In the midst of a historic political crisis in Haiti last February, Boston-based Haitian Americans United Inc. (HAU) and State Representative Marie St. Fleur convened an emergency town meeting at Codman Square's Church of the Nazarene. St. Fleur and the panelists addressed a sizeable crowd, including the likes of Reverend Eugene Rivers, Senator Jarret Barrios, Reverend Paul Jones of the Massachusetts Black Legislative Caucus and representatives from the offices of U.S. Senator John Kerry and state Senator Jack Hart, among others. Held on Feb. 25, St. Fleur and others called for United Nations peacekeeping troops to ensure public order and disarm both pro and anti Aristide agitators.
Repatriations of Haitians in the Dominican Republic have become an almost daily routine. Indeed Dominican authorities almost constantly expel hundreds of Haitians illegally living in the Dominican Republic. Haitian authorities seem to accept as a fait accompli the onslaught on our territory nationals of Haiti with their Dominican counterparts, regardless of taking long-term measures to stop the bleeding of the labor national work as well as the brain drain to benefit our bordering neighbors. Notwithstanding the ill-treatment Dominicans inflict our brothers, repressed people manage to return a month later to where they are to be expelled. Since, in the absence of a long-term strategy to frame the returnees and give them hope for a decent life in their country, crossing to the other side of the border continues to attract good workers sentenced to unemployment in their own countries.
This paper begins by reviewing briefly at historical changes in the employment of geospatial technologies in major devastating disasters, including the Sichuan and Haiti earthquakes. It goes on to assess changes in the available dataset type and in geospatial disaster responders, as well as the impact of geospatial technological changes on disaster relief effort. Finally, the paper discusses lessons learned from recent responses and offers some thoughts for future development.
