The goodwill is there all right. Some of the soldiers, emergency and rescue personnel who poured in to Haiti after the ground shook violently on January 12 have packed up their gear and returned home. Many aid workers from several countries, however, are still slogging away amid the widespread devastation from the earthquake which flattened much of Port-au-Prince almost 12 weeks ago. The estimated 40 million cubic metres of rubble is being cleared, truckload by truckload, and life for some is returning to normal.

But well over a million Haitians remain housed in makeshift lodgings often lashed together with whatever materials the occupants have been able to scrounge from the wreckage. Sheets of plastic or tarpaulin filter out the harsh rays of the sun. Tent cities fill almost every open space left in Port-au-Prince, even right across the road from the crumpled presidential palace. More than half a million others fled the capital for the countryside where relatives and benefactors are sharing their own meagre quarters and rations with them.

Adding to the misery is the prospect of the rainy season, which looms mere weeks away. It poses new perils for the battered, bewildered, bothered and bewitched tent-city dwellers, as the run-off will drench the makeshift communities with swirling floodwaters carrying cast-off water bottles, clotted plastic bags, bits of vegetation, in addition to sewage and deadly germs. There is a real possibility of serious outbreaks of cholera, dysentery and other water-borne diseases arising from poor sanitation.

We have been treated to television pictures of miraculous rescues of barely living people pulled from piles of crumpled concrete by brave rescue workers. But the image is deceptive – only about 150 people have actually been saved. The quake claimed more than 220,000 lives and injured some 300,000 more.

The scope of the devastation is enormous even in an age of mega-statistics. Although Port-au-Prince suffered extensive damage, the worst-hit community is the town of Léogâne, just south-west of the capital and right atop the epicentre of the magnitude 7 quake. It was 80 per cent destroyed. Across the sprawling, vastly overcrowded capital and outlying areas, 105,000 buildings were levelled and 208,000 others severely damaged. Some 1300 educational institutions and about 50 hospitals and health centres were rendered unusable.

Those stark facts greeted the representatives of 140 countries who attended an international meeting at the United Nations headquarters on Wednesday. They were joined by several international institutions, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Since the quake struck, experts have been studying the damage and what needs to be done about it. They came up with a figure of

US$7.9 billion, an amount equivalent to 120 per cent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product for 2009. They calculated that it would need US$11.5 over three years to recover and rebuild.

The conference was successful – it raised US$9.9 billion from 50 donors. Haiti’s president, prime minister and their colleagues presented a national strategic plan to guide relief efforts as well as reconstruction. The UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Mun, one of the hosts of the conference, described the plan as concrete, specific and ambitious, and urged the international community to give it full and generous support. He says the goal is not to merely rebuild, but rather, “To build back better” … “A Haiti where the majority of the people no longer live in deep poverty, where they can go to school and enjoy better health, where they have better options than going without jobs or leaving the country altogether.”

Haiti’s president, René Préval, has been criticised at home for being almost invisible since the quake. To be fair, such governmental structures as existed before the quake were obliterated by the tremor. At one point he was holding government meetings in the courtyard of a police station in Port-au-Prince.

Just think – they had very little or no access to files and records, let alone the ordinary tools like offices, desks, chairs, telephones and so on. But he was very much in attendance at the UN to present his recovery and rebuilding plan. Préval thanked those countries which had contributed to the relief effort since the quake and paid tribute to his fellow Haitians, both at home and abroad, for their endeavours. “Let us dream,” he said, “of a new Haiti whose fate lies in a new project.”

An important consideration about Haiti is that in recent years it has absorbed substantial amounts of foreign assistance with very little to show for it. One of the unfortunate by-products of this is the mendicant mentality which has taken root in the society. Haitians hardly even grow their own food any more, and such health care and education as they do obtain comes from foreign NGOs. There is barely any infrastructure such as roads, electricity, water supplies or communications.

Two urgent tasks are to re-establish self-sufficiency in food and to concentrate on education as no population can prosper without being able to read, write and compute. Closely following is establishing reliable essential services like police and courts, regulation of all the things modern societies need, and strict new building codes to cope with hurricanes and earthquakes.

Poor, unfortunate Haiti has been punished by the big countries on both sides of the Atlantic for deciding, 206 years ago, to defeat French imperialism and going out on its own. Its own elite stuck its proboscis into the body politic and sucked its quota of the limited supply of juice, leaving precious little for the vast majority of Haitians. Governments have been, at best, weak and ineffective, or – more commonly – vicious and rapacious, notorious for corruption and inability to do what governments elsewhere routinely do.

The US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who co-sponsored the conference, addressed this history head-on: “It will be tempting to fall back on old habits, to work around the government, rather than work with them in making the deeper, long-term investments that Haiti needs. But we cannot retreat to failed strategies … we have to follow through.”

So the old template won’t apply here – the Haitian government won’t be controlling the billions coming in from abroad. Instead, a new international commission, comprising representatives of the donor countries, the Haitian government, Caricom, the OAS as well as non-governmental organisations and international bodies will perform that task. It will be co-chaired by Haiti’s Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive and former US President Bill Clinton.

Ban Ki-Mun promises to be vigilant: “We will monitor very closely how this money will be spent. We expect the Haitian government should show a strong sense of accountability.” Bill Clinton met a group of NGOs a few days ago and challenged them to create such a radically new Haiti that it would no longer require the thousands of aid organisations which work there. As he put it: “Are we serious about working ourselves out of a job?”

keeble.mack@sympatico.ca