With the recent events in Haiti it was only a matter of time before private contractors would try to enter in and make their mark. In this article it explains how governments create summits so that private corporations can try and win contracts within distraught places. Similar situations can be traced back to Iraq as well as New Orleans. Now that Haiti needs to be rebuilt, businesses are jumping at the chance to try and get a piece of the action.
Naomi Klein discusses this in The Shock Doctrine as disaster capitalism. Klein explains this as when massive disaster occurs and businesses use it as an opportunity to cash in on the circumstances. However, the people that are often suffering in these situations feel much different and don’t want their lives replaced with something new. Klein explains,
“Most of the people who survive a devastating disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed; they want to reaffirm their relatedness to the places that formed them” (Klein 10).
From this we can see that often people don’t want to start over, they just want to repair the aspect of the lives that they can. I believe that trying to force people to start over just makes them suffer more and feel and even larger disconnect to the place that they used to call home. They want to continue to try and control the small parts of life that they still can in these situations and when contractors come in and tear everything down and start all over, these people just feel more lost and hurt. Thus, maybe the better thing to do for Haiti is not try and start fresh, but try and help these people reclaim a place that once felt like home so that it may be able to again.
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