From a friend in Belize, regards Haiti
Keith Lofstrom
Bleeding-heart do-gooders without discernment will not be all that
effective in helping Haitians. Like the natives here, Haitians know
a whole lot more about how to survive in their environment than
gringos from the North. What would help them are people with
infrastructure building skills (or doctors with medical supplies
in the short term) who are committed to stay there for a couple
of years and get something significant done. (What galls me is
the fad in evangelical churches of having kids write letters to
their relatives for money so that they can go to some underdeveloped
tropical paradise for two weeks "on a mission". I have a standard
form letter in reply and it is fairly direct about the reality
outside Disneyland.) Yes, you've hit the nail on the head.
The crying need in the developing world -earthquakes or not - is
infrastructure building including infrastructure skill building.
It's a giant bootstrapping process. It has happened in Euroamerica
because of the social outlook and the underlying worldview of the
culture that has resulted in our achievements. The Mayans have not
achieved much of anything here because they simply do not have the
same outlook and motivations. They do not value reading books and
learning much. But they can out-survive me in the bush any week.
Start from where the Haitians are and work from there. Don't expect
them to value what you think you have to offer them that is valuable
to you. It takes time to rebuild a culture. That's what I would
tell them. And Haiti is not terribly different from Belize in
important respects.
Keith
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Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs