Sunday October 3, 2004
Democracy depends on efficient infrastructure
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The people of Florida have suffered four hurricanes in six weeks, with another two months left in the hurricane season.
While I sympathize with their plight, I feel a lot sorrier for the people of the Caribbean islands. Grenada was trashed. Grand Cayman was shut down completely, with much of the low-lying island under water. Jamaica and Cuba suffered major blows.
Haiti was probably worst hit. An estimated 2000 Haitians died during or after the hurricane\’s deluge.
Television gloried in showing us pictures of Florida homes with their roofs ripped off by the force of the winds. But if you think a hurricane can do a lot of damage to a house put together properly, under all the provisions of a formal building code, imagine what that same blast can do to a jerry-built house tacked together from scrounged materials.
Over the years, Joan and I have been to more than a dozen different Caribbean islands. Wealthy homes have concrete foundations, dimensioned lumber, and proper nails. Poor homes usually have no permanent foundations, use warped tree limbs for rafters, and have roofs of corrugated iron panels. Typically, they\’re held together with rusty nails laboriously salvaged from the last house and pounded straight.
In a hurricane, tin roofs become flying guillotines, capable of cutting a person in two.
Unseen by tourists
\”Times New Roman\” size=\”3\”> We North Americans rarely see the dramatic results of a hurricane, because travel agents divert us to less devastated locations.
We also tend to idealize the simple life – a euphemism for poverty – as being mercifully free from bureaucrats, pollution, urban blight, and Wal-Mart.
It just ain\’t so.
Haiti is the poorest nation in the Caribbean, and by no coincidence also the most densely populated. Seven million people live in half the space of Nova Scotia. Haiti has a population density of 271 people per square kilometre. (By contrast, Canada averages three people per square kilometre.)
Where Haiti borders its next-door neighbour, the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola, the hills on one side are green and forested. The Haitian side is bare, stripped of timber for housing, firewood, or charcoal. Every rainfall sluices precious soil off steeply angled slopes. Even under normal weather conditions, the outflow of the Artibonite River, Haiti\’s longest, just north of Port au Prince, stains the ocean for miles with eroded silt. After a hurricane, it\’s vastly worse.
It\’s easy to blame Haiti\’s troubles on runaway overpopulation. But population density is only part of the answer. At least a dozen other nations are more densely populated. Holland has about 400 people per square kilometre, Singapore 6,000, and tiny Monaco 16,000.
But these all have a well-developed infrastructure. Haiti doesn\’t.
Essential infrastructure
\”Times New Roman\” size=\”3\”> Haiti has been a disaster largely because it has few of the systems we take for granted. While there has been much international effort to impose democracy on that troubled nation, democracy needs a smoothly functioning infrastructure.
When last summer\’s forest fires raged around Kelowna, a range of agencies – provincial, local, and volunteer – were able to work together relatively efficiently because there was already an infrastructure in place. In Haiti, the lack of any workable infrastructure prevented relief agencies even from delivering food and water to people in need.
Nelson\’s Canadian Dictionary (my choice of Canadian dictionaries, by the way) defines infrastructure as “The basic facilities, services, and installations needed for the functioning of a community or society.”
Haiti has next to none.
Beyond the capital Port au Prince, Haiti\’s roads vary from dreadful to appalling. Clinics may not have even the most basic medicines. Schools are lucky to have textbooks of any kind. Every group of children contains a few members with the orange-brown hair that marks kwashiorkor – protein malnutrition so severe that it may permanently harm mental ability.
And local concerns are governed more by gangs than by anything resembling a civil service.
A place in history
\”Times New Roman\” size=\”3\”> Haiti deserves better. If it hadn\’t been for Haiti, most of the western U.S. today would probably speak French, not Amurrican. Back in 1801, Napoleon Bonaparte sent a flotilla to assert French control over the mouth of the Mississippi. But he diverted his troops to quell a rebellion by black slaves in Haiti. The effort failed so spectacularly that France had to sell off its American territories at bargain-basement prices to finance its European battles. President Jefferson bought everything from the Mississippi to the Rockies, two years later, for $15 million.
In front of the presidential palace in Port au Prince stands a statue of a black man blowing a conch shell to summon his fellow slaves to liberty. It always brings a lump to my throat.
But revolutions do not necessarily result in democracy. Haiti plunged into a succession of ruthless dictators.
In hindsight, Haiti might have done better remaining French. Today, residents of Martinique and Guadeloupe enjoy both a higher standard of living and greater freedom than Haitians.
Infrastructure takes time to build. It requires administrators with a vision; dedicated workers; a cooperative populace. Education and health care systems do not miraculously emerge at the touch of a fairy-godmother\’s wand. Impartial police forces cannot be created by command. Water, sewer, and road systems cost money.
An infrastructure cannot be simply imported, no matter how well it works in another country. Building inspectors are a useless luxury when there\’s no dimensioned lumber, when walls are made of woven palm fronds and mud. Concerns about seat belts or clean air are laughable in Haiti, where free-enterprise buses – called “taptaps,” the only public transportation available – commonly cram a dozen or more victims into the back of a gaily decorated half-ton pickup belching blue clouds of acrid exhaust.
Over the years, Canada has built an enviable infrastructure. It\’s vastly more important than how many medals we won, or didn\’t win, at the Olympics. Sadly, we devote our energy to fixing the superficial things, while we let our infrastructure fall apart through political corruption, labor-management antipathy, and administrative incompetence.
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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