Reconstruction and Crisis in Haiti as Redevelopment Falters Following 2010 Earthquake

World attention focused on Haiti following the earthquake on January 10, 2010. However, nearly three years after the initial resolve to bring relief and even advancement in housing and infrastructure, results are sorely lacking. As the NY Times reports in an article by Deborah Sontag, "This represents a marked deflation of the lofty ambitions that followed the disaster, when the world aspired not only to repair Haiti but to remake it completely. The new pragmatism signals an acknowledgment that despite billions of dollars spent — and billions more allocated for Haiti but unspent — rebuilding has barely begun and 357,785 Haitians still languish in 496 tent camps.

“When you look at things, you say, ‘Hell, almost three years later, where is the reconstruction?’ ” said Michèle Pierre-Louis, a former prime minister of Haiti. “If you ask what went right and what went wrong, the answer is, most everything went wrong. There needs to be some accountability for all that money."

NY Times article here http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/world/americas/in-aiding-quake-battered-haiti-lofty-hopes-and-hard-truths.html

DITHOB: The world moves on from crisis to crisis, at home and abroad, in Haiti as in the Rockaways, and for reasons based on the bootstrap individualism of advanced capitalism, or the history of poverty and colonialism on the west end of the island island of Hispaniola, the people wait and wait and wait...