What happened to Haiti? It is bad enough that the people of that country is so irresponsible to completely deforest their land beyond repair but must the rest of the world be irresponsible in the handling of all the Billions of dollars that were supposed to help those poor people after the earthquake many years ago? It has been 5 years since the earthquake and most of the people still do not have homes or clean water or even a toilet. Almost 10 Billion dollars had been pledged from all over the world in relief aid to Haiti. Where did the money go?

It was one of the world’s quickest and largest relief efforts. In January 2010 the devastating earthquake struck Haiti and left an estimated 3 hundred thousand people killed and another 2 Million people were forced from their homes.  When disasters like this strike the natural human instinct is to want to help but even after Billions of dollars in foreign aid was given the country remains a disaster 5 years later. Now hundreds of thousands of survivors are still displaced. People still live in tent cities made up of trash being used for shelter. Plastic random sheets is the roof over their head as they sit in the dirt. There is no plumbing, clean water or electricity.

Water is brought in by a truck. They crap in buckets and they   wait for food in trucks too. The human buckets of waste is tossed just about anywhere and the disease from their disgusting ways are now a new source of death for the people of Haiti.  Haiti suffers from the world’s largest outbreak of Cholera from   waste products polluting their water supplies. This easily preventable infection has killed 9 thousand people just from the countries inability to organize and enforce a sanitation place for trash and feces.  Jake Johnston from the Center for Economic and Policy Research has done research into what happened to all the relief money and where did the educated   help  from professionals  disappear to?

The private donations were supposed to go to clearing the broken buildings away. The long term aid was to come from the developing government.  Our Congress alone appropriated $3.8 Billion dollars to the organization called USAID. USAID then contracts other organizations like CRS, NATHAN that are for profit and non for profit that should have actually done the work there. For every dollar spent less than a penny went to any Haiti organization. Rather than give the Haitian government any money all the supplies were imported everything including the construction companies and were supposed to build 15,000 houses at a cost of $53 Million dollars.  Rapidly the costs ballooned to $93 Million dollars   and instead of building 15,000 houses only 2,600 houses were built.

The United Embassy gave a contract for over $70 Million dollars and built town houses for them and their employees with unground pools for their own staff. We didn’t build many homes for the survivors that needed them. In Zoran, Haiti, Bill Clinton headed a building contest through his aid organization where various   styles of homes were built from log cabins to metal structures not equipped with any plumbing or electricity. It was a $2.4 Million dollar showroom where international firms competed prototype homes with the hopes of winning a contract for mass production. No real homes were built after the expo left and the sample homes are used by squatters on land they do not own with no plumbing or electricity.

It gets worse. In the mountains of Cannon there is a camp that goes on for miles that has been built out of trash without any relief money. Now the government is forcing them out because the people don’t own the land. There is one structure there that was approved by the international community and will remain there. It is a $18Million dollar state of the art soccer field and recreational structure built by the Olympic Committee adding insult to injury to the poor people of the country who have nothing.   I am not done yet!

More nonsense was built seven miles north of the earthquake site with $800 Million dollars in foreign aid   in the District of Caracol. This town was not destroyed by the earthquake but yet another sports center was built here.  Inadequate poorly built structures were built for high prices in the millions and all by a contractor called CHEMONICS. This company got lots of money to rebuild Afghanistan as well.  Audits show widespread corruption. As usual no one ever bothered to ask the locals what they needed.  Most of the money was spent on a $260 million dollar industrial park that looks like a sprawling factory in America complete with outdoor lighting, paved roads. Inside electricity and plumbing to house clean running water for workers from a South Korean garment company that employs 10% of the workers to make cheap cloths all day. They go home to sleep in the dirt under a plastic roof.  What a horrible shame.