Armed with experience in various fields, a panel of eight experts came together on the University of Pittsburgh campus Tuesday to brainstorm on how best to help Haiti recover from the earthquake that devastated the island nation last month.

More than 100 people, many of them students in Pitt's Graduate School of Public Health, heard discussion of the problems that confront Haiti's population as it looks to rebuild.

"We are [getting] past the crisis phase, and we are entering into phases of recovery and restoration," said moderator Donald S. Burke, associate vice chancellor for Pitt's Center for Global Health. "Universities are not rapid-deployment forces. We are not groups that, on a moment's notice, drop what we're doing and go places. ... But universities are structured in ways to provide help over the long-term, to provide training, research for problem-solving, to organize thinking both here and in other locations."

The first of the eight speakers was Paulo Teixeira, of the Pan American Health Organization, who shared his firsthand experience from the island nation. He spoke while videos taken from Haiti last week were projected on a screen.

"Many people are talking about a Marshall Plan for Haiti, something that can reconstruct the country," Dr. Teixeira said, referring to the rebuilding effort that took place in Europe after World War II. "It's not just to reconstruct buildings, but how are we going to face the poverty and other important issues that have to be solved to promote life and the quality of life?"

Kent Harries, associate professor in Pitt's School of Engineering, explained that Haiti was particularly vulnerable to the earthquake because the nation had no building codes or requirements for licensing and permits are lax. The result, he said, was that many structures were improperly designed or built and easily reduced to rubble.

Dr. Harries stressed that the rebuilding of Haiti cannot make the same mistakes.

Samuel Stebbins, director of Pitt's Center for Public Health Preparedness, agreed, saying that Haiti's recovery will depend upon how well the people of the nation are prepared to live on their own.

"Because at the end of the day, the international groups will largely go away, and the people who live there will be most affected by what is going on," Dr. Stebbins said.

"It's incredibly important that this opportunity to provide education, training, is not missed. I don't mean rebuilding the elementary schools. I mean working with the adults."

The problems, however, are entrenched in a faulty government, said Steven Williams, medical director of Greentree Medical Associates and a former internist at Hopital Albert Schweitzer in Haiti.

"The problem in Haiti is that Haiti has a government that does not function for the benefit of its people," he said. "An elite group of families controls the island, controls the wealth, and leaves the impoverished population to fend for themselves any way they can."

Dr. Williams said he doubted that things there could change dramatically.

"Aid will flow in, the world will turn away, and these people will resume their positions of power. And that will spell the doom of Haiti.

"No matter what we do, if you do not change the way the government functions in Haiti, you will not fix the problem. Haiti will continue to be poor, it will continue to not have building codes, it will continue to not have infrastructure."

The purpose of the session clearly was not to sugarcoat the problems, but rather how best the university could honestly assess them and solve them.

"Universities are very unique communities and can bring a great deal to processes like this," said Louise Comfort, a professor in Pitt's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. "It really is pulling together a group of people with different skills, different knowledge, different degrees of expertise, around a common goal, looking at it in terms of how do we translate new ideas into action."

Suggestions from the panelists and the audience ranged from supporting Haitian tourism and art to making sure that Haitian history and its Creole language are part of the international curriculum offered at Pitt.

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