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Hell and Hope in Haiti
Port Au prince police headquarters is gone, already bulldozed. A nearby college is pancaked. Goverment buildings are destroyed. Stores fallen down. Tens of thousands of buildings destroyed. Hundreds of thousands homeless.
Giant piles of concrete, rebar, metal pipes, plastic pipes, doors and wires.
Corpses are still inside many of the mountains of rubble. No estimates of how many thousands of people are dead inside.
Electrical poles bend over streets, held up by braids of thick black wires. On some side streets the wires are stll down in the street.
Buildings take unimaginable shapes. Some are half up while the other side slopes to the ground. Some like collapsed cakes. Others smashed like childre's toys.
Everywhere are sheet shelters. In parks, soccer fields, in the parking lot of the tv station, tens of thousands literally in the streets and on sidewalks.
Thousands of people standing in the hot sun waiting their turn. Outside the hospital, clinics, money transfer companies, immigration offices, and the very few places offering water or food.
Troops and heavy machinery are only seen in the center of the city.
After days in port Au prince I have seen only one fight - two teens fighting on a streetcorner over a young woman. No riots. No machetes.
Hope is found in the people of Haiti. Despite no electricity, little shelter, minimal food and no real goverment or order, people are helping one another survive.
Men and boys are scavenging useful items from the mounds of fallen buildings. Women are selling mangoes and nuts on the street. Teens are playing with babies.
Beautiful hymns are lifted as choirs calling to god in every sheet camp every evening. People pray constantly. The strikingly beautiful tap tap cabs trumpet in god we trust or merci Jesus on bright colors.
Everyone needs tents and food and medical care and water. But when you talk to them, most will lead you to the ailing great grandma or the malnourished child.
What should outsiders do, I asked Lavarice Gaudin? Lavarice, who helps the st. Clares community feed thousands each day through their What If Foundation, said "help the most poor first. Some who labored their whole lives to make a one bedroom home will likely never have a home again. Haiti needs everything.
But we need it with a plan. Pressure the Haitian goverent, pressure usaid to help the poorest."
International volunteers who work hand in hand with Haitians are welcomed. Others not so much.
Lavarice saw the associated press story that reported only one penny of every us aid dollar will go directly in cash to needy Haitians. "I can understand that they distrust the government but why not distribute aid through the churches and good community organizations?"
"We hope this will help us develop strong leadership that listens and responds to the people."
"No matter what, we will never give up. Haitians are strong hopeful people. We will rebuild."
- Posted in
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Show AllBill Quigley brainwash ---- “Intellectual betrayal”
Over one million in Haiti have not received water or food since the earthquake, and comes now this gutless-wonder article, surely new darkness to destroy your ability to see the light.
STARVING CHILDREN: "the malnourished child."
LIVING ON LEAN BODY TISSUE: "minimal food"
BABIES DYING OF DEHYDRATION: "Women are selling mangoes and nuts on the street"
Quote below from: http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/5083
“Varieties of intellectual betrayal
Almost no one now expects writers and cultural figures to stay aloof from politics. Open letters, manifestos and appeals from academics and writers are a common feature of contemporary political life, debate and propaganda, both nationally and internationally. Other much more practical varieties of intellectual betrayal than the idealistic variety identified by Julien Benda characterize debate and argument about contemporary affairs.
The most basic betrayal is to actively lie about events or deliberately misrepresent them by omitting readily available, relevant information. That kind of betrayal is most relevant to academics, who are generally subject to rigorous peer review. News reporters and their editors and publishers may once have aspired to similar high standards of appeal.
Such standards, if they ever existed in practice, have long ago been abandoned. Corporate mergers and acquisitions have concentrated media and Press ownership in a reactionary elite characterized by extremely ruthless solidarity against perceived enemies and critics. The news agencies' quasi-monopoly of news information combined with consolidation of corporate media ownership has effectively eliminated independent news media in most Western Bloc countries.
Even in the alternative media that proliferate on the Internet, other less obvious elements also affect the kinds of news and opinion that gets published. Class-attitudes and funding considerations definitely affect the news and views that appear. So, for example, if powerful individuals in the neocolonialist Left in Western Bloc countries decide, for example, to publish glib, mendacious attacks on Nicaragua's Sandinista government, then the alternative media they control will do so. Subsequently, they will omit to publish efforts to correct the falsehoods they have propagated.
Supposedly alternative media, like Counterpunch and ZNet, have both done exactly that over the last year or so. The class attitudes fomenting this kind of behaviour turn on who is friends with who, the intellectual managerial networks concerned and, crucially, funding. For most alternative media, as much as for the corporate media, editorial policy is decisively defined by marketing and consumer taste rather than by standards to which one might...”
Thanks to Bill Quigley for these reports.
Ray Berthiaume
Excellent. It is so difficult to read factual reports of what is happening in Haiti. The U.S. military has done to Haiti what they did to New Orleans after Katrina.
The one penny per US govt. $ comment refers to aid to the govt. of Haiti. Much of the US $ is spent on true aid, but unfortunately much of it is not.
NPR ----- VOICE OF CORPORATE RICH
“Our inclusion of critical comments from conservative pundit David Horowitz's in our obituary of Howard Zinn.”
“Zinn had a fringe mentality which unfortunately deceived a great many. He certainly altered the minds of millions of young people for the worse.”
Who is the person who posted the previous comment about Bill Quigley? Is he calling Bill a liar?
If so, he obviously does not know that Bill is a full time activist for the poor and all who have been treated unjustly. He has worked for the Haitian people for years.
It is an abomination to read what he posted.!