Haiti, only an hour and a half flight away from the United States, is now referred to as “the silent emergency.” In the last five decades, more than 98% of the tree forest has been lost due to the Haitian people being desperate enough to cut them and use them for fuel. As a result, the erosion has destroyed 2/3s of the countries farmlands while the population is increasing rapidly. Flood waters wash down the mountains like avalanches, Rivers and Lakes are dying. Tons of garbage and contaminants are breeding disease.

 

Because of Haiti’s high population density and its decaying infrastructure, the country is particularly vulnerable to the effects of natural disasters such as floods, mudslides and hurricanes. In 2008, several Hurricanes pounded Haiti. They say that the storms destroyed 15 percent of the country`s GDP or the equivalent of 8 to 10 Hurricane Katrina’s hitting the U.S. in one month. These hurricanes created flooding everywhere, a food shortage, and a breeding ground for diseases and illness.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. For the most part, people are living on about a dollar a day. In a study conducted a few years ago, researchers also named Haiti as one of the “most water-impoverished” countries in the world. About 80 percent of disease in Haiti is water-borne, and that stat affects children most acutely in a country where one in eight children won’t make it to his or her fifth birthday (generally because of a mixture of illness and malnutrition).

Since so many people understand the situation by comparing to other impoverished countries, here are some comparisons for you: Haiti has the third highest rate of hunger in the world. It has less clean water than Ethiopia. Its malnutrition rate is higher than Angola. Life expectancy is lower than the Sudan.

It is a moral outrage and the situation demands the heart and passion of all of us to create change, and we have to will power to make some of the changes.