Thoughts on Haiti

Essay 1: Throughout this course we have heard repeatedly that “Haiti has many problems”. There are, in fact, so many problems that no one seems to agree on the best starting point in working toward a comprehensive solution. The Haitian proverb says, “Chen gen kat pye, men li ka mache nan yon sèl chemen”— A dog has four legs, but it walks in only one path. Assume you are advising the leaders of Haiti and that, due to monetary constraints, you must choose which ONE of many possible paths to development has the greatest likelihood of success (e.g. health care, microfinance, infrastructure, public education, environmental quality, etc.). Which path would you advocate? Your answer should explain how you define “success”, why you chose the advocated path, and why you did not choose plausible alternatives.

Response:

It is not uncommon for the root causes of poverty to be blamed on the people who are poor, suggesting that poor people have simply made bad decisions that have led them down the road to economic disparity. Although I do believe that each person has control over the decision they make in life, I also believe that the root causes of poverty are often larger than each individual’s control. Jared Diamond in his book “Guns, Germs, and Steel” shows that each nation and society in the world today has developed based on the complex combination of many different factors [9]. As expected, research by Diamond and others has led to a deeper understanding of poverty and the uncontrollable factors that produce trends in development toward either economic prosperity or economic hopelessness.

Physical geography and isolation, for example, could be a major cause of Haiti’s current state of poverty. Developing countries such as Haiti have a disadvantage because when compared to places such as the United States, Haiti is more isolated, contains less natural resources, and has a higher percentage per total land area made up of difficult or impassable terrain. Physical...