Helping Haiti Should take Precedence Over Keeping Convention

In times of major disaster and suffering, when human life is relegated to a state of fragility, abolish all the rules, conventions, and laws.  Society and structure rules over the safe and secure, giving order to reign in the potential disastrous impacts garnered from unchecked selfish interests and amorality.  However, when safety and security are nil, law and order takes a backseat to more primal objectives, mainly survival, our most powerful and basic instinct.  Therefore, if we as a people desire to help others in this world, it would be wise to serve this most basic instinct, not the preservation of bureaucracy and law, but survival.

Such is the situation in Haiti.  A few weeks ago, an earthquake took hundreds of thousands of lives, relegating myriads more to homelessness, injury, disease, and desperation.  Every individual in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation was affected in one way or another.

The damage to the people and property of Haiti is incomprehensible to us in the United States, whose five worst natural disasters (according to death count) yielded about 10% of the casualties estimated in the Haitian earthquake.  Among the estimated dead of 150,000-200,000 include at least 90 Americans or Haitian-Americans with dual citizenship.  Imagine the entire city of Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan, including the University of Michigan Hospital, destroyed by a natural disaster.  Now shut down all airports within an hour’s drive from Ann Arbor, and extend the Great Lakes to separate Michigan from Ohio and the other neighboring states.  If you truly can imagine this unlikely, horrible, hypothetical scene, then it will be difficult for you to realize that this would still be overshadowed by the real tragedy in Haiti. 

Amidst this disaster in Haiti, donations of relief support from a plethora of organizations, from sports organizations to individual celebrities, in the US have been announced.  At the University of Michigan, numerous fundraisers, vigils, and events have brought awareness to the student body.  Television ads tell us that we can donate $10 to the relief effort via texting.  However, recently there have been many question raised about the usage of this donated money.  Speculation has led to the idea that more money than necessary has gone to fund bureaucratic activities not directly related to Haitian relief.  This is a credible concern not only for Haiti, but with any bureaucratic charity claiming to aid in the relief of world hunger and suffering.

A group of doctors recently ignored bureaucratic rules in Haiti, flying three dying Haitian children on a jet to the United States, avoiding a military suspension of medical evacuation flights.  If these doctors had followed the rules, these three children would have undoubtedly died.  For those of you who say that the rules should still have been followed, that renegade doctors should not be able to break rules that others must follow, that everyone must be the same and have the same rights and privileges, please think of the three people whom you are closest to in this world.  Now imagine that these three children are those three people; do you support breaking the rules now?  In times of desperation and need, laws and rules take a backseat to humanitarianism and simple human integrity, traits certainly espoused by these law broaching doctors. 

Many University of Michigan students have expressed desire to directly aid in Haiti, but have been told that this is not possible and that they should support the organizations already in place to assist Haiti.  Instead of paying for some charity members’ lunches, the University of Michigan would be wise to allow students the opportunity to help directly in Haiti, especially those students with an area of expertise.  Desperate times call for desperate measures; today in Haiti, desperate measures are needed, and bureaucracy and restrictive policies certainly are not.   

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