Keep focus on Haiti, please, it is desperately needed

NGOs operating in other parts of the world are softly worrying that focus on Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake threatens to shift resources from other trouble spots around the globe and to disrupt funding for charitable organizations serving those spots. Nick Kristof began a discussion of this yesterday in his NY Times On the Ground blog.

Of course I understand the point. Just because tectonic plates shift laterally in the Caribbean and topple Port-au-Prince, a city of at least 2 million (but who would know because there's no one really counting) built primarily on sandy cinder blocks without any structural support, doesn't lessen the need in Darfur or Cambodia any more than the upward thrust quake in Chile should lessen the understanding of the much more widespread devastation in Haiti, a totally failed state with no available infrastructure and children dying of kwashiorkor such as is seen and associated normally just with sub-Saharan Africa.

Go to Haiti as I did and you will see little babies dying in the ruined shell of a hospital, sometimes three or four a day with gangrenous bowels from untreated infections, dehydration, untreated heart failure, cerebral malaria. On one afternoon I saw a young woman in the ER tent in the General Hospital (such as it is, largely destroyed and thus in tents) with a thyroid crisis and oh, by the way, a tumor as large as a bunch of watermelons in her lower abdomen that she was told no one could do anything about months ago when it was smaller, and in the next litter (just above the dirt floor) a kid of 12 peeing blood with a giant tumor on his bladder seen in the portable ultrasound brought by one of the crazy quilt of NGOs trying to do some sort of good there.

Yes, it is correct that Haiti's quake should in the best of all worlds shake us into recognition of need wherever it occurs in the world and increase awareness rather than shift resources. But as Voltaire pointed out long ago, there is no "best of all possible worlds," certainly not in this one, and resources are shifted among NGOs and areas of need just as they are fiercely battled over by pork-barrel legislators during the melee of lawcrafting. It will continue that way, but I would ask you to remember that the Haitian quake, "la catastrophe," as they sometimes call it there, has the chance to focus the world's eyes on a country which hasn't had organized medical care for years, hasn't paid the doctors in the general hospital for the last 7 months, hasn't had an agricultural base since the deforestation due to commercialization of charcoal, hasn't had a viable political base since two generations of despotic dictatorship and one failed experiment in democracy gone awry, and is left with millions of displaced undocumented shanty-dwellers about to be inundated in the rainy season with flowing sewage. Let the focus shift a bit. It is desperately needed.