While the earthquakes that ravaged Haiti last January captured the attention of the global community and the student body in the direct aftermath, the island nation still struggles to rebuild beyond the public eye. Yet the students of the Haiti Action Relief Team (HART) continue to raise awareness of Haiti’s much-overlooked plight. On Oct. 5, HART brought Tori Hogan, a filmmaker and self-proclaimed aid advocate, to campus to screen some of her documentaries and talk to students about how aid organizations can better help those in need.
“We wanted HART to really focus this year on issues surrounding foreign aid—basically why the system is so broken,” said Jacob Eichengreen ’13, a member of the group. “We also wanted to focus some of our efforts towards broadening dialogue—how to have conversations with your friends about the issues without seeming like ‘that guy.’”
After viewing the first of Hogan’s films, students traded ideas and thoughts on how exactly aid workers can be most effective—what NGOs are doing wrong, what they’re doing right, and how they could improve. A large part of the discussion focused on how much effect an aid worker can have after staying in any given place for only a few weeks. Hogan and students discussed how workers could learn necessary skills, understand the needs and culture of their surroundings, and apply their limited knowledge to an entirely foreign community in this short amount of time.
“The real reason I do this work is to get young people talking,” Hogan said before showing her first film. “I want you to tell me what you’re thinking about these ideas and how you think we could do it better. It’s really about getting a dialogue started.”
Many students had first-hand experience with volunteering in Haiti or other countries, only to find that the local people really can build their own houses better than visiting Americans who have never been trained in carpentry or architecture. Hogan asked students at the meeting to raise their hands if they had ever been abroad to help teach English; about half of the assembled students raised their hands. When she asked how many of those students had any formal training in that area, only one hand remained in the air.
As the discussion continued, it was clear that aid organizations all over the world run into problems derived from good intentions without solid execution. Wesleyan students in HART expressed their frustrations with donations sent from the US to Haiti after the earthquake.
“The things people gave were totally inappropriate,” said HART member Haley Baron ’12. “When we asked for medical supplies we received hundreds of syringes, which piled up in the corner of rooms completely unused. None of the basic essentials we really needed like Tylenol, antibiotics, or band-aids were sent, but boxes of relatively useless things like scalpels were sent in.”
While some aid was ineffectual or badly organized, though, Hogan and other students offered several examples of projects that were very successful. One of Hogan’s videos highlighted a company called BushProof, which pioneered the idea of “bottom of the pyramid” marketing. If you sell something such as a well to a community in Africa instead of giving it to them, they will be more invested in maintaining it. BushProof’s theory has proved phenomenally successful, their wells and solar power panels now supplying power and clean water to many impoverished African communities.
While the stories of companies like BushProof provide evidence that aid organizations are headed in a more effective direction, Hogan affirmed her faith that students and volunteers were really the key to successful aid work.
“Start with yourself, then start with the people around you,” Hogan said as she concluded her presentation. “Make sure you treat your own community with respect, then spread that respect to wherever you travel.”
HART members viewed the discussion with Hogan as an excellent starting point for the year.
“As an aid critic, she really highlighted some major shortfalls of the current aid paradigm,” Eichengreen said. “I know a lot of people left the program feeling like, ‘Whoa, nothing works,’ which sounds like there is no hope, but the aim of the year is to come up with solutions that could be incorporated into public policy in the long term.”
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