The Association of South African Social Work Education Institutions (ASASWEI), the National Association of Social Workers, South Africa (NASW, SA) and the Association of Schools of Social Work in Africa (ASSWA) express their solidarity with all those organisations working to alleviate the untold trauma and suffering experienced by the peoples of Haiti.
We trust that social workers across Africa will, within their spheres of influence, support aid efforts at national and international levels in relation to the people of Haiti. We call upon social workers to make a difference by supporting initiatives – big and small – and we applaud those already doing so. We need to go beyond rhetoric in expressing our sympathies for the millions of lives displaced, the hundreds of lives lost, and the children left orphaned on account of the earthquake to provide tangible help wherever possible. Such disasters are acute reminders of our own privileges and those structural conditions that render us relatively better off than those who are struggling, against the odds, to survive without water, food, shelter and the comfort of family. Peta-Anne Baker in the Jamaica Gleaner (17/01/2010) reminds us that we need to go beyond “the popular refrain that Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere” and to understand those historical and structural conditions that render Haitians vulnerable. While the effects of the earthquake are acute and horrendous, the consequences thereof will last well into the future. But even before the earthquake, Haiti was a land in constant crises – perhaps normalized - with endemic poverty, disease, death and poor education and housing. We support the calls for the unconditional cancellation of Haiti’s debt to the IMF and the Inter-American Development Bank and exhort our national governments to put pressure on the international financial institutions and the world’s superpowers for the cancellation of the debt. We also support the recommendations made by the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS E-Bulletin NO 47) regarding the establishment of systems and procedures for early warning so that proactive action can be taken, the establishment of regional disaster management teams to monitor known indicators of natural disasters, and the allocation of sufficient economic and technical resources by developed countries and international agencies to prevent disasters and to ensure early intervention.Peter Singer, a contemporary ethicist asserts that ‘if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought morally, to do it”. If each of us tried to live by this principle, our lives and the lives of people around us would be fundamentally changed. This principle is of relevance to all of us for the following reasons:
* It takes no account of proximity or distance – it makes no moral difference whether the person we help is a neighbour or living in Sudan, Afghanistan, Guatemala or Haiti
* Global instant communication that brings news and visual images of suffering into our living rooms, as it unfolds, means that we cannot remain blind and deaf to it
* Rapid transportation and the instant transfer of money means that there is no pragmatic or moral justification for discriminating on geographical grounds
* It makes no distinction between cases in which we are the only ones who could possibly do something and cases in which we are just one among millions doing something to make a difference – numbers do not lessen our obligation
* The fact that others might be doing nothing does not absolve us from responsibility
* Alleviating suffering is more than an act of charity – it is a moral duty – it reflects our conceptions of humanity
* Pragmatic – it is in our common interests; in a world of interdependence, threats and disasters in one part of the world affect all parts of the world
No comments:
Post a Comment