I have been watching with great despair as Haiti has been devastated by an earthquake. As of yesterday people were still being pulled from the rubble. I woke up this morning in the comfort of my bed thinking, “. . . right now there are thousands of people trapped in concrete and dying. How can that be?” How can it be, that in the year 2010, we can see images broadcast on the news of bodies being dumped into open graves by bulldozers? I can’t help but think about the role trust played in this devastating earthquake. Yes, we live in an environment where earthquakes can happened anywhere, anytime. However, if that quake happened here in America we have the added comfort of an impressive infrastructure and generally good construction.
In Port-au-Prince the earthquake toppled many buildings killing and trapping people because of shoddy construction. Why is the construction so poor? One of the primary answers has to be corruption. How can the Dominican Republic which exists due to an imaginary line only slightly east geographically be in such better condition than the west side of the same island? It’s not about the fissures in the ground, it’s about the fissure between people. There is low trust and high corruption in Haiti. Transparency International Corruption Perception Index (CPI) ranks Haiti a 1.8 on a scale of 1 – to 10. Nearly the lowest ranking in the world. This is consistent for other countries like Somalia and Nigeria. When there is a system of greed and corruption an economy cannot thrive. The result is vast poverty.
Countries are not corrupt because they are poor, they are poor because they are corrupt. We can’t do anything about earthquakes in the ground, we can only work on our relationships with each other. It all starts with personal integrity. It is so simple to understand yet so hard to practice. We need to make sure we don’t create fissures within ourselves, things that make us feel less than whole. These small cracks build up pressure and in the long run turn into our own personal earthquakes. When a culture begins to encourage enough people to live out of their integrity, they encourage a massive number of these cracks. Over time the collective cracks in the culture can create as much devastation as the cracks in the earth. On the other hand when you have the vast majority living in a healthy culture of integrity, the result is stability. This gives people the confidence to fight off corruption and make room for a strong economy, including quality construction to prevent some of the horrors we are witnessing in Haiti. I know you get it, that is why you are here. Now all we have to do is increase the numbers of those who hear this message.
