The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster

"A third of Haiti's teachers hadn't completed the equivalent of ninth grade." 

Haiti's education deficit extends beyond poorly trained teachers. It is a systemic problem, Katz argues. With so many economic and political challenges confronting the country, education inevitably takes a back seat. Interestingly, the same prioritization happens in the United States, with adequate funding for corporate tax cuts and military spending but little left over for education. Politicians, it seems, are short-sighted, allocating money and resources where they see immediate need while diverting those resources away from more long-term investments.

"In the end, the same exact rivers flooded in the same exact way they had flooded a few years before, and the aid workers simply came back." 

The cycle of misapplied aid followed by another disaster perfectly summarizes Haiti's endemic problems as well as its persistent dependency on other countries. Hopes rise and fall like the Caribbean tide as promises are made, broken, and made anew. Rather than solving systemic problems, aid groups and NGOs apply band-aids to the country's wounds, only to reapply them when they fall off a short time later. 

"'Charity,' Préval emphasized from the marble podium, 'has never helped any country escape underdevelopment.'"

Addressing the United Nations, Haitian president René Préval argues for more permanent solutions to Haiti's problems rather than the scattered, transitory approaches that have so far failed to provide any semblance of self-sufficiency. The charitable approaches may help in the near term—and they may assuage donors' guilt—but handing out millions of bottles of water and thousands of tarps are no substitute for long-term economic development.