Thank you for appearing here today, gentlemen.
In reviewing your report and listening to your talk on it, I was reminded of my last visit to Haiti. There were several things that popped up in my attention, which would certainly lead us to believe that there are more difficulties than just those that appeared on the surface, in trying to bring about democracy through the recent elections.
I think the elections themselves indicated one situation, evident in the fact that the presidential election had such a high level of support for it, and the follow-up parliamentary election had a relatively low level at 30%. It was still a success compared to past elections. A 30% level, rather, indicated--in support of President Préval's comments in our private meeting with him--that there was a general understanding or misunderstanding of the roles of parliamentarians as to what they could actually do in contributing to the governing of Haiti. In the past they had been argumentative rather than being supportive of good works and actions.
I think this supports what had been discussed before about working on the democracy programs in Ukraine and Russia and many other countries. These countries have a a very strong literacy rate, whereas Haiti has an extremely low literacy rate. It would seem to substantiate the feeling that perhaps this direction of governance should go much further than just being at the parliamentary level. It should extend directly into the communities and into the schools themselves so that the children and eventually a generation down the road will have an understanding of the role their parliament can perform.
Also we had a discussion, Joseph, on whether the members of parliament themselves, as part of their training program, would be introduced into the community through town hall meetings or whatever to try to gain experience from our parliamentarians on how the community can interact with them. This is so the community can buy into the meaningful purpose of a parliament and so that members of parliament can take that information to the central government and hopefully make gains. But I'm not seeing that direction in there.
So my question would probably be more about what your budgetary allocations are and whether it would be your intention to do something like that if you had a more substantial budget. Do you have the resources that are necessary to be able to comprehensively take a really worthwhile approach straight from the grassroots level to the parliament, and what would that budgetary expectation be per year for the next year, two years, or four years?