Snapshot of Haiti

It is January 2, 2012. The second day of the new year. There is nothing on the television and a project remains unstarted-but procrastination prevails. I read a blog our journalism class had in our second year of college. 

Today it nears the second anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, a 7.0 Richter Scale disaster that occurred on January 12, 2010. My blog post at the time, as a second year student, describes the disaster, panic and worldwide reaction that followed the Haitian earthquake worldwide.

Monday, February 1, 2010. 

Have Some Sense.

The capital’s streets are strewn with rotting bodies. The buildings and roads are crushed beyond familiarity. The once proud and pompous palace is nothing but fallen bricks. Overnight, Port-au Prince became a whole city of livelihoods and homes beyond repair. Unfortunately, this snapshot is but a microcosm of Haiti as a country today. A country whose position on the list of the world’s poorest countries was hardly a prosperous one, suffered one of the largest earthquakes recorded by mankind on the 12th of January, 2010. An earthquake of the unbelievable measurement of 7.0 on the Richter Scale shot down all attempts of the country’s poor chances of survival.

Aid flocked from worldwide, however helpless or disorganised it was at the beginning of the chaos, the intentions were meaningful. Governments around the world donated money and aid to the disaster, charities and non-governmental organisations organised transport for food, water and medical assistance to the Caribbean island. Housewives hosted coffee mornings to raise cash for charities and children were encouraged by their parents to donate their week’s or month’s pocket money to those less fortunate than themselves.

And the host of a Christian Broadcasting Network show, The 700 Club, Pat Robertson, sat on his comfortable couch in a television studio in the United States of America and claimed that the Haitian earthquake was, in fact (I mean, how did we not know this ourselves already?), a consequence of the ‘Haitian Curse’. This curse, just so we all know the proper facts, was initiated when the founding fathers of Haiti made a ‘pact with the devil’ in exchange for Haiti’s independence from France. ‘Oh, ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other…’ Pat Robertson said knowingly.

Have I gone crazy?

How can a man who claims to be a man of God, a man of the twenty-first century even, sit there and say so confidentially, so all-knowingly, that the reason people lost their homes, their jobs, their livelihoods, their families and the reason that men, women and children are all wandering the streets of Haiti alone, hungry, tired, thirsty and grasping onto their last photograph of a loved one or their last piece of sustinance is because they deserved this earthquake as a result of the ‘pact with the devil’ that their founding fathers made years beforehand?

I need to know I am not the one going mad.