Haiti Earthquake: Young Doctors and Students Bring Health Care to the Masses
August 24—Thousands died, tens of thousands are injured or homeless. The August 14 earthquake that devastated southwestern Haiti was a natural event, but capitalism made it a disaster.
Capitalism impoverished the masses. It forced them to shelter in structures clearly unable to withstand the earthquakes that regularly shake the island. It stranded them without food and without healthcare. This murderous racist system must go!
Amidst the destruction, the actions of Drs. Timothee Jean-Jacques, Wonston Raphael, Ruben Misaac Pierre, Stanley Ettenne, Medgina Felix and Physical Therapist Rose-Milord Celestin shine a light on the path forward to communism.
“Once we saw what happened, as young doctors, we were shaken,” said Dr. Pierre. “We said, ‘We have to bring our assistance no matter what the circumstances are.’ Even though there is insecurity in the country, we said, ‘We have to come help.’”
These young health workers pooled their resources to fill their backpacks with supplies. They braved the gang-controlled route out of the capital to reach hard-hit Les Cayes. They had no definite plan except to rely on the masses.
A clinic in Les Cayes didn’t work out, but someone directed them to the devastated community of Marceline. There a local priest helped them borrow a tent. He offered the use of the soccer field by the church school. By day the tent would be their clinic, and by night their shelter.
Word spread. Patients arrived. The young medics set broken legs and treated head trauma. They enlisted others to take more severely injured patients to a government hospital. They planned to stay until there were no more patients or no more supplies.
Then a group of university students arrived with two more tents, hygiene kits, another doctor and a mental-health specialist. Together the two groups collaborated to treat hundreds of patients.
“Whatever support you are giving to someone you have to first always consider them to be people,” said a psychology student. “You can’t think you are better than them.”
“If we all move together, we will get there more quickly,” said the physical therapist. “If we all try to move together and someone is hit, we have to stop and give a helping hand. It’s not something that affects just one group of people, it affects everyone.”
Contrast these young people with the NGOs that swarmed over Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. Those NGOs raised tons of money but got very little help to the masses in need. Instead, UN troops and refugee camps triggered epidemics of cholera and violence against women.
Then, as now, most of the first rescuers were Haitians who searched for neighbors in the rubble, often with their bare hands. They shared food and water. Many volunteered at hospitals.
The essence of communism is masses volunteering to do, collectively, whatever it takes to meet everyone’s needs. The young Haitian doctors and students in Marceline are putting this ideal into practice, whether or not they all see it that way.
Capitalism’s economic and climate crises are creating more disasters everywhere, every day. These disasters create opportunities for many more of us to organize friends act on communist ideas as we see today in Marceline. But we see these also as opportunities to promote communist ideas to the masses and build the International Communist Workers’ Party. Young comrades in India are showing us how to do this.
Haiti, right now, is politically as well as geologically unstable. A real communist party with a mass base would be planning for revolution to destroy capitalism. Such opportunities are becoming more common. Let’s prepare now to fight for and build the communist world we need
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