16325: ForHaiti: helping the poor -- Corbett adds

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: ForHaiti@aol.com
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you are "stuck" -- people are starving and you want to give them a fishing
pole.

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Why must it be an either / or?  The conditions one encounters seems to me
to dictate humane intervention.  If one encounters desperate hunger and
malnutrition, as I have often in Haiti, it seems a two-fold strategy of
decent intervention is called for:

-- deal with the immediate life and pain threatening situation

-- at the same time, begin to work toward helping the community develop
strategies for assuming their own food production.

I've never understood the sense of any either / or solution.

Bob Corbett