Just when you think nothing worse can happen, it does. They say as many as 200,000 people have died in Haiti; no one knows for sure. We might never know for sure.

Viewed from space, Haiti is a rough-cut emerald in an azure sea. On the ground it is, and has been for centuries, a beleaguered loosely-governed nation sagging under the weight of its modern past.

Theft and corruption in every avenue of life bent Haiti’s back and slowed its gait. For a while, there seemed to be promise for the poor, descendents of the half million African slaves brought by the French to mine wealth from forests and sugar cane fields.

After nearly 200 years enriching France, those slaves rebelled and set up the first independent black national government in 1804. France demanded payment for their freedom and Haitians paid it. A few years ago, Haiti’s president, former priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, sent France a bill. He wanted $21 billion in repayment. Not surprisingly, the check never came.

But now, with the world’s antennae broadcasting nearly every rescue or recovery, every medical intervention or food drop, money from around the globe is washing up on Haiti’s sparkling shores.

The cynics will say it’s not enough, and what arrives will be stolen anyway. The hopeful point to new generators and cases of antibiotics for aid agencies, to tent cities pitched next to mountains of rubble, to pallets of food and water arriving daily.

Every new story is more incredible and more wrenching than the last. CNN’s medical correspondent, neurosurgeon Sanjay Gupta, was airlifted out of Port-au-Prince to the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, where he operated on a young Haitian girl whose head was peppered with shards of concrete. The Haitian-born surgeon-in-chief of Los Angeles Pediatric Hospital was there as well.

Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ll be seeing such stories a few months from now. The United Nations’ peace-keeping troops were already there, and thousands of U.S. Marines have arrived or are on the way. But neither they, nor the U.S. Navy ships anchored off Haiti’s crystal beaches can remain forever.

Someone has to take charge. Someone has to save Haiti.

The country has a president. It also has a retired dictator and a popular former president. Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, now in Paris, was run out in 1986; Aristide, now in South Africa, got a one-way ride to exile compliments of the U.S. government just five years ago. The current president is Rene Preval, once a close associate of Aristide.  

The poor may still want Aristide back in Haiti. Why? Quite simply, Aristide saw, and tried to tell the world, what we are all seeing now. In a dreadful twist, his prediction that the rich “up on a hill ... eating steaks and pate and veal flown in from across the water” will be overcome by the poor, who will “knock the table of privilege over, and take what rightfully belongs to them.”

Parts of Haiti are now in anarchy. Are the poor claiming what Aristide claims belongs to them? From clean offices and homes thousands of miles away, it’s hard to make a judgment.

The problem, of course, is that you don’t know who is legitimately rich, and who has strip-mined the lives of the poor. Corruption is not a pretty, or easy, thing to gauge. For now, we can be grateful that the world is paying attention, at least for a little while, and we can only hope that whoever ends up saving Haiti pays close attention to the poorest of the poor as well.

(EDITOR’S NOTE — Zagano is visiting professor of theology and religion at St. Leo University in Florida, and author of several books in Catholic Studies. She also holds a research appointment at Hofstra University, N.Y.)

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