterprise and finding ways for financial capital to stay in place.

And this:

Wacky, discredited ideas from some Christians claim a Satanic pact during the Haitian revolution has crippled the Haitian economy and corrupted its culture. It’s clear from Haiti’s history that human greed by so-called Christian nations (including Haiti’s own leaders) has a great deal to do with Haiti’s present situation. There’s a technical word for the mental condition that leads to crazy claims about pacts with the devil: idiocy.

If you want to read a Haitian Christian’s careful debunking of the Satanic-pact myth, look to the three part article, “God, Satan, and the Birth of Haiti,” by Jean R. Gelin, Ph.D., a Haitian Christian and agricultural expert.

Check out this and many fascinating articles at the Flourish Blog