Tears are not enough

[allhatnocattle]

"When I was in Haiti, a 19-year-old American in military fatigues showed up with boxes of latex gloves. His heart was in the right place, but he didn’t really know what he was doing and had a nervous breakdown after picking up an amputated leg when he was asked to clean a hospital’s waste-strewn yard. He went home the next day

Comments

[tridus]

The Hatians have been complaining about this a fair bit. Aid is needed, but the agencies have done a terrible job of distributing it. Some areas get too much while others are totally ignored, there's no coordination between the groups (most of which also don't work with the government), and far too much bureaucracy. Macleans had a great article in the early days of the disaster about it, showing one agency giving out water purification packets. Their plan was going around with a clipboard, and if your name was on their list, you got water that day. They gave out water to 600 or so people. (Meanwhile, Global Medic, which is a tiny group in comparison used the same time to bring in equipment and managed to purify water for 50,000 people. Amazing what happens if you send engineers instead of bureaucrats.)

Oxfam did a report on some of these problems back in 2005. Here's my favorite part: For example, in Ghana $100m of World Bank assistance was withheld because the government failed to privatise municipal water. The UK followed suit, withholding £7m of its own aid, and leaving two million urban Ghanaians waiting for clean water.

Now if you figure out exactly what forcing a country to privatize its water system has to do with aid, let me know. Municipal water seems to work okay for us here in Canada.

[enders_shadow]

Private water = private companies profits

Water is the oil of the third world.
I like my water clean and publicly owned.
But that's me, a crazy liberal....

[gunslnger]

Yes, yes you are...