LA ÑAPA

The pictures and reports coming out of Haiti are so devastating that the response from around the world has been immediate and compassionate. Countries and individuals, organizations and churches are coming forth with an outpouring of help, a desire to grant relief to so much suffering.

Sadly, it has taken this tragedy for many to realize what it means to be the poorest nation in the hemisphere. How could we have let any part of our human family live so miserably and precariously as life in Haiti has been for years -- even before the earthquake struck? It reminds me how it took hurricane Katrina to wake up many Americans to the unacceptable fact that -- as one commentator put it -- "we have a Third World situation here in our own nation." As if it were permissible that those conditions exist anywhere.

As a Dominican-American, I have felt a double shame towards my neighbor country. Many have been the Dominican abuses towards Haitians who cross our border, seeking only jobs, a chance to feed their families. Perhaps the nadir in our relations came with the genocide that took place in October 1937 under the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Over the course of several days, the military was sent out to the border to kill any Haitians on Dominican soil. Estimates vary, as low as six thousand to as high as forty thousand Haitians cut down with machetes so the murders would look like a popular uprising. The Massacre River that separates the two countries ran with blood. Since many Dominicans are dark-skinned, the test to distinguish Dominicans from Haitians was to ask the person to pronounce the word for parsley, perejil. The Haitian, whose Kreyol uses a wide, flat "r", could not pronounce the trilled "r" in the Spanish word.

Shameful indeed is the fact that there has never been a public apology by the Dominican government for this horrible massacre.

Now, once again, our neighbor has been struck down, not by our hand. I am heartened by reports of aid rushing to the border from Dominican organizations, individuals, our own government agencies. Luck has spared us the devastation, and this tragedy has granted us an opportunity to turn the historical tide. To roll up our sleeves as never before. To create a border of healing to replace the border of spilled blood: to establish triage clinics and aid stations on Dominican soil that Haitians can walk to since many roads are impassable, to grant accessibility to organizations for whom our country is the only way in by land. To pledge that for every Haitian life plowed down by a Dominican in 1937, one will now be saved.

Later, we must learn new words to say to our Haitian neighbors, perdón, pardon, paz, peace, Lapé.