“Googling” Haiti

During 2010 I had made several recommendations about Haiti that of course no one in position of power did read and one year after the quake, the same mess is still here, for all of us to see, with less than 5 percent of the debris cleared. What's striking to me is that even the so much admired president Clinton who was the UN special envoy and jointly oversees the Interim Reconstruction Commission along with Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive has been woefully ineffective.

Of the more than $5.6 billion that was pledged at a March 31 donors conference, some $3.2 billion in public funding is still owed and one is in right to wonder how the difference was spent. Sure Clinton and Bellerive said progress has been made — that half a million people have moved out of the camps that remain home to about 1 million. The aid group Oxfam disputes that figure, saying it's based on imprecise headcounts. The bottom line is that everyone has been dragging their feet and that barring unconventional thought process and idea, the situation will still be the same one year from now. Here again, we might have been better off asking Google to handle the whole project...