Mark Snyder, Beverly Bell and Alexis Erkert, Toward Freedom
August 21, 2013
"Those before you were strong. Now they're all dead. Stop what you are doing, or the same will happen to you."
Those were the words delivered to Frena Florvilus, Director of Education and Advocacy of the Haitian human rights organization Defenders of the Oppressed (DOP), early on the morning of August 11 by one of four unidentified men who attempted to enter DOP's office. The threat echoed numerous others that have been leveled against the DOP office and its staff since they took on the case of a young man who died in police custody within hours of his April 15 arrest, his body left covered with bruises and wounds inflicted by a severe beating. DOP has also been targeted for its work to support displaced peoples who face violent eviction from their camps, by the government and private landowners who are determined to rid the country of camps. Never mind that the people, homeless since the January 2010 earthquake, have nowhere else to go. [...]
Read the full article:
http://www.towardfreedom.com/home/americas/3340-qnow-theyre-all-deadq-threats-of-assassination-to-human-rights-advocates-in-haiti
Showing posts with label earthquake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label earthquake. Show all posts
Thursday, August 22, 2013
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Phoenix Project... born again?
Haiti Grassroots Watch
January 21, 2013
Port-au-Prince, HAITI, 22 January 2013 – For more than two years, teams of US and Haitian businesspeople have been working on massive public-private business deal: a factory that would transform garbage from the capital into electricity, a resource so rare in Haiti, only 30 percent of the population has access.
But the project involves a technology so potentially dangerous, it has been outlawed in some cities and countries. It would also commit the state to a 30-year contract.
The project emerged from the ruins of the January 12 2010. US businesspeople said they came up with the idea because they wanted to take part in the reconstruction but “do more than make a profit.” [...]
Read the full article:
http://www.ayitikaleje.org/haiti-grassroots-watch-engli/2013/1/21/phoenix-project-born-again.html
January 21, 2013
Port-au-Prince, HAITI, 22 January 2013 – For more than two years, teams of US and Haitian businesspeople have been working on massive public-private business deal: a factory that would transform garbage from the capital into electricity, a resource so rare in Haiti, only 30 percent of the population has access.
But the project involves a technology so potentially dangerous, it has been outlawed in some cities and countries. It would also commit the state to a 30-year contract.
The project emerged from the ruins of the January 12 2010. US businesspeople said they came up with the idea because they wanted to take part in the reconstruction but “do more than make a profit.” [...]
Read the full article:
http://www.ayitikaleje.org/haiti-grassroots-watch-engli/2013/1/21/phoenix-project-born-again.html
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Haiti Three Years After the Earthquake: NYC, 1/12/13
For immediate release
Contact: Haiti Anti-Sweatshop Committee, 212-781-5157 • 347-792-7091
Haiti Three Years After the Earthquake: A Labor Perspective
When: Saturday, January 12, 2013, 6 pm
Where: CWA Local 1180, 6 Harrison Street, basement, Manhattan (between Hudson Street and Greenwich Street, 1 to Franklin St or A, C, E, 2 or 3 to Chambers St)
What: Forum on Haiti three years after the earthquake
New York, Jan. 10—Three New York-based activist journalists are marking the third anniversary of Haiti's 2010 earthquake this Saturday with a report-back on their visits to the country last October. The forum, held at a union hall in Lower Manhattan, will focus on grassroots organizing by Haitians, especially in the garment assembly plants.
The anniversary has brought a run of articles in the media here. While the coverage notes the failure of international aid to help Haiti “build back better,” it also claims there has been “some progress,” in the words of a New York Times editorial. The paper’s example is “a new industrial park north of Port-au-Prince, the capital, providing the first 1,300 of what are supposed to be many thousands of manufacturing jobs.”
The three New Yorkers got a very different perspective in talks with Haitian assembly workers, who are currently struggling just to be paid the new legal minimum wage of $7 a day. They are looking for grassroots solidarity from the United States, they said--not projects like the new industrial park, built largely with $124 million in U.S. tax money170 miles from the earthquake zone, and mostly benefiting multinationals like Walmart..
The forum will include a photo projection from photojournalist Tony Savino and talks by David Wilson and Marty Goodman. Savino, who visited the northern city of Ouanaminthe in October, has photographed Haiti regularly for a quarter century; a sample of his work can be found at http://www.tonysavino.com/. Wilson was in Port-au-Prince when the earthquake struck, and has written about that experience and about the economics of the assembly sector. Goodman, a retired transit worker and former member of the TWU Local 100 Executive Board, began covering Haiti in 1986 with reports on the overthrow of Jean-Claude Duvalier (“Baby Doc”); an article on his most recent trip appeared in the November Socialist Action.
The forum has been organized by the Haiti Anti-Sweatshop Committee and is endorsed by One Struggle (NY) and the Batay Ouvriye Solidarity Network. The presenters are available for interviews. For more information, call 212-781-5157 or 347-792-7091, or visit http://www.facebook.com/events/512833625416529/
--30--
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Haiti: A Tale of Two Cities
Haiti Grassroots Watch/Ayiti Kale Je
September 24, 2012
Port-au-Prince, 24 September 2012 – One city was built just last year. A project costing over US$2 million. Dozens of brightly painted new homes, scattered across a two-hectare site. But they are empty. Some have been vandalized… and worse. The scene is desolate and sometimes disgusting. But the project’s backers say it was a “success.”
The other city is the “heart of the nation,” Port-au-Prince’s downtown. Despite hundreds of thousands dollars spent on plans and conferences, it remains dirty, disorganized, and un-reconstructed. The government is starting to build its own buildings, but what is everyone else supposed to do?
To learn more: A Tale of Two Cities
http://haitigrassrootswatch.squarespace.com/journal/2012/9/24/le-conte-de-deux-villes-a-tale-of-two-cities.html
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Why Haiti Wasn’t “Built Back Better”
By David L. Wilson, Upside Down World
April 17, 2012
Tectonic Shifts: Haiti Since the Earthquake. Mark Schuller and Pablo Morales, editors. Kumarian Press, 2012. Paperback, 288 pages, $24.95.
Earthquakes may be hard to predict, but it should have been easy to foresee the disaster that would result from the sort of quake that hit Haiti in January 2010. Haiti’s failure to recover in the two years since was just as predictable.
The structural problems that turned a bad earthquake into a cataclysm go all the way back to Haiti’s colonial history, but the immediate causes are much more recent. [...]
Read the full article:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/haiti-archives-51/3582--why-haiti-wasnt-built-back-better
April 17, 2012
Tectonic Shifts: Haiti Since the Earthquake. Mark Schuller and Pablo Morales, editors. Kumarian Press, 2012. Paperback, 288 pages, $24.95.
Earthquakes may be hard to predict, but it should have been easy to foresee the disaster that would result from the sort of quake that hit Haiti in January 2010. Haiti’s failure to recover in the two years since was just as predictable.
The structural problems that turned a bad earthquake into a cataclysm go all the way back to Haiti’s colonial history, but the immediate causes are much more recent. [...]
Read the full article:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/haiti-archives-51/3582--why-haiti-wasnt-built-back-better
Friday, August 26, 2011
January 12 victims - Abandoned like a stray dog
Ayiti Kale Je-Haiti Grassroots Watch
August 22, 2011
Eighty thousand tiny houses dot the cities and countryside in the capital and other parts of Haiti devastated by the January 12, 2010, earthquake that killed up to 230,000, damaged or destroyed 171,584 homes and displaced over a million people.
The Bill Clinton-led Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) has approved $254.5 million worth of housing repair and reconstruction projects that will reportedly fix, upgrade or build about 41,759 housing units.
The new government – led by singer Joseph Michel Martelly – recently organized “Reconstruction Week.” Among other activities, Clinton and the president inaugurated a “housing exposition” with over 60 model homes and a new mortgage program called “Kay Pa M” (“My House”).
Does that mean the reconstruction is off to a good start? Will the 634,000 people still living in Haiti’s 1,001 camps, and the undoubtedly tens of thousands of others living in unsafe and even condemned structures, soon move to safe housing?
Far from it, Haiti Grassroots Watch discovered. [...]
Read the articles, watch the video:
http://www.ayitikaleje.org/haiti-grassroots-watch-engli/2011/8/22/january-12-victims-abandoned-like-a-stray-dog.html
August 22, 2011
Eighty thousand tiny houses dot the cities and countryside in the capital and other parts of Haiti devastated by the January 12, 2010, earthquake that killed up to 230,000, damaged or destroyed 171,584 homes and displaced over a million people.
The Bill Clinton-led Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) has approved $254.5 million worth of housing repair and reconstruction projects that will reportedly fix, upgrade or build about 41,759 housing units.
The new government – led by singer Joseph Michel Martelly – recently organized “Reconstruction Week.” Among other activities, Clinton and the president inaugurated a “housing exposition” with over 60 model homes and a new mortgage program called “Kay Pa M” (“My House”).
Does that mean the reconstruction is off to a good start? Will the 634,000 people still living in Haiti’s 1,001 camps, and the undoubtedly tens of thousands of others living in unsafe and even condemned structures, soon move to safe housing?
Far from it, Haiti Grassroots Watch discovered. [...]
Read the articles, watch the video:
http://www.ayitikaleje.org/haiti-grassroots-watch-engli/2011/8/22/january-12-victims-abandoned-like-a-stray-dog.html
Friday, July 22, 2011
Cash for Work – At What Cost
By Haiti Grassroots Watch
July 18, 2011
“You have to ‘negotiate’ to get a job in the program.”
“Some of us put up with sexual harassment in order to get the tiny amount for survival.”
“The foremen… give the jobs to their relatives and girlfriends.”
“Around here, we don’t think these jobs are really in our interest.”
These are just some of the comments from participants in a so-called “humanitarian” program in the Ravine Pintade neighborhood in the Haitian capital.
The comments aren’t just random, and the program is not unique. It's one of dozens of “Cash for Work” programs, employing thousands of people, going on around the country. [...]
Read the full article:
http://www.ayitikaleje.org/haiti-grassroots-watch-engli/2011/7/18/cash-for-work-at-what-cost.html
Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society for the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA) and the community radios of the Association of Haitian Community Media (AMEKA).
July 18, 2011
“You have to ‘negotiate’ to get a job in the program.”
“Some of us put up with sexual harassment in order to get the tiny amount for survival.”
“The foremen… give the jobs to their relatives and girlfriends.”
“Around here, we don’t think these jobs are really in our interest.”
These are just some of the comments from participants in a so-called “humanitarian” program in the Ravine Pintade neighborhood in the Haitian capital.
The comments aren’t just random, and the program is not unique. It's one of dozens of “Cash for Work” programs, employing thousands of people, going on around the country. [...]
Read the full article:
http://www.ayitikaleje.org/haiti-grassroots-watch-engli/2011/7/18/cash-for-work-at-what-cost.html
Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society for the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA) and the community radios of the Association of Haitian Community Media (AMEKA).
Friday, June 10, 2011
Behind the closed doors of Port-au-Prince “reconstruction”
Port-au-Prince, June 9 2011 – Why hasn't reconstruction begun in downtown Port-au-Prince, the area of Haiti most savagely hit by the January 12, 2010, earthquake?
Why are there still tent cities surrounding the National Palace?
Why is planning conducted and decided behind closed doors, with secret contracts nobody sees?
Why are the beneficiaries – the capital’s poor majority – also kept out of the planning and in the dark?
Two new investigations by Haiti Grassroots Watch and students from the Laboratoire de Journalisme at the State University of Haiti tried to figure out what is blocking the reconstruction of downtown, and why the Champ de Mars is still home to thousands of families.
Journalists found a lack of transparency, lack of coordination, rivalry and sometimes even outright disagreement, in a context where no single authority seems to have a complete picture, or accept complete responsibility.
The results of the apparent impasse? Thousands of families braving the rains, winds and cholera under tarps and infrahuman conditions, undisbursed funding, and a rubble-strewn downtown characterized by empty plots and dying businesses.
Read the two series here
Impasse ? What’s blocking the capital’s reconstruction? http://haitigrassrootswatch.squarespace.com/7pap1eng
While the heroes are watching
http://haitigrassrootswatch.squarespace.com/7chaneng1
Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society for the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA) and the community radios of the Association of Haitian Community Media (AMEKA).
Why are there still tent cities surrounding the National Palace?
Why is planning conducted and decided behind closed doors, with secret contracts nobody sees?
Why are the beneficiaries – the capital’s poor majority – also kept out of the planning and in the dark?
Two new investigations by Haiti Grassroots Watch and students from the Laboratoire de Journalisme at the State University of Haiti tried to figure out what is blocking the reconstruction of downtown, and why the Champ de Mars is still home to thousands of families.
Journalists found a lack of transparency, lack of coordination, rivalry and sometimes even outright disagreement, in a context where no single authority seems to have a complete picture, or accept complete responsibility.
The results of the apparent impasse? Thousands of families braving the rains, winds and cholera under tarps and infrahuman conditions, undisbursed funding, and a rubble-strewn downtown characterized by empty plots and dying businesses.
Read the two series here
Impasse ? What’s blocking the capital’s reconstruction? http://haitigrassrootswatch.squarespace.com/7pap1eng
While the heroes are watching
http://haitigrassrootswatch.squarespace.com/7chaneng1
Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society for the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA) and the community radios of the Association of Haitian Community Media (AMEKA).
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Haiti: January 12, 2011 - Frustration, Anger, Exclusion
This is coverage of the first anniversary of Haiti's massive earthquake. It's by Haiti Grassroots Watch-Ayiti Kale Je, a partnership of several Haitian grassroots media groups. The articles are available in English, but as of this evening there still aren't subtitles for the video.
One of the demonstrations in the video is a call for justice for Jean Anil Louis-Juste, a professor at the public university who was murdered in broad daylight in downtown Port-au-Prince just a few hours before the earthquake. The protesters are chanting "Justice for Anil, prison for [Haitian president Rene] Preval." As far as we know, no one has been charged in the murder. Another demonstration is by residents of the displaced persons' camps. The big banner reads: "January 12, 2010 - Misery [or poverty] for Haitians, Millions for NGOs; Thanks, Papa Preval, for 2010 Under the Tents; Network of Organized Camps (Reko)."
http://www.ayitikaleje.org/haiti-grassroots-watch-engli/2011/1/13/january-12-2011.html
One of the demonstrations in the video is a call for justice for Jean Anil Louis-Juste, a professor at the public university who was murdered in broad daylight in downtown Port-au-Prince just a few hours before the earthquake. The protesters are chanting "Justice for Anil, prison for [Haitian president Rene] Preval." As far as we know, no one has been charged in the murder. Another demonstration is by residents of the displaced persons' camps. The big banner reads: "January 12, 2010 - Misery [or poverty] for Haitians, Millions for NGOs; Thanks, Papa Preval, for 2010 Under the Tents; Network of Organized Camps (Reko)."
http://www.ayitikaleje.org/haiti-grassroots-watch-engli/2011/1/13/january-12-2011.html
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Cash for… What?
Do cash-for-work programs help “the recovery”? Is it a good thing that the sidewalks are jammed with people selling mostly imported goods and cast-off clothing and shoes from overseas? And what lurks behind the comments of Clinton and Ban?
by Ayiti Kale Je/Haiti Grassroots Watch/Haïti Veedor
November 8, 2010
Since the January 12 earthquake, multilateral agencies and humanitarian organizations have deployed across Haiti with “cash-for-work” programs, employing tens of thousands.
Taken together, these agencies and “non-governmental organizations” or NGOs – the term is a misnomer, since many are direct subcontractors of the US and other governments – are likely Haiti’s largest employer. [...]
Read the report and watch the video:
http://haitigrassrootswatch.squarespace.com/haiti-grassroots-watch-engli/2010/11/8/cash-for-what.html
by Ayiti Kale Je/Haiti Grassroots Watch/Haïti Veedor
November 8, 2010
Since the January 12 earthquake, multilateral agencies and humanitarian organizations have deployed across Haiti with “cash-for-work” programs, employing tens of thousands.
Taken together, these agencies and “non-governmental organizations” or NGOs – the term is a misnomer, since many are direct subcontractors of the US and other governments – are likely Haiti’s largest employer. [...]
Read the report and watch the video:
http://haitigrassrootswatch.squarespace.com/haiti-grassroots-watch-engli/2010/11/8/cash-for-what.html
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Citizen Protests, Government Repression Mount in Haiti
by Beverly Bell, Huffington Post
October 19, 2010
"I came to protest so we can find a solution. Misery is killing me," said Mascarie Sainte-Anne, 70, at the edge of a rally in front of Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive's office on October 12.
Haitians have been taking to the streets with increasing frequency since August in calls for redress of the economic and social crisis which has followed the earthquake. The social movements' demands of the government include the right of those living in internally displaced people's camps to permanent, humane housing; accessible education; and an increase in minimum wage. Rallies have also protested the continued presence of the U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti, or MINUSTAH. [...]
Read the full article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/beverly-bell/citizen-protests-governme_b_766360.html
October 19, 2010
"I came to protest so we can find a solution. Misery is killing me," said Mascarie Sainte-Anne, 70, at the edge of a rally in front of Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive's office on October 12.
Haitians have been taking to the streets with increasing frequency since August in calls for redress of the economic and social crisis which has followed the earthquake. The social movements' demands of the government include the right of those living in internally displaced people's camps to permanent, humane housing; accessible education; and an increase in minimum wage. Rallies have also protested the continued presence of the U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti, or MINUSTAH. [...]
Read the full article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/beverly-bell/citizen-protests-governme_b_766360.html
Monday, October 25, 2010
Beyond Wyclef: What Haitians Want From Elections
“I see the elections of November 28 as an injustice to the population who are victims of the earthquake of January 12. This money [from the campaign] could be used to help people who are in difficulty."
Beverly Bell, Toward Freedom
October 18, 2010
We asked dozens of Haitians from different social sectors how they felt about the November 28 elections, and what they want or expect from a new government. Here are some of their responses. [...]
Read the full article:
http://www.towardfreedom.com/home/americas/2147-beyond-wyclef-what-haitians-want-from-electio
Beverly Bell, Toward Freedom
October 18, 2010
We asked dozens of Haitians from different social sectors how they felt about the November 28 elections, and what they want or expect from a new government. Here are some of their responses. [...]
Read the full article:
http://www.towardfreedom.com/home/americas/2147-beyond-wyclef-what-haitians-want-from-electio
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Food Shortage in Haiti
CNN
August 16, 2010
TV Link's Claire Doole visits Haiti's drought-stricken Central Plateau, where farmers struggle to feed more mouths.
Watch the video:
http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/international/2010/08/16/wv.haiti.food.security.cnn
August 16, 2010
TV Link's Claire Doole visits Haiti's drought-stricken Central Plateau, where farmers struggle to feed more mouths.
Watch the video:
http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/international/2010/08/16/wv.haiti.food.security.cnn
Friday, August 6, 2010
Days 5 and 6 in Port-au-Prince: Escape From Katrina
By David L. Wilson
August 6, 2010
[This is the second of two reports I wrote after returning to New York from Port-au-Prince on January 18; I didn’t get a chance to edit them until July. For the other report, see "Day 4 in Port-au-Prince: On the Veranda." ]
Founded in 1994 by the Liberation Theology priest Joseph Philippe and a number of local organizations, Fonkoze is Haiti’s main microcredit bank, making small, short-term loans to tens of thousands of ti machann—the street vendors, mostly women, who provide much of the activity in the country’s informal economy.
Like everything else in Port-au-Prince, Fonkoze was devastated by the January 12 earthquake. Many branch offices were destroyed, and structural damage had made the main office unsafe to use. No one died there, but an administrator had to be evacuated to the United States for medical care. The director, Anne Hastings, was calling for volunteers to come by on Saturday morning, January 16, to help retrieve important records from the building.
By Saturday, three of us—New Yorkers who’d come to Haiti the week before to visit a peasant movement in the Central Plateau—had decided that the best way to get back home was to take the Santo Domingo bus from a terminal in the northeastern suburb of Tabarre. This sounded easier and more reliable than the evacuation flights the U.S. government was promoting. We were told the terminal was right by the embassy: if we couldn’t get a bus, we could still throw ourselves on the mercies of the Colossus of the North.
So we made arrangements with Milfort Bruno, the proprietor of an art shop across the street from the Hotel Oloffson, where we were staying. He promised to get us a vehicle and a driver for just $40—a major accomplishment in a city where the corporate reporters seemed to have hired every car that still ran—and to pick us up early on Sunday.
This left us free on Saturday to make ourselves at least a little bit useful at Fonkoze.
Rue La Mort
We started late. We’d had some last-minute clarifications to make with Milfort, and I also think a certain lethargy was setting in now, in the fifth day since the quake.
The Fonkoze office was on Avenue Christophe, which comes right up to the Oloffson, but several people told us the best way to get there was to take Rue Capois north to the downtown area and then go east on Avenue John Brown, which intersects Christophe.
So we started off down the hill toward the National Palace. There were four of us now; another guest at the hotel had joined us.
We saw some signs of improvement in the residential areas. Neighborhood people had cleared most of the rubble out of the streets and had fashioned it into barricades so that cars wouldn’t run into the little street encampments—everyone was still sleeping outdoors because of the continuing aftershocks, and those without yards had nowhere to go but the street. The dead bodies were gone; apparently the authorities had gotten organized enough to hire people and trucks to remove the corpses. But this was the only evidence I ever saw of government action, just as the Belgian rescue mission we’d run into on Thursday was the only evidence I’d seen of international assistance. We knew the big U.S. transport planes were regularly lumbering into the airport, but what were they bringing? No aid had come down here to Carrefour Feuilles.
The scene grew grimmer as we moved downtown. Shopkeepers were trying to clean up and get back in business, but there was only so much they could do for the ruined stores without help from outside. Here too the bodies had been removed, but new ones had sprung up in their place. It seemed that people were bringing corpses to the main streets, where the government workers were more likely to see them and haul them off to the mass graves outside the city.
There seemed to be less respect for the dead now; instead of covering the bodies with sheets, as they had done in the first days, people were satisfied with throwing a rag or piece of plastic over the face.
It was around 11 am, and the sun had gotten bright and hot. I understood something I’d read about: the special look of horrors in the tropics. The bright sunlight brings out every detail, infuses everything with gorgeous, exaggerated colors, like the colors in the idealized country scenes of Haitian folk art. The sharp visual reality of a corpse lying in the street becomes too great; you don’t quite believe it.
Like the rest of us, the dead people were in their fifth day since the earthquake. Most Haitians were wearing scarves over their faces as they walked down the street; if they didn’t have scarves, they’d put a line of toothpaste under their noses to offset the smell.
The bright colors of the tropics extended to the clothes. A remarkable number of the people we passed wore clothes that were as bright and colorful as the day itself, and the clothes and the people were clean. How had they done it, living in yards or the street or encampments in places like the Champ de Mars across from the National Palace? I’d given up any idea of washing my clothes, and for days now my personal hygiene had been limited to sponge baths using a big plastic bucket of stale, chlorinated water from the Oloffson’s swimming pool.
We continued down Rue Capois, named for a revolutionary general so fearless that he was nicknamed “Lanmò”—Death. We turned right on Avenue John Brown, named for a man whose body lies a-moldering in the grave, and then right again on Avenue Christophe, named for a megalomaniac king. By now we knew our directions had been wrong; we’d made a long detour through downtown, and we were going to be very late.
I started to sense that like the smell, the mood in the streets had gotten worse. People remained polite, but I noticed how often they told us not to photograph them. I understood of course why you wouldn’t want to have your suffering end up in a tourist’s slideshow—but we weren’t carrying cameras or waving cell phones around; there was no reason to think we wanted to take pictures. I suspected they’d come to think of blan yo, the foreigners, as people who took pictures and never helped. The Haitians had to resent this; I certainly did.
As we were walking up Avenue Christophe, I noticed something about our own deteriorating morale. Two of us were talking as we approached a corpse on the sidewalk. With a slight nod to each other, we broke off our conversation and separated to walk around the body, giving it a wide berth. Then we came together again and resumed our conversation where we’d left off. I realized we’d done similar things several times during our journey.
We’d gotten used to dead people.
Haitian Know-How
The volunteers had already finished when we finally got to Fonkoze. Along with the rest of the international community, our little group from the Oloffson had turned out to be completely useless.
The Fonkoze offices were set back from the street in a large yard; this seemed to be a residential neighborhood. You could see at least one large crack in the building. It must have been hard work, not to say dangerous work, to go in there in the heat to pull out financial records. The volunteers were resting and drinking water under a sheet they’d strung up between trees as a sort of canopy. Most seemed to be Fonkoze staff, and like so many of the people on the street, they’d somehow contrived to be clean and neatly dressed.
Even while resting they stayed busy, sorting files and asking the director questions. Anne Hastings had been a management consultant in Washington, DC before she was recruited to head Fonkoze, and her answers were brief and businesslike. She spoke fluent Creole, but with a wonderfully all-American accent, like Jean Seberg’s French in "Breathless."
The one little bit of encouragement I got that day was watching Anne and the Fonkoze staff working together—the bank’s full name is Fondasyon Kole Zepòl, “Shoulder-to-Shoulder Foundation.” I’d been thinking the day before about how the myth of “American know-how” had been shown up by our government’s incompetence during Katrina. Now I realized that we can be competent after all, especially when we recognize and respect the competence of other people.
On the way back to the Oloffson I noticed a little white cloth bundle on the sidewalk beside Avenue Christophe. It was wrapped tight, like a tiny Egyptian mummy. I took a deep breath, but I didn’t point the bundle out to the others. As always, I felt the cosmic injustice in a grey-haired stranger like me coming out of the disaster without a scratch while this small Haitian was lying in the street waiting to be taken to the mass burial pits outside the city. There are some dead people you can’t get used to.
“The Ghosts of Beauty”
I didn’t sleep well my last night in Port-au-Prince, and I spent a lot of time wandering around beneath the tall palms of the Oloffson’s grounds.
It was a little spooky to walk there, thinking of the hundreds of people who had died in the blocks around the hotel. The first few nights I’d been cheered up by people singing hymns in the intersection in front, but now there were only a few singers, and they sounded like diehard evangelicals moved more by doctrine than by community spirit. They were loud, and one was flagrantly out of tune. The photographer Daniel Morel told me that people had been leaving to stay with relatives in the country, reversing the historic tendency for too many people to crowd together in the capital. That might be, but it was lonely without the hundreds of singers I heard the first nights.
The power was still out and the city was dark. You could see the winter stars in the sky, and that, at least, was lovely. I even caught a glimpse of a shooting star through the trees.
I began to think of all the people who had wandered in these grounds in the past or in fiction—Malcolm Lowry, John Barrymore, and, for comic relief, Charles Addams. Here was the swimming pool where the social welfare minister killed himself in the Graham Greene book. And I thought back to the earlier times before electricity, the 1890s, when the neighborhood had belonged to well-to-do mixed-race families with elegant manners and flawless Parisian accents.
A line from Pope came to mind:
Still round and round the Ghosts of Beauty glide….
Lack of sleep and maybe the stress of the past few days made me a little giddy, and I began fantasizing about the spirits of the old Haitian elite. How did they feel when they found the place crowded with so many fresh, plebeian ghosts—the schoolgirl crushed when the retaining wall fell on her in front of the hotel, the families buried under the houses in the block below the intersection, the sixty students lost in the St. Gérard school up the hill?
At around four in the morning I heard what had to be automatic weapons, three brief bursts off in the distance. This was the first time I’d heard gunfire in Port-au-Prince, despite rumors of escaped prisoners, of looters, and of the U.S.-trained police executing supposed looters.
I climbed up some cement steps to a point where I could look out over the darkened city. I’d thought the sound came from around the Delmas area, to my right, and as I stood at the top of the stairs, there was a fourth round of shots. This wasn’t a fantasy about old ghosts; it was real and it was happening right now. My God, I thought, weren’t there already enough dead people?
Our Fellow Americans?
Milfort came for us around 6:30 am with his driver and what may once have been a pickup truck. The way to the bus terminal went north toward the airport and then east to Tabarre. We bumped through downtown, past the crumpled National Palace, and then through impoverished Bel Air, where people were still trying to sleep and looked at us resentfully from inside the barricaded encampments. As we approached the airport, I noticed a big new sign. Someone had painted a large white square on a wall, and then, in large, professionally formed letters: “WE NEED HELP.” The plea was placed so that no one coming in from the airport could miss it.
The bus terminal turned out to be a small building in what seemed to be the U.S. embassy’s parking lot. Two U.S. soldiers in camouflage greeted us cheerfully as we got our bags out of the truck. “You’re not taking the evacuation?” one asked in a southern drawl. No, we thought going through Santo Domingo would be easier. “Well, you might just be right about that,” he said.
The bus company employees directed us to “standby,” a row of wooden benches in the shade in front of the little building. The waiting passengers were mostly middle-class Haitians and Haitian Americans, with a few Dominicans mixed in. Conversation was a mélange of Creole, English, French, and Spanish; the English was frequently in New York and Florida accents. It was a typically Haitian scene—an apparent chaos in which everything still got sorted out. Three hours later our turn came, and we boarded a large, air-conditioned bus.
As we started on our long but embarrassingly comfortable ride to the Dominican Republic, the bus passed in front of the embassy. A sympathetic murmur came from the other passengers. “Gade, gade!” the woman across the aisle told her companion. “Look!”
There was a long line by the street outside the embassy. It was close to 11 am now, and a hot sun was beating down on the people as they waited in all the different postures of weariness and dejection. Who were they? Were they our “fellow Americans” waiting to get approval to take the evacuation flights? Or were they Haitian citizens who still believed blan yo would somehow help them? I couldn’t pick out a single white face in the long, wilting line. I wondered if everybody else thought what I was thinking: Katrina.
[David L. Wilson is co-author, with Jane Guskin, of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers (Monthly Review Press, 2007), and co-editor of Weekly News Update on the Americas.]
August 6, 2010
[This is the second of two reports I wrote after returning to New York from Port-au-Prince on January 18; I didn’t get a chance to edit them until July. For the other report, see "Day 4 in Port-au-Prince: On the Veranda." ]
Founded in 1994 by the Liberation Theology priest Joseph Philippe and a number of local organizations, Fonkoze is Haiti’s main microcredit bank, making small, short-term loans to tens of thousands of ti machann—the street vendors, mostly women, who provide much of the activity in the country’s informal economy.
Like everything else in Port-au-Prince, Fonkoze was devastated by the January 12 earthquake. Many branch offices were destroyed, and structural damage had made the main office unsafe to use. No one died there, but an administrator had to be evacuated to the United States for medical care. The director, Anne Hastings, was calling for volunteers to come by on Saturday morning, January 16, to help retrieve important records from the building.
By Saturday, three of us—New Yorkers who’d come to Haiti the week before to visit a peasant movement in the Central Plateau—had decided that the best way to get back home was to take the Santo Domingo bus from a terminal in the northeastern suburb of Tabarre. This sounded easier and more reliable than the evacuation flights the U.S. government was promoting. We were told the terminal was right by the embassy: if we couldn’t get a bus, we could still throw ourselves on the mercies of the Colossus of the North.
So we made arrangements with Milfort Bruno, the proprietor of an art shop across the street from the Hotel Oloffson, where we were staying. He promised to get us a vehicle and a driver for just $40—a major accomplishment in a city where the corporate reporters seemed to have hired every car that still ran—and to pick us up early on Sunday.
This left us free on Saturday to make ourselves at least a little bit useful at Fonkoze.
Rue La Mort
We started late. We’d had some last-minute clarifications to make with Milfort, and I also think a certain lethargy was setting in now, in the fifth day since the quake.
The Fonkoze office was on Avenue Christophe, which comes right up to the Oloffson, but several people told us the best way to get there was to take Rue Capois north to the downtown area and then go east on Avenue John Brown, which intersects Christophe.
So we started off down the hill toward the National Palace. There were four of us now; another guest at the hotel had joined us.
We saw some signs of improvement in the residential areas. Neighborhood people had cleared most of the rubble out of the streets and had fashioned it into barricades so that cars wouldn’t run into the little street encampments—everyone was still sleeping outdoors because of the continuing aftershocks, and those without yards had nowhere to go but the street. The dead bodies were gone; apparently the authorities had gotten organized enough to hire people and trucks to remove the corpses. But this was the only evidence I ever saw of government action, just as the Belgian rescue mission we’d run into on Thursday was the only evidence I’d seen of international assistance. We knew the big U.S. transport planes were regularly lumbering into the airport, but what were they bringing? No aid had come down here to Carrefour Feuilles.
The scene grew grimmer as we moved downtown. Shopkeepers were trying to clean up and get back in business, but there was only so much they could do for the ruined stores without help from outside. Here too the bodies had been removed, but new ones had sprung up in their place. It seemed that people were bringing corpses to the main streets, where the government workers were more likely to see them and haul them off to the mass graves outside the city.
There seemed to be less respect for the dead now; instead of covering the bodies with sheets, as they had done in the first days, people were satisfied with throwing a rag or piece of plastic over the face.
It was around 11 am, and the sun had gotten bright and hot. I understood something I’d read about: the special look of horrors in the tropics. The bright sunlight brings out every detail, infuses everything with gorgeous, exaggerated colors, like the colors in the idealized country scenes of Haitian folk art. The sharp visual reality of a corpse lying in the street becomes too great; you don’t quite believe it.
Like the rest of us, the dead people were in their fifth day since the earthquake. Most Haitians were wearing scarves over their faces as they walked down the street; if they didn’t have scarves, they’d put a line of toothpaste under their noses to offset the smell.
The bright colors of the tropics extended to the clothes. A remarkable number of the people we passed wore clothes that were as bright and colorful as the day itself, and the clothes and the people were clean. How had they done it, living in yards or the street or encampments in places like the Champ de Mars across from the National Palace? I’d given up any idea of washing my clothes, and for days now my personal hygiene had been limited to sponge baths using a big plastic bucket of stale, chlorinated water from the Oloffson’s swimming pool.
We continued down Rue Capois, named for a revolutionary general so fearless that he was nicknamed “Lanmò”—Death. We turned right on Avenue John Brown, named for a man whose body lies a-moldering in the grave, and then right again on Avenue Christophe, named for a megalomaniac king. By now we knew our directions had been wrong; we’d made a long detour through downtown, and we were going to be very late.
I started to sense that like the smell, the mood in the streets had gotten worse. People remained polite, but I noticed how often they told us not to photograph them. I understood of course why you wouldn’t want to have your suffering end up in a tourist’s slideshow—but we weren’t carrying cameras or waving cell phones around; there was no reason to think we wanted to take pictures. I suspected they’d come to think of blan yo, the foreigners, as people who took pictures and never helped. The Haitians had to resent this; I certainly did.
As we were walking up Avenue Christophe, I noticed something about our own deteriorating morale. Two of us were talking as we approached a corpse on the sidewalk. With a slight nod to each other, we broke off our conversation and separated to walk around the body, giving it a wide berth. Then we came together again and resumed our conversation where we’d left off. I realized we’d done similar things several times during our journey.
We’d gotten used to dead people.
Haitian Know-How
The volunteers had already finished when we finally got to Fonkoze. Along with the rest of the international community, our little group from the Oloffson had turned out to be completely useless.
The Fonkoze offices were set back from the street in a large yard; this seemed to be a residential neighborhood. You could see at least one large crack in the building. It must have been hard work, not to say dangerous work, to go in there in the heat to pull out financial records. The volunteers were resting and drinking water under a sheet they’d strung up between trees as a sort of canopy. Most seemed to be Fonkoze staff, and like so many of the people on the street, they’d somehow contrived to be clean and neatly dressed.
Even while resting they stayed busy, sorting files and asking the director questions. Anne Hastings had been a management consultant in Washington, DC before she was recruited to head Fonkoze, and her answers were brief and businesslike. She spoke fluent Creole, but with a wonderfully all-American accent, like Jean Seberg’s French in "Breathless."
The one little bit of encouragement I got that day was watching Anne and the Fonkoze staff working together—the bank’s full name is Fondasyon Kole Zepòl, “Shoulder-to-Shoulder Foundation.” I’d been thinking the day before about how the myth of “American know-how” had been shown up by our government’s incompetence during Katrina. Now I realized that we can be competent after all, especially when we recognize and respect the competence of other people.
On the way back to the Oloffson I noticed a little white cloth bundle on the sidewalk beside Avenue Christophe. It was wrapped tight, like a tiny Egyptian mummy. I took a deep breath, but I didn’t point the bundle out to the others. As always, I felt the cosmic injustice in a grey-haired stranger like me coming out of the disaster without a scratch while this small Haitian was lying in the street waiting to be taken to the mass burial pits outside the city. There are some dead people you can’t get used to.
“The Ghosts of Beauty”
I didn’t sleep well my last night in Port-au-Prince, and I spent a lot of time wandering around beneath the tall palms of the Oloffson’s grounds.
It was a little spooky to walk there, thinking of the hundreds of people who had died in the blocks around the hotel. The first few nights I’d been cheered up by people singing hymns in the intersection in front, but now there were only a few singers, and they sounded like diehard evangelicals moved more by doctrine than by community spirit. They were loud, and one was flagrantly out of tune. The photographer Daniel Morel told me that people had been leaving to stay with relatives in the country, reversing the historic tendency for too many people to crowd together in the capital. That might be, but it was lonely without the hundreds of singers I heard the first nights.
The power was still out and the city was dark. You could see the winter stars in the sky, and that, at least, was lovely. I even caught a glimpse of a shooting star through the trees.
I began to think of all the people who had wandered in these grounds in the past or in fiction—Malcolm Lowry, John Barrymore, and, for comic relief, Charles Addams. Here was the swimming pool where the social welfare minister killed himself in the Graham Greene book. And I thought back to the earlier times before electricity, the 1890s, when the neighborhood had belonged to well-to-do mixed-race families with elegant manners and flawless Parisian accents.
A line from Pope came to mind:
Still round and round the Ghosts of Beauty glide….
Lack of sleep and maybe the stress of the past few days made me a little giddy, and I began fantasizing about the spirits of the old Haitian elite. How did they feel when they found the place crowded with so many fresh, plebeian ghosts—the schoolgirl crushed when the retaining wall fell on her in front of the hotel, the families buried under the houses in the block below the intersection, the sixty students lost in the St. Gérard school up the hill?
At around four in the morning I heard what had to be automatic weapons, three brief bursts off in the distance. This was the first time I’d heard gunfire in Port-au-Prince, despite rumors of escaped prisoners, of looters, and of the U.S.-trained police executing supposed looters.
I climbed up some cement steps to a point where I could look out over the darkened city. I’d thought the sound came from around the Delmas area, to my right, and as I stood at the top of the stairs, there was a fourth round of shots. This wasn’t a fantasy about old ghosts; it was real and it was happening right now. My God, I thought, weren’t there already enough dead people?
Our Fellow Americans?
Milfort came for us around 6:30 am with his driver and what may once have been a pickup truck. The way to the bus terminal went north toward the airport and then east to Tabarre. We bumped through downtown, past the crumpled National Palace, and then through impoverished Bel Air, where people were still trying to sleep and looked at us resentfully from inside the barricaded encampments. As we approached the airport, I noticed a big new sign. Someone had painted a large white square on a wall, and then, in large, professionally formed letters: “WE NEED HELP.” The plea was placed so that no one coming in from the airport could miss it.
The bus terminal turned out to be a small building in what seemed to be the U.S. embassy’s parking lot. Two U.S. soldiers in camouflage greeted us cheerfully as we got our bags out of the truck. “You’re not taking the evacuation?” one asked in a southern drawl. No, we thought going through Santo Domingo would be easier. “Well, you might just be right about that,” he said.
The bus company employees directed us to “standby,” a row of wooden benches in the shade in front of the little building. The waiting passengers were mostly middle-class Haitians and Haitian Americans, with a few Dominicans mixed in. Conversation was a mélange of Creole, English, French, and Spanish; the English was frequently in New York and Florida accents. It was a typically Haitian scene—an apparent chaos in which everything still got sorted out. Three hours later our turn came, and we boarded a large, air-conditioned bus.
As we started on our long but embarrassingly comfortable ride to the Dominican Republic, the bus passed in front of the embassy. A sympathetic murmur came from the other passengers. “Gade, gade!” the woman across the aisle told her companion. “Look!”
There was a long line by the street outside the embassy. It was close to 11 am now, and a hot sun was beating down on the people as they waited in all the different postures of weariness and dejection. Who were they? Were they our “fellow Americans” waiting to get approval to take the evacuation flights? Or were they Haitian citizens who still believed blan yo would somehow help them? I couldn’t pick out a single white face in the long, wilting line. I wondered if everybody else thought what I was thinking: Katrina.
[David L. Wilson is co-author, with Jane Guskin, of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers (Monthly Review Press, 2007), and co-editor of Weekly News Update on the Americas.]
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Day 4 in Port-au-Prince: On the Veranda
By David L. Wilson
August 3, 2010
[I wrote this shortly after returning to New York from Port-au-Prince on January 18, but I didn’t get a chance to edit it until July. For earlier reports, see “Singing and Praying at Night in Port-au-Prince," “Day 2 in Port-au-Prince: ‘Young Men with Crowbars,'" and “Day Three in Port-au-Prince: ‘A difficult situation.’”]
By Friday, January 15, it was clear that most of the U.S. citizens in the Hotel Oloffson had no business staying in Haiti. It was now the fourth day since the great earthquake had leveled much of Port-au-Prince, and while independent journalists like Tequila Minsky and Daniel Morel had work to do, the rest of us found that all our plans had evaporated and our cash was running out, along with access to electricity and the internet. The two days of interviews I’d arranged were impossible in the general breakdown of communications; it wasn’t until I got back to New York that I knew for sure my Haitian contacts were still alive.
We heard that U.S. citizens were supposed to go to the embassy—off in Tabarre, a suburb northeast of the city—to get evacuated.
Something about that made me uncomfortable. It’s true that the plan sounded logical: the U.S. government was flying big transport planes into the Toussaint Louverture International Airport, presumably with emergency supplies; once they were unloaded, the planes would be flying back to Miami empty, so why not use them to evacuate some of the estimated 45,000 U.S. citizens in Haiti? But I remembered the smugness that always seems to creep into our media’s coverage of natural disasters. The United States has succeeded in evacuating its citizens, we’re told; unspoken but implied is the contrast with all the other countries of the world, which clearly lack our American know-how and our can-do spirit.
I also knew that in the image-world of U.S. corporate media the evacuation of U.S. citizens would somehow become the evacuation of “real” U.S. citizens—middle-class white people like me, not the dark-skinned Haitian Americans who undoubtedly made up the vast majority of the 45,000.
And I thought the U.S. government would probably try to play the other side as well, for the benefit of African Americans and most of the rest of the world. The image of Haitian Americans being rescued by the first black U.S. president might help the world forget how American know-how had turned out for the black population of New Orleans back in 2005.
We all had Katrina on our minds. A Haitian business owner had brought the hurricane up the day before, by the ruins of the Transport Ministry. The man, neatly dressed amidst the devastation in a polo shirt and pressed trousers, approached New York Times reporter Simón Romero as Tequila and I walked with him and the guide Jean Lundy through the downtown area. We had to remind people in the States about Katrina, the man told us in English. Haiti had sent aid, if only a little, to New Orleans after Katrina; we had to remember that.
I wondered if anyone in the U.S. media would pick up on the Katrina angle.
Still, the politics of evacuation mattered less to me than a practical consideration: I figured it would be much easier to get out of Haiti by taking one of the regular bus runs to Santo Domingo. People said there were no problems with the buses, at least for those of us with cash and U.S. passports.
“Reporters of Fortune”
The phrase “corporate media” was no longer an abstraction for me. Reporters and photographers were very physically present everywhere I looked in the Hotel Oloffson: eating on the veranda, camped out in the various annexes, crowded around laptops on the grounds, sleeping in deck chairs by the driveway.
The Oloffson started off in the late nineteenth century as a private mansion for the then-powerful Sam family. With its gingerbread architecture, its white gothic flourishes and occasional Vodou symbols, its circular driveway and the towering palms in its grounds, the place looked like the setting for an old movie or a novel of international intrigue—and in fact it was the model for the fictional hotel in Graham Greene’s The Comedians.
The earthquake had hardly touched the Oloffson, so dozens of corporate journalists ended up there as they poured into the city for disaster coverage; many of the newer luxury hotels had collapsed. But it also became a meeting place for many other people: NGO employees, Haitian Americans who’d rushed to the country to find relatives, Haitian professionals looking for internet access.
For Daniel Morel, a Haitian American photographer who’d been covering the country for decades, the newcomers were “reporters of fortune.” A lot were in fact rude and brash, young men who tried hard to give themselves an adventurous, swashbuckling look—as far as it’s possible to look swashbuckling when you’re carrying cameras, computers, and satellite phones. At one point I heard a bunch of them discussing the esthetics of body shots. But a lot of the journalists were quite smart and professional. Some, like Marc Lacey from the Times and Mary Beth Sheridan from the Washington Post, were positively likeable.
That Friday a group of Times people were eating and conferring at the table next to me on the veranda. They weren’t being secretive, so I listened in as they considered story ideas.
I was struck by how similar their reactions were to my own and those of the various left-leaning people I’d come to Haiti with. For one thing, they seemed as dismissive as we were of the U.S. media’s obsession with looting--there must have been some, but none of us had seen it.
Marc Lacey, who seemed to be in charge of the meeting, was listening to story proposals while a photographer was showing him that morning’s pictures on her laptop. I was impressed by his decisions, which favored stories about the disaster’s impact on real Haitians, not the generic victims and imagined looters of most media.
“Look at this!” he said suddenly.
I couldn’t see the photo he was pointing to, but apparently it was an aerial view of one of the big assembly plants near the airport. Lacey told the others that the earthquake had left a huge crack in the roof. “This is perfect!” he said.
The assembly plants—sweatshops, maquiladoras in Spanish, where low-paid workers stitch clothes for the U.S. market—were what I’d intended to investigate while I was in Port-au-Prince. They’d been promoted under Baby Doc in the 1970s and 1980s as a motor for Haiti’s economic development. The industry collapsed in the 1990s, but for the last year Bill Clinton, the UN and the U.S. apparel industry had been promoting the plants again, as if the past had never happened.
“This sums it all up,” Lacey said, shaking his head. “This plant was Haiti’s future—and now look at it….”
I suddenly understood something about reporters. They can write what they write because at least sometimes they actually believe their own hype.
“Take Lake Péligre”
A different view of Haiti was on display at a nearby table.
“Take Lake Péligre,” another “fellow American” was telling a Latin American reporter, who frantically scribbled notes as a Haitian American doctor looked on.
Lac de Péligre is a huge artificial lake created in the 1950s when U.S. engineers and contractors built the Péligre Dam, the source of Port-au-Prince’s electricity. I’d seen Lac de Péligre on Tuesday, hours before the earthquake, as our group returned from a visit to the Mouvman Peyizan Papay (MPP), a peasant cooperative movement in the Central Plateau.
The runoff from the dam was wasted, according to the speaker, a man about my age whose homemade business card identified him as an “environmental response” specialist. The lake could easily have provided potable water to the capital, he said. Instead, the people of Port-au-Prince had to buy their water in plastic bags and bottles from trucks. No one had been interested in the people, he added.
This man was a character. He was bald on top, with long white hair on the sides, making him look, as an old acquaintance of his told me, like Bozo the Clown. He talked in quick bursts of sound bites, like the people who sell things on late-night TV—except that he was talking about Haiti’s environmental problems and he actually seemed to know what he was talking about.
Why had so many new cement buildings collapsed while others suffered no damage? he asked rhetorically. Corruption, of course, and cutting corners on the cement and the rebar. This was especially true of the schools, he noted, where thousands of students and teachers had died.
“Argile,” the man said, and paused dramatically. “Clay.” Haiti is filled with different varieties of excellent clay, he said, explaining ways to construct earthquake-resistant buildings from bricks made out of the local clay.
I was fascinated. Long before the earthquake, the peasant movement in the Central Plateau had been encouraging people to use locally produced clay bricks instead of cement.
Still, like Marc Lacey, this man couldn’t shake off a certain faith in American know-how, a sense that the world’s problems could be solved with a little tinkering by people from the North, by the folks who brought you Katrina. Another of his projects was having the U.S. Navy put President Préval’s government on a ship in the harbor. “You want transparency?” he asked in his late-night commercial tone. “Put Préval and company right there where everyone can see them. And if the Haitians really get fed up with them, they can just weigh anchor and go somewhere else.”
The reporter scribbled faster.
And what about rebuilding, what about planning an environmentally sound capital that would never again collapse on its people? Tequila and I had been talking about the need for building inspectors and proper building codes, and a way to bring back the many Haitian architects and engineers who’d been brain-drained to the States. The environmental expert’s response was to cut Haitian contractors out of the rebuilding completely. “Everything needs to be built by people from outside,” he announced.
Right, I thought. We need to replace the corrupt Haitian contractors with corrupt contractors from Miami.
The Unnamable
Jean Lundy, our guide from the day before, dropped by the veranda around suppertime, still wearing a green shirt and a blue baseball cap. A thin man with a slight stoop, he always had a sad look—something about the lines on his face suggested that he’d had the look even before the disaster—but that evening he also had a look of accomplishment.
He’d told us on Thursday he would take Friday off to search for his brother’s body. Had he found it? we asked. Yes, he said. He and some others had dug it out of the rubble and had arranged for a proper burial.
That was the sort of thing that counted as a success on Day 4 of the earthquake—making sure your brother’s body wasn’t carted off in a truck and dumped in a mass grave somewhere outside the city.
At dinner on Thursday I had asked Serge, a retired Haitian American musician, the Creole for “earthquake.” He nodded. “I was wondering that too,” he said. Was it something from the French séisme? asked a Swiss woman who works with an NGO. “No, I think it’s tranblemanntè,” Serge answered. “But you’re right,” he added, looking at me and guessing my unspoken thought. “I haven’t heard anyone say the word.”
When I got back to New York, I was told that people were calling the event bagay la, “the thing,” or else just 12 janvye, “January 12.” But in those first few days the people of Port-au-Prince seemed not to call the earthquake anything at all. For visitors like me at least there was a narrative: we’d been in one of the worst catastrophes of human history, with tens of thousands killed, maybe hundreds of thousands. But what was it for the people whose whole lives were there? It was something so vast, so all-encompassing that it was nameless, and almost unnamable.
But of course life goes on. A worker at the Oloffson was keeping her two daughters with her at the hotel. She’d noticed I could speak some French, and she ordered the younger one, who seemed to be around eight, to sit with me on the veranda and practice.
I felt my French probably wasn’t a good model for an eight-year-old, but I went ahead and asked the girl the questions adults always ask children. She was bright and inquisitive; you’d never guess she’d survived a world-historic cataclysm just three days before.
Eventually I asked where she went to school.
Her face fell, and I knew at once what an idiot I’d been. “Mon école a été écrasée,” she said sadly, carefully enunciating her words. And of course her school had been destroyed; hadn’t they all?
They’d build a new school, I told her, maybe a better one. Peut-être une meilleure. She cheered up and said, in her clear, formal French, that then she would go back to school.
I felt guilty. I felt I was just another Yankee huckster selling a second-hand optimism I couldn’t really believe in.
[David L. Wilson is co-author, with Jane Guskin, of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers (Monthly Review Press, 2007), and co-editor of Weekly News Update on the Americas.]
August 3, 2010
[I wrote this shortly after returning to New York from Port-au-Prince on January 18, but I didn’t get a chance to edit it until July. For earlier reports, see “Singing and Praying at Night in Port-au-Prince," “Day 2 in Port-au-Prince: ‘Young Men with Crowbars,'" and “Day Three in Port-au-Prince: ‘A difficult situation.’”]
By Friday, January 15, it was clear that most of the U.S. citizens in the Hotel Oloffson had no business staying in Haiti. It was now the fourth day since the great earthquake had leveled much of Port-au-Prince, and while independent journalists like Tequila Minsky and Daniel Morel had work to do, the rest of us found that all our plans had evaporated and our cash was running out, along with access to electricity and the internet. The two days of interviews I’d arranged were impossible in the general breakdown of communications; it wasn’t until I got back to New York that I knew for sure my Haitian contacts were still alive.
We heard that U.S. citizens were supposed to go to the embassy—off in Tabarre, a suburb northeast of the city—to get evacuated.
Something about that made me uncomfortable. It’s true that the plan sounded logical: the U.S. government was flying big transport planes into the Toussaint Louverture International Airport, presumably with emergency supplies; once they were unloaded, the planes would be flying back to Miami empty, so why not use them to evacuate some of the estimated 45,000 U.S. citizens in Haiti? But I remembered the smugness that always seems to creep into our media’s coverage of natural disasters. The United States has succeeded in evacuating its citizens, we’re told; unspoken but implied is the contrast with all the other countries of the world, which clearly lack our American know-how and our can-do spirit.
I also knew that in the image-world of U.S. corporate media the evacuation of U.S. citizens would somehow become the evacuation of “real” U.S. citizens—middle-class white people like me, not the dark-skinned Haitian Americans who undoubtedly made up the vast majority of the 45,000.
And I thought the U.S. government would probably try to play the other side as well, for the benefit of African Americans and most of the rest of the world. The image of Haitian Americans being rescued by the first black U.S. president might help the world forget how American know-how had turned out for the black population of New Orleans back in 2005.
We all had Katrina on our minds. A Haitian business owner had brought the hurricane up the day before, by the ruins of the Transport Ministry. The man, neatly dressed amidst the devastation in a polo shirt and pressed trousers, approached New York Times reporter Simón Romero as Tequila and I walked with him and the guide Jean Lundy through the downtown area. We had to remind people in the States about Katrina, the man told us in English. Haiti had sent aid, if only a little, to New Orleans after Katrina; we had to remember that.
I wondered if anyone in the U.S. media would pick up on the Katrina angle.
Still, the politics of evacuation mattered less to me than a practical consideration: I figured it would be much easier to get out of Haiti by taking one of the regular bus runs to Santo Domingo. People said there were no problems with the buses, at least for those of us with cash and U.S. passports.
“Reporters of Fortune”
The phrase “corporate media” was no longer an abstraction for me. Reporters and photographers were very physically present everywhere I looked in the Hotel Oloffson: eating on the veranda, camped out in the various annexes, crowded around laptops on the grounds, sleeping in deck chairs by the driveway.
The Oloffson started off in the late nineteenth century as a private mansion for the then-powerful Sam family. With its gingerbread architecture, its white gothic flourishes and occasional Vodou symbols, its circular driveway and the towering palms in its grounds, the place looked like the setting for an old movie or a novel of international intrigue—and in fact it was the model for the fictional hotel in Graham Greene’s The Comedians.
The earthquake had hardly touched the Oloffson, so dozens of corporate journalists ended up there as they poured into the city for disaster coverage; many of the newer luxury hotels had collapsed. But it also became a meeting place for many other people: NGO employees, Haitian Americans who’d rushed to the country to find relatives, Haitian professionals looking for internet access.
For Daniel Morel, a Haitian American photographer who’d been covering the country for decades, the newcomers were “reporters of fortune.” A lot were in fact rude and brash, young men who tried hard to give themselves an adventurous, swashbuckling look—as far as it’s possible to look swashbuckling when you’re carrying cameras, computers, and satellite phones. At one point I heard a bunch of them discussing the esthetics of body shots. But a lot of the journalists were quite smart and professional. Some, like Marc Lacey from the Times and Mary Beth Sheridan from the Washington Post, were positively likeable.
That Friday a group of Times people were eating and conferring at the table next to me on the veranda. They weren’t being secretive, so I listened in as they considered story ideas.
I was struck by how similar their reactions were to my own and those of the various left-leaning people I’d come to Haiti with. For one thing, they seemed as dismissive as we were of the U.S. media’s obsession with looting--there must have been some, but none of us had seen it.
Marc Lacey, who seemed to be in charge of the meeting, was listening to story proposals while a photographer was showing him that morning’s pictures on her laptop. I was impressed by his decisions, which favored stories about the disaster’s impact on real Haitians, not the generic victims and imagined looters of most media.
“Look at this!” he said suddenly.
I couldn’t see the photo he was pointing to, but apparently it was an aerial view of one of the big assembly plants near the airport. Lacey told the others that the earthquake had left a huge crack in the roof. “This is perfect!” he said.
The assembly plants—sweatshops, maquiladoras in Spanish, where low-paid workers stitch clothes for the U.S. market—were what I’d intended to investigate while I was in Port-au-Prince. They’d been promoted under Baby Doc in the 1970s and 1980s as a motor for Haiti’s economic development. The industry collapsed in the 1990s, but for the last year Bill Clinton, the UN and the U.S. apparel industry had been promoting the plants again, as if the past had never happened.
“This sums it all up,” Lacey said, shaking his head. “This plant was Haiti’s future—and now look at it….”
I suddenly understood something about reporters. They can write what they write because at least sometimes they actually believe their own hype.
“Take Lake Péligre”
A different view of Haiti was on display at a nearby table.
“Take Lake Péligre,” another “fellow American” was telling a Latin American reporter, who frantically scribbled notes as a Haitian American doctor looked on.
Lac de Péligre is a huge artificial lake created in the 1950s when U.S. engineers and contractors built the Péligre Dam, the source of Port-au-Prince’s electricity. I’d seen Lac de Péligre on Tuesday, hours before the earthquake, as our group returned from a visit to the Mouvman Peyizan Papay (MPP), a peasant cooperative movement in the Central Plateau.
The runoff from the dam was wasted, according to the speaker, a man about my age whose homemade business card identified him as an “environmental response” specialist. The lake could easily have provided potable water to the capital, he said. Instead, the people of Port-au-Prince had to buy their water in plastic bags and bottles from trucks. No one had been interested in the people, he added.
This man was a character. He was bald on top, with long white hair on the sides, making him look, as an old acquaintance of his told me, like Bozo the Clown. He talked in quick bursts of sound bites, like the people who sell things on late-night TV—except that he was talking about Haiti’s environmental problems and he actually seemed to know what he was talking about.
Why had so many new cement buildings collapsed while others suffered no damage? he asked rhetorically. Corruption, of course, and cutting corners on the cement and the rebar. This was especially true of the schools, he noted, where thousands of students and teachers had died.
“Argile,” the man said, and paused dramatically. “Clay.” Haiti is filled with different varieties of excellent clay, he said, explaining ways to construct earthquake-resistant buildings from bricks made out of the local clay.
I was fascinated. Long before the earthquake, the peasant movement in the Central Plateau had been encouraging people to use locally produced clay bricks instead of cement.
Still, like Marc Lacey, this man couldn’t shake off a certain faith in American know-how, a sense that the world’s problems could be solved with a little tinkering by people from the North, by the folks who brought you Katrina. Another of his projects was having the U.S. Navy put President Préval’s government on a ship in the harbor. “You want transparency?” he asked in his late-night commercial tone. “Put Préval and company right there where everyone can see them. And if the Haitians really get fed up with them, they can just weigh anchor and go somewhere else.”
The reporter scribbled faster.
And what about rebuilding, what about planning an environmentally sound capital that would never again collapse on its people? Tequila and I had been talking about the need for building inspectors and proper building codes, and a way to bring back the many Haitian architects and engineers who’d been brain-drained to the States. The environmental expert’s response was to cut Haitian contractors out of the rebuilding completely. “Everything needs to be built by people from outside,” he announced.
Right, I thought. We need to replace the corrupt Haitian contractors with corrupt contractors from Miami.
The Unnamable
Jean Lundy, our guide from the day before, dropped by the veranda around suppertime, still wearing a green shirt and a blue baseball cap. A thin man with a slight stoop, he always had a sad look—something about the lines on his face suggested that he’d had the look even before the disaster—but that evening he also had a look of accomplishment.
He’d told us on Thursday he would take Friday off to search for his brother’s body. Had he found it? we asked. Yes, he said. He and some others had dug it out of the rubble and had arranged for a proper burial.
That was the sort of thing that counted as a success on Day 4 of the earthquake—making sure your brother’s body wasn’t carted off in a truck and dumped in a mass grave somewhere outside the city.
At dinner on Thursday I had asked Serge, a retired Haitian American musician, the Creole for “earthquake.” He nodded. “I was wondering that too,” he said. Was it something from the French séisme? asked a Swiss woman who works with an NGO. “No, I think it’s tranblemanntè,” Serge answered. “But you’re right,” he added, looking at me and guessing my unspoken thought. “I haven’t heard anyone say the word.”
When I got back to New York, I was told that people were calling the event bagay la, “the thing,” or else just 12 janvye, “January 12.” But in those first few days the people of Port-au-Prince seemed not to call the earthquake anything at all. For visitors like me at least there was a narrative: we’d been in one of the worst catastrophes of human history, with tens of thousands killed, maybe hundreds of thousands. But what was it for the people whose whole lives were there? It was something so vast, so all-encompassing that it was nameless, and almost unnamable.
But of course life goes on. A worker at the Oloffson was keeping her two daughters with her at the hotel. She’d noticed I could speak some French, and she ordered the younger one, who seemed to be around eight, to sit with me on the veranda and practice.
I felt my French probably wasn’t a good model for an eight-year-old, but I went ahead and asked the girl the questions adults always ask children. She was bright and inquisitive; you’d never guess she’d survived a world-historic cataclysm just three days before.
Eventually I asked where she went to school.
Her face fell, and I knew at once what an idiot I’d been. “Mon école a été écrasée,” she said sadly, carefully enunciating her words. And of course her school had been destroyed; hadn’t they all?
They’d build a new school, I told her, maybe a better one. Peut-être une meilleure. She cheered up and said, in her clear, formal French, that then she would go back to school.
I felt guilty. I felt I was just another Yankee huckster selling a second-hand optimism I couldn’t really believe in.
[David L. Wilson is co-author, with Jane Guskin, of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers (Monthly Review Press, 2007), and co-editor of Weekly News Update on the Americas.]
Thursday, July 29, 2010
How to Write About Haiti
By Ansel Herz, Huffington Post
July 23, 2010
Port-au-Prince, Haiti--Actor Sean Penn, who is helping manage a camp of displaced earthquake victims in Haiti, is making pointed criticisms of journalists for dropping the ball on coverage of Haiti. He's wrong. I've been on the ground in Port-au-Prince working as an independent journalist for the past ten months. I'm an earthquake survivor who's seen the big-time reporters come and go. They're doing such a stellar job and I want to help out, so I've written this handy guide for when they come back on the one-year anniversary of the January quake!
For starters, always use the phrase 'the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.' Your audience must be reminded again of Haiti's exceptional poverty. It's doubtful that other articles have mentioned this fact. [...]
Read the full article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/crossover-dreams/a-guide-for-american-jour_b_656689.html
July 23, 2010
Port-au-Prince, Haiti--Actor Sean Penn, who is helping manage a camp of displaced earthquake victims in Haiti, is making pointed criticisms of journalists for dropping the ball on coverage of Haiti. He's wrong. I've been on the ground in Port-au-Prince working as an independent journalist for the past ten months. I'm an earthquake survivor who's seen the big-time reporters come and go. They're doing such a stellar job and I want to help out, so I've written this handy guide for when they come back on the one-year anniversary of the January quake!
For starters, always use the phrase 'the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.' Your audience must be reminded again of Haiti's exceptional poverty. It's doubtful that other articles have mentioned this fact. [...]
Read the full article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/crossover-dreams/a-guide-for-american-jour_b_656689.html
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
"We've Lost the Battle, but We Haven't Lost the War:" Haiti Six Months After the Earthquake
By Beverly Bell, Truthout
July 15, 2010
Haiti during the World Cup is much like my hometown of New Orleans was during the Superbowl. Don't try to make plans with anyone to do anything during a game. (In the more cash-rich New Orleans, the ban on non-game-related activity stretched back a day or two before a game, because there was food and alcohol to be purchased and a feast to be cooked.) I make the mistake of trying to go to a cell phone office during that time; employees sit hypnotized in front of the big-screen TV, unwilling to be distracted by clients.
When Argentina, a favorite in Haiti, loses the soccer match, I can finally conduct my business and leave the store. People are pouring out from their tents and houses with a thing or two to express about Argentina's loss. A group of skinny men parades in bikinis and wigs. Noontime drunks shout nonsense at each other. Throngs of mourners dance through the streets of Port-au-Prince, waving Argentine flags and palm fronds. Among them, loyalists still smarting from Brazil's loss wrap cloths with that country's flag around their heads.
"Thank God it's almost over," my friend Maryse, director of a special education school, said this morning. [...]
Read the full article:
http://www.truth-out.org/weve-lost-battle-we-havent-lost-war-haiti-six-months-after-earthquake61321
July 15, 2010
Haiti during the World Cup is much like my hometown of New Orleans was during the Superbowl. Don't try to make plans with anyone to do anything during a game. (In the more cash-rich New Orleans, the ban on non-game-related activity stretched back a day or two before a game, because there was food and alcohol to be purchased and a feast to be cooked.) I make the mistake of trying to go to a cell phone office during that time; employees sit hypnotized in front of the big-screen TV, unwilling to be distracted by clients.
When Argentina, a favorite in Haiti, loses the soccer match, I can finally conduct my business and leave the store. People are pouring out from their tents and houses with a thing or two to express about Argentina's loss. A group of skinny men parades in bikinis and wigs. Noontime drunks shout nonsense at each other. Throngs of mourners dance through the streets of Port-au-Prince, waving Argentine flags and palm fronds. Among them, loyalists still smarting from Brazil's loss wrap cloths with that country's flag around their heads.
"Thank God it's almost over," my friend Maryse, director of a special education school, said this morning. [...]
Read the full article:
http://www.truth-out.org/weve-lost-battle-we-havent-lost-war-haiti-six-months-after-earthquake61321
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Mayor Builds Palace Among Haiti Rubble
More Than 1 Million Remain Homeless in Haiti Six Months After the Quake
WPLG Local 10, Miami
July 12, 2010
[Le magistrat de Delmas (Port-au-Prince, Haiti) y construit une mansion alors que la zone pullule de milliers de sans-abri frappés par le séisme du 12 janvier 2010. Pour en voir plus, cliquez en bas.]
http://www.justnews.com/video/24230298/index.html
DELMAS, Haiti -- Among the cracked roads and broken-down lives of the Haitian city of Delmas rises a palace.
There, the emerald lawn is cut by hand. Walls are constructed with hand-laid limestone. Floors are lined with imported marble. The palace even features an amphitheater. When construction is done, the building will be the new city hall and the part-time residence of the mayor.
"This is our response to what happened," Delmas Mayor Wilson Jeudy told Local 10's Jonathan Vigliotti. "The state has to be well represented. It has to be royal."
Jeudy said the last city hall was undamaged by the January's 7.0-magnitude quake. Still, he built the new edifice as the people who elected him into office fought for their lives on the streets.
"In order for us to respond, we need a city hall like this one," he said.
According to Jeudy, when the doors open full-time later this year, it will function as a place to host visitors.
"It's beautiful. Did you see the floors?" said Miami-Dade County Commissioner Audrey Edmonson.
On Friday, Edmonson and other Miami-Dade County officials visited Delmas to announce their donation of fire trucks and ambulances. The county also will fly Haitian citizens to Miami for training.
The group gathered in one of the palace's unfinished rooms, where a Haitian man modeled new fire equipment brought over from Miami.
Following the ceremony, commissioners took a tour of how the other side lives in the western hemisphere's poorest country.
"The palace we just left was very grandiose. When you come down here where the people are, it just looks like there has been no movement," said Commissioner Dorrin Rolle.
Life is much different on the other side of city hall's gates. It has been six months since the quake first hit and still an estimated 25 million cubic yards of debris remain. Officials said it could take more than five years to remove the rubble. Only 10,000 of an estimated 1.2 million people have been found housing, and 1,300 new tent cities dot Haiti.
Ironically, critics said the delay in cleanup and rebuilding stems from the United Nations' close oversight of the distribution of funds.
For every dollar donated of the $1.2 billion so far, 99 percent goes directly to aid organizations. Only about 2 percent has been released. The remaining 1 percent, or about $10 million, has gone to the Haitian government.
"How much does this palace cost?" Vigliotti asked Jeudy.
"I cannot tell you how much it is because we're still under construction," he said.
While the price tag is unknown, Jeudy said American cities personally wrote him checks for $150,000.
"We're going to have to talk about this," Edmonson said.
"If you're not moving the people and making a better quality of life for them, then to us, on our side, it looks like nothing has been done. Nothing is being done," Rolle said.
As rebuilding continues, donors said breaking down the walls between the wealthy and those who are barely getting by is important to Haiti's recovery.
After seeing Local 10's story online Monday, a representative from Jeudy's office called to correct a statement. Now, the mayor's office says donations are not being used for the construction. Instead, Jeudy's office said, Haitian taxpayer dollars are being used.
The representative said that following the earthquake, the property was used for patients injured in the quake. The patients moved out as construction continued.
Since the people of Haiti are paying for the construction, according to the mayor's office, Vigliotti asked if the mayor's office would open its gates and allow people who are sleeping in the streets to set up tents on the lawn. The representative said the office would get back to Local 10.
Copyright 2010 by Post-Newsweek Stations. All rights reserved.
WPLG Local 10, Miami
July 12, 2010
[Le magistrat de Delmas (Port-au-Prince, Haiti) y construit une mansion alors que la zone pullule de milliers de sans-abri frappés par le séisme du 12 janvier 2010. Pour en voir plus, cliquez en bas.]
http://www.justnews.com/video/24230298/index.html
DELMAS, Haiti -- Among the cracked roads and broken-down lives of the Haitian city of Delmas rises a palace.
There, the emerald lawn is cut by hand. Walls are constructed with hand-laid limestone. Floors are lined with imported marble. The palace even features an amphitheater. When construction is done, the building will be the new city hall and the part-time residence of the mayor.
"This is our response to what happened," Delmas Mayor Wilson Jeudy told Local 10's Jonathan Vigliotti. "The state has to be well represented. It has to be royal."
Jeudy said the last city hall was undamaged by the January's 7.0-magnitude quake. Still, he built the new edifice as the people who elected him into office fought for their lives on the streets.
"In order for us to respond, we need a city hall like this one," he said.
According to Jeudy, when the doors open full-time later this year, it will function as a place to host visitors.
"It's beautiful. Did you see the floors?" said Miami-Dade County Commissioner Audrey Edmonson.
On Friday, Edmonson and other Miami-Dade County officials visited Delmas to announce their donation of fire trucks and ambulances. The county also will fly Haitian citizens to Miami for training.
The group gathered in one of the palace's unfinished rooms, where a Haitian man modeled new fire equipment brought over from Miami.
Following the ceremony, commissioners took a tour of how the other side lives in the western hemisphere's poorest country.
"The palace we just left was very grandiose. When you come down here where the people are, it just looks like there has been no movement," said Commissioner Dorrin Rolle.
Life is much different on the other side of city hall's gates. It has been six months since the quake first hit and still an estimated 25 million cubic yards of debris remain. Officials said it could take more than five years to remove the rubble. Only 10,000 of an estimated 1.2 million people have been found housing, and 1,300 new tent cities dot Haiti.
Ironically, critics said the delay in cleanup and rebuilding stems from the United Nations' close oversight of the distribution of funds.
For every dollar donated of the $1.2 billion so far, 99 percent goes directly to aid organizations. Only about 2 percent has been released. The remaining 1 percent, or about $10 million, has gone to the Haitian government.
"How much does this palace cost?" Vigliotti asked Jeudy.
"I cannot tell you how much it is because we're still under construction," he said.
While the price tag is unknown, Jeudy said American cities personally wrote him checks for $150,000.
"We're going to have to talk about this," Edmonson said.
"If you're not moving the people and making a better quality of life for them, then to us, on our side, it looks like nothing has been done. Nothing is being done," Rolle said.
As rebuilding continues, donors said breaking down the walls between the wealthy and those who are barely getting by is important to Haiti's recovery.
After seeing Local 10's story online Monday, a representative from Jeudy's office called to correct a statement. Now, the mayor's office says donations are not being used for the construction. Instead, Jeudy's office said, Haitian taxpayer dollars are being used.
The representative said that following the earthquake, the property was used for patients injured in the quake. The patients moved out as construction continued.
Since the people of Haiti are paying for the construction, according to the mayor's office, Vigliotti asked if the mayor's office would open its gates and allow people who are sleeping in the streets to set up tents on the lawn. The representative said the office would get back to Local 10.
Copyright 2010 by Post-Newsweek Stations. All rights reserved.
Monday, July 12, 2010
NYC: Haiti Events on 7/28 and 7/31
(Creole version below)
Haiti Emergency Committee
Wednesday July 28, 2010:
Anti-Occupation Demonstration in Front of the United Nations
43rd St/1st Ave, New York, NY
5:00 P.M. – 7:00 P.M.
and
Batay Ouvriye Solidarity Network
Saturday July 31, 2010:
Anti-Occupation Forum
Community Hall
Jean-Jacques Dessalines
836 Rogers Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11226
(Between Church Ave & Erasmus St; #2 Train to Church Ave)
6:00 P.M. – 9:00 P.M.
On Friday July 2nd, 2010, we met and decided to continue to work in the framework of the Haiti Emergency Committee, an organization many groups and individuals created in response to the tragic earthquake that hit Haiti on January 12, 2010. As can be noted above, we also agreed on a time and specific area for the anti-occupation Demonstration. We are calling on all progressives, justice-minded people and groups to join us and build these events during the month of July 2010
For more information, please call 646-829-9519
E-mail: bosolidarity@yahoo.com
*******************************
Komite Ijans Pou Ayiti
Mèkredi 28 Jiyè, 2010:
Manifestasyon Anti-Okipasyon Devan Nasyon Zini
43èm Ri/1e Avni, Nou Yòk, NY
5:00 P.M. – 7:00 P.M.
e
Rezo Solidarite ak Batay Ouvriye
Samdi 31 Jiyè, 2010:
Fowòm Anti-Okipasyon
Kay Jean-Jacques Dessalines
836 Rogers Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11226
Ant Church Ave ak Erasmus St
(Tren #2, Desann nan Church Ave)
6:00 P.M. – 9:00 P.M.
Vandredi 2 Jiyè 2010, nou te rankontre e deside travay sou banye Komite Ijans Pou Ayiti (Haiti Emergency Committee), yon gwoup dives òganizasyon ak endividi te kreye an repons a latè tranble trajik ann Ayiti 12 Janvye 2010 la. Kòm nou ka wè pi wo a, nou te dakò tou sou yon lè ak yon kote espesifik pou Manifestasyon an. Nou fè apèl a tout pwogresis, tout moun ak gwoup ki renmen jistis, pou rejwenn nou nan jefò pou bati aktivite sila yo pandan mwa Jiyè 2010 la.
Pou tout enfòmasyon, rele 646-829-9519
Imel: bosolidarity@yahoo.com
Haiti Emergency Committee
Wednesday July 28, 2010:
Anti-Occupation Demonstration in Front of the United Nations
43rd St/1st Ave, New York, NY
5:00 P.M. – 7:00 P.M.
and
Batay Ouvriye Solidarity Network
Saturday July 31, 2010:
Anti-Occupation Forum
Community Hall
Jean-Jacques Dessalines
836 Rogers Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11226
(Between Church Ave & Erasmus St; #2 Train to Church Ave)
6:00 P.M. – 9:00 P.M.
On Friday July 2nd, 2010, we met and decided to continue to work in the framework of the Haiti Emergency Committee, an organization many groups and individuals created in response to the tragic earthquake that hit Haiti on January 12, 2010. As can be noted above, we also agreed on a time and specific area for the anti-occupation Demonstration. We are calling on all progressives, justice-minded people and groups to join us and build these events during the month of July 2010
For more information, please call 646-829-9519
E-mail: bosolidarity@yahoo.com
*******************************
Komite Ijans Pou Ayiti
Mèkredi 28 Jiyè, 2010:
Manifestasyon Anti-Okipasyon Devan Nasyon Zini
43èm Ri/1e Avni, Nou Yòk, NY
5:00 P.M. – 7:00 P.M.
e
Rezo Solidarite ak Batay Ouvriye
Samdi 31 Jiyè, 2010:
Fowòm Anti-Okipasyon
Kay Jean-Jacques Dessalines
836 Rogers Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11226
Ant Church Ave ak Erasmus St
(Tren #2, Desann nan Church Ave)
6:00 P.M. – 9:00 P.M.
Vandredi 2 Jiyè 2010, nou te rankontre e deside travay sou banye Komite Ijans Pou Ayiti (Haiti Emergency Committee), yon gwoup dives òganizasyon ak endividi te kreye an repons a latè tranble trajik ann Ayiti 12 Janvye 2010 la. Kòm nou ka wè pi wo a, nou te dakò tou sou yon lè ak yon kote espesifik pou Manifestasyon an. Nou fè apèl a tout pwogresis, tout moun ak gwoup ki renmen jistis, pou rejwenn nou nan jefò pou bati aktivite sila yo pandan mwa Jiyè 2010 la.
Pou tout enfòmasyon, rele 646-829-9519
Imel: bosolidarity@yahoo.com
Friday, July 9, 2010
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.
&
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!
Stay tuned for updates on Facebook at:
www.Facebook.com/TheFreedwomensBureau
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.
&
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!
Stay tuned for updates on Facebook at:
www.Facebook.com/TheFreedwomensBureau
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