By James Morgan
The false and hurtful stories about Haitian immigrants abducting and eating pets in Ohio conjure my father’s edict: “No gratuitous insults.” They also evoke the teachings of St. Paul, who wrote in Corinthians, “When I became a man, I put away childish things.”
I’d hasten to add, “Slandering an entire ethnicity is exceedingly juvenile” as a coda to both.
Over the past few weeks, many of us have felt offended, saddened, and angered by rhetoric that targets a vulnerable Haitian immigrant population yet again. The scare tactics used to vilify this group are blatant lies, designed to perpetuate a false Manichean reality — namely that immigrants are taking over — and that it will lead our country down a diabolical path.
For over 20 years, I have traveled to Haiti close to 100 times, mostly to provide health care through our nonprofit organization, Lamp for Haiti. I have worked in many corners of the country — from the rural South to the rural North — though the majority of my work is in Cite Soleil, one of the country’s largest, poorest, and most notorious ghettos.
It is in Cite Soleil where I have been inspired most. In 2022, for example, one of our nurses practically dared gang members to stop her as she carried vaccines to administer to young children at an immunization clinic that she had arranged. I have been privileged to be called “colleague” by Haitian physicians who regularly risk their lives just to come to work.
These young, talented doctors could readily have other jobs in safer parts of the country, but they choose to stay because of their commitment to a mission. I am humbled when I see a patient arrive in a wheelbarrow, too sick to walk, brought to our health center by a family member who has put on their best clothing out of respect for the treating physicians.
Daily life in parts of Haiti is more than a grind. It can be pulverizing.
I have seen, most often in the Haitian capital Port au Prince, the impact of the current political insecurity on the lives of families who merely want to go to work to provide food for their children or buy schoolbooks and uniforms. One of my physician friends who was kidnapped and threatened last year agonized over his decision to leave Haiti, knowing the role that doctors play, especially in the poorest areas.
Lamp for Haiti provides quality, cost effective health care to a population that scrapes by on about 50 cents per day. Whereas many NGO’s have cut or canceled services altogether, we have expanded to a second site to accommodate more patients. In addition to a robust primary care program for children, adults, and pregnant women, we also manage a nutrition program for children under six years old. This past year, the increase in malnutrition in this age group in Cite Soleil is nearly threefold.
Despite enormous stress, our intrepid Haitian staffers work not with guns, but with courage and commitment. We don’t insult those on the margin, we embrace them. We don’t push people away, we expand our reach.
When discourse in the U.S. veers to the absurd, or pejoratively targets an entire group, negative consequences ensue. When the former president called Haiti a “s—hole country” I was harassed for several months. This backlash hurt our work.
Early in the AIDS epidemic, when Haitians were wrongly labeled a source of that disease (a label that would later be dropped), it contributed to substantial economic hardship in Haiti. When politicians cynically fabricate stories that Haitian people are eating pets, resources are wasted in refuting them. Complex issues, like immigration’s impact on small cities, are over simplified; ill-informed answers are embraced.
The recent spate of bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio are a terrible — but not surprising – sequela of such gratuitous insults. Haitian immigrants, like most people, have inspiring stories to tell. Those stories are being drowned out by hateful fear mongering. Haiti and its hard-working people have inspired me for decades. Vitriolic comments, beyond being childish, have no place in a serious national conversation.
Dr. James Morgan, MD, is co-founder of Lamp for Haiti, a non-profit organization that has provided healthcare and community development assistance in Cite Soleil, Haiti since 2005.
To comment on this op-ed, send a letter to [email protected].
Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.
Bookmark NJ.com/Opinion. Follow on Twitter @NJ_Opinion and find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.
