Repaso: Haiti 18 months later, poverty/dignity, humanitarian journalists, Latin America’s game, and more
1. Paul Farmer on post-quake Haiti
NPR’s Fresh Air had a half-hour interview this week with Dr. Paul Farmer, founder of Partners in Health, in which he talks about Haiti a year and a half after the devastating quake in January 2010. It’s tied in with his new book, which is one I’ll definitely plan to read and possibly review for the blog or a magazine. Farmer has been working in Haiti for a very long time, and his perspective is sobering but worth listening to. In the interview he says:
Some people talk about Haiti as being the graveyard of development projects. Our own experience has been very positive working in Haiti — building health facilities and working with the public sector and creating jobs — but [we are now thinking about] how we can now make these other, more ambitious projects also effective on the implementation front.
2. Haiti: 18 months later
Roseann Dennery, a good friend of Katie’s, has a new piece in Relevant Magazine on Haiti as well, focusing on the country’s tragic orphan crisis. She has been living there for the past year, working with Samaritan’s Purse along with Justin, her husband. Her first-hand experience of the crisis has led her to a unique perspective:
It is one thing to read statistics about Haiti’s expanding orphan crisis, but it is quite another to witness it; to walk down a squalid dirt road and visit several overrun orphanages within a few minutes of one another, each with greater need than the last. Wide eyed, hungry, soiled. Each humble face tells a different variation of the same story. It is unsettling and overwhelming. And it feels harshly unjust. What does it mean, then, to be a Christian in the midst of a swelling sea of abandoned children, a trend that shows no sign of slowing?
3. Snapshots of Suffering
My friend Chris Horst, who works for HOPE International, has a great personal reflection on dignity and suffering, based on experiences in the Dominican Republic. He concludes:
I’m thrilled to serve a God who truly knows me. A God who does not define me by my weaknesses. A Creator who made me in his image. A Father who “exults” over me, his child. These truths convince me that If God and I sojourned across the Dominican together, his pictures would look strikingly different than mine.
4. Are humanitarian groups doing the media’s job overseas?
This was an interesting one for me, since I’m a communications specialist for a large NGO not unlike the one featured in this post. It is an interesting observation Tom Paulson makes about this trend of NGO communicators doing something very similar to journalism and what this means for mainstream media.
5. Is baseball becoming Latin America’s game?
NBC Sports has an interesting piece on the rise of Latino players in the MLB:
Much like the recent influx of immigrants from Latin America into the general U.S. population, MLB has seen a remarkable shift in it's demographic over the last 20 years. Ozzie Guillen, the outspoken manager of the Chicago White Sox, said last year that within 10 years "American people are going to need a visa to play this game because we're going to take over." And while Guillen's comments can be taken as a humorous exaggeration, there is an element of truth to what he says. Baseball might be America's pastime, but the sport is becoming increasingly Latino at heart.
6. Trailer for :58 film
I highlighted the new :58 campaign here on the blog a month ago today. Now here is the trailer for the campaign’s feature length film, due for release this fall.
58: THE FILM Trailer July, 11 2011 from LIVE58NOW on Vimeo.
The ethics of faith-based aid
An aid/development blog I read called A View From The Cave recently featured a video from a series called Beyond Good Intentions. The series takes a look at various issues within development, including disaster relief, the role of the aid worker, research methods, micro-lending, etc. -- all focused on the question of effectiveness: Is what we're doing really working?
The video I came across on the blog was focused on faith-based aid. It features interviews with missionaries in Mozambique who live among very poor people. Using my own very unscientific methods, I'm not sure these missionaries are in any sense representative, but I think the questions raised and the answers given do provide some good food for thought, especially for those like me -- and maybe you -- who believe that faith and development do belong together.
Is what we're doing really working?
Are we really doing what we say we're doing?
Might our actions have unintended consequences?
Can we do better?
What kind of moral document is the federal budget?
Not everyone would agree that the U.S. federal budget is a moral document, but even among those who do, there's no shortage of disagreement over what ought to constitute budget morality. Relevant Magazine published on Monday two opinion pieces with very different visions of what a moral budget would look like.
The first is by former Democratic congressman and ambassador Tony Hall, head of the Alliance to End Hunger, who is fasting and praying in support of government assistance for the poor, along with more than two dozen members of Congress and over 30,000 citizens as part of HungerFast.org. Hall writes:
Budgets are moral documents by nature. They reflect the priorities of individuals, households and even nations, exposing our real notions of who and what is valuable. As elected leaders in Washington engage in shouting matches over how to solve America’s looming sovereign debt crisis, the voice of the poor is still getting drowned out. They’re obviously not our priority.
In short, according to Hall, a moral budget keeps in place or increases funds for domestic feeding programs and international aid.
On the other side of the debate is Eric Teetsel, with the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute and Common Sense Concept. Like Hall, he calls us to "end the fist banging and partisan pandering," but unlike Hall, he emphasizes the need to tackle entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid:
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the road to serfdom is paved with the pietistic convictions of the uninformed. Serious servants of the public good have recognized the need to fix the entitlements that support Grandmothers and handicapped children. Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” is one path towards accomplishing sustainable reform. By creating a voucher-like system for seniors and the provision of Medicaid block grants for states to allocate as they see most fit he reduces costs, localizes implementation, and maintains services.
Teetsel's harshest critiques are reserved, unsurprisingly, for Democrats, but to his credit he admirably calls out Republicans for taking cheap shots at the Democrats' pet programs rather than tackling the real causes of the budget crisis.
Both opinion pieces are fairly predictable along partisan lines, though, and one gets the impression that were Hall and Teetsel to have an actual conversation, they'd largely be talking past each other. This is unfortunate, because I don't think the two arguments are necessarily as mutually exclusive as they may first appear. Hall focuses on the need to protect aid programs that constitute a tiny percentage of the budget, while Teetsel focuses on the big picture, sensibly calling for spending not to exceed government revenue.
Neither side will be able to have their way entirely without making some significant compromises. But if we really could get past the shouting matches, the fist banging and the partisan pandering, maybe we could indeed balance the budget without ignoring the most vulnerable.
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