University of New Orleans student Youwans Thamard had just returned home from his summer job one Saturday night when he turned on the television to devastating news.
The date was Aug. 14, and a magnitude 7.2 earthquake had struck Haiti’s southern peninsula, causing major damage in La Cayes, Jeremie and surrounding areas. Thamard, who is from Haiti’s capital Port au Prince, began to panic.
“I could almost smell the dust coming out of the screen,” Thamard said.
The tragedy reminded him of when he was 13 in 2010, and a magnitude 7 earthquake hit the Caribbean country — its epicenter only 16 miles from Port au Prince — killing more than 200,000.
And then he remembered the chaos of the relief effort that followed
“By the time they got to us, or we even got to them, it was either crowded or [there was] not enough resources to help the ones in need,” Thamard said.
Much has been reported on how the approximately $13.5 billion in foreign aid that was donated or pledged to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake was poorly managed. Lack of trust in the Haitian government and Haitian grassroots organizations led donor nations and nongovernmental organizations to work in ways that proved counterproductive.
A 2015 investigative report from NPR and ProPublica found that the American Red Cross, which raised $500 million, spent more aid money on administrative costs and less on Haitians in need that it reported. And before that, a2012 study from Tulane University found that, “humanitarian assistance provided by the national and international community did not make a detectable contribution,” and that it “...may have been associated with undesirable outcomes.” Those outcomes included an outbreak of cholera, brought to Haiti by United Nations Peacekeepers from Nepal.
As the international community begins to send aid to Haiti once again, Haitians living in New Orleans, like Thamard, say they want the recovery effort to center Haitians this time.
“I believe if you want to help a country, you’ve got to sit and figure out what is their problem first,” Barthelemy Jolly, co-founder of a local Haitian culture station Radio Gonbo Kreyol and owner of West Bank restaurant Rendez-vous Creole, said. “You cannot decide, ‘Oh, I'm going to help them.’ Maybe what you're going to do is not [what they] need.”
He said Haitians are the best people to identify who needs aid and how it should be delivered.
“That’s our job to help our people,” Jolly said.
Knowing how funds were used on overhead costs after the 2010 earthquake, Jolly encouraged donors to give to Haitian grassroots organizations, where he believes most, if not all, of the money will be used on the recovery effort.
Centering Haitians is important to artist Lori Martineau, also from Port au Prince, who traveled home days after the 2010 earthquake.
She worked for one of the many nongovernmental organizations that was launched during the aftermath and said people swarmed Haiti and brought donations that weren’t always useful.
“I met people who came to teach Haitians how to grow beans because we don't know apparently. I met people who came to donate used yoga mats because we really want your sweaty yoga mats,” Martineau said with sarcasm.
She found it insulting and when a group came with the intention to “play with the kids in the tent cities.”
Martineau said she also was overwhelmed by all of the people who wanted to come to Haiti just to see the devastation.
“They just had to come and look at us in our misery,” she said, pointing to constant references she reads in the news of her birthplace being the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
But in New Orleans, she says the people don’t see Haiti that way, and that’s why she chooses to live here. New Orleans, which welcomed tens of thousands of Haitians in 1809, instead celebrates the deep ties and similarities it shares with the first free Black republic.
That includes second lines, which Jolly was comforted to see in the French Quarter upon his arrival to New Orleans from Haiti. It reminded him of home.
“I said, ‘Wow, that’s Haiti! I think I’m good here. I’m not going anywhere else,’” Jolly said.
Similarities aside, Haitians in New Orleans say they are now focused on the crisis back home.
Jolly is part of an organization called the Haitian Community Center of Louisiana. Last Wednesday he and other members met at his restaurant to come up with a plan to collect funds and donate them to the people struggling to recover from the recent disaster.
One of the members, Manel Charles, is from Bino, one of the communities hit by the recent earthquake. He’s launched a GoFundMe campaign in hopes that he can bring money to the people in his hometown.
Charles plans to travel to Bino and document his distribution of the funds he collects so that donors know where the money is going.
“That [money] goes directly to people that [have been] hit, not only my people, but the whole people in the area, people that I don't even know,” Charles said. “They're gonna really get something.”
