Where Did Everyone Go?

By Chris Talamo, Staff Columnist

Published on Thursday, March 4, 2010

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Latin America recently became the site of a natural disaster of unfathomable power. A country that had suffered under a dictatorship for years and has only recently found democracy was struck by a devastating earthquake that claimed the lives of hundreds of civilians and caused millions of dollars of infrastructure damage. Looting followed, forcing the president to all but threaten her citizens to stop. I could be speaking about either the Haitian or the Chilean earthquake, but only one is advertised on this campus, and only one is receiving our aid. Is it that our altruism has run out, or that there was never true altruism at all?

Even if you don’t watch the news, you couldn’t miss Dartmouth’s Haiti disaster response. It seems like a new blitz account dedicated to gathering aid for Partners in Health appeared overnight and began sending daily messages appealing for aid. The e-mails brought tragic images of a shattered nation whose very existence had been nearly undone in a matter of seconds to our usually sheltered campus.

I have no intention of making light of that tragedy, but it seems like no one is taking the terrible tragedy in Chile seriously. Faced with an almost identical disaster, there has been no more than a peep about supporting Chile. No blitz account. No donation drives. No organization sponsored all the way up to Parkhurst. Not even competition between the Ivy League schools to see who can raise the most money. If there wasn’t a brief tsunami warning for Hawaii, this campus might not have ever heard about the disaster. Let’s also not forget the incredible momentum the administration put behind the Haiti aid effort. Thanks to College President Jim Yong Kim’s personal connection to PIH, we all felt more comfortable donating because we knew it would go to a good cause. Now that there’s a disaster outside the scope of PIH, where are the administration’s appeals for help? Where are the e-mails sent to our parents asking them for help, too? Kim encouraged us to become citizens of the world by working with PIH, and I thought that quite admirable. Now is no time to stop broadcasting that message. I hope the administration meant what it said about tying Dartmouth to the international community, but I can’t help wonder if the Haitian earthquake is the only disaster that we will tie ourselves to.

Sadly, the international community hasn’t done much better. It seems as though Doctors Without Borders is still conducting an exploratory mission to determine if their help is needed, despite the fact that the Chilean quake denied many access to clean water. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made an appearance in Chile’s capital offering satellite phones, but little else. True, Chile didn’t initially request international aid, but it quickly became clear that the damage was much worse than initial estimates suggested. With all the money our community was able to muster for Haiti, can we really not gather together a few more cents to help Chile as well? To be fair, the Chilean earthquake, while stronger, did less damage than the Haitian one. This is in part due to the stricter building codes that made the structures there more resistant to collapse. The Chilean government has also been more stable than the Haitian one in recent years, making an adequate response more feasible. However, in one particularly baffling Oxfam article, the author claimed that the Haiti disaster was worse because it affected poorer people. I can only imagine drawing two lessons from this: either you’re better off not being prepared so that other countries will help you, or in the case of a natural disaster, poor people are more important than people who are moderately less poor.

The Haitian earthquake caused many more deaths and much more infrastructure damage. The country needs and deserves all the aid it can get. But that’s no reason to ignore Chile altogether. The dead, injured and sick there, while fewer in number, are worth just as much as people in similar conditions in Haiti. So, Dartmouth, which is it? Was it all a hoax, or is your concern just all dried up?