Today in this country and around the world, most eyes are staring at the new 44th president of the United States. Many with admiration, many more with high expectation. Although, he repeatedly warned that the current economic situation may worsen before it becomes better, nearly three-quarter of the U.S. population are hoping for a Barak Obama‘s marvel.
Their hope is based on the mandate they gave him to change Washington and the country for the better. As a conscientious leader, he realizes that he cannot alone satisfy the voluminous demands of his fellow citizens and address the dangerous threats of terrorism at home and abroad, while unemployment is becoming increasingly high and too many countries in the world are suffering from malnutrition, AIDS and all kinds of other sickness.
Therefore, bringing in play his skills as a former community organizer, he called on the competence, the citizenship, and the commitment to public service of a number of men and women, democrats and republicans, straits and gays of divers shades and origins to bring their talents in this patriotic renovatïve undertaking. Some of them were even his opponents during the long and contentious presidential campaign.
Once a fiery adversary of Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton is the Secretary of State, the top cabinet position in the president’s government. Speaking to the State Department’s personnel at her installation by President Obama, Mrs. Clinton declared that the stool of U.S. foreign service stands on three legs: Defense, Diplomacy, Development. Two of them, she added, Diplomacy and Development, are the responsibility of the State Department.
The following day, at USAID [United States Agency for International Development] the new Secretary of State talked about the misery, the hunger , the depravation that are affecting the world’s poorest countries and the necessity for the United States to help these populations in distress. Therefore, we can conclude that USAID will cease to be an unofficial CIA agency and return to its initial role of an aid agency.
This is good news for countries like Haiti where in the early days of this agency, U.S. civil servants, mostly specialists and technicians in the fields of agriculture, health and rural development, were really committed to help a poor country become self-sufficient. Then, USAID became more a propaganda than a helping agency. Local development programs in health, education, agriculture became U.S. programs to serve the interest of the provider.
Haiti should take its cue from this new approach to U.S. international development facilitator and prepare a coherent, substantial and practical plan, detailing its goal, its objectives, its priorities with timetables and benchmarks, its implementation needs, so that whatever help that is proposed, it meets the real necessities of the country and can enhance the future of its population.
Along that line, delegates and sub-delegates can play a more practical role other than official big-shots. They should have the ability to assemble, motivate and coordinate, to serve as “national organizers”. The country’s universities and schools of high learning graduate a number of students in administration and sociology, they should be given the opportunity to serve their country by helping their fellow citizens to organize and to plan for the future. Then, they will prove the validity of their admiration for Barak Obama.
Now is Time for Delegates to be Skilled Country Organizers
