ABSTRACT
Though previous chapters have drawn attention to the positive contributions of religious beliefs for survivors, these were not the only significant contributors to Haitian resilience. This chapter sets out how additional, more historically embedded, “complicating factors,” such as education, employment, historic and contemporary politics and construction methods, all challenged survivors’ application of their religious beliefs to disaster response and recovery and for risk mitigation. These complicating factors have created a culture of constant struggle for the majority of Haitian people, which, ironically, has helped to create a culture of trauma survivability among them. That exposure to stressors on a regular basis has contributed, so we argue, to the survivors’ capacity for coping with and recovering from the trauma of a catastrophic event, the capacity of which was enhanced by the contribution of faith. This chapter identifies the complications that structural evils presented for survivors and their limited capacity to transform such structural evils since they are dominantly produced by the elite and governing classes.
