Haiti is where suburban American kids go on mission trips to get photos of themselves hugging black children.
“Haiti is where suburban American kids go on mission trips to get photos of themselves hugging black children.”
I thought they did that in Newark (as part of their high schools’ mandatory “volunteer” work)...
That’s a little cold! Actually, in the Lower South, a lot of church groups, both Catholic and Protestant, go to Haiti because it’s one of the most wretched places in the universe and needs a huge amount of help, and people know about this because there are Haitian immigrants in the Lower South. Most of the missions are sanitation or health care missions.
Still, the Haitians are hard to love, because they seem to have the worst characteristics of both of their colonial worlds: African and French. And the steady drumbeat of quasi-Marxism sure hasn’t helped.
French colonies uniformly have had difficulty adapting to independence. Note that the Dominican Republic, a former Spanish colony, is on the same island, and while there’s a lot of poverty and the population is also heavily of African descent, they’re light years ahead in terms of being a civilized country. Heck, when you fly across the island, you can see the border of the two countries: the Haitian side is barren and deforested, and the DR side is green and has farms and towns.
Of course, the malevolent influence of the Clintons and their corrupt $$ friendship with Aristide and all of the leftist dictators there certainly hasn’t helped.