I have been very impressed with the world’s response to the Haiti earthquake, with aide coming from all over the globe. Monetary donations have poured in via a wide range of means, but most notably from social media. The Red Cross has their text campaign, where you can send $10 straight to the cause by SMS messaging the word "Haiti" to 909991, which I was happy to do.
I was listening to NPR the day after it happened, and I was moved by Bill Clinton's interview about the situation, as he has been going to Haiti doing humanitarian work there with his family for 35 years. I thought to myself, “Wow, he's been going there for 35 years; Haiti gets huge amounts of donations and charity to subsidize them and still they remain that poor with diseases and have such problems.”
At the time of the earthquake, there were an estimated 45,000 Americans in Haiti who were there doing charity work to help the area. I was honestly impressed that so many of my fellow countrymen and women would be doing such work, but I thought perhaps we have been going about it the wrong way.
One thing America is really good at is capitalism, and when it comes to capitalism, we do it better than anyone in the world in the history of the world. Why not take that same skill-set and deploy it to assist Haiti? You can read the Wiki page for Haiti1 and realize they no longer have any natural resources to help drive their economy due to deforestation. Because the country is so poor, they do not have any realistic source of knowledge power either (fewer than 30% of Haiti’s inhabitants reach 6th grade1).
If we can turn the deserts of Las Vegas into a huge thriving vacation and entertainment location that is green and a churning gear in the American economy why not work with Haiti to turn them into a vacation destination which would fuel more than enough jobs, economics, geographic revitalization, and self sustainability for the future? Dubai can build an entire city such as this from their desert and even palm tree-shaped islands so why not this area as well?
The old adage of give a man a fish and he eats for a day (charity) but teach him how to fish and he eats for a lifetime (education and enterprise) comes to mind. I'm sure I am out of my mind and more research on my part will most likely prove there are plenty of political, economic, geographic, cultural issues which make it not feasible, but I would love to go on vacation to Haiti and help their country recover. I'm willing to bet most of the global world at large would be willing to "help" with a much bigger economic impact. Knowing business and capitalism, if there was a full scale plan laid out, I'm sure the companies of the world would be willing to invest and probably get some good will (and transactions) from their existing client base in the meantime.
What do you think? Am I crazy? Would you go? Would you support companies who invested towards the recovery?
1http://www.redcross.org/portal/site/en/menuitem.94aae335470e233f6cf911df43181aa0/?vgnextoid=15c0c5a210826210VgnVCM10000089f0870aRCRD Retrieved 01-17-2010
2http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti Retrieved 01-17-2010
