Helping Or Hurting ?

Almost a month after it was struck by an earthquake the relief effort in Haiti is continuing. Although in a situation like that you can never have enough food, water and medicine the multiple agencies involved are now able to meet the absolute basic needs of the survivors. This allows them to concentrate on more medium term needs like providing emergency shelter in time for the rainy season and providing the most seriously injured with more advanced medical care. While there are around 3 million people who need emergency shelter the task of providing medical care is in itself massive. There are hundreds of thousands of people with complex fractures and dislocations along with associated bone and soft tissue infections. All of these people require specialist surgery and those who don't get it will have to have limbs amputated. All those amputees will then need to be fitted with prosthetics and have months of aftercare to be taught how to use them because you do not want to be disabled in Haiti where there is no social safety net.

Amid these hundreds of thousands of cases the reporting of the relief effort has focused in on the case of Landina Seigon. Although she was completely alone when she was pulled from the rubble rescuers believe that Landina is about three months old and both her parents were killed in the earthquake. Because it took so long to dig her from the ruins doctors were forced to amputate her arm. Since then they have discovered that she is suffering from a bone disease which has killed part of her skull leaving it to press dangerously onto her brain. In order to stop this killing her she needs brain surgery to remove the diseased bone and plastic surgery to replace it with a titanium plate. At the moment her primary physician is Dr David Nott, a British doctor working for Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF)* and her case has been taken up by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO).

The way the FCO have gone about helping Landina is more then a little bit suspicious. The obvious thing to do would be to ask the US Navy if she could be treated aboard the USNS Comfort, a hospital ship that is equipped to handle the surgery and could have specialist surgeons on deck within 24 hours. Instead the FCO and it must be said MSF are insisting that she must be flown to either Britain or France for treatment. As Landina is an orphan this has meant that the British government, the French government and sadly some elements of Unicef have spent the last four days bombarding the already overstretched Haitian government with incredibly detailed questions about the circumstances that people will be allowed to take orphans out of Haiti. The interrogation has got so idiotic the Haitian government have perhaps understandably got paranoid over how serious the girls condition is and how complicated the brain surgery she requires really is.

It would be nice to pretend that all the foreigners are doing this out of a genuine desire to stop Haitian children being trafficked out of the country but this is quite frankly ridiculous. Both the British and French governments can be trusted to take a small number of injured children out of Haiti for treatment and then bring them back after a few weeks of positive media coverage. Even if they weren't there are no doubt millions of trustworthy Haitian adults who would jump at the chance to travel abroad with the children to act as guardians.

Instead this is all being done to fish for information about the US Missionaries who were recently arrested for child trafficking. Specifically what they're trying to find out is;

1. Was the whole thing staged by the Americans to provoke debate over the risk of child trafficking.

2. If it was a stunt how did the Americans go about organising it and carrying out.

3. If it was a stunt to what extent was the Haitian government involved.

4. What are the power structures within the Haitian government and how do they operate.

5. What will happen to the missionary's and in what conditions are they being held.

Of course absolutely none of this has anything whatsoever to do with helping the Haitians and is probably making the situation much worse. It does though highlight why it would be a very good idea, in the exceptional situation that is Haiti, for the UN to set up a parallel authority to handle relief and reconstruction. This authority could be led by a statesmen like Bill Clinton who is well practiced in the evils and idiocies of international diplomacy meaning that the difficult things get done more efficiently while the Haitian government, and by extension the Haitian people, are better protected from the wolves in sheep's clothing.

In slightly better news Simon Cowell and lots of musicians have recorded a charity single for Haiti. It sold a million copies before it was released and is expected to sell a million more before it goes straight to number 1 in the charts. This should help to bring in some much needed cash to the relief effort.




*I should point out that despite being French dominated MSF are a truly international charity. Therefore they need to maintain good relations with lots of governments in order to be able to operate.