What Haiti Needs Now

Contents

1) Drinking water, food, clothing, temporary shelter, basic medical supplies. Treat the wounded in make-shift hospitals that would hopefully be established in all the neighborhoods.

Get people out from underneath the remains of buildings. Fight epidemics and the risk of epidemics and disease due to the presence of piles of corpses.

2) Credible mechanisms for coordination, a crisis committee for scientific assessment and monitoring of the situation, and coordination of aid and its distribution with intelligence and transparency to ensure that victims receive help as quickly as possible. Be in permanent communication with the population about instructions as to what to do.

3) Rehabilitation: recover and repair communications and all infra-structure, especially transportation within and between cities.

4) Structural solidarity: activities and investments that will allow people to rebuild their lives in better conditions. It is time for a great wave of solidarity brigades with the people of Haiti other than the misery and characteristic aggression represented by MINUSTAH (the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti). Instead, we need a broad movement of solidarity between peoples that makes it possible to:

• a) Overcome illiteracy (45% of the population)
   
• b) Build an effective public school system that is free and that respects the history, culture, and ecosystem of our country
  
  
• c) Overcome the environmental crisis and rebuild Haiti’s 30 watersheds with the massive participation of young people and international volunteers
  
  
• d) Construct a new public health system which brings together modern and traditional medicine and offers quality, affordable primary services to 100% of the population to overcome child mortality, malnutrition, and maternal mortality (currently 630 women per 100,000 live births)
  
  
• e) Reconstruct a new city based on different logic: humane and balanced urbanization, respect for workers and the real wealth creators, privileging public transportation, parks that maximize our biodiversity, scientific research, urban agriculture, handicrafts and the popular arts.
  
  
• f) Construct food sovereignty based on comprehensive agrarian reform, prioritizing agricultural investments that respect ecosystems, biodiversity, and the needs and culture of the majority.
  
  
• g) Destroy the dependency ties with Washington, the European Union, and other forms of imperialism. Abandon policies issued by different versions of the Washington Consensus. Cut ties with the International Financial Institutions and their plans: structural adjustment, the Growth and Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper, Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, and Post-Conflict Countries.
  
  
• h) Expel MINUSTAH and build solidarity people to people brigades.