Haiti is here, Haiti isn't here.

[Henri Christophe]

What can we do to give aid to Haiti?

 

[Birdjaguar]

Haiti's RNG rolls terribly with few lucky streaks.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Well, France owes them ~17 billion Euros. That'd be a good start.

 

[Henri Christophe]

Biden, of the USA, said will send some aid to Haiti. That's is all international help I know far now.

 

[Birdjaguar]

US military is deploying field hospitals to Haiti.

 

[Samson]

I wonder if they will bring cholera along again.

 

[EgonSpengler]

I wonder if they will bring cholera along again.

Hey, now, that wasn't us. Not everything is the United States' fault.

But that does make me think: What would it cost to install a modern sewage treatment & fresh water system in Port-au-Prince? A quick Google search doesn't provide easy answers on cost. One of the links on the first page is to a document from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that was published in 1964. Using US cities as referents, Port-au-Prince is about the population of metro Baltimore, Denver, Tampa, San Diego, or Minneapolis, so maybe information on those cities could at least provide an outline (if I wanted to do that much research). I would imagine it would have to be a multi-year project, maybe 10 years, and you'd probably have to budget for the personnel & maintenance costs for, I dunno, 50 years after that? And do they have any engineering schools in Haiti? Part of your budget might have to include relocating promising high school students to other countries to train them to be engineers. Some kind of fund, maybe, so you could do it in perpetuity.

A quick Google search suggests that a modern, 150-bed hospital with operating rooms and an emergency/casualty department can be built for about a quarter-billion USD. But then you'd have to staff it and stock it. Again, some kind of education fund to send students to medical & nursing schools abroad. If you're wondering, as I was, whether 150 beds is a lot, it isn't. The giant hospitals - Johns Hopkins, Mass. General - are around 1,000 beds. If you wanted to really do the thing, a 2018 article in In-Building Tech says,

The University of Texas Southwestern research hospital, a 1.3 million square feet space with 532 beds, cost nearly $800 million. Similarly the Parkland Memorial, Dallas County’s public hospital, a 2 million square foot building which houses 862 beds, incurred $1.3 billion in construction costs.

But the construction costs are barely the beginning, and these hospitals are whales: A couple-hundred thousand emergency/casualty/trauma patients per year; dozens of babies delivered per day; high-end diagnostic equipment; multiple simultaneous surgeries; research and teaching sections; etc. Wikipedia says the 2019 operating budget for UT Southwestern was a little over $3 billion USD, but I can't tell how much of that is the inflation of the U.S. healthcare system. The same hospital in Canada, Europe or East Asia might have a lower operating budget.

Military field hospitals and chemical toilets are great in the aftermath of an earthquake or hurricane, but Haiti & Port-au-Prince still need some of the basic fixtures of a 20th-Century country/city.

 

[Samson]

Hey, now, that wasn't us. Not everything is the United States' fault.

But that does make me think: What would it cost to install a modern sewage treatment & fresh water system in Port-au-Prince? A quick Google search doesn't provide easy answers on cost. One of the links on the first page is to a document from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that was published in 1964. Using US cities as referents, Port-au-Prince is about the population of metro Baltimore, Denver, Tampa, San Diego, or Minneapolis, so maybe information on those cities could at least provide an outline (if I wanted to do that much research). I would imagine it would have to be a multi-year project, maybe 10 years, and you'd probably have to budget for the personnel & maintenance costs for, I dunno, 50 years after that? And do they have any engineering schools in Haiti? Part of your budget might have to include relocating promising high school students to other countries to train them to be engineers. Some kind of fund, maybe, so you could do it in perpetuity.

A quick Google search suggests that a modern, 150-bed hospital with operating rooms and an emergency/casualty department can be built for about a quarter-billion USD. But then you'd have to staff it and stock it. Again, some kind of education fund to send students to medical & nursing schools abroad. If you're wondering, as I was, whether 150 beds is a lot, it isn't. The giant hospitals - Johns Hopkins, Mass. General - are around 1,000 beds. If you wanted to really do the thing, a 2018 article in In-Building Tech says,


But the construction costs are barely the beginning, and these hospitals are whales: A couple-hundred thousand emergency/casualty/trauma patients per year; dozens of babies delivered per day; high-end diagnostic equipment; multiple simultaneous surgeries; research and teaching sections; etc. Wikipedia says the 2019 operating budget for UT Southwestern was a little over $3 billion USD, but I can't tell how much of that is the inflation of the U.S. healthcare system. The same hospital in Canada, Europe or East Asia might have a lower operating budget.

Military field hospitals and chemical toilets are great in the aftermath of an earthquake or hurricane, but Haiti & Port-au-Prince still need some of the basic fixtures of a 20th-Century country/city.

I was trying find how much it costs here. I did not find an exact match. I did find this, which makes it look like we could do it cheaper if we did not have to make so much money for fat cats:

Queen Mary's Hospital, Roehampton, has 88 beds, no A+E dept.

NHS Wandsworth said it followed national guidelines when entering the 30-year private finance initiative (PFI) contract with Catalyst Healthcare to build Queen Mary’s Hospital in Roehampton in 2004.

Catalyst spent £55m to build the hospital, which reopened in 2006 and will be returned to the NHS at the contract’s end, another £12.5m on providing equipment - including scanners, MRI machines and prosphetics equipment - and a further £6m in interest and fees.

To date, figures show NHS Wandsworth has paid Catalyst £36m and - if repayments stay at 2009 levels - Catalyst will receive another £303m (£12.1m for 25 years left on the contract).​

 

[Ajidica]

Hey, now, that wasn't us. Not everything is the United States' fault.

But that does make me think: What would it cost to install a modern sewage treatment & fresh water system in Port-au-Prince? A quick Google search doesn't provide easy answers on cost. One of the links on the first page is to a document from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that was published in 1964. Using US cities as referents, Port-au-Prince is about the population of metro Baltimore, Denver, Tampa, San Diego, or Minneapolis, so maybe information on those cities could at least provide an outline (if I wanted to do that much research). I would imagine it would have to be a multi-year project, maybe 10 years, and you'd probably have to budget for the personnel & maintenance costs for, I dunno, 50 years after that? And do they have any engineering schools in Haiti? Part of your budget might have to include relocating promising high school students to other countries to train them to be engineers. Some kind of fund, maybe, so you could do it in perpetuity.

A quick Google search suggests that a modern, 150-bed hospital with operating rooms and an emergency/casualty department can be built for about a quarter-billion USD. But then you'd have to staff it and stock it. Again, some kind of education fund to send students to medical & nursing schools abroad. If you're wondering, as I was, whether 150 beds is a lot, it isn't. The giant hospitals - Johns Hopkins, Mass. General - are around 1,000 beds. If you wanted to really do the thing, a 2018 article in In-Building Tech says,


But the construction costs are barely the beginning, and these hospitals are whales: A couple-hundred thousand emergency/casualty/trauma patients per year; dozens of babies delivered per day; high-end diagnostic equipment; multiple simultaneous surgeries; research and teaching sections; etc. Wikipedia says the 2019 operating budget for UT Southwestern was a little over $3 billion USD, but I can't tell how much of that is the inflation of the U.S. healthcare system. The same hospital in Canada, Europe or East Asia might have a lower operating budget.

Military field hospitals and chemical toilets are great in the aftermath of an earthquake or hurricane, but Haiti & Port-au-Prince still need some of the basic fixtures of a 20th-Century country/city.

The problem with complex infrastructure is it needs people and resources to maintain it, run it, and expand it. Michela Wrong in In Search of Colonel Kurtz, a book about the collapse of Zaire, talked quite a bit about this phenomena. (Exemplified in the classic joke "What did Zaireans use for lighting before candles? Electricity.")
Suppose the World Bank and UN step in to build a modern sewer system in Port-au-Prince. A country needs qualified engineers to maintain and run a sewer system. In a low-development country, that requires people to be sent abroad for training. Once a Hatian national has become a qualified engineer, what incentive do they have to go back home when their skills are in demand in Europe/America and they can command European/American wages? Suppose the Hatian engineers return home and are available to maintain the system; they need the government and administration to put money toward its upkeep. In Zaire, this became a major problem as parts were often stolen and sold on the black market, funds were never appropriated, or if the funds were appropriated they got frittered away either through corruption/bribery or straight up theft.

 

[EgonSpengler]

The problem with complex infrastructure is it needs people and resources to maintain it, run it, and expand it. Michela Wrong in In Search of Colonel Kurtz, a book about the collapse of Zaire, talked quite a bit about this phenomena. (Exemplified in the classic joke "What did Zaireans use for lighting before candles? Electricity.")
Suppose the World Bank and UN step in to build a modern sewer system in Port-au-Prince. A country needs qualified engineers to maintain and run a sewer system. In a low-development country, that requires people to be sent abroad for training. Once a Hatian national has become a qualified engineer, what incentive do they have to go back home when their skills are in demand in Europe/America and they can command European/American wages? Suppose the Hatian engineers return home and are available to maintain the system; they need the government and administration to put money toward its upkeep. In Zaire, this became a major problem as parts were often stolen and sold on the black market, funds were never appropriated, or if the funds were appropriated they got frittered away either through corruption/bribery or straight up theft.

Yes, like I said, you'd have to budget for personnel and maintenance for years after construction, and you'd need some sort of fund to send students abroad in perpetuity, not just once. I imagine the students would sign some kind of contract to return to Haiti to work for N years. As to the other stuff, I don't know enough about Zaire or Haiti to be able to draw any meaningful parallels between them.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Or Haiti could develop its own education system, importing pedagogy/knowledge from elsewhere and training people domestically. Perpetual foreign aid is not a viable design. Foreign aid towards that might actually work, if a particular country receiving it can avoid corruption.

 

[Lexicus]

The problem with complex infrastructure is it needs people and resources to maintain it, run it, and expand it. Michela Wrong in In Search of Colonel Kurtz, a book about the collapse of Zaire, talked quite a bit about this phenomena. (Exemplified in the classic joke "What did Zaireans use for lighting before candles? Electricity.")
Suppose the World Bank and UN step in to build a modern sewer system in Port-au-Prince. A country needs qualified engineers to maintain and run a sewer system. In a low-development country, that requires people to be sent abroad for training. Once a Hatian national has become a qualified engineer, what incentive do they have to go back home when their skills are in demand in Europe/America and they can command European/American wages? Suppose the Hatian engineers return home and are available to maintain the system; they need the government and administration to put money toward its upkeep. In Zaire, this became a major problem as parts were often stolen and sold on the black market, funds were never appropriated, or if the funds were appropriated they got frittered away either through corruption/bribery or straight up theft.

IMO, France should be forced to provide all this and more to Haiti.

 

[Ajidica]

IMO, France should be forced to provide all this and more to Haiti.

Why? My knowledge of Haitian history is not great, but my understanding is that despite Haiti being a francophone country, France has had little to do with Haiti in the 20th Century, with it firmly under American influence.
As far as its immediate post-independence history, there was the French demand for repayment on abolition of slavery; but early Haitian history also had multiple civil wars and domestic upheavels under its 'Empires' - all of which carried a distinct The Emperor Jones vibe crossed with Jean-Bedel Bokassa.

Or, how would the French government paying to build a modern and robust sewer system in Port-au-Prince not entail a de facto French takeover of the Haitian government? If the Haitian government was able* to build and maintain a modern sewer system, they would have done it already.
*ie: those in power able to conduct large scale projects without entirely reducing it to a chance to loot state coffers and enrich their patronage network.

 

[Henri Christophe]

IMO, France should be forced to provide all this and more to Haiti.

I agree with you, and say more, all western countries should help the development of Haiti.

 

[Lexicus]

Why?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_indemnity_controversy

Though France received its last indemnity payment in 1893,[4] the government of the United States funded the acquisition of Haiti's treasury in 1911 in order to receive interest payments related to the indemnity.[5] It took until 1947 – about 122 years – for Haiti to finally pay off all the associated interest to the National City Bank of New York (now Citibank).[6][5]

France and the US (at the very least) should be paying Haiti back for this garbage

 

[Ajidica]

France and the US (at the very least) should be paying Haiti back for this garbage

Alright, so how do we pay back Haiti? Swing by the Presidential Palace and drop off a check? If we are expected to pay the Haitian people compensation for harm done, checks and controls need to be in place to ensure the money goes to help the Haitian people and not get looted by the powerful and well connected.

 

[innonimatu]

Appoint a new government for it and invade it again "at the invitation of the haitian government"?

 

[E.man]

Notice Haiti is on an island and the country on the other half of the island is in nothing like the same state of chaos.

 

[Snowygerry]

Apparently one half the old island of Hispaniola declared itself independent from the other, never knew that...

In the following decades, the Dominican Republic achieved its independence in 1844 by fighting against Haitian colonialism. This accomplishment served as a cornerstone for the Dominican national identity known today.

The Complex History and the Border Tensions between Haiti and The Dominican Republic

Hidden behind the sun-kissed shores of the Caribbean, the tense story of Haiti and the Dominican Republic is one of shared legacies and simmering hostility. Beyond the vibrant cultures lies a history imprinted with both unity and division. Yet, one pressing issue persists, casting shadows over...

thesciencesurvey.com

Earlier in 2023, the Dominican Republic made a move to close its borders to Haiti. This was a calculated decision influenced by multiple factors, but at the forefront of these considerations are heightened concerns over immigration.

 

[Snowygerry]

What can we do to give aid to Haiti?

Not much it seems - the few Belgians that were there had to run to the border, they interviewed (in French) this fellow on radio this morning...

Gewapende bendes hebben Haïti onder controle: "Vrijgelaten misdadigers zorgen voor paniek" | Radio 1

Gewapende bendes hebben Haïti onder controle. De internationale luchthaven in Port-au-Prince is in handen van de bendes en ook de wegen hebben ze onder controle. Richard Sahinguvu is landenvertegenwoordiger in Haïti bij Broederlijk Delen en is uit voorzorg gevlucht naar de grens met de...

radio1.be

Armed gangs control Haiti. The international airport in Port-au-Prince is in the hands of the gangs and they also control the roads. Richard Sahinguvu is the country representative in Haiti at Broederlijk Delen and fled to the border with the Dominican Republic as a precaution.

Humanitarian crisis in Haiti due to gang violence and absent state

The structural work of our partners remains essential in times of unrest.

broederlijkdelen.be