Narcissistic hacks and others: Do Haiti a favour and stay away

WE in Ireland have a general response to external disaster such as the earthquake in Haiti.

We consume every available fact about it; gaze, mesmerised, at photographs of bodies swelling in putrefaction on the streets; fasten on any story of unexpected survival, particularly if it involves adult heroism or a rescued child.

And then we slowly shake our heads as if those heads are weighty with new wisdom.

“It puts everything in context, doesn’t it?” we ask, and everybody nods, buying into the transient consensus that the Haiti horrors have taught us a moral lesson and rendered it inappropriate to continue whining about our own negative equity. We convince ourselves that the scale of the tragedy will change us utterly, so that we will be less negative about our own situation, because it cannot compare with the suffering seen on our computer screens. Of course, within minutes, we go back to bitching about ice, snow, floods, water shortages, politicians, bankers, developers and all the usual suspects, although we do pause long enough to electronically send help, whether through Concern or the Red Cross or some other NGO.

One of the multitude of problems facing Haiti is that so many people, worldwide, contributed out of sympathy and had their assistance translated into chaos. Port-au- Prince’s airport always matched the shocking chronic poverty of the country it served, with one runway. When the earthquake hit, the innards of their air traffic control tower got mangled, which meant they could not manage incoming or outgoing flights. Did that stop the incoming flights? No. Them that’s determined to give gifts will deliver those gifts whether it’s the right thing to do or not. Think of the three wise men visiting Bethlehem to welcome a baby born to a carpenter and his wife. Gold, frankincense and myrrh, they brought. None of them of immediate benefit to the girl who had just given birth or her baby and of doubtful long-term applicability. Not to mention the problems caused by the arrival of three strangers into a birthing room consisting of a stable.

In much the same way, in Haiti, the flights arrived, disgorging loads of materials and personnel. The loads could not be distributed, because the roads were destroyed by the earthquake, and the airport had never had the storage capacity to cope with a sudden influx of goods. At the same time, the Haitian head of state asked that aid agencies should co-operate with each other, rather than compete. And this was before survivors started to form horrifying piles of the dead as a desperate signal to the outside world of the help needed.

Haiti’s situation demonstrates, yet again, that kindness, in a disaster, is not enough. In fact, uncontrolled kindness can be actively dangerous. When the liberators moved into Hitler’s concentration camps at the end of the Second World War, they encountered skeletons in striped pyjamas. Survivors so emaciated, so diseased, so filthy as to present a homogeneity of horror. The fact that the Nazis had dressed them all alike to further dehumanise them made it even weirder for the well-fed Allied troops when individuals from within the groups of survivors called out questions or statements of welcome in English or French: how could such abandoned human detritus be multi-lingual?

The frailty of the survivors was not uniform. Some could not move from the tiered wooden bunks where they had lain in filth, cold and hunger during countless previous nights. Some were gone past the point where Allied uniforms meant anything to them.

Officers had different reactions to what they saw. Some, famously, sent their men out into the surrounding villages to drag the good bourgeois from those villages to stand in front of what they had managed not to notice over several preceding years. Some were more practical and caring. Those officers told their men they’d shoot them if they fed the survivors.

On the face of it, this was a gruesome instruction calculated to increase the numbers dying, because the most emaciated and sick continued to die after liberation. In reality, it was knowledgeable, kind and humane. Each of those officers knew their men carried rations on their persons and had bars of chocolate or peanuts stashed in their pockets. Each of them had seen GIs tossing such goodies to kids in towns their convoys passed through, to screams of delight from the hungry youngsters. But they also knew that the survivors in the death camps had been systematically starved for so long that their bodies could not cope with the good nourishing food now available to them. Even spoonfuls of water laced with glucose, too eagerly swallowed, led to vomiting and diarrhea. The medical men among the forces now in charge knew that the key task they had to undertake was to control the survivors’ access to food, and that closely related to that task was controlling the kindness of their own men, because kindness, in the wake of a disaster, manmade or delivered by nature, can kill. As can curiosity.

If the number of journalists travelling from Ireland to Haiti to witness the aftermath of the quake is matched by nations of 10 or 100 times our population, then the problems at Haiti airport caused by arriving aid will be as nothing compared with the problems caused by the logistical demands placed on destroyed systems by large numbers of journalistic ambulance-chasers. Except, of course, in Haiti, there are no ambulances to chase, and no roads on which to chase them. So why go? In order to tell the truth? Oh, come on. Within minutes of the earthquake, it was clear that citizen journalism through texts, emails and tweets, were telling the truth of Haiti to the world without any mediation by media.

Of course, good journalists can provide the telling detail, like survivors smearing toothpaste on their upper teeth to mask the smell of ambient death. Some journalists can get emotional, which is always satisfying to their employers. One American reporter, we learn, got “all choked up” when telling the story of a mother who had lost her four children. Great career move for the reporter, but did the rest of us really need a tearful hack to be flown in, fed and watered, to tell us human interest yarns while people are dying?

Every print reporter who goes into Haiti at this time uses what’s left of the roads and the taxis – both of which should be the exclusive property of the rescue attempts. Most TV reporters will go in with a crew, thus escalating their demands on the non-existent resources of a devastated state. In that context, the passionate search for the truth which has brought generations into journalistic careers seems to diminish and morph into something closer to the delivery of vicarious thrills of horror.

In which context, while the Americans have got hospital ships, helicopters and much needed equipment/personnel into place with admirable speed, it has to be asked why Secretary of State Hillary Clinton felt she had to go there personally.

Every extra body flying into that airport costs time, fuel and attention that should be going to earthquake victims.