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29469: Re: 29457: A comment. From Math Jay: About the contributions of MIke deVine and Bob Graham (fwd)





From: jepiem@aol.com

It's interesting to read the article relayed from the Sun Sentinel about the political exit of Senator Mike deVine of Ohio and, in passing Bob Graham who interestingly enough has been out of the Senate for quite sometime now. If I'm not mistaken, his successor is already on a second term. Whatever the good intentions of these men, the beneficial effect of their apport to the wellfare of Haitians is not really apparent when one visits Haiti. If you've been going there regularly for the last 10 to 20 years like I have you can't help but notice the fact that the poor has been getting much poorer, that homelessness has been increasing and the general economic situation of the great majority has been growing worse and worse. On the other side of the coin there has been a proliferation of buildings for businesses, new car dealerships, banks gasoline stations, mostly in the capital and the surroundings, an increasing number of cars, a lot of them luxury vehicles which of course mak et motor vehicle traffic a nightmare and foot traffic more dangerous than a walk in the jungle. The sides of the mountains are scarred with tightly packed cubicle dwellings that the locals call bidonvilles. But where's the real progress for the majority in all that. In spite of promisses and even the hoax of electricity suddenly provided by a barged moaring in the Port au Prince bay for a while at the beginning of the de facto Latortue government, the country is still in the dark most of the time, so much so that those who can afford it depend on deafeningly noisy generators unsafely installed exhuming plumes of noxious fumes into the athmosphere and sometimes right into people's living room and bedrooms. Water is getting even scarcer and kids have to fight to get water out of holes from broken pipes and homeowners depend more and more on expensive water purchased from trucks who have to negotiate narrow crowded corridors to make deliveries. And on and on. This begs the question as to where are or where were the haitian leaders when all that started so rapidly declining. When we find the answer to that question, may be there will be a hope that may be there is possibility of at least slowing that Haiti's decline.