Helping or Harming: Haiti, International Aid, and NGOs

This week’s reading was based on the book, Killing with Kindness by Mark Schuller. In his book, Schuller explores the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that bring foreign aid to countries like Haiti and how they fell short after the tragic earthquake that hit the small country in January of 2011. In particular he looks at two women led organizations, Sove Lavi (“saving lives”) and Fanm Tet Ansanm (“women united”) and he looks specifically at their “civil infrastructure”, “the interrelated set of relationships between and among various stakeholder groups of a given social grouping” (177). By peeling back the layers of these two organizations, the reader gets a look into this “civil infrastructure” and see how foreign aid organizations are in some ways ran like businesses; some NGOs being funded by private donors and others being funded by organizations with political agendas in mind. Through Schuller’s work the reader gets to play detective and figure out what happened? What went wrong? And who is accountable for the incident? In comparison to other work written on Haiti, Schuller does a good job in telling the whole story not just from an outsider’s perspective but from an insider’s perspective as well, especially in regards to women. Something Chandra Mohanty proclaims is missing from scholarly work written by Westerners about women from developing countries especially in regards to violence against women. Mohanty’s states in her article “Under Western Eyes”, “Women are defined consistently as the victims of male control- the “sexually oppressed”. Although it is true that the potential of male violence against women circumscribes and elucidates their social position to a certain extent, defining women as archetypal victims freezes them into “objects-who-defend-themselves,” men into “subjects-who-perpetrate-violence”(339). This is not the case in Schuller’s book, he includes this part of the story but allows the women to provide an explanation of why it happens. Malya Villard a woman representing a victims organization says this, “Rape or violence are directly connected with the country’s economy. Sometimes a woman doesn’t have any earning power, which makes her a victim.” (27) From this as the reader we get to see how some of these NGOs, like Saving Lives and Women United came to be. They were meant to help women, educate them about sex, help them talk to factory owners about the conditions within the factories, but not be an answer to solving poverty which we can see where everything went wrong.

Foreign aid is meant to be given to people in need to help them temporarily through an unsalvageable situation, but how can it be helpful if no one from the underclass receives the aid? In this situation, sometimes they succeeded other times they failed, one organization in particular, Sove Lavi (Saving Lives), failed a lot more than Fanm Tet Ansanm(Women United). When the women asked for more help within the community they barely received any. Which raises a question of why give money to a country that the poor will never see? Sadly an answer is given at the end from a USAID representative, “The goal is to spend it all and say, ‘ See, we’ve done all we can for Haiti.’” (187). This only leaves me questions which remain unanswered. How do we get the aid to the poor? Should we stop sending money? Who is at fault? The organizations? The donors? The recepients? From the stories shared in Schuller’s book we as the reader can see the importance of having a voice and paying attention to the money we give in hopes to help others. This was definitely a lesson well appreciated.