When the earthquake in Haiti was initially reported, I reacted to it with much the same detachment I did to 9/11, Katrina, the 2008 earthquake in China, etc: whenever I hear these initial reports, I always have a hard time feeling their reality. But as more news continues to pour in from Port-au-Prince, I’ve noticed that some of the most emotional and powerful information seems to be, for me at least, coming in the form of numbers.
I was standing in line at the supermarket yesterday after hearing a news report that tens of thousands may be dead. The number didn’t register for me until that moment when I compared it to death toll of 9/11, which I remember being somewhere around 3,000. Before this moment, I had naturally felt concern for the people of Haiti and a desire to help them, but I hadn’t felt truly sad. For some reason those numbers resonated for me. Today I read on the BBC that the estimated death count is between 45,000 and 50,000, which seems small in the grand scheme, but it’s still really hard to conceptualize that many people dying.
On the other hand, if we want to look at numbers, that same BBC article said that the UN counted $270 million pledged for relief efforts in Haiti. And a social news site I belong to, Reddit, set up a donation collection with a goal of raising $31,415. At latest count, the Reddit community has raised $77,842, more than twice its original goal. I find these kinds of numbers just as emotional.
There are some very different numbers, according to another article I found through Reddit. 4,000 metric tons: this is the number of unsolicited medicine that poured into Sri Lanka after the tsunami. That’s 4 pounds to every tsunami victim, much of which was “labeled in a language that locals did not understand.” The medicine was part of a “tsunami of misguided goodwill” that included “everything from pajamas and teddy bears to birth control pills and Bibles,” a deluge of donated items that rather than help the relief effort, actually hindered it by clogging supply lines and taking up valuable space in hospitals. In the aftermath of the conflict in Bosnia of the late 90’s, according to the article, 17,000 tons of inappropriate donations had to be burned. The article goes on to suggest the only helpful donations in these situations are monetary ones made to reputable relief organizations.
That last article got me thinking about my own experience in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In January 2006, four months after the hurricane struck, I went down to New Orleans with my school to do a week’s worth of relief work. We did a lot of mucking-out houses and volunteering in schools, but the only part that everyone hated (because we wanted to be out actually helping people) was sitting around in a high-school gym sorting through mountains of donated detritus, mostly clothes, that was monopolizing the floor space. These unneeded items had been sitting there for four months since the disaster struck. Here are some of my pictures from that trip:
