NYC & New Orleans: Haiti Events 7/10 and 7/15

Author Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts intended to spend most of 2010 traveling in Haiti to start research on her second book. With that project postponed but her mind and heart very much on Haiti, Sharifa is organizing fundraisers in New Orleans and New York City for two grassroots organizations working in the environmental sector.

The events will feature a French-English bilingual reading of Martinican Negritude poet Aimé Césaire’s epic poem “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal” (“Notebook of a Return to My Native Land”).

NEW ORLEANS
When: Saturday, July 10, 7pm
Where: GRIS GRIS LAB, 2245 Brainard Street, Central City

NEW YORK CITY
When: Thursday, July 15, 7pm
Where: THE SHRINE, 2271 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd, Harlem

Suggested donation $10-$25. No one will be turned away.


The beneficiary organizations are:

Seeds for Haiti ( www.seedsforhaiti.org ) works in concert with Mouvman Peyizan Papay (Peasant Movement of Papay), to support farmers in Haiti’s Central Plateau in achieving social justice and asserting food sovereignty. With the reverse migration from the city back to the countryside since the earthquake, their work is even more urgent. Recently farmers of MPP made headlines when they promised to burn any seeds donated by Monsanto, a gift-horse of seeds that will not reproduce and are laced with pesticides, thus subjecting farmers already facing a state of emergency to the vicious cycle of industrial agriculture.

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SOIL Haiti ( www.oursoil.org ) focuses on ecological sanitation, working alongside communities to create composting toilets that remove dangerous pathogens from the water supply and provide nutrient rich compost to farmers. Since the earthquake, SOIL Haiti has been working in Port-au-Prince along with OXFAM and the Haitian government to implement environmentally sound sanitation strategies urgently needed to serve the 1 million+ people living in tent cities since the disaster.


Come raise voices, spirits and funds at this liberatory literary gathering in the name of rebuilding Haiti!

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