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It would be so easy to criticize the people of St. Marc Haiti who organized a protest against the construction of a 400-bed cholera treatment center that was so violent, the humanitarian group building the facility decided to pack up and find another location.
After all, the protests which included stone throwing and the burning of tents in the treatment compound look like the actions of a desperate, ungrateful, irrational people unwilling to help their fellow Haitians.
It's so easy to judge them while sitting here in the United States, safe and sound from the spread of fatal diseases like cholera.
Doctors Without Borders promised St. Marc residents that the new facility posed no extra risk to residents. They added that closing the proposed center would hurt their work to curtail the spread of the disease which has killed nearly 300 and sickened more than 4,000 in the past few weeks.
The people of St. Marc said they feared the clinic could put nearby schoolchildren at risk of catching the disease. Is that fear legitimate? Maybe. Maybe not.
No one can ever excuse the use of violence to make a political point. Taking the law into one's own hands leads to nothing more than the rule of the gun and the breakdown of civil discourse.
Try for a second to put yourself in the place of the people of St. Marc. Your nation has been devastated by an earthquake and now a group of doctors from foreign lands tell you they are going to build a clinic for cholera-infected people in your backyard.
Exactly how welcoming would you be?
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By: paul on 10/29/2010 9:42AM
Well, at least they're banding together and fighting for something they believe in.
If they could only figure out how to channel that enthusiasm toward cleaning up and building some infrastructure they'd really be moving toward progress.
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