Looking back can be productive

While reading the report on Haiti and the earthquake, I took various notes. Just today I looked back at what I wrote down and noticed things I hadn’t noticed before. I think looking back to notes taken is a really good way to formulate questions because through your notes not only do you remember more clearly what it was that you were reading about but also you come up with new questions and things such as events to connect it with. When taking notes, you use prior knowledge to make connections and inferences to later formulate questions. When you look back and read previous notes on a subject you’ve been working on, you use prior knowledge and the things that you’ve learned to then think more and to analyze what you thought before. You can then come up with even more questions that will help you learn more.

So when I was looking at my notes, I saw that I quoted a part of the reading and next to it wrote: Why had the aid taken longer than it should have? But after reading it again I made a connection.

The part of the text that I quoted was:

“Delays in aid distribution led to angry appeals from aid workers and survivors, and some looting and sporadic violence were observed. There were also accounts of looters wounded or killed by vigilantes and neighborhoods that had constructed their own roadblock barricades.” It reminded me of what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina left them in devastation and while private organizations provided aid, the federal government took a long time doing their job and providing aid. Looting became a really big problem in New Orleans and looters were also shot. Even though, in my opinion, New Orleans had much more of a reason to turn chaotic because they were in need of resources just like Haiti but in New Orleans, they went far longer than they should have without them. It’s true, Haiti also suffered very much with the earthquake and the aftershocks but aid arrived relatively quickly compared to New Orleans, but I think it should have arrived even earlier than it did.

Would have chaos and violent measures been able to be avoided if international aid had arrived earlier to Haiti? Its difficult to say but taking into account the circumstances in which things turned chaotic, it could be that the level of it could have been much lower and it would have lasted less. Also, the way in which aid was given, by dropping it from airplanes, throwing it out in the streets, it just made the people more desperate to get the resources provided. I think some kind of rationing should have taken place.