One Island - Two Worlds - Haiti and the Dominican Republik🏝️ Country and People of the Dominican Republic

Hola mis Steemians

Both countries share an island, but have developed completely differently: While the Dominican Republic is one of the most popular travel destinations in the Caribbean, today Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world.

At first glance, the Dominican Republic looks like a paradise:

• Palms
• bright blue sea
• and miles of sandy beaches

Around 6 million people visit the island every year to spend their holidays. But the beauty of the diverse nature and the many luxurious hotels often hide the fact that the Dominican Republic belongs to the poorer countries of Latin America - and that Haiti, the poorest country in the western world, is just behind the border.

About six million tourists visit the Dominican Republic every year

Although the Dominican Republic and Haiti share one island (Hispaniola), they could not be more different. For example, in terms of infrastructure: with a good and sensible road system, it is possible to travel from one place to another in the Dominican Republic without major problems. In Haiti, on the other hand, it often takes an hour or more to travel just a few kilometres.

A similar picture can be seen in other areas as well:

• Just under 40% of all Haitians can read and write at all (90 percent of all people in the neighbouring country, on the other hand, learn it, although the standard here is still very low).
• Child mortality in Haiti is almost three times as high as in its neighbour, the Dominican Republic. And around 25 per 1,000 births are already dying here.

Climate change hits Haiti particularly hard

The huge differences also have a direct impact on how the two countries are affected by climate change and, above all, how they deal with its consequences. The huge coastal area makes Haiti particularly vulnerable to hurricanes. Floods often have dramatic effects, as all the major cities are located by the sea.

Many people in Haiti live in settlements scattered throughout the country.

And the lack of infrastructure makes it even more difficult to provide rapid aid from home or abroad, especially in the event of other natural disasters. More than 220,000 people died in the severe earthquake at the beginning of 2010.

Wood is the most important source of energy for the vast majority of Haitians, because no city in Haiti has a decent and regular electricity supply. This is also one of the reasons why the forests throughout Haiti have largely disappeared. And the bare mountains have consequences for the soil; in heavy rain it is simply washed away.

This worsens the livelihoods of people throughout the country. In contrast to the Dominican Republic, Haiti is very rural and extremely densely populated. But to preserve the soil, a dense vegetation is very important. Normally, this is achieved with combined forestry and food cultivation.

Due to a different colonial history

the two island neighbours have developed so differently. The whole island of Hispaniola was actually under Spanish rule for a long time - until Spain ceded the western third to France in 1697...

Around two-thirds of Haiti's population lives from agriculture

The so-called "Saint-Domingue area# developed into one of the richest French colonies. Hundreds of thousands of African slaves were shipped there mainly for the production of coffee, cocoa, sugar and cotton. Shortly after a slave revolt in 1791, slavery was abolished and in 1804, after a cruel war of liberation, independence was proclaimed. From this time on, "Saint-Domingue" was now called Haiti.

The population was now free, but the former colony had to fight from now on with big problems. The huge estates were divided among the population in such a way that almost every Haitian owned a piece of land. But hardly anyone could live from it - the plots were simply too small for that.

There was no community farming, because the Haitian population is anything but homogeneous. Originally, the slaves came from more than a hundred different ethnic groups and generally had nothing to do with each other. And this pattern unfortunately continues to this day.

The key to new perspectives is vegetation.

Most Spanish settlers, after having mined many raw materials on their two-thirds of the island, moved on to Mexico. As a result, the colony of Santo Domingo, later to become the Dominican Republic, soon had only livestock. In the course of time, a homogenous society of Spanish origin with only a very narrow layer of African slaves has developed there.

And because there were fewer different ethnic groups, the Dominican Republic soon became politically and economically much more stable than its neighbor Haiti. Despite civil wars and dictatorships, the country has managed to establish a democratic political system over the past 50 years. Tourism is one of the main sources of income for the Dominican Republic.

On the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic

Haiti is still very far away from this. Special reforestation projects are a concrete step towards restoring an acceptable livelihood for the people in this massively crisis-stricken country. And newly forested areas also prevent landslides caused by thunderstorms and floods.

The Dominicans had already paid much more attention to vegetation in the past. Today thousands of Haitians are trying to immigrate to the Dominican Republic to find refuge and work because of the much better living conditions. For many Haitians, their neighbor is still a paradise, although it does not belong to the wealthy countries of Latin America.

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More articles about country and people:

• Children in the Dominican Republic
• School and educational situation in the Dominican Republic

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all posts by @followmikecee here in the overview

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Hasta luego.
mikeCee aka Captain Mike Sparrow the steemian of the caribbean

@limesoda

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