Haiti: Living Life on the Brink

Death is peaceful. Life is painful. Haiti is a grim reminder of this traumatic fact that rules the essence of our life. God may be non-existent or maybe somewhere there, waiting to punish us for our sins. Haitian would now like to believe that God watches it all.

As rubble lie on the streets of Haiti socked in the blood of its people many of those bodies may have wriggled for emancipation before they gave up their soul. We do not know if they are in heaven or hell.

We do not know if these places actually exist. All we know is of the human tenacity to squarely put the blame on God. If he created the earth and the heavens above, all disasters that happen indeed come from him. Are minds are trained to believe that. We are trained to trust that our destiny is pre-defined by the spiritual. We are born with it and we will live and die of it.

Whose sins have Haitian suffered for; the people or their leaders? Questions that we will soon stop asking as the stink of the dead soul pass off in the Caribbean air.

But Haiti once held out a glimmer of hope and democracy. The nation has been the harbinger of sorts for democracy in the Latin American continent. Overthrowing the French colonial control and slavery in a series of wars in the early 19th century, Haiti became the world's first black-led republic and the first independent Caribbean state.

The new dawn of freedom and the hope was soon drawn to dust. What Haitian saw was decades of poverty, environmental degradation, violence, instability and dictatorship that has left the country as one of the poorest nations in Latin America. Voodoo physician Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" brought further notoriety to an already ravaged country as tens of thousands of people were killed under their 29-year rule. Peace has lived far away from the country. Haiti continued to be plagued by clashes among rival gangs and political groups - confrontations that led the UN to describe the country's human rights situations as "catastrophic".

Today as the world rushes, the reach the much needed help to Haitians it is important for us to sit and reflect back on many other nations in the world - ravaged by poverty and economic degradation. Skeletal souls fighting on the streets - it is time to think whom do nations suffer for.