[Olpc-Haiti] "Diaspore" No More: Haitian Diaspora kickstarting Haiti--with more than $$

[Adam Holt]

"For years, educated émigrés have tried to play a more vital role in 
Haiti’s development, with little success. The earthquake has changed that."

NYT Excerpts:

FOR EMIGRES, HOSTILITIES BECOME RUBBLE

“The diaspora must organize to help us,” Prime Minister
Jean-Max Bellerive said last week at a conference in Montreal.
“I have no alternative. They have to be involved in Haiti; they
have to be engaged.” ...He need not have asked...

Still, the Haitian government’s new attitude has not erased
all skepticism. Some in the diaspora say they have been kept
at bay by fears that they would usurp jobs or expose corruption,
while others say the negative sentiment has been a political tool,
fanned for cynical ends. Whatever the reason, it did not ease the
hurt when Haiti welcomed the billions of dollars that émigrés sent
home but rebuffed their expertise...

The Haitian diaspora is estimated to be at least two million
strong, with more than half a million Haitian-born people
in the United States alone, heavily concentrated in South
Florida and Brooklyn. In 2008, Haitians around the world
sent at least $1.3 billion to Haiti, far more than the amount
of foreign aid the country received, according to the World Bank.

...On an economic and political level, the diaspora could be
threatening, said Harry Casimir, 30, a Haitian-born businessman
who opened an information technology business there just
before the earthquake.

“Once the elites have money and power,” Mr. Casimir said,
“they’re scared of people like me, the younger generation and
so on. Because we travel around the world and see how other
governments function, and obviously most countries are not
corrupt like Haiti.”

But several expatriates acknowledged that some of the fault
might lie in a certain swagger on their own part.

“People in the diaspora may be coming with that complex of
superiority, where they think, We know better; we can do it
better,” said the Rev. Reginald Jean-Mary, pastor of Notre
Dame d’Haiti in the Little Haiti section of Miami.

Yet Father Jean-Mary provoked murmurs of excitement
Sunday at a packed high Mass here, when he proclaimed,
“This is the moment to suspend politics, because we have
had enough politics in Haiti.”

He added, “It’s time to open Haiti to the diaspora.”

IN FULL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/us/04diaspora.html