One month into the cholera outbreak, and even people who haven't caught cholera are losing their tempers. Via the Disaster Accountability Project: We donated to Haiti relief and we're angry. Excerpt from the petition, reformatted for easier reading:
As many as 1.5 million people in Haiti are living in camps like these that were set up by relief and aid organizations and the Haitian government. At the very least, the fact that these organizations' leadership did not see cholera coming or failed to thwart it demonstrates a Katrina-esque failure of initiative.
Each of these organizations stated that they worked on Water and Sanitation after the Haiti earthquake. As of July 2010 - six months after the Haiti earthquake,
American Red Cross raised $464 million and spent $117 million;
Catholic Relief Services raised $140.8 million and spent $30.6 million;
Oxfam America raised $29 million and spent $11 million;
Salvation Army raised $20.5 million and spent $6.8 million;
Food for the Poor raised $20.5 million and spent $10.7 million;
Mercy Corps raised $14.9 million and spent almost $2.9 million;
International Medical Corps raised $13 million and spent $4.5 million.
World Vision raised $44 million and spent $56 million worldwide and
CARE raised $18.2 million and spent $9.6 million worldwide (it is unclear how much was spent in Haiti).
See the Chronicle of Philanthropy's accounting of how much was raised and how much was spent: http://philanthropy.com/article/How-Charities-Are-Helping/66243/
It is the individual aid workers on the ground that deserve our gratitude for doing the back-breaking work to help those in need.
Meanwhile, the headquarters of these major relief/aid organizations raised billions of dollars using emotional, heart-wrenching and urgent appeals, prioritized how they spent that money, and apparently chose to spend less than half.
Potentially billions of post-earthquake relief dollars, intended for the Haitian people, are just sitting in U.S. and foreign banks. The question remains: Why are conditions so poor, after all that has been donated, that cholera is still such a threat?
