I was inspired after reading an article Foto8 about how all the pictures coming out of Haiti looked the same. And I remembered Binyavanga Wainaina’s article, “How to Write About Africa“, in which he writes:
Describe, in detail, naked breasts (young, old, conservative, recently raped, big, small) or mutilated genitals, or enhanced genitals. Or any kind of genitals. And dead bodies. Or, better, naked dead bodies. And especially rotting naked dead bodies. Remember, any work you submit in which people look filthy and miserable will be referred to as the ‘real Africa’, and you want that on your dust jacket. Do not feel queasy about this: you are trying to help them to get aid from the West. The biggest taboo in writing about Africa is to describe or show dead or suffering white people.
So, I thought I’d upload some pictures I took on Wednesday to a trip to the countryside, where a colleague and I were seeing how the waves of IDPs leaving Port au Prince were affecting rural communities. What we found was, in a sense, typical: we found problems, people who were frustrated, people who seemed to still be in shock. We also found families back together for the first time in a long time. We found parents taking in children, and children taking back their parents.
Read the rest of this entry »
Please visit this site if you agree with the letter and want to sign the petition.
Dear Mr. Brooks,
In your January 15, 2010, opinion piece in The New York Times, “The Underlying Tragedy,” you present what you seem to believe is a bold assessment of the situation in Haiti and what you certainly know is a provocative recommendation for Haiti’s future. You also offer some advice to President Obama. In order to successfully keep his promise to the people of Haiti that they “will not be forsaken” nor “forgotten” the president, you say, has to “acknowledge a few difficult truths.” What follows, however, is so shockingly ignorant of Haitian history and culture and so saturated with the language and ideology of cultural imperialism that no valuable “truths” remain. Please allow us, therefore, to present you with some more accurate truths.
First, Haiti is not a clear-cut case of the failure of international aid to achieve poverty reduction. For almost its entire existence, Haiti has been shouldered with a load of immense international debt. The Haitian people had the audacity to break their chains and declare independence in 1804, but were later forced by France to repurchase their freedom for 150 million francs, a burden that the country has had to carry throughout the 20th century.
What’s more, the “aid” Haiti has received from its powerful neighbor to the North has never been the sort that would help the country reduce poverty or achieve meaningful development. In the early 20th century, the principle aid Haiti received from the United States came in the form of a brutal military occupation that lasted from 1915 to 1934. After “Papa Doc” Duvalier ascended to power, “aid” meant assistance to a ruthless (but conveniently anti-communist) dictator. The US gave Duvalier $40.4 million in his first four years in power, briefly suspended military and economic assistance to the dictator in 1963, but resumed shortly thereafter, restoring full military and economic aid to Duvalier by 1969. In the early 1970s and 1980s, when “Baby Doc” Duvalier was at the helm, the “aid” the United States and other international agencies contributed failed to reduce poverty, but did enrich foreign investors in the newly constructed assembly industry. Economic policies that the US forced upon Haiti decimated its agriculture for the benefit of American farming while driving Haiti’s peasants into Port-au-Prince and other cities where they found few jobs and scarce housing. Four years after Baby Doc’s departure, the Haitian people decided to help themselves by democratically electing a new leader, but the United States aided Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s domestic opponents in the coup of 1991 and did so again in 2004. It is no wonder then that that such aid from the United States has failed to lift Haiti out of poverty.
Equally unconvincing is your argument about “progress-resistant cultural influences,” which brings us to important truth number two: Haitian culture is not “progress-resistant” as anyone familiar with the examples you yourself provide can attest to. If Vodou or “the voodoo religion” as you put it, “spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile,” how do the majority of Haitians manage to survive on scant resources and less than two dollars a day? How do so many Haitians manage to travel abroad, find and maintain difficult jobs and send money back home if not through careful planning and a fierce defense of precious life? How do the nationwide customers of Fonkoze, the Haitian banking operation that teaches literacy and business practices to curbside marketers to whom it makes small loans, achieve such strong records of loan repayment? In fact, it might be Haitian culture itself (and even Vodou) which allows Haitians to persist. After all, the Vodou spirit Ogou (St. Jacques) is honored as a clever planner and master of skills. So was the champion of Haiti’s war of independence, Gen. Toussaint L’Ouverture, a onetime slave who entered history as a military and diplomatic genius.
The third important truth we have to offer (and we hope President Obama is listening as well) is the opposite of your call for “intrusive paternalism” as the solution to Haiti’s woes: Haiti does not need nor does it want the paternalism of the United States. Haiti is literally dying of cultural imperialism.
Whenever America’s leaders and pundits speak of subordinate peoples, the ideology of imperialism shines through. As it does in your words, Mr. Brooks, so it has done for far too many earlier Americans. President William McKinley, for example, facing the difficult question of how he was to govern the newly-conquered Filipinos worried that:
left “to themselves they are unfit for self-government-and they would soon have anarchy and misrule … [So] there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them.”
Closer to home, those who worried about an earlier form of “progress-resistant cultural influences” decided it was better to remove the children of Native-American families than to let them absorb the backwardness of their pagan and uncivilized parents and community. A common refrain by these “reformers” was, “kill the Indian, save the man.” And now, Mr. Brooks, you propose to save the Haitians from themselves by replacing Haitian cultural values and institutions with “middle-class assumptions, an achievement ethos and tough, measurable demands.” Imperialism, whether economic or military, is the primary reason for the conditions that so worsened the impact of the earthquake on January 12. Haitians need less imperialism, not more.
During the Vietnam War, an American officer famously stated that “it became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.” Today, Haiti is virtually destroyed. The earthquake having done the hard part, Mr. Brooks, you think “intrusive paternalism” will save it. Lacking a foundational understanding of Haitian history and culture, and bearing the familiar colors of American imperialism, you and your ilk will do vastly more harm than good.
Direct Link to iPhone App via iTunes
I’ve been inundated with requests by people wanting to be volunteers in Haiti. While they’re intentions are great, unfortunetely there are too many conversations like this:
Me: Hope for Haiti Caller: Hi! I want to get on the next flight to Haiti and help! Me: Oh, hi, thank you! Do you have a background in medicine or disaster relief? Caller: Not at all! I just want to help!
Me: Hope for Haiti
Caller: Hi! I want to get on the next flight to Haiti and help!
Me: Oh, hi, thank you! Do you have a background in medicine or disaster relief?
Caller: Not at all! I just want to help!
I get it, and I don’t begrudge them one bit. But the truth is, right now the only volunteers needed are experts. Haiti will need plenty of non-expert volunteers in the coming weeks and months, but for now resources there are so tight, and security is so haphazard, that it’s not practical, safe, or helpful to go down there.
So what can I do? Give money to these big orgs that already have raised a ton?
Well, yeah, that would be a good start. Give $5. Give $10. I’m working with Hope for Haiti, and we’re having our first plane full of doctors and nurses land in Port au Prince in about 10 minutes. Another plane is landing in the DR with supplies. So the money being donated to Hope for Haiti IS REACHING HAITIAN PEOPLE.
But let’s say you already donated, or want to help in a more tangible way. If you’ve got tech skills, we need your help with Crises Mapping.
From the co-founder of Ushahidi (quotes are from Beth’s Blog)
We have received tremendous support from the crisis mapping community through the Crisis Mapping Network, the developer community, collaborating organizations like UN OCHA Columbia, INSTEDD, Haitianquake, Digital Democracy, FrontlineSMS, Google and others, and dozens of volunteers who’ve helped with everything from data entry, to translations, to data filtering. Since the site went live, the team has been working round the clock to make improvements to the instance, fix problems (our server has crashed several times already and our alert system went beserk!), coordinate efforts with volunteers, share information with partners, and collaborate with other tech-based efforts e.g. the people finder at Haitianquake (since merged with Google’s). The fact that we have a global team means that we have been able to offer round the clock support, with the Africa-based team taking over when the US-based team goes to sleep and vice versa.
We have received tremendous support from the crisis mapping community through the Crisis Mapping Network, the developer community, collaborating organizations like UN OCHA Columbia, INSTEDD, Haitianquake, Digital Democracy, FrontlineSMS, Google and others, and dozens of volunteers who’ve helped with everything from data entry, to translations, to data filtering.
Since the site went live, the team has been working round the clock to make improvements to the instance, fix problems (our server has crashed several times already and our alert system went beserk!), coordinate efforts with volunteers, share information with partners, and collaborate with other tech-based efforts e.g. the people finder at Haitianquake (since merged with Google’s). The fact that we have a global team means that we have been able to offer round the clock support, with the Africa-based team taking over when the US-based team goes to sleep and vice versa.
Ory describes their current challenges, including:
Close the feedback loop: that is, ensure that agencies trying to figure out where help is needed are tracking our reports and following up on requests for help that are coming in. We are currently doing this via the Crisis Mappers network, Sahana, and Internews and INSTEDD teams who have just landed in Haiti, but a lot more needs to be done.
Lots of reports coming out of Jacmel that there has been a lot of damage there. Photos here courtesy of the Cine Institute
Please find below:
1. Haiti: What Actions Have Been Taken Up to the Moment?
2. Haiti: What is in the Pipeline and What is the Timeline for Further Actions in the Next 24-48 Hours?
We will send more information as it becomes available.
Thank you,
White House Office of Legislative Affairs Read the rest of this entry »
http://haiti.ushahidi.com We have set up an international number: +44 7624802524
We would be forever grateful if you could share this number with as many people in Haiti as possible and let them know that this is one way to identify who is in trouble and where they are so that response operations has them on their radar. The site has already been publicized by the Clinton Foundation, UNDP and we’re expecting CNN to cover this as well. Plus, we’ve got 200+ members on the CrisisMappers Google Group who are desperately looking for real-time information so they can plan their response operations accordingly.
In my previous post, I mentioned some places you could donate money. Now, some words of caution, courtesy of Laura Freschi over at AidWatch, one of the best blogs around about International Development and, in particular, foreign aid:
(via http://aidwatchers.com/2010/01/haiti-earthquake-help-navigating-complex-terrain-of-disaster-relief/)
What you can do to help:
#1: Give $$$:
While the “big” agencies, such as the Red Cross and Medicines san Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) are “safe” bets, right now they’re receiving so much money that their delivery systems of money to people slow down. I would recommend giving to smaller NGOs that work on the ground, with less bureaucracy and more individual involvement. (This is not my advice in general, just for this particular emergency.) Some NGOs that fit this criteria would be:
#2: Stay informed
While CNN has had the best coverage, in my opinion, of the earthquake thus far, it is still relying on social network services for its news supply. Better to go to the source, no? These days, that (for better or worse) means Twitter.
The LA Times has its own list of people they follow on Twitter
I’m on Twitter.
The New York Times has a list they follow on Twitter
Make you own list! (the best option by far)
#3: Spread the word
If you’re on Twitter, “retweet” news you find. If you have a blog, blog about it. If you’re on facebook, post something. You get the idea.
There is a film of discomfort here that one doesn’t find in the south, partially explainable by the myriad of myopic Minustah, frantically looking at their watches while music pulsates in the background, reminding everyone that they have a 1am curfew, a badge of honor somehow. But they are an easy target—in truth, most of the people I meet working in development here are dissatisfied with their jobs, to varying degrees, ranging from apathy to antipathy to downright derision. Are their jobs really that uninspiring, truly that worthy of contempt? I don’t think so. The city itself is partly to blame, whether they recognize this or not. And not the city. Their perception of it. Port au Prince is like so many other big cities walled in from the outside country, protected from its’ countrymen, built on their bones, modern day St. Petersburg’s scattered throughout the “south”.
