The Big Truck that Went By

Since September, Kelly & I have joined other Haiti Compact student leaders from six universities around the country on weekly conference calls to share challenges, successes, resources, and best practices for leading alternative break trips to Haiti. One of the main goals of the Compact is to facilitate collaboration between students as part of a larger process of movement building. Joined by our faculty and staff advisors, past student leaders and trip participants, we counter prevailing attitudes about (under)development in Haiti simply by asking questions that prioritize sustainability, ethics, and human dignity.

And so, thanks to the Compact's connections and hard work, Jonathan Katz joined our call a few weeks ago. Incredibly personable and honest, Katz is a journalist who traced the post-quake cholera epidemic to UN peacekeepers and wrote a definitive book on the shortcomings and politics of foreign aid in Haiti: The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster. On our conference call, we asked him about his experience with education reform in Haiti, environmental challenges, local governance, food security, and the context of foreign aid.

Because it seems self-evident that the international system should protect the most vulnerable, especially in natural disasters, sometimes it becomes difficult to admit failure. The first time that I fundamentally questioned the idea of “foreign aid” was through alternative breaks. Our trips have a tendency to challenge the foundations of students’ assumptions about the world, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed or burnt out. As an alternative break leader, I know this all too well.

Katz put it well: the important thing, he explained, is to harness those good intentions wisely. There are things we can do to assist, but money and power also need to be turned inward, to re-examine the consequences of our actions. Doing something is not always better than doing nothing, contrary to popular belief. But that doesn’t mean that nothing should be done. It means that supporters can re-direct our efforts in more productive ways:

“The issue is less with some organizations having more know-how than others; it’s that the whole system needs to be overhauled – and not just when it comes to aid. Poverty and a lack of local institutions create the shoddy conditions that make disasters deadlier than they have to be. […] Supporting efforts to give to aid directly to local governments, and the goal of building local institutions that operate independently of foreign control, will go exponentially farther than cargo planes full of tarps and bottled water.

It’s true that we don’t always know what locals will do with that assistance, but that’s the point. It’s up to them (Katz 278)."