Well the Haiti earthquake has come and gone (the major quake anyway, there are still continuous aftershocks). The world has gathered together and is now trying its best to help Haiti recover and save as many of the victims of the quake as possible. Sadly while most people have said that saving anymore people has become more or less impossible now due to the lack of available time (people have been trapped for in excess of a week now), the rescue effort is still important because quite frankly the abilities of the human body is limitless and chances are even 2 weeks from now I bet there will be people found alive (however barely).

**taken from the Jamaica Gleaner

Being Haiti is Jamaica's closest neighbour next to Cuba Jamaicans have been particularly terrified by the prospects of an earthquake of similar proportions striking us (and the effects that such an earthquake would have), and also Jamaicans are also terrified of what will probably happen next. You see, being so close the possibility is high that we will eventually have hundreds of thousands of Haitian refugees as these people try to escape the abject poverty that they currently live in, that has also been increased 200 fold with the recent string of natural disasters. The fact is, with every natural disaster that strikes Haiti we get a slew of refugees, and as international law states, we have to house and take care of them and decide on whether or not to give them asylum in our country. But this has two effects, the first is that it costs money to house these people who come in, money that Jamaica really doesnt have. The second is that as these foreigners come in, they carry with them diseases which while popular in Haiti (and which Haitians are possibly immune to), may not exist in Jamaica or may have been eradicated from Jamaica; reintroducing them to our population may have far reaching effects to our own population.

**taken from the Jamaica Gleaner

So with these two things in mind there has been a debate raging as to whether or not we really should extend help to these Haitians and offer them asylum. Alot of religious zealots have been stating that we should definitely offer them asylum and reach out to them and help them in their time of need. While the more none aligned thinkers are saying that we shouldn't offer them any help as we are already strapped for cash. Instead we should let the countries/people who can afford to house them do the housing. Both of these arguments do have merit because of course we should be humanitarian and offer our help because had we been in the same problems we would want to be offered the same level of assistance. However we also have to think about the state of our economy, the fact that we are about to join a very expensive IMF deal, are Billions of dollars in debt, and we couldn't possibly afford the risk of introducing/reintroducing some deadly disease to our country after all we have so many to deal with already.

**taken from the Jamaica Gleaner

So you see, we have quite the decision to make and we are now in quite the pickle due to that decision. Being the naturally friendly people we are, alot of us feel inclined to offer our help to Haiti and the Haitians, but we also need to think about our own country.

What is your take on this?