Uncharitable Thoughts

T he earth shakes, houses and hospitals and palaces fold into themselves. A f terwards, bodies are pulled from the rubble, and we give. Which is only natural, and only right. Well done.

But after that the people of Haiti will have to rebuild, and after that we may look back on our first reaction and ask ourselves other questions. Do we give only when we can see the carnage? If a house falls in the forest where there are no TV cameras, does it make a sound? If poverty and early death is, as it was in Haiti, always an everyday risk where now it is an instant visitation, do we care?

Before the quake 55% of Haiti’s population lived below the poverty line. Political instability, urban violence and inaccessible healthcare were part of daily life. When the earthquake struck, basic infrastructure like w ater supply, electricity, waste disposal, transportation and telecommunications fell to ruins, pushing the death toll up over 200,000.

The worse your problems are to start with, unfortunately, the harder you get hit by a natural disaster.

The world’s poorest people make up 68% of all deaths in natural disasters, and 94% of people killed by natural disasters have low or lower-middle incomes. Cheap and flimsy housing and dysfunctional social and economic infrastructure make the damage much worse and the recovery much harder.

No one can prevent an earthquake, but early intervention could have minimised the devastation. If a 7.0 earthquake struck a wealthy nation like the United States - if the San Andreas fault twitched again, say - the cost to its prime - built infrastructure would certainly be huge, but fatalities would be far fewer. If we’d all made a permanent financial commitment to improving life in Haiti, would this have made a di ff erence to the almost unthinkable loss of life there?

But as the dust clears we see the complexities of the situation emerge, and it was the simplicity of the disaster that made it so easy to give. The footage of catastrophe can be both distressing and enthralling. We’re jolted out of our comfort zone, and an avalanche of fundraising enthusiasts answers the urgent call for help.

Sometimes so many of us are trying to help that we trip over each other’s feet. Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has been running emergency health centres and mobile clinics in Haiti’s cities and neighbourhood slums since 1991. Since January’s earthquake, a sort of giving hysteria has churned hundreds of millions of dollars through aid agencies worldwide. MSF is in overdrive, and its Haiti funding requirements are now so saturated that donors have been asked to redirect their Haiti dollars to any of its 400 other another disaster is just waiting to happen.

Similarly, the Victorian Bushfire Reconstruction and Recovery Authority was both inundated and overwhelmed by the deluge of material aid donations made to Black Saturday’s survivors. One year later 10,000 of the original 63,000 tonnes of clothing, toys, bedding, household goods and food are still in storage, despite ongoing distributions to 1,000 people a week.

Not only that, generosity to the victims sometimes comes at a cost to others. Last year the Smith Family’s Christmas appeal was down 20% and St Vincent de Paul’s down 15% on 2008 figures , despite demand being up about by about 20%. Even animal shelters fell short of their usual bedding donations. It’s a good rule to follow up your donation to disaster relief with a quick cheque to one of the other causes that you think may be missing out.

Haiti’s curse has always been that people with good intentions didn’t stay interested long enough – that the do-gooders went away after a while and left the place in the hands of those who’d contributed to stu ffi ng it up in the first place.

We have to do better this time, focusing on sustaining genuine giving over the long haul.

That’s quite a challenge. We need the prod of a disaster before we feel the pain of others. We shouldn’t. Instead of - no, as well as - knee-jerk responses to tear-jerking tragedies, why don’t we make monthly donations to aid agencies to help structure and maintain important projects?

Feeding the general fund of a trusted cause rather than earmarking contributions for an over-resourced mission means the money will go where it’s needed most. It shouldn’t take a magnitude 7 shock to open our eyes.