Tuesday, 26 January 2010 10:20
On January 15, Haaretz reported that:
"The Israel Defense Forces' aid mission to Haiti left Israel overnight (January 14) with equipment for setting up an emergency field hospital. Around 220 soldiers and officers (were) in the delegation, including 120 medical staff (to) operate the hospital in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince." According to Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it includes "40 doctors, 25 nurses, paramedics, a pharmacy, a children's ward, a radiology department, an intensive care unit, an internal department and a maternity ward (able to) treat approximately 500 patients each day," including in two surgery rooms.
Love, Care & Overcoming Rage.
There are many differences between our wars in Vietnam and in Afghanistan. There are also similarities we can’t ignore, including the vital need for an indigenous government that commands broad-based popular support. 
Haiti is no stranger to adversity and anguish - over 500 years of severe oppression, slavery, despotism, colonization, reparations, embargoes, sanctions, deep poverty, starvation, unrepayable debt, and natural calamities from destructive hurricanes to a dozen magnitude 7.0 or greater Caribbean region earthquakes in the past 500 years. The last major one was in 1946 at 8.1 in the adjacent Dominican Republic, also striking Haiti. Earlier catastrophic ones were in 1751 and 1770, both devastating Port-au-Prince, and the 1842 one destroying Cap-Haitien in the north.
There are moment in life when one, seriously, wonders whether our species, overall, is mentally ill in some underlying ways. Then again, any definitive determination is likely relativistic since it largely depends on the standards that a given society and culture use to define mental illness, it would seem.
