Pinpoints of Light in the Haitian Night

Haiti and the Servant-Leader Response

Who knows how many dead and injured. Families in Haiti, the United States and around the world desperate for information. A crippled airport, a damaged port. Black nights with no electricity.

As we know, a 7.0 level earthquake has devastated Port-au-Prince, the capital of the small island nation of Haiti, the poorest nation in the western hemisphere.

The world is responding - with people, money, ships, helicopters, medical supplies, food and water. Sadness and disbelief hang in the air, and shock. An inability to imagine the horror.

As servant-leaders, what can be our most helpful response? To send cash, surely. If we are in a profession that can help to address the immediate chaos and suffering, to go to Haiti ourselves or help from a distance.

Surely the right-now needs must be met: saving as many lives as possible, burying the dead, tending to the injured, restoring order, providing food, shelter, water, comfort.

But what about healing on a long-range basis? As servant-leaders, we do respond to emergencies as they occur, but our role is also to look to the systemic issues involved in such catastrophes and ask if factors exist that contribute to such disasters occurring and reoccurring in a tragic cycle that does not contribute to the ongoing growth and health of everyone involved.

Time after time, an impoverished country suffers an unimaginable natural disaster, and the wealthier, stronger powers come in to help. We are familiar with the pattern; just as one example out of many, we remember the horrific Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, leaving 150,000 people dead or missing and injuring and displacing countless more.

The world literally responded, helped with the crushing first hours, days, weeks, until some form of stability returned.

Experts describe Haiti as a particularly vulnerable nation because of its chronic poverty, its geographic location subject to earthquakes and hurricanes, a long history of government oppression.

What thoughts can we as servant-leaders offer that would contribute to a basic change in the dismal system that exists now and bring about a transformation that would help to bring Haiti and other countries like it into a new way of living and being? Stronger infrastructures, stricter building codes, yes, but on a deeper level, more national independence growing from a fairer share of the world's wealth, health and strength?

Such issues have begun to be addressed; for example, former president Bill Clinton, as the United Nations special envoy to Haiti, has with others begun to talk about Haiti's future and exploring ways to make that little country stronger.

It remains for us as servant-leaders, however, to ask certain basic questions -- hard, sometimes unwelcome and unpopular questions:

How does a history of governmental oppression contribute to the magnitude of destruction once an event like this occurs?

How do we make decisions not just in Haiti but everywhere in the world about where we live, especially when it comes to places that are particularly subject to hurricanes, floods, earthquakes?

How do we help with the immediate needs without fostering an unhealthy, cruel system that keeps repeating itself again and again?

What, in short, is the servant-leader's best response?

The Gabriel Center welcomes your thoughts and ideas and invites you to share them as part of this conversation.

It may not feel like much of a contribution in alleviating the suffering visited on our southern neighbors.

But, both now and in the long run, your thoughts of love and support, your creative impulse to help build a stronger Haiti as we go forward, do matter, do have energy, strength, power, import.

It means that as we give cash, professional expertise, send thoughts and prayers, taking time to look at this catastrophe from a systemic perspective means that we are giving all that we have to this struggling people.

And it means that a young Haitian boy, a Haitian grandmother, a young Haitian man and woman might be able to look up at that black sky - the blackest of all black nights - and see tiny yellow pinpoints of light piercing the dark.

And it means that they just might know that we are with them. In these days of darkness and in the days to come that will assuredly bring greater light.

Sources:

"Atlanta Journal-Constitution"
News programs: CNN, "PBS NewsHour"
"The Two-Way," National Public Radio's news blog