Hello out there.
Today I am really searching my heart, hard. You see, I am supposed to go to Haiti for a week in March. I signed on with a group run by a friend of mine through a local university; paid for my tickets last Sunday. Most in the group were going to do a general building project for a school in the desperately poor neighborhood of Cite Soleil; I was potentially going to work in a clinic there as an RN, though the details hadn't yet been worked out. I would have been just as happy doing building work. Now, of course, the situation on the ground in Haiti is drastically changed from just a few days ago, and I find that I am torn with regard to whether or not to take the trip. Many people have encouraged me not to go; others have said I should wait and see what happens before I make my decision; the group leader still fully intends to make the trip.
What I wonder is this: how much good can a group of volunteers who are novices to post-disaster work actually do? And how much would we be getting in the way of the professionals and using up resources needed for the people already there? Haiti is not an easy country to work in even in normal times; this much I have gathered from reading the words and works of people who have been there for years. It will be even more difficult to get things done in the weeks and months to come. On one hand, if I can do some real good, I need to go. On the other hand, though I have a fair amount of experience working in developing countries, I have never worked in a situation anything close to that in Haiti right now. It seems more appropriate to me to give whatever financial support I can to organizations with experience in this type of post-disaster scenario (Partners in Health, Doctors without Borders, Red Cross) than to insert myself into a situation wherein I might be more of a liability than a help.
I will be talking to the project leader this weekend.
We shall see what happens.
