Haiti 6 Months Later

Helping Haiti rebuild
A nation in need of its expats

PETIT GOAVE, HAITI

SIX months in from the earthquake, charred corpses no longer line curbsides in Haiti. In their place now is the living -- homeless, jobless, orphaned and maimed.

Of the 1.5 million-plus displaced to flimsy encampments, only a fraction has moved to sturdier shelter. Roughly half of the population suffers from malnutrition and has no access to drinking water.

Making our way amid the rubble -- past the mass graves and feral dogs that dig through them -- we spotted a man atop a ruined hotel. Three stories up, he tightrope-straddled the building's wire frame, with all his might swinging a sledgehammer at the bolder-size mass of limestone that clung to the façade -- rock scribbled red with the word "Demolir." A scrum of onlookers, many children, stood below -- gazing up, waiting to salvage fallen scraps of metal and stone.

The man demolishing an entire building singlehanded with a hammer is Haiti today: hell-bent on survival, but facing huge tasks with only the most modest resources.

The international pledges of $10 billion over the next 10 years to help rebuild Haiti are excellent promises. But foreign donors know that mismanagement has historically devoured the lion's share of funds sent to Haiti. Getting aid where it should go requires the involvement of Haiti's professionals -- accountants, engineers, doctors, professors. Unfortunately, 83 percent of them don't live here.

Haiti's educated are disproportionately with the diaspora -- the 2 million living in New York, Paris, Montreal, the Dominican Republic, Boston, Miami, Africa and more.

In March, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the director of the International Monetary Fund, told an international donors conference that there is absolutely no way to carry out Haiti-rebuilding plans without creating new benchmarks of accountable spending and performance. That only begins to describe Haiti's need for its college graduates. The return of even a minority of skilled expats would jolt reconstruction.

The quake exacerbated the brain drain, claiming 20,000 professional lives and prompting all who could -- which meant many of the surviving professionals -- to get out.

Make no mistake, the world's response to the earthquake was quick and kind, and the aid effort has made progress, but not nearly enough. Roughly $800 million has been dedicated for relief projects, but that's only a bit more than half of the $1.5 billion that the United Nations believes Haiti needs to meet this year's most basic housing and health needs.

Haiti is working with the United Nations to involve professional Haitians, with a portion of reconstruction contracts reserved for these workers. Nations that host the diaspora -- America foremost -- can and should help.

One good idea: Haitians in Canada are pushing for government-sponsored leaves to help expatriates returning to the island to rebuild.

Of course, expats also help by sending money home. In 2008, the diaspora remitted $1.9 billion to Haiti, far exceeding all other aid sources and equivalent to almost a third of Haiti's gross domestic product.

Any country that relaxes its immigration policy for earthquake refugees would increase remittances, enlarging the economic foundation for the long rebuilding. Intuition and history both suggest that émigrés sending money back to their families is a surer bet than government-to-government or even to-charity aid.

Conditions in Haiti remain horrific. Immediate aid is critical, but money isn't everything. Haitians must be given the space to help themselves -- and that means involving the professionals in the diaspora. Congress could start by making it easier to come and go between homeland Haiti and the "adopted lands."

(Elizabeth Lazar, freelance writer who's traveled Haiti over the last six months.)