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

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

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.