Dedicated to an enduring hope that Haiti can rebuild itself

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Author and UC Irvine professor Amy Wilentz met a 2-year-old boy in Haiti who had lost both of his hands in the January earthquake that ravaged the capital city of Port-au-Prince. “He wasn’t even crying anymore, he was beyond pain,” she said. The boy and his mother were waiting in line at an overwhelmed clinic for more medication. Upon seeing that he’d barely advanced in the line after several hours, she drove him to another hospital.

She has since lost track of him but speculated that, given the current lack of resources, he might become a street beggar. But she urged the crowd at the panel “Haiti and Recovery from Disaster” at the Festival of Books to have optimism all the same. Without hope, what is there?

At the Saturday afternoon panel moderated by L.A. Times Managing Editor Davan Maharaj, panelists Wilentz, Mark Danner and Rebecca Solnit kept returning to this point, though not always in obvious ways. The rich political history of the country and the nature of communities in disaster provided context, the backbone on which to build hope. The media predicted early on that looting might run rampant, but Solnit, author of “A Paradise Built in Hell: ‘The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster,’ analyzed it as almost a case of semantics: Is it looting when all your stuff is in rubble but a store down the road has formula for your baby? No, it’s survival skills at work.

Haiti has estimated that it needs $11.5 billion to rebuild, but the question is: How do all those funds get allocated? Wilentz and Danner, journalists who have reported extensively from Haiti, want that money to land in the pockets of actual Haitian citizens to ensure better fates than begging.

Danner stated that the spirit of the Haitian people, doggedly resistant to outside intervention, for better or worse, should serve as a guidepost for how important it is that funds land in the hands of the people so they can learn skills to pass down to future generations.

Though affection exists in Haiti for the U.S., despite a relationship that Wilentz characterized as sick and dysfunctional, our country time and again has not saved Haiti. The take-away message of the panel: For this Caribbean nation built up from the only successful slave revolution, it will ultimately be most satisfying for Haiti to have the biggest role in saving itself.

-- Margaret Wappler