Haiti earthquake: Act of God or human negligence?
Earthquakes may qualify as acts of God. But don't try blaming the Almighty for the calamity gripping Haiti right now if you're talking to Glenn Smith. The director of Christian Direction in Montreal holds an honorary doctorate from Haiti's private universities for his contribution to Haiti's urban theological practice. For more than 15 years he has been travelling four times a year to Haiti where he helps train pastors to care for their cities. Human negligence, Smith says, is at least partially to blame for this tragedy, perhaps even a deficient theology.
What makes you angry about this disaster?
Back in the 1990s we began to look at zoning regulations, urban plans and how cities work in Haiti. We discovered that they don't work. There are no urban plans; there are no zoning provisions. We've known for years that an earthquake is going to take place. I've been telling my students that for ages. Now we're just living with the consequences.
So sewer systems, for example, just happen haphazardly?
Totally haphazardly. Only about one third of Haiti is actually served by a sewer system.
How do people take advantage of that?
Haiti is a middle ground for the Colombian drug trade, and the best way to launder money is through real estate. So because there's no zoning, people just build wherever they want—that's how money gets laundered.
We also know that Haiti is one of the most corrupt countries in the world when it comes to government. When you don't have sewer system controls, when you don't have provisions for how schools get built, for how clinics and hospitals get built, then when the earthquake hits, this type of travesty happens.
Have there ever been zoning regulations?
If you look at the old city of Port-au-Prince and particularly the old city of Cap-Haïtien, it's obvious there was a very intentional plan. But with urban immigration came slum communities. There's been a huge urban expansion in the 1990s and during the first decade of the 21st century. All that went uncontrolled and uninhibited.
What drove people to the city?
Fifty-five to 58 per cent of people who live in the city are women who come because there are opportunities for micro enterprise, better access to schools and clinics for their children. The men stay in the rural areas where they do agriculture, which is the opposite of what you have in African urban immigration.
Another factor is that the land is tired because of deforestation, so the land itself can't provide subsistence for families anymore.
What do you teach in your urban theology classes?
What I've been doing in my urban classes for the last 15 years is teaching students how caring for your city and loving your city also means advocating for just zoning provisions and just ecological policies. Part of this is just good urban theology: teaching students to read the Scriptures through the lens of the city. All of [my students] have to design strategies for how to engage their churches with the communities. There are wonderful things going on in every major city in Haiti. These are the people who are going to be directly involved in reconstructing.
Our network in Cap-Haïtien has already started to rehabilitate houses to help house displaced persons. Another network has upgraded its clinic and brought in more doctors. People are travelling up to 160 kilometres from Port-au-Prince to get medical help. These are ordinary churches doing down to earth stuff.
Our churches do a lot of ecological things. The ecological crisis in Haitian cities is just stunning. One church in Cap-Haïtien paved the streets around the church to say, "this neighbourhood is important to us." The city doesn't do this kind of stuff in Haiti.
Does a 10-year reconstruction timeline seem realistic to you?
It's going to take longer than that. You cannot talk yourself out of behaviour that you've acted yourself into. We've acted ourselves into this dilemma in Haiti for decades. It's one thing to rebuild a city, it's another thing to reconstruct a culture.
Rebuilding Port-au-Prince is going to be a macro project. I'm afraid if they start rebuilding too quick before they get the urban plan in place we're going to build on disaster. Port-au-Prince has got to be built on a solid urban plan.
Port-au-Prince is what you call a "primate" city: everything is centralized in Port-au-Prince. If you want to get your drivers' license renewed, you have to go to Port-au-Prince. Now all those buildings have been destroyed, those records are gone. So there will be an implicit decentralization in Haiti.
Could that be a good thing?
I think it's a brilliant thing. Primate cities facilitate corruption. In a small way I can understand this earthquake as a severe mercy.
I recently read comments by a Haitian theologian in the U.S. who said that Christianity in Haiti has left a vacuum, has left political landscape untouched.
The research we did on cities in 1999 is a scathing indictment of Protestantism and evangelicalism. Haiti's three largest cities are majority Protestant. And the gospel—how the church has understood the mission of God—has contributed. There's a whole rethinking of what the gospel is and how it gets communicated.
The good thing is that Haitian Protestants are understood in the culture as people of integrity. I know business men in Haiti who tell me: "I'll employ a Protestant before I'll employ anybody else." But it's a disengaged Protestantism. And I've seen that begin to change. It has changed in the 15 years that I've been teaching, but it hasn't changed nearly as much as the problem. That just shows you that the Church did its work in evangelization; it has not done such a good job in understanding integral mission
What's the history of Christian missions in Haiti?
The first people to engage Christian mission in Haiti were American Methodists and British Baptists. Both of them have been there for almost 200 years. The Methodists and Baptists have done marvelous ministry. Roman Catholic sisters and brothers have done incredible work in Haiti. And many of them were killed in this earthquake. The Haitian church has become an indigenous church over the last 25 years and has grown incredibly, primarily the Baptists in their various manifestations and the Pentecostals. In 1999 we counted 625 Pentecostal churches in Port-au-Prince. It would easily be double that today.
Other Christian NGOs are there. World Vision has been there since 1976 doing marvelous work, probably the largest NGO in the country with the most extensive network. Mennonite Central Committee is doing good work; Catholic Relief Services are doing good work.
What's Christian Direction doing?
We do not have competencies for the kind of emergency response the international governments and relief agencies are doing. There's a huge need for trauma counselling, grief counselling and spiritual accompaniment. So we're sending down five teams—probably in the next three weeks—to help train Haitians to do that work. One thing that our networks have taught us, after the floods in Gonaïves, this is one thing that the Church can do well.
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