The thousands of Haitians who took to the streets in December, waving banners and chanting the unequivocal message ‘UN, go home!’ could be accused of biting the hand that feeds them. After all, Haiti currently relies on the UN and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to provide 80 per cent of its basic services. But the outpouring of anger, though partly in response to the cholera epidemic that was likely brought into Haiti by UN troops from Nepal, was also a result of wider frustrations with the painfully slow relief effort and the general state of the country. For despite billions having been pledged in aid since the 2010 earthquake, the lives of the majority of Haitians remain woefully threadbare.
‘Two years on and you have nearly half a million people still in tents or tarps, some 7,000 dead from cholera and hundreds of thousands more infected,’ says Ben Smilowitz, head of the Disaster Accountability Project, a non-partisan aid organization watchdog. ‘They’ve had to live through two hurricane seasons like this, which is simply unacceptable given the amount of money that was donated.’
