More Words, Deeper Hole

When the infrastructure goes away, and you have to do everything by hand, as it were, of course things aren't going to work right.

This is in a country where the people were receiving aid to begin with, before the earthquake.

Now they have less than they had before, when they were merely starving. I don't blame them for looting. Taking the weapons with them, on the other hand, is drama, more than anything else. It is a poor choice by people who are desperate to begin with.

The world is doing what it can to help them, now. You can't just drop troops in a country without a plan and diplomats to set things up. Oh, wait, you can, it's called "invasion." And if we invaded Haiti, that wouldn't go well, and would set a bad precedent. "Well, we decided that your people were in danger, so we invaded."

You have to figure out what is going on at an incident, before you stick your nose into it. In the fire service, we call that "doing a 360." The chief himself takes the time to walk all around the burning structure and see for himself what's going on. The bigger the problem, the longer it takes to do the walk around. This is a pretty big incident, since it involves the whole country. Admittedly, this is a country that's pretty small, but there's a lot of people in there, none the less.

Plus there's a matter of scale. It's easy enough to hand one guy a sandwich. Or take him to the hospital. When you've got hundreds of thousands of people looking for a sandwich or a doctor, you have to rethink how you hand that sandwich over, or allow someone to see that doctor. Who goes first?

This is much more complicated than "send them the money, they'll get better right away." No matter what anybody thinks.

--Hawk
23 years fire service
12 years EMS
WTC responder