Haiti Earthquake News

Yoga Mats For Haiti?

2010-02-08T14:38:00.000-08:00

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Yoga Mats For Haiti?

via The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com by The Huffington Post News Editors on 2/8/10

Most of us haven't thought about our leisure/exercise equipment being needed in Haiti, but according to one sharp photographer in San Francisco, you can donate your used yoga mats for use in Haiti.

Effective or superfluous? You be the judge. (via boingboing)

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Haiti Earthquake Facts and Figures, Latest Update

2010-02-08T10:57:00.001-08:00

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Haiti Earthquake Facts and Figures, Latest Update

via (title unknown) by Mark Leon Goldberg on 2/8/10

The UN gives the latest facts and figures on Haiti recovery efforts, including mortality and displacement estimates.

The Haitian government has not issued a mortality estimate since January 28, when the government said that 112,405 had died. However, on February 3 the government said that as many as 200,000 may have been killed in the earthquake. Meanwhile, one of the major new developments of the past week has been a mass exodus from Port au Prince to rural areas. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that over 400,000 Haitians have fled Port au Prince for rural areas in the past two weeks. Food distribution is still a challenge.

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White "Savior-Afflicted" Christians, Black Haitian Babies: This Won't End Well

2010-02-08T10:56:00.001-08:00

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White "Savior-Afflicted" Christians, Black Haitian Babies: This Won't End Well

via AlterNet.org Main RSS Feed by Devona Walker, AlterNet on 2/5/10

Would the Baptists accused of taking Haitian kids out of the country illegally have tried to pull this off in a predominantly white country? Doubtful.

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UN Plaza: Talking Haiti Reconstruction With Paul Collier

2010-02-08T10:55:00.001-08:00

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UN Plaza: Talking Haiti Reconstruction With Paul Collier

via (title unknown) by Mark Leon Goldberg on 2/8/10

The author of The Bottom Billion, Wars Guns and Votes sits down with me to talk about Haiti reconstruction

The author of The Bottom Billion, Wars Guns and Votes sits down with me to talk about Haiti reconstruction. Collier has something of a front line view of this effort. He was tapped by the secretary general to write a report on Haiti's recovery for the United Nations last year. In the diavlog, Paul explains the roots of Haiti's poverty and explains how best the international community can manage Haiti's recovery.

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Why Haiti Should Beware Professional Do-Gooders

2010-02-05T14:15:00.001-08:00

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Why Haiti Should Beware Professional Do-Gooders

via Home on 2/5/10

Picture credit:telegraph.co.uk

The recent earthquake revealed several interesting facts about Haiti, one of them being that the nation has the highest number of local NGOs per capita in the world. The heavy presence of humanitarian and anti-poverty NGOs in the small country - which is also one of the poorest and worst developed in the Western hemisphere - begs a few questions: doe the presence of NGOs hinder Haitian efforts in pursuing development and self-sustainability? If there are more local NGOs in Haiti than any other, then why has it never managed to pull itself out of the quandary of chronic poverty and underdevelopment? As the Haitian government struggles to recover and respond to the recent calamity, increased involvement of foreign players triggers troubling concerns regarding its sovereignty.

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Haiti after the earthquake.

2010-02-05T14:14:00.001-08:00

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Haiti after the earthquake.

via Slate Magazine by Michael Deibert on 2/5/10

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti—Haiti's radio journalists, many of whom have long experience of operating under dictatorships and elected governments with little tolerance for critical press coverage, know a thing or two about adversity. But nearly a month ago, when Haiti's capital was devastated by an earthquake that leveled large sections of the city and killed at least 150,000 people, local reporters were suddenly faced with a whole new set of challenges."We try and orient people to where aid is being distributed, and every day we announce messages about people who are still missing," says Wendell Theodore, the silken-voiced news director of Radio Metropole in the capital's Delmas region. His own home destroyed, Theodore now broadcasts the names of the missing from under a tree in the radio station's yard, next to the tent he has slept in since his house collapsed."I saw our building shake," says Rotchild Francois, director of the capital's RFM radio in the Pétionville district, who was at his desk in the studio when the earthquake struck and dashed into the street with a dozen other employees. The station lost a reporter in the quake and was knocked off the air for five days. Reporters from Radio Galaxie, Radio Magic 9, and Radio Télé Ginen were also killed.Francois now spends his days combing the capital, trying to paint an audio picture of what is happening and to get information on the air about where aid is being distributed, the location of feeding and medical centers, and other important information. Many of the station's employees, fearful of aftershocks, refuse to enter the building.

[more ...]

Haiti - Port-au-Prince - Earthquake - Caribbean - Pétionville

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Fwd: Just arrived in Port-au-Prince

2010-02-05T09:13:00.000-08:00

View this email as a web page.

Zeeshan,

Flying into Port-au-Prince for the second time since the earthquake -- I was pleased to see continued signs of an expanding relief effort.

Today, I'll help my team deliver the emergency supplies we brought with us on our plane.

Donation by donation, it's the generosity of people like you that is keeping this relief effort going. And your continued dedication is what will make sure the Haitian people have the tools and supplies they need to rebuild.

As you read this, work is underway to deliver meals, set up temporary shelters, and restore access to health services for earthquake survivors. I'm proud that today we were able to deliver laptops, generators, plastic sheeting, protein bars, and 1,900 lbs of medical supplies.

And it's not going to stop there.

Long after the television crews have gone and emergency response teams have returned to their home countries, I can promise you the Clinton Foundation will remain committed to Haiti's long-term rebuilding and recovery.

We will work with reputable organizations, the Haitian government, and most importantly the people of Haiti to ensure that they are empowered to create more opportunities for jobs, education, and health care than existed the day before this tragedy occurred.

There is a Haitian proverb, "Men anpil chay pa lou," which translates as "Many hands lighten the load."

It's going to take a lot of help and a long time, but I know that together you and I can lighten the load that the Haitian people have carried on their own for far too long.

I'll continue to be in touch as our work continues here in Port-au-Prince and beyond.

Bill Clinton

PS. Only with your continued generosity will we be able to sustain these efforts. Please make a donation of any size today:

www.clintonfoundation.org/haitiearthquake

The Clinton Foundation seeks to address some of the world's more pressing challenges -- such as HIV/AIDS, global climate change, and extreme poverty -- through collaborative and systematic effort.

William J. Clinton Foundation • 55 West 125th St. • New York, NY 10027

White "Savior-Afflicted" Christians, Black Haitian Babies: This Won't End Well

2010-02-05T06:47:00.001-08:00

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White "Savior-Afflicted" Christians, Black Haitian Babies: This Won't End Well

via AlterNet.org Main RSS Feed by Devona Walker, AlterNet on 2/5/10

Would the Baptists accused of taking Haitian kids out of the country illegally have tried to pull this off in a predominantly white country? Doubtful.

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US Aid Reshuffling on Haiti Shows the Need for a Contingency Disaster Fund f...

2010-02-04T22:07:00.001-08:00

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US Aid Reshuffling on Haiti Shows the Need for a Contingency Disaster Fund for Humanitarian Relief

via (title unknown) by Mark Leon Goldberg on 2/4/10

The lead agency in charge of foreign humanitarian assistance is facing across the board cuts to pay for its efforts in Haiti.

The Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) is the lead American agency on humanitarian relief efforts like the one underway in Haiti. The problem is, it is just one office within the relatively small U.S.

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How to Rebuild Haiti

2010-02-04T22:06:00.001-08:00

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How to Rebuild Haiti

via Home on 2/3/10

Picture Credit: javno.com

World Bank President, Robert Zoellick, has made a strong statement on Haiti reconstruction and aid. But it remains to be seen what the Bank will actually do after years of negative influence on the islands economy. Zoellick highlights cash-for-work programs so Haitians can themselves be paid for reconstruction of their country. Debt-relief is also mentioned - Haiti is stifled by a debt burden of nearly $1 billion.

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Who's paying for Haiti?

2010-02-04T21:59:00.003-08:00

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Who's paying for Haiti?

via The Cable by Josh Rogin on 2/2/10

The State Department and the White House are busily working on a new request for supplemental funding to cover the near and immediate term costs for Haiti relief. But in the meantime, other countries funded by the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance are feeling the pinch and being forced to accept big budget cuts.

Consider this email sent to Somali teams working with OFDA funding that was sent to The Cable (emphasis added):

As a result of Haiti there have been some significant budget changes at OFDA that will have a major impact on the Somalia programs," it reads, "As you are probably well aware, OFDA is engaged in a multi-million dollar response in Haiti. As a result, we have had to make all available resources available for Haiti. What this means is that all regions within OFDA are being reduced by 40% resulting in subsequent reductions in planned programming at the country level."

State Department P.J. Crowley told The Cable that the redirection of funds from other countries' accounts was necessary but would not have consequences on the ground unless there is a long delay in receiving supplemental funding, which he said is unlikely.

"This temporary movment of money from the Somalia account to the Haiti account is going to have no impact on the ground in Somalia," Crowley said, "assuming that the supplemental occurs expeditiously."

In an exclusive interview with The Cable, Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew said that although the administration couldn't include Haiti funding in this week's budget request because the crisis came too late, the administration plans to ask for more Haiti relief funding soon. "There will be additional requirements related to the Haiti earthquake," said Lew. "We're working with OMB to come up with both the requirements and a strategy for meeting those needs."

A senior Democratic Senate aide told The Cable that the administration is "expeditiously" preparing a Haiti supplemental that will be separate from the regular and supplemental budget requests given to Congress this week, although no final decisions have been made.

In the meantime, "those places where they have existing or ongoing humanitarian issues are the ones that are having to slash their budgets," the Senate aide said, "That's basically saying there's a hierarchy of humanitarian assistance and Haiti is the most important ... and the other places will have to make due at the moment."

"We've drawn down emergency funds substantially," Lew acknowledged.

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Haitians Under U.S. Treatment Are Often Separated From Families

2010-02-04T21:59:00.001-08:00

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Haitians Under U.S. Treatment Are Often Separated From Families

via (title unknown) by Sheri Fink, ProPublica on 2/2/10

The U.S. has brought medical services to thousands of Haitians. But a bureaucratic tangle has left some struggling to find loved ones who were taken away for treatment.

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Scientologists In Haiti: Volunteers Doing More Harm Than Good?

2010-02-04T21:58:00.001-08:00

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Scientologists In Haiti: Volunteers Doing More Harm Than Good?

via The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com by The Huffington Post News Editors on 2/2/10

Gawker spoke to an aid worker who traveled to Haiti in the same plane as a group of Scientologists. He wrote to the website detailing the group's inadequate preparation and potentially harmful practices on the ground.

Among the offenses detailed: wearing inadequate footwear, bringing only money to attempt to buy supplies instead of bringing any food and water on the plane, bringing nobody who spoke Creole, feeding patients who were about to go into surgery.

By the time we arrived in Haiti, after a stopover in Miami, we had missed three landing slots at the airport. Aid agencies -- genuine aid agencies -- from other countries were being turned away, refused permission to land. But we still got a slot straight away. The guy who ran our charter seemed to think that the Scientologists had some real influence with the US Government, who were assigning the slots.

The doctors and EMTs in our party headed straight downtown to start working. The Scientologists had nowhere to go, and nowhere to put up the big yellow tent they'd brought for touch healing people in. They went to the UN, and managed to get on to their list of approved NGOs somehow. That meant they could set up in the UN grounds.

Read the full account on Gawker.com.

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Why We're Addicted to Disaster Porn

2010-02-04T21:55:00.001-08:00

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Why We're Addicted to Disaster Porn

via (title unknown) by David Sirota, AlterNet on 2/2/10

We can thank the likes of Sanjay Gupta, Brian Williams, Anderson Cooper -- disaster porn stars with visions of Peabodys and Pulitzers dancing in their heads.

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Haiti's Tragedy Belongs to the Environment

2010-02-01T20:03:00.003-08:00

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Haiti's Tragedy Belongs to the Environment

via Home on 2/1/10

Picture credit: NASA

The chronic suffering unleashed by Haiti's earthquake was exacerbated by the country's environmental degradation. Deforestation has destabilized Haiti's ecosystem, making it unsuitable for farming and vulnerable to natural disasters.

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UNESCO Protecting Haiti's Heritage

2010-02-01T20:03:00.001-08:00

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UNESCO Protecting Haiti's Heritage

via (title unknown) by Matthew Cordell on 2/1/10

UNESCO announced today that it is launching a campaign to protect the cultural heritage of Haiti, which will be an indispensable element in reconstruction.

UNESCO announced today that it is launching a campaign to protect the cultural heritage of Haiti. Amid the carnage, this may seem like a low priority, but, as Director General Irina Bokova explained:

This heritage is an invaluable source of identity and pride for the people on the island and will be essential to the success of their national reconstruction.

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Ration Cards in Hand, Thousands Welcome Aid

2010-02-01T20:02:00.001-08:00

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Ration Cards in Hand, Thousands Welcome Aid

via NYT > United Nations by By DAMIEN CAVE and GINGER THOMPSON on 1/31/10

Thousands lugged heavy sacks of rice through the streets as the first day of a new United Nations distribution system got under way with few snags.

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Jon Lee Anderson: One woman’s survival in Haiti.

2010-02-01T20:01:00.001-08:00

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Jon Lee Anderson: One woman’s survival in Haiti.

via Reporting & Essays by Jon Lee Anderson on 1/31/10

On the morning of Monday, January 18th, I set out with Frantz Ewald, a Haitian-born painter, to drive into Port-au-Prince from the hilltop suburb of Pétionville, where I was staying. It had been six days since the earthquake struck, and the city was still in . . .

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Dropping Haiti’s debt = sending old shoes

2010-02-01T20:00:00.001-08:00

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Dropping Haiti’s debt = sending old shoes

via Aid Watch by Guest Blogger on 1/31/10

The following post is by David Roodman, a research fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD) in Washington, DC.

Last week my colleague Michael Clemens blogged in this space about the "The best way nobody's talking about to help Haitians." So as a complement, here's what I think is the worst way that everybody's talking about to help Haitians: cancelling Haiti's debt.

I am not suggesting that Haiti's foreign creditors should stick to their guns in order to teach the country a lesson about the sanctity of international debt contracts. Canceling or reimbursing Haiti's debt payments over the next, say, five years, just as was done after the Asian tsunami, would make eminent sense. That would constitute debt relief but would not require debt cancellation.

Why not just cancel the debt outright, as the One Campaign, the Jubilee Debt Campaign, and Oxfam have demanded?

The benefit would be low. Most outstanding loans to Haiti are repayable over 25–40 years and charge 2%/year or less in interest. So while the face value of Haiti's debt is impressive—some $1.25 billion, not counting the $114 million in new IMF credits—the debt service over the next few years will be tiny. The IMF projects (table 7) the cost at $18 million for fiscal year 2009/10, rising to $34 million in 2011/12. Even those figures are high since the U.S. government is paying the $9 million/year interest on Haiti's loans from the Inter-American Development Bank. Perhaps half the rest is owed to Taiwan and Venezuela, whose susceptibility to press releases from western NGOs is uncertain. So as little as $25 million in debt service may be in play over the next 3 years.
Lobbying for debt cancellation crowds out other more important issues. Activist groups and politicians have limited time, staff, and political capital. Instead of fixating on dropping the debt, why don't activists and politicians campaign to hold public and private donors accountable for avoiding the mistakes of past disaster relief efforts? Why don't they take on textile interests in order to open our borders to "Made in Haiti"? Why not, as Michael argued, push for a Golden Door visa that would allow at least a few tens of thousands more Haitians into rich countries to work?

Reforming trade and migration policies, even getting donors to respond more effectively to disasters, requires confronting entrenched interests. But activists are at their best when they take on the tough fights. We owe it to Haitians to strive for what is best for them, not easiest for us.

A couple of weeks ago here on Aid Watch, Alanna Shaikh blogged under the title, Nobody wants your old shoes: How not to help in Haiti. Beyond the specific advice, she was voicing a big idea close to Aid Watch's heart: so many aid efforts go awry because the giver decides what the receiver needs.

I fear that calls to cancel Haiti's debt are the old shoes of political activism. Debt relief will hardly help Haiti recover from the quake. And in a crisis, if you're not helping, you're in the way. Let us do the equivalent in the policy realm of sending cash, by advocating reforms that will do far more to alleviate the suffering.

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Quake an opportunity for foreigners to “get Haiti right”? Aid “shock doctrine”?

2010-02-01T19:57:00.001-08:00

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Quake an opportunity for foreigners to “get Haiti right”? Aid “shock doctrine”?

via Aid Watch by William Easterly on 1/31/10

NEIL MacFARQUHAR in a good NYT story this morning (self-promotion alert: I am quoted in the story) notes all the discussion that the quake is an opportunity to sort out all the problems of long-run Haitian development. But an opportunity for whom? Apparently for foreigners. The story mentions some of the proposals for foreign intervention:

Haiti should be temporarily taken over by an international organization

{Bill Clinton as} Haiti reconstruction czar.

"Is it too wild a suggestion to be talking about at least temporarily some sort of receivership?" Senator Christopher J. Dodd, ….Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, echoed that thought, adding, "I think something far more draconian than just us working behind the scenes to prod reforms and those kinds of things is going to be necessary."

This current debate is an ironic echo of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, which is an excessively hysterical rant on how conservative foreigners impose free market doctrine on poor countries when they are reeling from things such as…natural disasters. Beneath Klein's purple rhetoric is the germ of a good idea, however: foreigners should not exploit disasters to bypass local, homegrown choices. The liberal version of the "Shock doctrine" is that disasters are an opportunity to impose their own statist solutions to development.

Even if the recipient of "shock therapy" does not have a democratic government, foreign intervention is also non-democratic. You can't trust foreigners to have the right incentives and the right knowledge – all they will wind up doing is delaying further the homegrown efforts of the locals to solve their own problems, with domestic politics distorted futher by xenophobic reactions against foreign intervention.

Foreign intervention is just another variety of the perpetual fantasy: the benevolent autocrat who will "get development right." We have already seen how this movie ends in Haiti, which has been the recipient of multiple military interventions and grand aid plans over more than a century – with the unhappy results that were on display before the earthquake.

Haitians certainly could benefit from some foreigners providing relief and aid to individual , but only if the foreign providers are humble searchers like Paul Farmer, and not grandiose and coercive foreign planners like those quoted above.

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Haitian Lawmakers Seek to Delay Elections

2010-02-01T19:56:00.001-08:00

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Haitian Lawmakers Seek to Delay Elections

via NYT > United Nations by By DAMIEN CAVE on 1/29/10

Haitian lawmakers plan to ask President René Préval to extend their terms of office, U.N. officials said.

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Senate Hearing on Haiti

2010-02-01T19:53:00.003-08:00

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Senate Hearing on Haiti

via (title unknown) by Mark Leon Goldberg on 1/28/10

A very refreshing hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Haiti just concluded.

A very refreshing hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Haiti just concluded. Paul Farmer who is Bill Clinton's Deputy UN Special Representative on Haiti, RAND's Jim Dobbins (a UN Dispatch favorite), and Rony Francois, the incoming director of public health for the state of Georgia testified on what is needed for Haiti's long term recovery.

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Rebuilding Connections After the Quake

2010-02-01T19:53:00.001-08:00

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Rebuilding Connections After the Quake

via (title unknown) by Mark Leon Goldberg on 1/28/10

To reconnect families affected by the earthquake, Telecoms Sans Frontieres visited the largests camp for internally displaced persons in Port-au-Prince.

By Myriam Annette, read part 1 of Myriam's

"Thanks to TSF's calling operation, I could call my uncle in Venezuela. It was essential to reassure him about my family, to tell him that we all are alive. For me, the most important thing for survival is to keep the family connections, whatever the situation."

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Imagine Haiti with Radiation Sickness and Burns: Why We Must Disarm

2010-02-01T19:52:00.001-08:00

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Imagine Haiti with Radiation Sickness and Burns: Why We Must Disarm

via AlterNet.org Main RSS Feed by Linda Gunter, AlterNet on 1/27/10

If we wish never to see a "nuclear Haiti," nuclear abolition must happen and it is up to all of us to maintain the pressure on our leadership until it does.

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Haiti: "Cash for Work" Program Up and Running

2010-02-01T19:51:00.001-08:00

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Haiti: "Cash for Work" Program Up and Running

via (title unknown) by Mark Leon Goldberg on 1/27/10

The UN is trying to jump-start the cash economy in areas affected by the earthquake.

The Haiti earthquake not only collapsed buildings and killed as many as 200,000 people, it also destroyed the already fragile economy around Port-au-Prince. Now that the search and rescue phase has concluded, the UN is trying to jump-start the cash economy in areas affected by the earthquake. To that end, the United Nations Development program launched a "cash for work" program in which Haitians are hired on a day-to-day basis to help clear rubble and clean the streets. From the UN New

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U.S. ambassador to Haiti: "There's a great deal of frustration among people ...

2010-02-01T19:50:00.003-08:00

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U.S. ambassador to Haiti: "There's a great deal of frustration among people here"

via The Cable by Josh Rogin on 1/27/10

Problems with food distribution and infrastructure, rather than a lack of food supplies, are responsible for rising unrest on the ground in Haiti, U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Merten (the man looking into the camera at right) told The Cable in a phone interview from Port-au-Prince.

"The amount of food we have is sufficient; the issue is getting it out to people in a form they can most easily use and eat and getting it to certain distribution points in sufficient numbers," he said.

Merten confirmed that on Monday Brazilian personnel used tear gas on a crowd of Haitians at a food-distribution point. He said that aid groups were reevaluating the system for how much food to send where.

"People need to understand there's a great deal of frustration among people here," Merten said. "They have to wait longer. Their anger is understandable; it's unfortunate."

He also said he completely shared Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's sentiment that she "deeply resented" criticisms by other countries about the military face of the U.S. relief effort.

"The fact of the matter is the military is here because they have the immediate capability to bring humanitarian aid to the area," Merten elaborated. "They're close, they have the capability, that's why they are here."

"I would suggest that other countries maybe haven't thought that through."

The number of flights landing at the Haiti airport has actually gone down recently, but that's not due to a decrease in demand, according to Merten. There has been a rise in "no shows" -- planes that asked for landing clearance but then for whatever reason missed their appointed slots. U.S. Southern Command is still running the airport, but coordinating flight priorities with USAID and the U.N., he added.

Food distribution is the top mission right now, but in a few days that will shift to increasing the amount of temporary shelter. It's been fortunate for the relief effort that not much rain has fallen since the earthquake, but that luck won't last forever, Merten said.

It will still be several weeks, however, before any plans for large-scale reconstruction will be developed. The U.S. is evacuating orphans by the hundreds and the main challenges there are linking up the orphans with the correct foster families and making sure they really are orphans in the first place.

Overall, the aid mission is hampered most by poor roads and facilities that weren't in good shape in the past, but are now also covered in rubble. It takes an hour to travel just 5 miles, Merten said, and traffic congestion is horrendous.

"The infrastructure is a huge limitation here and there's a lack of appreciation of what the infrastructure challenges here are and were even before the crisis occurred."

There are now 56 confirmed American deaths in Haiti and 36 more reported but not confirmed. One embassy official, four local hires, and three dependents of U.S. government employees have perished since the crisis began.

JEAN-PHILIPPE KSIAZEK/AFP/Getty Images

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IMF to Haiti: Freeze Public Wages

2010-02-01T19:50:00.001-08:00

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IMF to Haiti: Freeze Public Wages

via Home on 1/27/10

Picture Credit: deloitte.com

"It's time to stop having a conversation about charity, and start having a conversation about justice" says Richard Kim on Haiti's reconstruction and development. The country's vulnerability is not accidental. Since liberation from France in 1804, Haiti has been stymied by a relentless debt-burden. Recently, the IMF announced a new $100 million emergency loan. But Haiti is already bound to $165 million in IMF debt, and limited to the conditionalities imposed along with it.

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Is mobile giving a good idea?

2010-02-01T19:49:00.001-08:00

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Is mobile giving a good idea?

via Slate Magazine by Sandy Stonesifer on 1/27/10

Dear Sandy,I've seen more organizations request donations via text message lately, especially after the earthquake in Haiti. Is this a cost-effective way to donate? How does the overhead charged by phone companies compare with credit card donations or the trouble of processing checks? Are there any downsides?

[more ...]

Haiti - Text messaging - Credit card - Telephone company - Caribbean

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Earthquake Aftermath: Delivering Food and Connecting Aid Workers

2010-02-01T19:47:00.005-08:00

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Earthquake Aftermath: Delivering Food and Connecting Aid Workers

via (title unknown) by Mark Leon Goldberg on 1/26/10

A World Food Program insider describes how relief workers regrouped in the immediate aftermath of the Haiti earthquake to provide aid to desperate Haitians.

By Mariko Hall, Consultant, Advocacy (IT Emergency Preparedness and Response Branch)

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New Haiti PSA

2010-02-01T19:47:00.003-08:00

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New Haiti PSA

via (title unknown) by Mark Leon Goldberg on 1/26/10

A new public service announcement on Haiti from the UN Foundation shows how the UN is helping Haiti

A new public service announcement on Haiti from the UN Foundation shows how the UN is helping Haiti.

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What the Jan. 12 earthquake means for Haiti's ecosystem.

2010-02-01T19:47:00.001-08:00

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What the Jan. 12 earthquake means for Haiti's ecosystem.

via Slate Magazine by Nina Shen Rastogi on 1/26/10

The human toll of the Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti has been devastating, with the government reporting more than 150,000 dead in the Port-au-Prince area alone. What, if anything, does the disaster mean for the environment?

[more ...]

Haiti - Port-au-Prince - Government - Caribbean - Travel and Tourism

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Mexico Argues for New UN Approach in Haiti

2010-02-01T19:46:00.001-08:00

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Mexico Argues for New UN Approach in Haiti

via Home on 1/25/10

Picture credit: CBS News

Ambassador, Claude Heller, of Mexico asserts that UN peacekeeping forces in Haiti must do "much more...in order to deal with this disaster." Mr. Heller's comments follow the earthquake that devastated Haiti on January 12. He recommends that the "United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti" (MINUSTAH) re-examine its mandate because it is not addressing the most pressing need of the Haitian people: to establish a secure and stable environment.

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Haiti Should Merge With the Dominican Republic - FOXNews

2010-02-01T19:45:00.001-08:00

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Haiti Should Merge With the Dominican Republic - FOXNews

via Dominican Republic - Google News on 1/25/10

Haiti Should Merge With the Dominican Republic
FOXNews
Haiti, a nation neighboring the Dominican Republic to its east, is on the island Hispaniola. Hispaniola was discovered -- well before what we now call North ...
Learning about HaitiBurlington Times News
Funds for HaitiSCSU University Chronicle
Haiti's troubles preventableRutland Herald
Stabroek News
all 6 news articles »

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Explore Haiti in Fully Interactive 360 Degree Video [Haiti]

2010-02-01T19:44:00.001-08:00

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Explore Haiti in Fully Interactive 360 Degree Video [Haiti]

via Gizmodo by Kyle VanHemert on 1/23/10

We've covered how technology has shaped relief efforts in Haiti and shown how it has affected our perception of the nation's continuing tragedy. CNN is now offering new perspectives of the devastated nation with three interactive, immersive videos.

The videos were shot over the last week in Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital and largest city, the third of which captures the destruction most strikingly. The technology comes courtesy of Immersive Media, a company that specializes in interactive 360 degree video and helped provide much of the data that powers Google Street View. Their website already had demos of their unique videos, in which the viewer has full control to pan and zoom even as the video plays, but it's good to see the technology being applied to a very current event and displayed on as visible a platform as CNN.com.

The situation in Haiti remains in many ways unfathomable, no matter how many reports or photos or statistics one consumes. But this type of project shows how technology is constantly providing new ways to experience and understand the world. [CNN via Boing Boing]

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Shah visits Haiti response center

2010-02-01T19:43:00.001-08:00

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Shah visits Haiti response center

via The Cable by Josh Rogin on 1/25/10

Newly minted USAID administrator Rajiv Shah stopped by the operations hub of the Haiti crisis response management team on the ninth floor of the Ronald Reagan building Monday morning, as the response effort shifts from lifesaving to food aid and eventually, development.

Shah was accompanied by World Food Programme Executive Director Josette Sheeran, formerly head of the State Department's Economics, Business, and Cultural Affairs bureau. Both officials traveled to Haiti over the weekend and reported that while rescue efforts are giving way to food and medical aid, the long-term needs and plans are still unknown.

"We're just assessing the magnitude of the damage and challenges ahead," said Sheeran. "What's important is the commitment of the world to stand by them beyond the crisis phase, which we're not out of yet... I don't think we yet know the full dimension of the problem."

"Our primary goal for the next few weeks is to support the WFP and support the capacity they have ... to reach as many Haitians as possible with food, water, and other critically needed supplies," said Shah.

WFP has delivered more than 1.5 million rations in the 10 days immediately after the earthquake and is ramping up that flow of meals every day. The rations are mostly what are called High Energy Biscuits so far, but now there is a drive to switch to regular commodities like rice, oil, and salt.

New sea and land routes are being opened up, the U.S. military is supporting food-distribution efforts by helicopter, and the first of a number of landing boats that can bring food right to the beach will arrive soon.

[[BREAK]]

The core office pictured here will probably last only until the end of February, said one USAID official who was authorized to speak only on background. Plans for the response management team overall extend to the end of the 2010 calendar year. After that, most ground efforts will be rolled up and all Haiti efforts will probably shift back to USAID's regional bureau, the official said.

Shah gave no specific details about how the U.S. was thinking about the long-term Haiti commitment saying, "We were there before for a long time; we will be there going forward."

USAID is draining funds from its emergency and regular accounts to pay for the mission, but will need that funding replenished sooner rather than later.

"We're hoping on a pretty robust supplemental," the USAID official said.

One major question is over whether USAID really has a say in how the airport in Port-au-Prince, which is managed now by U.S. Southern Command, functions.

"DOD maintains control of the airport at this time," the official said, adding that about 150 to180 flights per day is the maximum rate. A spokesman for USAID said that USAID is involved in setting the priority for which flights get those spots.

Another emerging issue is whether the U.S. is actively searching for and dealing with refugees who may try to get to the United States. No refugees have been caught trying to make their way from Haiti to the United States. That's odd, considering that Haitians who are in the U.S. illegally have been given 18 months of amnesty from deportation, raising their incentive to make the trip.

So is the U.S. is just too busy to catch fleeing refugees? Or has there been some determination made to deprioritize that issue? Shah said the Coast Guard is on the job and closely monitoring the situation.

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150,000 Bodies Buried in Haiti; Death Toll Could Top 300,000

2010-01-25T09:32:00.001-08:00

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150,000 Bodies Buried in Haiti; Death Toll Could Top 300,000

via AlterNet.org Main RSS Feed by , Democracy Now! on 1/25/10

Haiti Communications Minister: "Nobody knows how many bodies are buried in the rubble."

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IAEA Sends Much-Needed X-Ray Machines to Haiti

2010-01-25T09:31:00.001-08:00

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IAEA Sends Much-Needed X-Ray Machines to Haiti

via (title unknown) by Matthew Cordell on 1/25/10

Beyond acting as the world's nuclear watchdog, the IAEA also fosters "the role of nuclear science and technology in sustainable development" and also, apparently, in emergency assistance. How cool is that?

If that headline strikes you as surprising, you are not alone. I, for one, thought that the IAEA had enough on its plate acting as the world's nuclear watchdog, but, it turns out, they also run a "Department of Technical Cooperation," which fosters "the role of nuclear science and technology in sustainable development." How cool?

Just a taste of some recent projects:

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The best way nobody’s talking about to help Haitians

2010-01-25T09:30:00.001-08:00

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The best way nobody’s talking about to help Haitians

via Aid Watch by Guest Blogger on 1/24/10

The following post is by Michael Clemens, a research fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC, and an affiliated associate professor of public policy at Georgetown University.

The U.S. coast guard interdicts a boat of Haitians on the high seas, 2004

The earthquake two weeks ago hit Haiti hard because Haiti is poor. The rich U.S. had similar earthquakes with far less carnage. So, what would do the most to lift Haitians out of poverty?

Start here: What has done the most, to date, to lift Haitians out of poverty? That answer is easy. Leaving Haiti brought more Haitians out of poverty than anything else that has ever been tried: any aid project in Haiti, or any trade preference for Haiti. See my note and video posted the day before Haiti's catastrophe.

Of all the Haitians who live either in the United States or Haiti, and who live on more than $10 per day—at U.S. prices, adjusted for the fact that things are cheaper in Haiti—how many live in the U.S.? (That's a barebones poverty standard, just one third of the U.S. "poverty line" for a single adult.)

82 Percent of Haitians above this poverty line are here in the United States. (I calculate this with Lant Pritchett here, ungated version here.) Only the top 1.4 percent of people in Haiti had that living standard even before the quake, and there is no evidence that Haitian emigrants come primarily from the extreme tip-top of the income distribution. So for most of Haitians who left, leaving Haiti was the cause of leaving poverty.

The Obama administration decided that for the next 18 months it will not deport any Haitian. But the U.S. has only been deporting about 1,000 Haitians per year recently. More importantly, the U.S. has forcibly stopped and repatriated about 5,000 Haitians per year for the past 20 years—people who never made it to the U.S. And this policy surely deterred thousands more each year from even trying. When Gallup asked people in Haiti last year if they would leave permanently if given the opportunity, 52 percent said yes. The U.S. is actively blocking the most effective poverty reduction strategy for Haitians.

When I talk about leaving Haiti as a development strategy for Haitians, some thoughtful people argue that this "can't be the solution for Haiti." Compared to what we all wish for in Haiti—rapid emergence from poverty for everyone there, in their homeland—leaving Haiti is a terrible solution. But compared to what is actually likely to happen in Haiti, continued poverty for decades at least, leaving Haiti is the principal solution to poverty. This is the right comparison, not the comparison to a prosperous Haiti that must remain a fantasy for now.

The best thing the United States could do for Haitians would be to let them in, either temporarily or permanently. We are now accepting about 21,000 permanent Haitian immigrants per year, and just a few hundred temporary workers per year. If we really wanted to raise Haitians out of destitution, we could absorb many times more than this. To say that we shouldn't because it wouldn't be the end-all solution is like saying that a lifeboat shouldn't fill its ten empty seats just because there are 100 people in the water.

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Edwidge Danticat: Haiti, the earthquake, and my family.

2010-01-25T09:29:00.003-08:00

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Edwidge Danticat: Haiti, the earthquake, and my family.

via Politics by Edwidge Danticat on 1/24/10

My cousin Maxo has died. The house that I called home during my visits to Haiti collapsed on top of him. Maxo was born on November 4, 1948, after three days of agonizing labor. "I felt," my Aunt Denise used to say, "as though I spent all . . .

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Bill Clinton for President……..of Haiti?

2010-01-25T09:29:00.001-08:00

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Bill Clinton for President……..of Haiti?

via Aid Watch by William Easterly on 1/24/10

The Economist leader on Haiti:

investment {should} be targeted on infrastructure, basic services and combating soil erosion to make farmers more productive and the country less vulnerable to hurricanes.

The pressing question is who should do it and how. Haiti's government is in no position to take charge, yet the country needs a strong government to put it to rights. Paul Collier, a development economist who worked on the plan, reckons that the answer is to set up a temporary development authority with wide powers to act.

Given the local vacuum of power, this is the best idea around. The authority should be set up under the auspices of the UN or of an ad hoc group (the United States, Canada, the European Union and Brazil, for example). It should be led by a suitable outsider (Bill Clinton, who is the UN's special envoy for Haiti, would be ideal…

If this doesn't strike you as misguided on too many levels to count, then … I give up.

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Telethon: “We’ve seen the earth quake but the soul of the Haitian people it ...

2010-01-24T06:51:00.001-08:00

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Telethon: “We’ve seen the earth quake but the soul of the Haitian people it will never break.”

via Aid Watch by William Easterly on 1/23/10

You might expect a certain critic of celebrity-aid to make fun of the Haitian telethon last night.

And there were indeed some cringe-inducing moments in this 4-minute video summary I just watched.

But it's a little-known dark secret that crotchety skeptics often have a sentimental streak. So what's really wrong about some well-meaning gushy-anthem-belting megastars raising money for some currently very needy people?

I just hope that some day we will get to the point where there will also be an anthem about accountability. Here's some lyrics by an anonymous contributor, for which I take no responsibility:

So clear the fogs/Listen to the blogs/Don't just throw dollars out the door/Make sure them reaches the poor.

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Media Disaster: In Haiti, Words Can Kill

2010-01-23T08:37:00.001-08:00

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Media Disaster: In Haiti, Words Can Kill

via AlterNet.org Main RSS Feed by Rebecca Solnit, Tomdispatch.com on 1/22/10

Why call the victims of a devastating earthquake looters? How about: "Resourceful survivors salvage the means of sustaining life from the ruins of their world."

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Haiti after the earthquake.

2010-01-23T08:36:00.003-08:00

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Haiti after the earthquake.

via Slate Magazine by Michael Deibert on 1/22/10

PETIT-GOÂVE, Haiti—They work all day under the blazing sun, hammers and saws in hand, pulling down the last remnants of a structure that had served as the crowning jewel for this once-picturesque town set along the glittering Caribbean Sea.Numbering about two dozen, the men are tearing down what little remains of the town's storied Église Notre Dame, which once loomed over the city in gleaming blue-and-white relief. Now, only its foundation and the altar remain.Along with the capital, Petit-Goâve, some 45 miles southwest of Port-au-Prince, was perhaps the most thoroughly devastated municipality in the country after the Jan. 12 earthquake.As well as the church, the state telephone company building, the mayor's office, a hotel, and scores of houses—all with people still inside—were leveled by the tremor. Dangerous, yawning fissures opened up along the road into town"This church was here for a long time, for 208 years," said 67-year-old Nathan Leger, pausing as hammers echoed in the background and men milled about wearing surgical masks to protect them from particles of dust and human decay. "It's a catastrophe. We will not have something like this again."The church collapsed within seconds, burying market women, passers-by, and people who had paused to rest in its shade. Residents estimate that at least 350 died in the town, which was playing host to three large meetings on the day of the quake.Once, it was known for its particularly fine collection of Haitian "gingerbread" wooden architecture, as well as for its sweet tricolored candy, douce marcosse. Now, Petit-Goâve presents a face of utter destruction, its streets choked with the debris of collapsed buildings. The town was further traumatized by a 6.1 aftershock Wednesday morning, which caused even more damage"We were injured, we were hit hard, and now we are sleeping in the street," says Andre Zanmi, a white-haired woman camped out in the middle of Rue Faustin with a dozen members of her family, some of whom bear deep cuts and gashes that have yet to receive medical attention.Sitting in front of a house with half its roof collapsed, the family has strung a blanket between two trees to provide some cover.Like most people in town, Zanmi said that other than patrols by a Sri Lankan contingent of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti—which itself lost its top command when the organization's Port-au-Prince headquarters was destroyed—they have yet to receive any outside help.By late in the week, though, help appeared to be on its way. In a clearing in the town of Carrefour Dufort, near Petit-Goâve, members of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, based in Camp Lejeune, N.C., were distributing food aid by helicopter."It's just good to be able to be here to help," Sgt. Claude Barthold, who was born in the Haitian capital, told me. "But it's overwhelming what you see here."On Thursday, the Red Cross also announced that it had opened two first-aid posts in Petit-Goâve, staffed by Haitian Red Cross volunteers.The earthquake has been a brutal blow for this historically significant community, which was the birthplace of one of Haiti's most important leaders, Faustin Soulouque. The son of African-born slaves, Soulouque climbed through the ranks of the post-independence military before being elected president by a Senate vote in 1847. (Building up an irregular network of armed partisans called zinglins, Soulouque's modus operandi served as a precursor to the creation of the feared Tonton Macoutes paramilitary force of Haitian dictator Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier a century later, as well as that of the chimères, the armed youth groups with which President Jean-Bertrand Aristide sought, unsuccessfully, to cling to power.)After two unsuccessful invasions of neighboring Dominican Republic in search of loot he could use to pay the onerous 150 million franc "debt" that former colonial power France demanded in exchange for Haiti's hard-won independence, Soulouque was overthrown in 1859 and died in exile, the melancholy fate of so many of Haiti's leaders.In more recent years, Petit-Goâve was the site of one of the first major demonstrations against the Aristide government in December 2001, when the funeral of a local journalist, Brignol Lindor, murdered by Aristide partisans, was fired on by police and flared into a major disturbance.Now, though, residents are literally picking up the pieces of a shattered way of life."Only God knows why this happened," Robert Henry Etienne told me as he walked the dusty streets with a notebook in hand, carefully cataloging every ruined and damaged structure in meticulous handwriting in the hope that they might one day be rebuilt. "But we need the international community to help the Haitian people, who are sleeping on the streets. We need help, from whatever country in the world."

[more ...]

Haiti - Port-au-Prince - Dominican Republic - Jean-Bertrand Aristide - Tonton Macoute

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How the United States and the United Nations Are Cooperating in Haiti

2010-01-23T08:36:00.001-08:00

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How the United States and the United Nations Are Cooperating in Haiti

via (title unknown) by Mark Leon Goldberg on 1/22/10

UN Dispatch obtains the "Memorandum of Understanding" between the United States and the United Nations regarding Haiti relief efforts.

Earlier today, the United States formally entered into an agreement with the United Nations on a division of responsibilities in Haiti. The "Memorandum of Understanding," obtained by UN Dispatch, enumerates the tole of a U.S.

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Israeli Military Being Celebrated For Work In Haiti, But What About The Suff...

2010-01-23T08:35:00.003-08:00

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Israeli Military Being Celebrated For Work In Haiti, But What About The Suffering in Gaza?

via AlterNet.org Main RSS Feed by Jerrold Kessel, Pierre Klochendler, IPS News on 1/22/10

Israel's President Shimon Peres recently referred to the Israeli Defense Forces as the "Israeli forces for saving mankind."

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Haiti Earthquake PSA

2010-01-23T08:35:00.001-08:00

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Haiti Earthquake PSA

via (title unknown) by Mark Leon Goldberg on 1/22/10

A Haiti earthquake PSA from the UN Foundation, "Help the UN Help Haiti."

A Haiti earthquake PSA from the UN Foundation.

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Prices in Haiti on the Rise While the Population Starves

2010-01-22T05:06:00.001-08:00

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Prices in Haiti on the Rise While the Population Starves

via AlterNet.org Main RSS Feed by Garry Pierre-Pierre, New America Media on 1/22/10

A gallon of cooking oil that cost $10 only days ago now fetches US$20. What will they cost tomorrow? No one knows.

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A Multiple Choice Post on Haiti Disaster

2010-01-22T05:05:00.001-08:00

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A Multiple Choice Post on Haiti Disaster

via Aid Watch by Laura Freschi on 1/21/10

Which best describes Port-au-Prince?

A) A hotbed of looting, machete-wielding gangs and violence.

"Downtown Port-au-Prince now feels like a war zone. Gangs with machetes rule the streets here." – CBS News 1/14/2010

"Hundreds of people desperate for food and supplies swarmed downtown Haiti yesterday, climbing atop piles of broken rubble and shards of glass to get to canned goods, powdered milk, and batteries buried underneath. On the main boulevard, the Grand Rue, their desperation flared into violence at times as teenage boys and men scuffled over goods, and some sparred with sticks. Police fired warning shots into the air but were powerless to halt them." – Boston Globe, 1/19/2010

B) Currently being saved by American and international rescue teams (with heroic assists from Anderson Cooper and Sanjay Gupta).

"On Tuesday, the White House press office emailed out the YouTube clip below with a subject line, 'AMAZING VIDEO: Crowd starts chanting USA, USA during L.A. County USAR rescue.'" – Huffington Post 1/19/2010

C) Full of relatively calm people trying to get by amidst overwhelming destruction.

"The mood managed to stay mostly calm, as residents carried leather-bound Bibles to pray outside their ruined churches." – New York Times 1/18/2010

"One saving grace is that in spite of reports of violence and outbreaks of looting, the overriding atmosphere across the capital is of patient resignation rather than a society on the brink of collapsing into anarchy. – Financial Times, 1/19/2010

D) ALL or NONE of the above.

This is not to diminish the extent of the devastation in Port-au-Prince, the poor state of governance and infrastructure even before the quake, or the degree to which many survivors must be thirsty, hungry, tired, weak and in shock. But I wonder if some media coverage of the earthquake's aftermath leads to a distorted picture of Haitians as either crazed and violent on one hand, or completely helpless and awaiting our rescue on the other.

Earlier this week on his blog, Chris Blattman asked whether robbery was as widespread as some news reports and photographs seemed to imply. This perception mattered, he said, because "an aid and security policy designed for thieving, ungovernable, progress-resistant Haitians looks very different from one that views civil society institutions as shaken but fundamentally strong."

How would an overblown perception of violence and insecurity in Port-au-Prince affect the delivery of disaster-relief aid?

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DC DIARY: Hope for Haiti —Zeeshan Suhail

2010-01-21T20:09:00.005-08:00

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DC DIARY: Hope for Haiti —Zeeshan Suhail

via www.dailytimes.com.pk on 1/21/10

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How Western Domination Has Undermined HaitiÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s Ability to Recover from...

2010-01-21T20:09:00.003-08:00

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How Western Domination Has Undermined HaitiÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s Ability to Recover from Natural Devastation

via AlterNet.org Main RSS Feed by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! on 1/21/10

An interview with journalist Kim Ives about Washington's domination of Haiti.

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Haiti and Dr. Shah’s First Test

2010-01-21T20:09:00.001-08:00

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Haiti and Dr. Shah’s First Test

via Conversations on Diplomacy and Power Politics by admin on 1/21/10

Over the last week, the world has been watching the brutal aftermath of a 7.0 earthquake, which struck Haiti last Tuesday afternoon. For Rajiv Shah, the execution and delivery of relief efforts are to be his first test since taking over the US Agency for International Development (USAID) this past Christmas Eve. However, in the coming weeks ahead, after the initial nutritional, shelter and hygienic needs of Haiti are met – a real development plan for Haiti must be made.

Supplies being unloaded onto Haiti's airport tarmac photo/Google Earth

While this seismic tragedy was unexpected, the knowledge that Haiti was a fragile and poor nation with a struggling government was not. It has had a United Nations peacekeeping force and developmental presence in Haiti since 1993. In the first hours after the earthquake struck the county's flimsy structure was easily apparent and swift action was taken by the US government to provide basic logistical services that the Haitian government could not. Many other governments have pledged support, but the US has essentially taken over the command and control functions of the entire relief operation, with the US Federal Aviation Administration dictating all air traffic into Port-au-Prince's airport and the Pentagon coordinating every supply airlift and sea delivery.

One bright spot is the outpouring of civilian assistance and humanitarian aid from all parts of the world. Boosted by new donation streams such as mobile text messages and online social networking sites, these contributions have generated tens of millions of dollars with The American Red Cross alone reporting over $10 million in mobile txt donations late Friday evening. At the same time, aid workers armed with technology are using their mobile phones to pin point their locations as trouble spots on Google Maps and share this geographical information with command and distribution centers. However, while these and other factors such as Haiti's proximity to the US are in its favor, years of abject poverty, ignored development, UN bureaucracy and weak state institutions are compounding the earthquake's tremors.

As USAID's Administrator, Dr. Shah is a competent professional, with previous stints at the US Department of Agriculture and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. According to his official USAID bio he earned his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and M.Sc. in Health Economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and also attended the London School of Economics. Not too shabby…but Haiti will be harder than any other test he has had to face.

The relief efforts will go on for some time, but when the US leaves, albeit probably not any time soon, Haiti's people need to be able to hold up their own economy and communities again. As USAID marshals its own plan for Haiti's recovery, job creation, exportable goods and outsourced services must be the end goal of any development scheme. Good luck Dr.

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U.N. officials reject criticism of Haiti relief efforts

2010-01-21T16:52:00.003-08:00

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U.N. officials reject criticism of Haiti relief efforts

via Turtle Bay by Colum Lynch on 1/21/10

Facing criticism over the sluggish international relief effort in Haiti, top U.N. officials have mounted a vigorous defense of the organization's handling of the crisis, and asserted that Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has acted decisively to address the needs of suffering U.N. staff and Haitians.

U.N. officials say that they are still struggling to unblock a clogged operational bottleneck that has delayed the delivery of relief to Haitian civilians, but are now feeding hundreds of thousands of people and expect to reach more than one million in two weeks. And they are trying to raise $40 million to fund a program to provide cash and food to Haitians in exchange for work, they say.

The U.N.'s top emergency relief coordinator, John Holmes, said the U.N. is working closely with major relief agencies to step up assistance, but voiced concern about the possible arrival of a second "tsunami-like" wave of fringe relief organizations that "don't really have much capacity but want to be seen on the ground producing loads of Teddy Bears or whatever, which people don't need."

U.N. officials said media reports of widespread looting in Haiti were overblown and that the security situation remained relatively calm. "It's clear that it is happening," said Alain Le Roy, the U.N.'s top peacekeeping official. "But it has happened in Haiti for decades. There was always looting here and there."

U.N. officials also pushed back on recent Turtle Bay reporting suggesting that Secretary-General Ban appeared slow to grasp the seriousness of the calamity, telling journalists some 14 hours after the earthquake that that the death toll could rise into the hundreds, a figure that contrasted with the thousands predicted by Haitians and another U.N. envoy. Ban had also initially announced that it might take a full two days before his special envoy would arrive in Haiti, though his schedule was accelerated later in the day.

[[BREAK]]

At a luncheon with a small number of reporters hosted by the U.N. Foundation, Ban said he immediately set up a Haitian task force to manage the crisis and phoned former President Bill Clinton, his special envoy for Haiti, and U.S. ambassador Susan E. Rice within hours after the earthquake hit, asking for American transport helicopters and for the U.S. to repair the damaged air control tower to enable relief supplies to come into the country. Within days, he said, he had secured support from the Security Council to authorize the dispatch of 3,500 peacekeepers to reinforce the U.N. mission.

Ban acknowledged problems in the initial days following the earthquake, including a chaotic period at the airport that prevented the arrival of relief planes. But he said that airport traffic had improved, that the U.N. has since opened five land corridors to deliver aid, and that the U.S. has agreed to take on the costly reconstruction of the Haitian port.

"I think we have been managing this situation well," said Ban. "The U.N. took up this issue immediately. We assembled the best people at headquarters; we dispatched the best people on the ground. You should understand the magnitude, the enormity, of this situation." But he cautioned that "we still have to address the bottleneck to delivery" and that "there should be no illusion that this will be over in a week, or even a month."

Ban urged Haitians to show patience, saying the flow of aid will begin to increase over the coming days, and that he would work to provide immediate jobs for Haiti's young. "I was struck by so many young people just wonder[ing] around aimlessly without knowing what to do," Ban recalled from his weekend tour of Port-au-Prince. "'We want jobs, we want jobs': this is what they were shouting."

U.N. officials in New York have also sought to underscore what they see as the many acts of heroism performed by U.N. officials in Haiti, including many who lost family members and friends in the earthquake.

Logan Abassi, a U.N. photographer, helped rescue a Haitian man who was trapped under a phone company building, according to a U.N. account. Abbasi was following a group of U.N. peacekeepers in order to capture photos of the looting in Port-au-Prince when he heard the voice of Pierre-Louis Ronny, a 43-year-old employee who worked at the building. Abassi flagged down a Russian search-and-rescue team that pulled Ronny alive from the rubble.

Officials also cited the bravery of Kim Bolduc, a Canadian relief worker who temporarily took charge after the mission's two leaders, Hedi Annabi and Luiz Carlos da Costa, were killed. Bolduc, who has asked to stay on in Haiti, had previously served in the U.N. mission in Baghdad in 2003, when a suicide bomber attacked U.N. headquarters, killing 22 officials and guests. Her colleague died at their shared conference table.

In this month's earthquake, Bolduc was sitting in her second-floor office when another building threatened to collapse. "It was extremely violent," she recalled. "I didn't have time to seek cover. I was sitting on my chair and holding on to the table. Everything collapsed around me. I saw the wall in front of me opening up with a very large crack ... It lasted a long time."

David Wimhurst, another Canadian national who survived the collapse of the U.N. headquarters building in Haiti, went back to work immediately.

"David Wimhurst got his whole team out of a third-story window by screaming down to the people on the street to 'get a ladder, get a ladder,'" said Nick Birnback, the U.N. spokesman for the department of peacekeeping, who served under Wimhurst during the 1999 siege of the U.N. compound in East Timor. "The next day he went to the logistics base to get the U.N. information center up and running. The staff in Minustah never stopped working despite the conditions, despite what they had been through."

Birnback said the response both inside Haiti and at U.N. headquarters has been made all the more difficult by the emotional impact the earthquake has had on staff, most of whom have worked long hours, with little time to stop and grieve for lost friends.

Birnback accompanied Ban on his trip to Haiti this weekend. As he surveyed the wreckage of the Christopher Hotel, the U.N.'s headquarters building, he received confirmation that his former assistant, Renee Carrier, had been killed there. "Every single one of us in peacekeeping has friends who were killed," he said.

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Will Haiti need donated can openers to open all that donated food?

2010-01-21T16:52:00.001-08:00

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Will Haiti need donated can openers to open all that donated food?

via Slate Magazine by Jessica Dweck on 1/21/10

Following the massive earthquake that rocked Port-au-Prince last week, relief organizations have begun shipping canned goods such as Spam, tuna, evaporated milk, and baby formula to the Dominican Republic and the northern shores of Haiti. Do these donations pose a problem in a country where more than half of the population lives on less than $1 a day and lacks access to basic household supplies like can openers?

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Haiti - Dominican Republic - Port-au-Prince - Earthquake - Caribbean

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Inside the Haiti response situation room

2010-01-21T16:51:00.003-08:00

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Inside the Haiti response situation room

via The Cable by Josh Rogin on 1/21/10

On the ninth floor of the Ronald Reagan building in downtown Washington, the lights are on 24 hours a day in the room where the massive U.S. government response effort to the Haiti crisis is being coordinated.

The first conference call is at 7:30 each morning, after which a series of issue teams that make up the interagency task force on Haiti get their assignments for the day. They regroup around 5 p.m. to prepare for another call in the early evening. But the desks are manned throughout the night.

"People have been working flat out 24/7. Some folks have been up until 5 a.m.," Susan Reichle, the USAID official who heads the coordination effort, told The Cable.

Reichle is not in charge of the entire relief effort -- her boss, USAID chief Rajiv Shah is -- but her shop is the clearinghouse through which the information is channeled up and down the chain within the U.S. government.

"It's a way for all that information at Port-au-Prince to come up to the interagency and a way for us to get messages back to Port-au-Prince from here," she said. "We deconflict issues and problems all day."

The interagency team is led by USAID's Office for Disaster Assistance, but has representation from an alphabet soup of government entities, including DHS, FEMA, the Coast Guard, DOD, the Joints Chiefs, OSD, OCHA, HHS, the State Department, U.S. Southern Command, and U.S. Transportation Command.

Shah isn't in the room. He's busy interfacing with top officials and lawmakers. Shah met with national security advisor Jim Jones yesterday, speaks with people like State Department counselor Cheryl Mills and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen regularly, and went to Capitol Hill today to brief House appropriators.

But Shah "is the decision maker," Reichle emphasized.

The interagency team coordinated by USAID doesn't have complete control over every aspect of the mission. For example, Southcom still makes the decisions about how to vet the 1,400 daily requests for planes to land at the lone Haiti airport. There are only about 140 landing spots to offer, and only about 50 percent of those go to humanitarian missions. The rest are divided between foreign government flights and military missions.

And the coordination mission has been a mix of successes and failures. In one example, a team of experts from Health and Human Services sat idle for days in Port-au-Prince because there were no vehicles or security personnel to move them and they had no direction as to what to do.

"Every team has had to go through some struggles to get into countries and then when they are in the country to do their jobs," Reichle acknowledged.

In the long term, it's not clear that USAID will remain in charge. Although President Obama announced an initial $100 million for Haiti relief, a long-term budget is being put together at State's Bureau of Foreign Assistance, the "F" Bureau, led by Rob Goldberg.

In the past, USAID administrators have supervised the F Bureau, but under the current arrangement its money (as well as USAID's) is controlled by Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew, rather than Shah.

For now, the search-and-rescue mission continues, but the interagency team is beginning to shift some of its focus to longer-term needs like shelter, food, water, and health. Eventually, Reichle said, the center of gravity will move back from USAID to State.

"It always transitions over to the regional bureau. They're the ones with the lead over the long term," she said.

The administration completed a Haiti policy review recently and the crux of the review will still be implemented. The goal is to build Haiti better than it was before the quake.

The goal, Reichle said, is "decreased dependency over the long term on foreign assistance," and to "build a foundation for a more stable, resilient, and market orientated Haiti."

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Filling Another Need for Haiti - Information

2010-01-21T16:51:00.001-08:00

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Filling Another Need for Haiti - Information

via People, Spaces, Deliberation - Exploring the interactions among public opinion, governance, and the public sphere by Shanthi Kalathil on 1/21/10

As the Bank and others prepare their response plans for Haiti, it is worthwhile taking a moment to stress the importance of media and communication in the aftermath of the disaster, as well as in the more long-term post-crisis reconstruction period.

In both post-conflict and natural disaster situations, donors focus on filling people's basic needs: shelter, sustenance, medical care. But there is another basic need that people have in emergencies: information. People need to find out if their loved ones are safe, and if so, how they can communicate with them. They need to find out where they can access basic services. They need to find out if it is safe to go back to their homes, and if not, where they can stay. And in the longer term, they need to reconnect with others in society, to come together to rebuild a nation.

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What happens to Haitian earthquake victims whose limbs were crushed?

2010-01-21T16:50:00.001-08:00

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What happens to Haitian earthquake victims whose limbs were crushed?

via Slate Magazine by Brian Palmer on 1/21/10

Doctors have swarmed to Haiti from around the world to tend to the victims of last week's earthquake, including many whose arms or legs were pinned under steel beams or slabs of concrete. Can you die from a crushed limb?

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Haiti - Earthquake - Caribbean - Concrete - Steel

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Why did U.S. aid focus on securing Haiti rather than helping Haitians?

2010-01-21T11:19:00.001-08:00

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Why did U.S. aid focus on securing Haiti rather than helping Haitians?

via Slate Magazine by Ben Ehrenreich on 1/21/10

By the weekend, it was clear that something perverse was going on in Haiti, something savage and bestial in its lack of concern for human life. I'm not talking about the earthquake, and certainly not about the so-called "looting," which I prefer to think of as the autonomously organized distribution of unjustly hoarded goods. I'm talking about the U.S. relief effort.

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Haiti - United States - United States Agency for International Development - Earthquake - Caribbean

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Op-Ed Columnist: Some Frank Talk About Haiti

2010-01-21T07:49:00.001-08:00

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Op-Ed Columnist: Some Frank Talk About Haiti

via NYT > Opinion by By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF on 1/20/10

Just because Haiti is poor, it does not mean it always will be. Far more than most other impoverished countries, Haiti could plausibly turn itself around.

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New PSA for Rapid Disaster Relief

2010-01-21T05:23:00.001-08:00

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New PSA for Rapid Disaster Relief

via (title unknown) by Mark Leon Goldberg on 1/21/10

Two new public service announcements for the United Nations recovery and relief efforts in Haiti.

Two new public service announcements for the United Nations recovery and relief efforts in Haiti. Via, the UN Foundation:

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World Bank Team Prepares for Damage Assessment, Recovery Plan

2010-01-20T14:28:00.001-08:00

http://go.worldbank.org/F9ELJXTE40

CrisisCommons is Community Technology + Humanitarian Relief

2010-01-20T13:48:00.001-08:00

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CrisisCommons is Community Technology + Humanitarian Relief

via swissmiss by swissmiss on 1/20/10

Nina pointed me to Crisis Commons, an organization that brings together professionals to create useful tools in times of need. They have been conducting something called CrisisCamp where people get together on a specific day to work on projects.

In their words:

"Crisis Camp is a gathering of technologists who come together to build platforms to assist with the releif efforts in Haiti."

"We are an international network of professionals drawn together by a call to service. We are developers, specialists, communicators, first responders, project managers, and people who just want to help!"

More here: http://crisiscommons.org/

Check on their site, top right corner, for upcoming CrisisCamp meet-ups in London, New York, Boston, Boulder/Devner, Los Angeles, Miami, Portland, Sillicon Valley and Washington DC.

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How does Haiti communicate after the earthquake?

2010-01-20T10:56:00.000-08:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8470270.stm

Not Ban's Katrina

2010-01-20T10:53:00.001-08:00

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Not Ban's Katrina

via (title unknown) by Matthew Cordell on 1/20/10

At the new Turtle Bay, Colum Lynch writes the provocatively titled "Ban Ki-moon's Katrina?" inviting the comparison between the response in New Orleans to that in Haiti.

Like Mark I'm excited that seasoned reporter Colum Lynch now has more room to stretch his legs on UN issues, but I hope that his reporting in this morning's "Ban Ki-moon's Katrina?" is off the mark.

Lynch writes:

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Earthquake survivor says iPhone helped save his life

2010-01-20T10:52:00.001-08:00

http://www.tuaw.com/2010/01/20/earthquake-survivor-says-iphone-helped-save-his-life/

Officials Strain to Distribute Aid to Haiti as Violence Rises

2010-01-20T06:58:00.001-08:00

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Officials Strain to Distribute Aid to Haiti as Violence Rises

via NYT > United Nations by By GINGER THOMPSON and DAMIEN CAVE on 1/16/10

A sprawling assembly of international officials and aid workers struggled to fix a troubled relief effort.

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Relief Groups Seek Alternative Routes to Get Aid Moving

2010-01-20T06:57:00.001-08:00

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Relief Groups Seek Alternative Routes to Get Aid Moving

via NYT > United Nations by By ALAN COWELL and SHARON OTTERMAN on 1/15/10

Relief flights are snarled at Port-au-Prince airport, and survivors are voicing angry criticism that no help is getting through.

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Too much of a good thing? Making the most of your disaster donations

2010-01-20T04:36:00.001-08:00

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Too much of a good thing? Making the most of your disaster donations

via Aid Watch by Laura Freschi on 1/19/10

The global outpouring of support for people affected by the South Asia earthquake and tsunamis of 2004 added up to more than $14 billion.

One notable fact about this $14 billion is that it represents the most generous international response to a natural disaster on record. Another is that it exceeded the total estimated cost of damages from the storm by some $4 billion, or about 30 percent.

What drove these record-breaking sums in the aftermath of the tsunami was not aid from governments, although that too was large. It was private individuals and companies who reached into their pockets and gave generously, to the Red Cross, to UNICEF and other UN agencies, and above all to what is estimated to be the largest proliferation of NGOs that had ever implemented relief efforts in a single disaster.

We don't yet know how the Haiti response will compare. We do know that donor pledges to help those affected by last Tuesday's earthquake in Port-au-Prince, pushed along by texting and twitter campaigns, have also been fast and plentiful (while no list seems totally comprehensive, there are tallies of pledges here , here and here).

And we know that some of the same conditions that made the response to the tsunami so generous are at play in Haiti as well. For one, the proximity to the Christmas season, when many Western donors are predisposed to be thinking about giving, and have holiday charity solicitations fresh in their minds. For another, the barrage of media coverage, especially (from Haiti) television stories featuring dramatic rescues that underscore the heroism of American-funded rescue teams.

Relief agencies having a lot of money to draw upon had many real, positive consequences for the survivors of the tsunami in South Asia. Quick-response relief efforts received praise from evaluators and local populations. But the unprecedented pledges in answer to post-tsunami fundraising appeals didn't solve all problems, and in fact amplified some existing ones—like competition among NGOs, funding decisions based on media and political pressure rather than actual needs or capacities of affected countries, and weakening humanitarian impartiality.

The authors of one report by the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition* found that generous funding "exceeded the absorption capacity of an overstretched humanitarian industry" and actually served as a disincentive for NGOs to work together and pool resources and information. It also caused inexperienced NGOs to proliferate, and encouraged even experienced actors to work outside their realm of expertise.

Some NGOs that found themselves with unexpected amounts of money to spend responded by extending the time horizons or scope of their programs. Only Médecins sans Frontières was quick to admit that they had enough donations for the tsunami and request that additional funds help people elsewhere, a move which initially drew criticism from other NGOs. (MSF posted a similar statement for Haiti last week).

Humanitarian aid is supposed to be allocated according to the principle of impartiality — the idea that assistance should be offered according to need, not nationality, or political belief, or even how compelling a particular disaster may be to donors. This may be an impossible ideal, but consider that the $14 billion for survivors of the tsunami works out to about $7,000 per person, and compare that to the roughly $150 per person for Somalis affected by civil strife in 2005, or $3 per person for the 2004 floods in Bangladesh.

It may seem callous to suggest even by analogy that the flow of funds going immediately to Haiti be in any way stemmed or diverted. But the effects of big fundraising appeals are complex, and not as temporary we might assume: "The scale of the resources to be spent will distort agency programmes in favour of tsunami-affected areas for years to come," found another report.

The solution is not to stop donations to organizations doing good work in Haiti. Haitians need international help to rebuild now. The point is rather to give money in such a way that mitigates the negative effects of this compassionate onslaught of giving, and encourages the international system to allocate funds effectively and fairly. Other, good blogs have already discussed some strategies; I give you three of them:

Don't restrict (or earmark) your donations to be used only in Haiti, but rather allow your chosen NGO to spend the money you donate as they see fit. If you don't trust them to allocate your funds effectively to where they are most needed, then why are you giving them money in the first place?
Take up the Philanthrocapitalism blog's advice to give an equal amount to "someone suffering just as much, but less dramatically, elsewhere in the world."
Space out your giving. Organizations with a history of working closely with Haitian communities will still be there in six months. They will probably be there in a year, and probably in five years too. They will need your money then as well, when the spotlight has shifted to the next disaster.

–

*ALNAP (Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance), is the repository of many useful documents from the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition. ALNAP has also produced lessons learned reports on Responding to Urban Disasters and Responding to Earthquakes 2008, among others.

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US Corporations, Private Mercenaries and the IMF Rush in to Profit from Hait...

2010-01-19T18:39:00.001-08:00

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US Corporations, Private Mercenaries and the IMF Rush in to Profit from Haiti's Crisis

via AlterNet.org Main RSS Feed by Benjamin Dangl, Toward Freedom on 1/19/10

In the midst of a colossal human disaster, Washington is promoting unpopular economic policies and extending military and economic control over the Haitian people.

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Where do the reporters in Haiti get their food and shelter?

2010-01-19T18:38:00.001-08:00

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Where do the reporters in Haiti get their food and shelter?

via Slate Magazine by Nina Shen Rastogi on 1/19/10

In the week following the massive Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti, a number of high-profile American journalists—Anderson Cooper, Katie Couric, even Al Roker—have reported from the ground in Port-au-Prince. This has many Explainer readers wondering: If aid organizations are having such a hard time delivering food and medical supplies, how are so many journalists getting into Haiti?

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Haiti - Anderson Cooper - Port-au-Prince - Al Roker - Katie Couric

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Sanjay Gupta 'Shocked' When Doctors Left Him Alone In Haiti Clinic Overnight...

2010-01-19T12:08:00.001-08:00

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Sanjay Gupta 'Shocked' When Doctors Left Him Alone In Haiti Clinic Overnight (VIDEO)

via The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com by The Huffington Post News Editors on 1/19/10

CNN chief medical correspondent, and actual doctor, Sanjay Gupta told Joy Behar that he was "shocked" when doctors and nurses walked away from a field clinic in Haiti last Friday night over security concerns, leaving Gupta as the only doctor left to make sure the patients, some badly wounded, made it through the night.

As Gupta watched doctors pack up some of their supplies and walk away from the clinic he "looked at my crew and I said, 'I'm gonna stay. You decide what you want to do.' And the whole crew, we decided to stay and take of these patients throughout the night."

When asked if these doctors had left completely of their own volition, Gupta said he thought they were most likely ordered to leave: "I really don't think they wanted to go."

The next day one of the doctors who came back told Gupta that he was ashamed.

WATCH:

More on Haiti Earthquake

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Guest Post: A Marshall Plan for Haiti?

2010-01-19T10:52:00.001-08:00

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Guest Post: A Marshall Plan for Haiti?

via Undiplomatic by Guest on 1/19/10

The following guest post was written by Jacob Francois, an entrepreneur with over eighteen years experience in the financial services industry, and owner of Lakay Financial International, Inc. in addition to reaching out to the Haitian and Haitian-American communities via appearances on radio and television, Mr. François has served 7 years as a board member and two years as president of the Haitian-American Community Association (HACA) located in Chicago. He is also founder of Project 2000 International, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing assistance to Haitian children. The organization is responsible for securing donations in-kind, as well as monetary donations to purchase whatever is necessary to facilitate the education (school supplies, uniforms, shoes, etc.) of these youngsters whose families would otherwise be unable to provide these necessities for them. For more information about these organizations, please follow the above links.

Haiti has been struck by a terrible catastrophe far beyond its economic capacity. Immediate humanitarian assistance is essential, but Haiti will need more that just relief if it is to rebuild and prosper. For this reason, we at the Haitian Priorities Project propose a "Marshall Plan" for Haiti:

$5 billion to help the Haitian people rebuild their livelihood
$2 billion earmarked for the private sector
$1 billion for a 1500-megawatt electrical plant
$1.5 billion to rebuild various government compounds in the 10 departments
$1 billion for a communication system capable of providing at least 1 million land lines
$3 billion to rebuild 5,000 km of roads, connectors, sewers and provide garbage collection
$1 billion for 10 national airports in 10 departments
$1 billion for the agricultural sector
$2 billion for the school sector
$2.5 billion for economic development programs
$700 million for heavy machinery

In all, $20.7 billion per year for three years could put Haiti back on the path to becoming a modern nation. If we put this amount is the context of the United States GDP for 2009, the amount is less than 1/100th of 1 percent of the United States GDP.

The Marshall Plan from its inception, was known as the European Recovery Program, (ERP). The first phase of the program started in 1948 and ran through 1952. The United States implemented the ERP as a tool for rebuilding and creating a stronger economic foundation for countries in Western Europe.

Given the destruction of its infrastructure, Haiti would benefit from a similar plan, which could be dubbed the Haiti Recovery Plan (HRP), and without which Haiti may never be a viable nation.

Haiti is the most impoverished country in the Western Hemisphere with 80 percent of the population living under the poverty line and 54 percent in abject poverty. Two-thirds of all Haitians depend on the agricultural sector, mainly small-scale subsistence farming, and remain vulnerable to damage from frequent natural disasters, exacerbated by the country's widespread deforestation.

The economy has shown some signs of recovery in recent years, registering positive growth since 2005 after the ravages of hurricane Jeanne in 2004. Several hurricanes damaged the entire system in 2008 as well as the transportation infrastructure and agricultural sector. Haiti has enough natural resources to build a viable nation, although capital investment is lacking and some natural resources possessed by Haiti are deemed strategic reserves to the United States. Haiti has bauxite, copper, calcium carbonate, gold, marble, hydropower and oil.

US economic engagement under the Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement (HOPE) Act, passed in December 2006, has boosted apparel exports and investment by providing tariff-free access to the US. HOPE II, passed in October 2008, has further improved the export environment for the apparel sector by extending most favored nation preferences to 2018; the apparel sector accounts for two-thirds of Haitian exports and about 8 percent of GDP. Remittances are the primary source of foreign exchange, equaling more than 15 percent of GDP and about twice the earnings from exports.

Haiti suffers from high inflation, a lack of investment, limited infrastructure, and a severe trade deficit. In 2005, Haiti paid its arrears to the World Bank, paving the way for reengagement with the Bank. Haiti has received debt forgiveness for about $525 million of its debt through the Highly-Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) initiative by mid-2009. The government relies on formal international economic assistance for fiscal sustainability.

The United States and France have a moral obligation to correct the wrongs against Haiti dating back to 1824, four years after the Monroe Doctrine was initiated. In 1824, France sent 65 ships to Haitian ports threatening to take the country back to slavery if an agreement was not signed to start paying 100 million francs to France on a yearly basis. At the time, Haiti had to shut down all government services including all the schools. This action had a profound impact on Haiti's development and on all subsequent government efforts to build viable institutions.

Without substantial new investment, Haiti will never come out of its terrible position. A government operating with less than $2 billion a year, of which 60% is from bilateral aid, will never be able to respond to the needs of a population of 10 million people.

The United States has in particular been helpful. At this juncture, however, if substantial investment is not made in Haiti, the epidemic of boat people to Florida will continue for a long time.

Our plea is to appeal to the humane compassion we know to exist in the Unites States, France, Canada, Venezuela, and all other countries to make their investments in the framework that was stated above in a length of time not to exceed three years. Otherwise, the spiral of misery will continue in Haiti for another two hundred years.

Photo: UNDP Flickr Photostream using a CC 2.0 license

Post from: Undiplomatic

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Defense Department Briefing Skipper: Haiti crisis

2010-01-19T10:37:00.001-08:00

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Defense Department Briefing Skipper: Haiti crisis

via The Cable by Josh Rogin on 1/19/10

Here are the important parts of two Defense Department related briefings on the U.S. government response in Haiti. One was a bloggers roundtable with Gen. Ken Keen, commander of the Joint Task Force, from Monday evening. The second was a Pentagon briefing with Gen. Daniel Allyn, deputy JTF commander, Tuesday morning:

"The security situation is relatively calm," said Keen, "What I would say is these are pockets of violence, and we are being very vigilant to watch that closely." The Brazilian-led UN mission is in the lead as far as security goes.
Allyn reported that the 22^nd Marine Expeditionary Unit arrived Tuesday morning and will deploy about 800 of its 2,200 personnel on shore, adding to 1,000 deployed soldiers from the 82^nd Airborne's 2^nd Brigade Combat Team. The Comfort hospital ship will arrive Wednesday morning.
Allyn said here were now over 2,000 U.S. military personnel on the ground and another 5,000 or so offshore. By the end of the week there will be about 5,000 personnel on the ground and 10,000 total military personnel in the area.
The USS Batan, a multipurpose amphibious ship, arrived Monday, and its personnel will be deployed southwest of Port-au-Prince, where aid has been slow to materialize. A Canadian force of about 2,000 has arrived and will be deployed to Jacmel, south of the capital city. Keen hopes to have two more ports in the south usable by the end of the week.
The U.S. distributed 233,000 bottles of water on Monday, bringing the total to about 400,000, as well as 140,000 rations on Monday, brining that total to about 300,000. 12,000 pounds of medical supplies have been delivered. There are about 3.5 million people in need. "This is a drop in the bucket in terms of the need, but we are doing more every day and we will continue to do that," Keen said.
C-17 Transport planes dropped 15,000 meals and 15,000 bottles of water on Haiti Monday and more sites are being looked at for additional drops. Monday there were 180 flights landed with no delays. Two more runways are being looked at to increase flights.
A "humanitarian coordination center" is being set up at MINUSTAH, under Brazilian Maj. Gen. Floriano Peixoto, who commands the U.N. force there, to evaluate aid contributions and determine how they fit with needs.
Keen also explained why a mobile hospital being flown in by Doctors Without Borders was turned away from the airport. Apparently, a plane on the tarmac was having maintenance issues couldn't take off as scheduled, preventing the plane with the hospital equipment from landing. Eventually, the medical plane had to divert to Dominican Republic due to fuel issues and bring the supplies over land.
"That's extremely unfortunate, and it certainly is not what we want to see. And clearly, we wanted that field hospital on the tarmac," said Keen, adding, "This has happened a number of times."

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Our Haiti Response Has Been Yet Another Example of Western Hypocrisy and Rac...

2010-01-19T10:22:00.003-08:00

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Our Haiti Response Has Been Yet Another Example of Western Hypocrisy and Racist Double Standards

via AlterNet.org Main RSS Feed by Jeremy Seabrook, Comment Is Free on 1/19/10

Why does it take an emergency for the people of Haiti to get clean water and basic infrastructure?

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Haiti after the earthquake.

2010-01-19T10:22:00.001-08:00

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Haiti after the earthquake.

via Slate Magazine by Michael Deibert on 1/19/10

LEOGANE, Haiti—When Elvis Cineus rushed to his home in the town of Leogane, 18 miles west of Port-au-Prince, in the aftermath of Haiti's devastating earthquake, he was not prepared for what awaited him.Under the remains of his home, smashed flat as if pummeled by a giant fist, lay the bodies of his wife, his nephew, his cousin, and a friend, all dead. His 1-year-old son was dangling from the building's jagged facade, injured but alive."It was a miracle," he says of the infant's survival. "But I think there are still survivors in the fallen schools, because we still hear them screaming."This coastal town, once one of the most pleasant in Haiti, was largely decimated by the quake. The International Federation of Red Cross estimates that as much as 90 percent of the town has been destroyed. Along Leogane's Grand Rue, once-stately concrete buildings lie in rubble, with only a few structures built in Haiti's distinctive wooden gingerbread style remaining. The putrid smell of death wafts through the lanes, helped along by an ocean breeze. At a ruined dental clinic, a woman cries when she tells how a neighbor died after her leg was severed by falling debris and how the neighbor's child, a little girl, took off screaming down the street."It's beyond chaos, beyond catastrophe," says Michael Moscoso, a local businessman. "The losses cannot be numbered."One week after the earthquake flattened large swaths of central Port-au-Prince, people beyond the capital and closer to the epicenter have grown ever more desperate as much-promised aid has been slow to trickle in or has failed to materialize altogether.In the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in the capital's southern Carrefour neighborhood, several hundred people lay on makeshift surgical tables, on benches, or sprawled on the floor. Half a dozen people groaned with severe suppurating burn wounds caused when a gas cylinder exploded during the great tremor. Nine-year-old Michel St. Franc lay with blood caking his face, his leg in a primitive cast and tears in his eyes."This is the worst situation I've ever seen," says Julien Mattar, project coordinator for the hospital. "We have huge needs in terms of human resources, medical supplies, and materials."Mattar tells me that a supply plane that was unable to land in Port-au-Prince was instead rerouted to the Dominican Republic. From there, the supplies made the seven-hour overland journey to Haiti.The injured who were able to reach the hospital were the lucky ones. Farther down the road, both the living and the dead waited for respite in the form of assistance from the international community or from the government of Haitian President René Préval, who has faced withering criticism at home for his perceived lax and disorganized response to the disaster.Along the Route des Rails, almost every home seemed to have been destroyed, and, again, the intense smell of decay intensified under a glaring Caribbean sun. Residents say they feel abandoned."No one has ever been here," Vilaire Elise, a 38-year-old Protestant minister, said as he led a visitor and fellow residents to survey homes where his neighbors had died. "We have no water to drink, nor food to eat. We are suffering here."Though nearly 105,000 food rations and 20,000 tents had been distributed by humanitarian groups on Monday, the effort seemed unable to come to grips with the scale of the disaster. The U.N. World Food Program has said it will need 100 million prepared meals over the next 30 days.The growing foreign military presence in Haiti, which has played host to a U.N. peacekeeping mission since 2004 and will now house at least 2,000 U.S. troops, also seemed overwhelmed.Late on Monday, with the sun setting outside Leogane, in a scene reminiscent of others played out in severely war-torn countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, at least 1,500 townsfolk rendered homeless by the quake took over a flat patch of grassy land and constructed fragile shelters from logs, twigs, bed sheets, and leaves. "Since the disaster, everyone here has had nothing," said Innocent Wilson, a 31-year-old who acts as one of the impromptu camp's spokesmen. "No one is here to help us, so we are organizing ourselves."

[more ...]

Haiti - Port-au-Prince - Caribbean - Dominican Republic - Médecins Sans Frontières

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U.S. Troops Land With Aid at Presidential Site in Haiti

2010-01-19T10:21:00.003-08:00

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U.S. Troops Land With Aid at Presidential Site in Haiti

via NYT > United Nations by By SIMON ROMERO and MARC LACEY on 1/19/10

The troops, who appeared to be establishing a position at the palace, were among a contingent of some 10,000 U.S. military personnel on their way to Haiti.

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Mona Gable: Doctors Without Borders in Haiti: Why Couldn't They Land?

2010-01-19T10:21:00.001-08:00

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Mona Gable: Doctors Without Borders in Haiti: Why Couldn't They Land?

via The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com by Mona Gable on 1/18/10

Bill Clinton is on the ground in Haiti with Chelsea touring the rubble. I'm elated the former president was able to get permission from the Defense Department to fly in. It's no small feat, I'm telling you. Because apparently not everyone can.

Take Doctors Without Borders (MSF), the highly respected international medical humanitarian organization. You know, the one Sandra Bullock gave $1 million this week before she won the Golden Globe? They've been in Haiti for years. They have hundreds of medical staff in place, and are working in five hospitals in Port-au-Prince. They know the country. They're experts in delivering medical aid. These are the people you want on the ground after a killer earthquake? Am I right?

Then why was an MSF cargo plane carrying, among other badly needed supplies, an inflatable surgical hospital, not allowed to land in Port-au-Prince on Saturday and re-routed to the Dominican Republic? Despite assurances from the United Nations and the Defense Department that its planes would be allowed in?

If this is an air traffic control problem, they need to fix it now. Maybe Bill could help?

The inflatable hospital included two operating theaters, an intensive care unit, 100 beds, an emergency room and equipment for sterilizing material. The supplies had to be sent by truck, so the hospital didn't arrive in Haiti until a day later.

To be fair, a plane carrying supplies for the other half of the field hospital did arrive in Port-au-Prince on Sunday. But for a while even that looked sketchy. And as Isabelle Jeanson, an MSF Emergency Communications Officer wrote in an email from Haiti on Sunday: "MSF is still concerned that delivery of vital supplies is being delayed."

As the crisis in Haiti drags on survivors are dying. Even if they're rescued, they're slowly and painfully dying from their wounds because they can't get into surgery quickly enough. And they can't get into surgery because the hospitals have collapsed and the makeshift ones aren't equipped to do surgery. That is, except for the Israelis. They had a modern field hospital up and running in seconds. But they can't treat 2 million people.

The MSF plane that was dispatched to the Dominican Republic was carrying medical supplies for Choscal hospital in Cite Soleil. Which had barely a 24-hour supply left for the 500 patients waiting to have surgery. Even under horrific conditions, MSF teams performed more than 90 operations in the day after their operating theatre was functional.

Like other aid groups in Haiti, Doctors Without Borders is hurting too. Some of their Haitian staff members died. Some they haven't been able to reach.

And then there is the frustration of trying to help. Of not having the right equipment. The heartache of watching people die when you know you could have saved them.

As Jeanson wrote in her email on Sunday: "Patients who were not critical only three days ago are now in critical phases. This means that people will die from preventable infections. It's horrible. It's really so terrible that people are begging for help and we can't help them all to save their lives!"

More on Haiti Earthquake

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