It has little to do with the politics -- only FEMA teams are likely to be called, and we're a state resource, and it has little to do with logistics -- it's a smaller area than was impacted by Katrina. No, it's cultural.
We went to New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward six weeks AFTER Katrina, in order to start the orderly search for the dead. We left Virginia on Oct. 8, the day of the Pakistan earthquake that killed 79,000 people, and three days before Hurricane Stan killed 4500 people in Guatemala. In both of those cases, as we painstakingly clawed through rubble to find and document weeks-old bodies of Americans, they used bulldozers to create mass graves.
In Haiti, where people die of violence, hunger and disease in the city streets on a good day, I doubt that either its government or ours is going to send us in to find and extract the dead one at a time. They'll just bulldoze them along with the rubble and start rebuilding shantytowns.
It's a cultural thing as much as anything else. We Americans and Europeans have a sort of obsession with burying our dead and make quite a show of it. In developing countries, where death is always around the corner, it's not quite the same.
They're not wrong, just different.
