Reply #21: You're welcome.

[Altoid_Cyclist]

All that I ever hear from the conservatives (especially some of my in-laws) where I live is how evil people like Chavez and Castro are. They never want to hear about the positive things that they've done to help people in their region of the world.

I think that you're correct that countries in South America and some of their allies need to have a large say in how Haiti is rebuilt. I can't see where the decisions of the US and the IMF/World Bank have always been in the best interest of the countries and people that they are supposedly "helping" to build a better way of life.



This is another comment that Cockburn made while traveling in Central America in the early 90's. It isn't about Haiti, but parts of it seem very appropriate given the events of the last week. The emphasis was added my me.


"The moving part of it for me," he said, "was, well, first of all, to see what suffering people can really experience, and then to see how people respond to that suffering or to the threats that they're under and so on. Especially in the refugee camps, people were so together, given the circumstances, and had such an ability not to fall into hopelessness. That was the most moving thing at all, and that, combined with the threat of violence against those people particularly, was a terrible feeling and a terrible set of feelings to have and a terrible sort of juxtaposition to see.

"These people had absolutely nothing and no prospects whatever. Still, they were trying to get something going, they were still building schools in their refugee camps even though they had nothing to put in them, no books and no teachers. They built a little infirmary even though they didn't have any medicine, just so they'd be ready when it did come, and it never did, of course. The Mexican army went in and burned it all down after a while.

"But those people still had this ability to go, 'Well, okay, we're just gonna build something here.' That just made the kind of cynicism, that we who live in the developed world can so easily feel about the usefulness or not of political action, seem so pathetic. It seemed like complete self-indulgence for us to sit around going, 'Oh, well, there's nothing we can do.'"