This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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Haiti chérie: not unlucky but unprepared

By:   []

Date: 2021-09

On 14 August, more than 11 years after Haiti suffered the deadliest earthquake ever recorded in the western hemisphere, it was hit by another, stronger one. Its epicentre was 59 miles west of the goudougoudou, the onomatopoeic Haitian Kreyol word for the quake of 12 January 2010.

Then on 16 August, Tropical Storm Grace struck Haiti, compounding the problems faced by the Caribbean nation. Many people­­­ – both in Haiti and beyond – responded to news of the two natural disasters with the bleak phrase “Haiti never gets a break”. Others restricted themselves to commiserations. “Poor Haiti”, said the WhatsApp messages flying around between people in Haiti and people abroad who knew Haiti. “Haiti chérie. Poor Haiti chérie. What can Haiti do? Non-stop problems.”

The messages represented a fatalistic idea: that Haiti is doomed to constant suffering, that its problems are inevitable and nothing will ever change.

It didn’t help that half a world away, Afghanistan returned to Taliban control the day after this year’s earthquake. The world became absorbed by events in Kabul and there was little bandwidth for Haiti, with its supposed ill luck and seemingly long-ordained problems.

There is some truth in the impression of ill luck. When the most recent earthquake and tropical storm struck, Haiti was already reeling from a political crisis caused by the assassination of its president on 7 July. In the years since the 2010 goudougoudou, Haiti has been hit by a series of natural disasters, including Hurricane Matthew in 2016.

Matthew was a Category 4 hurricane, an event predicted to occur only once every 56 years. A World Bank estimate a few months after Hurricane Matthew said that it had caused losses equivalent to 22% of Haiti’s GDP, affected more than two million people (20% of Haiti’s population), washed away key roads and bridges and destroyed the vaccine cold chain. It was a hard blow after the 2010 quake, which killed 220,000, displaced 1.5 million and destroyed the equivalent of 120% of GDP. The World Bank used historical data to calculate that weather-related disasters had “caused damage and losses in Haiti amounting to about 2% of GDP on average per year from 1975 to 2012”.
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