Jennifer Moody

Terrible student of the world that I am, I know little more about Haiti than what I’m learning, in short order, from the news reports coming in every hour.

Anything more than that, I know only through my former coworker, Carrie Petersen, who regularly volunteers with medical missions there.

So I admit my ignorance. I don’t know the real situation. But from everything I’ve been reading and seeing, I’m starting to think the only realistic option for the country is to move everybody in it somewhere else.

The destruction sounds simply unfathomable. Two million people homeless? No roads or sewage systems? Little to no water or food?

I heard a report on NPR a couple of days ago about an 84-year-old woman whose daughter was killed in the quake. The older woman is trying to care for her daughter’s baby and toddler. They’re staying under a piece of plastic propped up by sticks for shelter. The woman does the best she can by the children, in spite of the fact that her own arm was broken in the cataclysm and she has received no treatment as yet.

How do you cope with a situation like that, when the country has no coping resources?

Aid is pouring in. My check is part of that effort. I think helping, however we can, is the right thing to do, not only for the Haitians but for the human race. It speaks well of us that we can put our own interests aside for a hurting civilization most of us know so little about.

But from my tiny exposure to the situation, I’m starting to wonder if any long-term recovery is even possible here. Haiti’s nine million people were on the verge of starving well before this tragedy, I gather. The island’s resources have been ravaged pretty much beyond replacing.

And now this.

To me, it’s sounding akin to losing your spaceship’s life support to a collision with an asteroid. Your government can send up all the oxygen and water from Earth that it has time and money for, but eventually, the safest thing might be just to evacuate your astronauts and bring them home.

I’m thinking, however painful and complicated it might be, it may soon be time for the United States and the other nations of the world to open their immigration policies and start welcoming Haitians to their new homes among the rest of us. It just doesn’t sound to me like the old one will be able to be rebuilt for a long, long time.

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