Haiti has had a miserable last few years. In 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck the already poor country, killing more than 160,000, displacing nearly 1.5 million, and starting a reconstruction effort that continues today. Then this October, Hurricane Matthew swept through the Caribbean, killing over 1,000 people and ripping homes, vegetation, and the country’s infrastructure from the ground. More than a million people are left needing food, clean water, and medicine, as disease spreads in the midst of a cholera epidemic.

Disasters like these are compounded by endemic poverty. Haiti, born from a 1791 slave revolution, was hobbled from the beginning when France, its former colonial overlord, forced the world’s first black republic at gunpoint to pay extortionate reparations for winning its own freedom. Haiti has been the venue of constant Western intervention ever since, including a 1915 invasion by the United States.

This legacy continues. State Department cables released by WikiLeaks in 2011 show that companies like Levi’s and Fruit of the Loom colluded with the US Embassy in Haiti to block a proposed increase in the minimum wage in 2009. Hillary Clinton was running the State Department at the time. Haitian workers currently earn a minimum wage of 225 gourdes a day, after successfully raising the wage in 2014. Today that equates to US$3.40.