Matt Labash on Haiti
What, you thought just because the week of Labash had passed I was going to stop shilling for him? Obviously you don’t know me. I promise not to hock his book any more, though, which can be purchased at Amazon for the low, low price of $17.15.
Anyway, his latest is on Haiti and a priest who was working the country long before the earthquake devastated it. Of course, as Matt points out, there wasn’t much to devastate in the first place:
Frechette can recount unspeakable atrocities. He has seen bodies being eaten by pigs in the middle of the street. He has seen a man roll around his half-dead wife all day in a wheelbarrow, after she’d been shot in the head, looking in vain for medical help. He has seen a severed head stuck on a post outside a nunnery, for no apparent reason. He has been shaken down to recover the remains of murder victims. He has seen his customs broker shot in the jaw. He knew a mother who took her epileptic son to a houngan, who poured lye on the boy’s head in an attempt to exorcise the evil spirit. The boy, whose burned skin turned him into an unrecognizable monster, seethed with hatred for the woman who only wanted to help him, until he went crazy and died.
Then there are the kidnappings—a robust industry in a country without many. One of Father Rick’s many sidelines is playing hostage negotiator. It’s a trade that chose him, not the other way around. Frechette’s missions provide all manner of services to Port-au-Prince’s sprawling Cité Soleil slum, which seems to have been named ironically as it is one of the darkest places on earth. About 20 minutes away from St. Damien, it is considered by some to be the most dangerous place in the world. Known for its grinding poverty and hair-trigger violence, it’s a place which U.N. troops go years at a time without entering.
The unanswered question in Matt’s 10,000+ word piece is “How do you rebuild something that was ruined in the first place?” Haiti is a country that is, for the lack of a better word, a hellhole. It has been a hellhole for a long, long time. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of hope there. Father Rick Frechette is doing as much as one man can be expected to — more, really — but he can’t bring jobs to a country that has no infrastructure, or law to a society that has lived by the way of the gun for countless generations.
Matt’s piece is one of several good articles in the latest issue of The Weekly Standard. There’s also Andy Ferguson on Evan Bayh, Matt Continetti on the growing liberal disenchantment with democracy, and Christopher Caldwell on Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism in a Post-Soviet Era. Check them out when you get a chance.