For 15 Taiwanese health workers, the arrival of the Year of the Tiger did not mean red lanterns, lavish banquets and festive fireworks. Instead, they ushered in the Lunar New Year with flashlights, meager meals and the sound of sick children crying.
The location: Haiti.
On Jan. 12, the Caribbean country suffered its biggest earthquake in two centuries. Already the poorest country in the western hemisphere, 95 percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince, as well as eight surrounding cities, were reduced to rubble.
The quake left more than 200,000 dead and 1.2 million homeless, the latest UN report said.
Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive estimated it could take at least 10 years and US$10 billion for the country to rise from the ashes.
As one of Haiti's allies, Taiwan has been an eager participant in helping the country get back on its feet. It has pledged US$10 million and donated more than 17 tonnes of supplies — including medicine, equipment, food, tents and clothes.
The International Cooperation Development Fund (ICDF) — Taiwan’s Peace Corps — has also dispatched various medical missions to offer emergency and long-term health services to the Haitians during this dire period.
The last team of 15 volunteers — including pediatricians, podiatrists and infectious disease experts — gave up their Lunar New Year break to help the people in Haiti. The next team is already packing supplies and waiting to leave.
Taiwan's efforts have earned praise from different media organizations, including Time and the New York Times, as well as the UN's Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
However, Taiwan's humanitarian presence in Haiti and in the world started long before the earthquake.
ICDF said Taiwan has been sending teams of agricultural experts to Haiti since the early 1970s. Upholding the principle of “teaching a man how to fish,” the agricultural missions have undertaken several public welfare projects, such as livestock breeding, planting vegetables and fruit, building irrigation systems and maintaining water sanitation.
Haitian doctors and healthcare workers have also been invited to further their studies in Taiwan.
Six decades ago, Taiwan was a developing agrarian country dotted with rice paddies and fruit orchards. However, thanks to generous aid from the US, it grew rapidly and steadily into the world class high-tech giant that it is today.
Many older-generation Taiwanese still remember wearing “flour sack” outfits made of the scratchy cloth the Americans used to bag flour.
For 15 years, Taiwan received an average of US$100 million in aid annually from Washington.
But in spite of its poverty, in December 1959, Taiwan sent out its first overseas humanitarian team to Vietnam and another to Liberia the following year.
These missions have blossomed over the years, with more than 70 technical teams being dispatched over the years to non-allies or former allies around the globe, including Jordan, Macedonia, Papua New Guinea, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Congo and all of Taiwan’s 23 ally nations.
“It is with a spirit of gratitude and solidarity that we are engaged in global humanitarian efforts and it will continue for a long time. We have taken on other countries' development, especially our allies, as part of our own responsibility,” said Chen Lien-gene (陳連軍), former ICDF secretary-general.
Millions of lives have been improved but some lives also lost, such as Lee Da (栗達), a hydraulics expert and the first mission leader to Gambia who is credited with starting several agricultural projects and turning barren lands into fertile tilling grounds.
Lee died in Gambia from a heart attack at the age of 44. The locals erected a bronze statue in remembrance of his contributions, the ICDF said.
Veteran agricultural expert Chen Hsi-hu (陳西虎), who was part of the mission in Cameroon, the Ivory Coast, Senegal and Guinea-Bissau, also died from fatigue in 2002 after serving as an overseas technician for 38 years.
To date, 39 ICDF overseas humanitarian mission members have died in the field from work-related causes, while three have been murdered.
Liu Wen-li (劉文利), a former mission leader in the Ivory Coast, remembered the jittery but excited feeling he had when he first “enlisted” as a volunteer in 1965, aged 29 with a promising career ahead. Instead of accepting an offer from Taisugar, one of the most lucrative state-run enterprises at that time, he chose to join the overseas humanitarian mission.
“The director-general of the Department of African Affairs told us the reason why our group was called a ‘mission’ and not a ‘team’ was because we were embarking on an important mission in which there was no room for failure,” he recalled.
It took Liu two weeks and six stops before reaching his destination. When he arrived, the mission wasted no time and quickly started a grain-growing project that saw immediate results.
The team not only won the respect of the locals, he said, but his counterparts from France, Italy and Germany also lauded the Taiwanese team’s accomplishment.
Liu said back then, the Ivorians were used using traditional methods to grow crops, which were left to the whims of nature. No one used pesticides or fertilizer.
The mission taught the locals farm management, including the importance of timing — when to plant seeds and when to till. In the first year, the Ivorian farmers saw two harvests and rice production shot up from 13 tonnes to 310 tonnes, he said.
The Ivory Coast mission unfortunately came to a halt in 1983 when it severed relations with Taiwan. The embassy and the agricultural mission departed at the same time, lamented Liu, now retired and living in Taipei.
The Ivory Coast was one of the many countries that Taiwan's agricultural and technical mission had to leave because of what the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) called “the cruelty of political reality.”
In spite of China's interference, Taiwan’s willingness to be an active player in international humanitarian efforts has never wavered.
In 2001, the government sent its first batch of conscripts who were allowed to serve their one-and-a-half-year compulsory military service as volunteers to Taiwan’s allied nations.
In 2004, the government also dispatched its first team of information technology engineers to help narrow the digital divide in various countries by setting up basic telecommunication infrastructures.
Two years later, the Department of Health established the International Health Action (Taiwan IHA), a platform for qualified health workers in Taiwan to find opportunities to do volunteer work abroad.
“We might be small, but we are effective. No matter what the political circumstances are, the fact is Taiwan is a big-hearted country full of compassionate individuals who are always ready to lend a helping hand,” said Jeffery Chen (陳志福), an ICDF doctor and leader of the medical mission in Haiti.
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