Text: Haiti's missing millions - the people, not the dollars

Nine million people in Haiti? Pull the other leg, it has a goat tied to it.

About a million people are not getting food and water, by Red Cross estimates, of the 3 million in the Port au Prince and nearby quake-devasted region.

But the question is, where are the other 6 million Haitians?

They appear to have not one radio station between them, and from Google Earth, there are clearly no other large towns. And, there are very few fields along the rivers. or anywhere. I may have this badly wrong, but it seems possible this is the elephant that is not in the room. Maybe there are 2 million more people, in small cities and towns and in the rural areas. But something like 4 million people seem to be missing. Not since the earthquake. Before it. Maybe they live in Atlantis and have no email or radios. Or relatives in the city.

Successive Haitian governments have had plenty of incentive to inflate their population statistics, and they do not rate as the straightest governments in the world. If there are six million more Haitians, unaffected by the quake, what are they doing to help the folk in the devastated areas? Why has no mayor or householder offered shelter, in the housing that is undamaged? Or the use of schools or other public buildings?

Someone might like to check this carefully. It may be this awful disaster is manageable, if the population outside the city of Port au Prince is not twice that inside it.

We have been trying, totally ineffectually, to assist with water, and now to do an airdrop of food, (much blocked on the net, see the website) and opinions on the population issue in our group are divided. And, I am not the world’s GE expert. But I have, as a geologist, been at aerial photography and satellite remote sensing for about 4 decades, on and off. And on Google Earth for a couple of years now.

There, you can now see individual people, and often who is on a bicycle, on the roads, when the images are good, as in Haiti. But not, for some reason, 6 million extra people.

Six million people are supposed to live in Haiti, outside the earthquake-struck area. But between them, they have offered no aid, have no hospitals, not even a school building in which to house the destitute? In fact, they are all so poor they have no roofs over their heads? Because Google Earth can see them personally, and their bicycles, if they go down a clear road. Never mind their houses, that is dead easy. Or would be, if they existed. And if they did, why has the Haitian government, in one of its few feeble acts since the quake, sent the destitute out to camps in the country, and not to the towns and cities housing the other 6 million of their citizens ???????????????

The official population statistic is in fact close to 10 million people for the whole country.

I just did a rough calculation, measuring with the ruler on Google Earth, that gives very exact distances, as easy as pie, every town in Haiti, of the area covered by urban development. I missed a few small villages, but doing every town or village of any size, I got that they all together cover about 32 sq kms, more or less. OK, bump it up to 50 sq kms, to be safe.

I will accept for this calculation, though I do not in reality know if the number should be trusted, that Port au Prince and its adjacent sprawl houses 3 million people minus the people killed so tragically. But say 3 million, before the quake, the official number. Port au Prince covers close to 100 sq kilometres.

So the other 6 or 7 milllion people in Haiti are all living in say 50 sq kilomtres of small towns? Or in tthat and in rural areas with very few fields or roads or traces of humanity? theere is very little sign of ative farming, the usual when you drown a nation in aid food. The farmers shut up shop, as they cannot compete. Most field look to be long deserted, on Google Earth. All over the county, more or less.

So, in the small towns, the density of people is, in other words, about 6 times the density in Port au Prince? But we can see from Google Earth that the small towns are in reality not nearly as densely-populated as Port au Prince.

Something is amiss.

So why would a corrupt government fake the figures?

A close friend lives in The Gap, a suburb of Brisbane, that recently made national and overseas headlines a year or so back, when a storm blew down maybe half the trees. He argued with a neighbour, who had claimed that his son and daughter were living with him, though they had left years before. He got an extra $150 for each of them, not even a week's wage here. My mate asked why? Easy money, the man said. People were also dumping perfectly good fridges, saying they were storm-damaged and getting replacement grants and new ones. My friend got a splendid one off a huge pile of dumped appliances, after a fairly stiff row with the truck crew, who wanted it themselves. There were not enough chainsaws. So 1,000 new ones, Stihl's, the very best, were handed out. Only 300 were ever returned. Those 300 could have done the job just fine. People in a sister city in China. out of generosity, donated $100,000 to help fill The Gap. Aptly named. One hopes it did not go on chainsaws.

Haiti is not unique.

If 5 or 6 million people in Haiti are phantoms or live in Atlantis, and you are in the government or an aid agency, you can collect a lot of aid money and bank it in Switzerland. Which may be aprt of why NGO's are intensely hated in Haiti, as our US manager was told last week. And if it is that blatant in Haiti, what about the rest of the world? The government there, though good at its trade, is not only corrupt ones on this planet, supplying the population figures to the UN.

We may have several hundred million phantoms being sent aid money. The people pocketing it are stealing from both the donors and the real people it was meant to help, like the survivors of this terrible Haiti 2010 earthquake.

I have worked with the aid industry before. I several times found it even more corrupt than the mining exploration, where after a long career, I had decided about half the players were scam artists. See also Climategate. Where there are large tides of money sweeping past, most will jump on the wagon and few will fuss.