If you really want to talk about it, there are a million displaced people who are living on the street and you have to move them into proper housing. The housing they used to be in, destroyed or not, was NEVER habitable. So you cant put them back in the slums, even if you wanted to. The real problem is then that you have to actually build housing for one million people. How the hell do you justify that? EQ damages a bunch of bad to start with housing and now world comes in with its standards and realizes that they have to start from scratch b/c its standards are so far above what was. How do you spend all this money when its not 1/3 of the money you need to address the housing problem? Its like the friend you went to help with his flat tire but turns out he has blown his engine and everyone else went home so now you have help him fix his engine...except for you only brought a jack and a spare tire. Dont know if that made sense. Since we know Haiti wont get 6 billion more to do the job right, we know it wont get done. How then could we spend the money we have to get the biggest possible boost for the Haitian economy and country?
With the money we have, we need to put it all in to ramping up the electricity generation capacity of the dams in Haiti AND building out the grid to serve the whole country. No power equals no factories, more obstacles for small business, schools, health care, more cutting down of trees for fuel etc. No energy means whatever you build in "reconstruction" will stay dark. Renewable power and a rebuilt grid is the one thing you can do now that will have dividends for a very long time. Everything and anything else can not have the same impact. That is what all concerned parties can do if they have vision and they really want to help build a middle class and stronger economy.
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