Fri, 05.03.2010

A Fighting Life: Eunice “Queen Nina Simone” Waymon

Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone, examines the artistic legacy of Waymon/Simone while dutifully dissecting her formidable mental illnesses, including bipolar disorder, shizophrenia, multiple personality disorder, late-in-life alcoholism, and the uniform rage cited by all in her satellite as overwhelming (“One of her sidemen, before playing with her each night, had to go into the men’s room and throw up”).  The book was given a passable review by the New York Times, the Washington Post took their review as a means to examine her instead of it, and the San Francisco’s Chronicle summarizes it as “depressing.” However and whomever attempts to breach the wall of Simone’s life are left in quiet and melancholy reverence of someone so consistently powerful. And prideful.

The videos below shows Queen Simone in France – railing, ranting, and singing in such confident not-give-a-fuckery we’re all left to wish for one with half her presence in our time of rubbery figures all posture and no compunction. A dozen and one places and memories cross her face: her royalty and happiness and sadness and anger and laser-sharp intelligence…her terribly useful schizophrenia in full demonstration.

Tags: nina simone

NOTE: Be sure to watch both segments—Nina is devastating!

Forgotten 1972 Aretha Franklin Documentary By Sydney Pollack Getting Release ("Amazing Grace”)

By Tambay, on March 5th, 2010

Aretha Franklin’s 1972 album Amazing Grace was her best-selling album. Some even say it’s the greatest gospel album ever recorded.

But what few of us know is that the recording sessions on those two nights in January 1972, at L.A.’s New Temple Missionary Baptist Church, were captured on film by a 4-man camera crew, headed by the late director Sydney Pollack, shooting more than 20 hours of footage.

Now, 38 years later, the footage is being edited and prepped into a concert film for possible theatrical distribution, billed as a film by Sidney Pollack. Interestingly, Warner Bros. once envisioned the film as part of a double bill theatrical release with Superfly! How groovy would that have been?

The studio would later drop the project in September of 1972, not knowing what to do with a gospel concert movie.

Producer Alan Elliott, who had several conversations with Pollack in the year before his May 2008 death, is overseeing the project, working off Pollack’s notes. David Ritz, who co-authored Franklin’s autobiography, told Variety:

“Most Aretha Franklin fans feel this is her greatest work [...] To me, it’s one of the highlights of 20th-century American musical culture [...] We put a lot of work into making the arrangements tight. We brought in all of the traditional gospel values that everybody knew and loved, yet we added here and there sprinkles of what was then modern: Marvin Gaye’s ‘Wholy Holy,’ Carole King’s ‘You’ve Got a Friend in Me.’ That’s what made it a universal hit. It combined the traditional gospel with songs by secular artists that did not subvert the gospel message.”

Elliott spent the last two years piecing the project together, stating that Pollack attempted to revive the project several times, but without success. Only a snippet of the footage has ever been seen publicly (in a 1988 BBC documentary).

And now, thankfully, the full feature-length film may finally see a release – if not theatrical, at the very least, on home video. Stay tuned…

Here’s its trailer:

The Third World Cup

March 6, 2010 · Leave a Comment

I don’t think my man Vijay Prashad would mind me reposting his first in a series of World Cup posts put on Facebook:  “… Herein starts my backgrounder, on football, third worldism and history. This first one is on the historic FLN football team, which was formed by Algerian militants who were some of the best soccer players in France; they left fame for their commitment, and went on the fly the Algerian flag from Ho Chi Minh City to Baghdad and beyond.”

Algeria is playing England in Cape Town on 18th June during the group stages of the 2010 World Cup.  I’ve got my Algerian strip.

FAB Magazine: Fabulous, African and Black

Reshma Madhi

Catchavibe.co.uk caught up with Sinem Bilen-Onabanjo, the founder and editor-in-chief of FAB Magazine, which is due to launch in March. The high-end quarterly aims to be the first-of-its-kind fashion & lifestyle magazine for both men and women, with 80% African content. Sinem explains why we need a magazine truly made by Africans for Africans…

CAV: So tell us about FAB – who is it for and what does it aim to provide?
Sinem Bilen-Onabanjo: Nigeria and Nigerian readers in the UK deserve to have a fashion and lifestyle magazine, in the true sense of the word, made by Africans for Africans; a magazine showcasing the best of what Africa and Nigeria have to offer with top-notch photography, innovative graphic design and thought-provoking editorials. We really want our readers to have the international magazine experience; with high quality images, trend pages, interesting reads and most importantly adverts (promoting) local and international African designers page after page – something that has previously not been possible in any Nigerian publication, simply because fashion advertisers often cannot compete with big brands to vie for advertisement space.

CAV: Why is there a need for a magazine such as FAB?
Sinem Bilen-Onabanjo: FAB has arisen due to the fast pace at which the African fashion industry is growing. I do not believe there are any publications that solely cater for the new generation of stylish, sophisticated African men and women. We aim to open a quarterly window to the worlds of high fashion and high street, as well as produce an end product created by Africans for Africans. At a time when people are increasingly speculating the need for an African Vogue; we want to show the world that we can produce a high quality magazine, with our own expertise and resources and do not need to wait for Conde Nast or any other international publishing house to do it for us.

CAV: What subject matters will you explore?
Sinem Bilen-Onabanjo: Fabulous, African {and) Black with style, swagger and sophistication. We aim to set the trends – not follow them, celebrate our continent’s successes, highlight its problems, offer solutions, continue to bring hard-hitting editorials, cutting-edge imagery and inspirational design delivered with quality and consistence. Our content will be 80% African and 20% international.

CAV: Why a unisex fashion magazine? Is there a significant market in glossy mags for African men?
Sinem Bilen-Onabanjo:In Nigeria, where we will initially start distributing, men’s magazines such as Made and Mode Men have been quite successful, (although) perhaps not as popular as women’s glossies. By providing content for both male and female audiences in a 150-page magazine, we are doing something that has not been done before, in terms of the unisex material and volume of pages.

CAV: The internet is becoming an increasingly popular alternative to traditional print formats. How will your magazine compete?
Sinem Bilen-Onabanjo: While (the) internet is changing the nature of publishing, I strongly believe that print magazines are not likely to go out of fashion anytime soon, especially high quality fashion publications which are handled as a bit of a collector’s item. However, utilising the power of the internet to access our world-wide audience following the launch of our first issue, we will of course have a live website, which will be updated regularly. This is especially important as a quarterly, as we would like to keep our readers with us in between issues.

CAV: Any tips on up-and-coming names in African fashion?
Sinem Bilen-Onabanjo: Two of my favourite African designers are already quite established, both internationally and in their native Nigeria – Deola Sagoe and Jewel by Lisa. I’m also a huge fan of the Ghanaian designer Aisha Obuobi behind the couture label Christie Brown, who won the Emerging Designer of the Year Award at last year’s Arise South Africa Fashion Week. In the UK, the designers whose work I admire are Tina Atiemo of Ghana and Nkwo Onwuka’s Afro Bohemian Chic label. In terms of modelling, do watch out for Paula Okunzuwa, the 2010 winner of Top Model of Colour and a fantastic new model.

CAV: Are there any fashion designers outside of Africa that you admire?
Sinem Bilen-Onabanjo: Who doesn’t love Azeddin Alaia? Okay, admittedly, he’s from North Africa but has become an international name. Also, you can take a girl out of Turkey but you can’t take the Turk out of the girl [Sinem is of Turkish heritage]; I will always feel inspired by Turkish designers. First and foremost Cengiz Abazoglu and Rasit Bagzibagli.

CAV: Can you define what is FAB about Africa and African fashion? Is this portrayed in non-African media?
Sinem Bilen-Onabanjo: The culture, the colours, the people and the raw energy. Africa has long been portrayed in the western media as synonymous with poverty, starvation and warfare and I am happy to see that this has recently been changing; (with) focus gradually shifting to music, entertainment, fashion and art. We want to be a part of the African Renaissance, to celebrate the achievements of the Continent and her diverse people, while also addressing problems in an unbiased way.

The first issue of FAB Magazine – the ‘music meets fashion’ issue will launch on March 21st.

"Rebuilding Haiti" -- the Sweatshop Hoax
by David L. Wilson

Within days of a January 12 earthquake that devastated much of southern Haiti, the New York Times was using the disaster to promote a United Nations plan for drastically expanding the country's garment assembly industry, which employs low-paid workers to stitch apparel for duty-free export, mainly to the U.S. market.  This, according to several opinion pieces in the Times, is the way to rebuild Haiti.¹

The outlines of the plan were drawn up a year earlier, in January 2009, by Oxford economist Paul Collier,² but the leading proponents of development through sweatshops have been liberal Democrats in the United States.  Members of the Congressional Black Caucus pushed hard for HOPE and HOPE II, the 2006 Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement Act and its 2008 extension; these acts make the plan possible by giving preferential treatment to U.S. imports of apparel assembled in Haiti.³  UN Special Envoy for Haiti Bill Clinton, the former U.S. president, has provided much of the PR for the plan; in the fall of 2009 he organized a special meeting to encourage foreign business investment in Haiti.⁴  Liberal U.S. financier and philanthropist George Soros is helping build a new $45 million industrial park near Port-au-Prince's impoverished Cité Soleil neighborhood as part of the plan's implementation.⁵

Adding to the project's liberal credentials, in August 2009 Bill Clinton made Dr. Paul Farmer his deputy UN special envoy.  Harvard professor Farmer is widely respected for his medical work in Haiti; he is a founder of Partners in Health/Zanmi Lasante and is on the board of directors of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), a US-based left-liberal advocacy group.⁶

The Fall of the Maquiladoras

The plan's liberal supporters sometimes admit that assembly plant jobs may not be the very best type of employment.  But Haitians need work, they say, and the new sweatshops will create jobs -- as many as "several hundred thousand," according to Prof. Collier's description of the plan.  What the liberals don't explain is where they think the jobs will come from.

The garment export industry in the Caribbean Basin has been in a sharp decline for the past five years.  The current round of jobs losses in the region's apparel maquiladoras -- the Spanish name for the assembly plants -- started with the growth of competition from industrial powers like China and has intensified with the economic crisis in the United States, the main market for the industry's products.

The Dominican Republic, Haiti's closest neighbor, lost 73,000 garment jobs from 2005 through 2007, according to an informative article by Marion Weber and Jennifer Blair in the July/August 2009 NACLA Report on the Americas.  The six countries that signed on to the 2005 Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) -- in addition to the Dominican Republic, the U.S.-sponsored trade zone includes Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua -- saw their combined exports fall from a 13.3% share of the U.S. import market in 2004 to 9.8% in 2008.⁷

The job situation continues to deteriorate.  Garment jobs in the Dominican "free trade zones" (FTZs) -- the special areas where the maquilas are clustered -- fell another 15.05% in 2008, from 58,546 to 49,735.⁸  In Honduras, site of Latin America's most recent coup d'état, textile and apparel production for the first six months of 2009 was down by 17.9% compared to the same period the year before.  The Honduran maquiladora sector lost 15,000 jobs in 2008 and about 8,000 in the first eight months of 2009, leaving it with some 114,000 employees.

By September 2009 Guillermo Matamoros, a leader in the Honduran assembly industry, was giving up on apparel and pushing a new type of maquiladora: call centers and software centers in the north of the country, which he said could generate 25,000 to 40,000 new jobs because of the large number of Hondurans who are bilingual in English and Spanish.⁹

Magical Thinking on Jobs

Of course, the U.S. market for imported apparel is expected to grow back if the economic crisis recedes, but it's hard to see how that by itself would produce several hundred thousand new jobs for Haiti.

People in the United States tend to think irrationally about things like job creation.  Many of us believe that immigration reduces the number of jobs available for U.S. citizens, while the same people often swallow the idea that building new industrial parks in Port-au-Prince will magically create jobs for Haitians.

The reality is exactly the opposite.  If Haitian immigrants were stitching garments in New York or Los Angeles at jobs with standard wage rates, they and their dependents would be able to pay for decent housing and staples like food and clothing.  This would stimulate job creation, and the new jobs would make up for the jobs the immigrants had taken -- as in fact happened in the past when the United States produced its own apparel in union shops.  But if the same Haitians work in assembly plants in Port-au-Prince or in the FTZ near the Dominican border in Ouanaminthe, they have to accept wages at about one-twentieth the rate they would get in the United States.  These workers are barely able to scrape by; their spending can do little to stimulate job creation either in Haiti or in the region as a whole.

But the UN plan isn't really about creating jobs; it's about relocating them.  The key, according to Prof. Collier, lies in Haiti's "propitious fundamentals" -- its "poverty and relatively unregulated labor market" and "labor costs that are fully competitive with China."  Add Haiti's location near the United States: it's "on the doorstep of its market."  Haiti is the "only low-wage economy in the region," Collier writes, meaning that the maquilas in nearby countries just can't compete with Haitian factories paying a minimum wage of around $3.05 a day, approximately half the minimum in the Dominican FTZs.¹⁰

So when the professors and politicians say they will help Haitian workers by giving them jobs, what they really mean is that they plan to take the jobs away from Dominican, Mexican, and Central American workers -- and pay the Haitians even less for doing the same work.  It's no wonder that the American Apparel and Footwear Association (AAFA), a U.S. manufactures' organization, hopes to "play a responsible and proactive role in Haiti's overall recovery."¹¹

Rerunning the Race to the Bottom

The jobs the Haitians will get are only temporary, in any case.  Haitian workers have been through all this before.

Haiti pioneered export-based development plans in the 1970s under Jean-Claude Duvalier ("Baby Doc").  Once assembly plants started operating in Haiti, other parts of the region followed suit under the Reagan administration's 1984 Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI).  The brief boom in the Caribbean apparel industry ended when jobs started going to Mexico because of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).  Mexican workers became still more "competitive" after 1994, thanks to an economic crisis and a currency devaluation (a de facto wage cut).  The Mexicans in turn lost jobs to lower-paid Chinese workers as the new millennium started.  Dominican and Central American manufacturers responded with DR-CAFTA and, predictably, more wage cuts.  And yet the job losses have continued.¹²

Anti-sweatshop activists Barbara Briggs and Charlie Kernaghan used to warn back in the 1990s that this type of "economic development" would create a "race to the bottom" in which workers in different countries would have to compete by accepting lower and lower wages.  And that's exactly what happened.

Haitians have learned not to listen to people like Prof. Collier and Special Envoy Clinton.  In August 2009 thousands of Haitian sweatshop workers went on strike to demand a higher minimum wage.  They ignored arguments that they needed to keep their wages competitive -- it took tear gas and UN troops to get them back into the factories.¹³  Grassroots organizations meeting in Port-au-Prince since the earthquake have been working on proposals for rebuilding Haiti through a sustainable development plan rooted in Haitian reality.  "Not more of the same," Camille Chalmers of the Haitian Platform to Advocate Alternative Development (PAPDA) said in late January, "but something really alternative and popular."¹⁴

Maybe it's time to listen to the Haitians for a change.

 

1  Nicholas D. Kristof, "Some Frank Talk about Haiti," New York Times, January 20, 2010; Paul Collier and Jean-Louis Warnholz, "Building Haiti's Economy, One Mango at a Time," New York Times, January 28, 2010;  "Thinking About a New Haiti," editorial, New York Times, February 1, 2010

2  Paul Collier,  "Haiti: From Natural Catastrophe to Economic Security," report for the secretary general of the United Nations, January 2009.  For more on the Collier plan, see Ashley Smith, "The 'Shock Doctrine' for Haiti," Socialist Worker, February 8, 2010.  For Collier's related views on peasant farming, see Walden Bello and Mara Baviera, "Food Wars," Monthly Review, vol. 61, no. 3, July-August 2009.

3  Rep. Kendrick Meek, "A Helping Hand for Haiti," The Louisiana Weekly, June 20, 2008.

4  Marc Lacey, "Still Fragile, Haiti Makes Sales Pitch," New York Times, October 5, 2009.

5  "Haiti-based WIN Group and Soros Economic Development Fund Announce a $45 Million Commercial Zone in Haiti," Business Wire, October 6, 2009, via Reuters.

6  "President Clinton Appoints Paul Farmer as Deputy Special Envoy for Haiti," Office of the Special Envoy for Haiti press release, August 11, 2009; Partners in Health/Zanmi Lasante website, <http://www.pih.org/where/Haiti/Haiti.html>, and IJDH website, <http://ijdh.org/about/board-of-directors>, both accessed February 26, 2010 .

7  Marion Werner and Jennifer Bair, "After Sweatshops? Apparel Politics in the Circum-Caribbean," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol. 42, No. 4, July/August 2009.

8  "Informe Estadístico 2008," Consejo Nacional de Zonas Francas de Exportación, Cuadro No. 28.

9  "Honduras: Economy Could 'Quickly Buckle,'" Weekly News Update on the Americas, #1002, August 30, 2009; "Honduras: Will Maquilas Survive the Coup?"  Weekly News Update on the Americas, #1005, September 27, 2009.

10  The minimum wage for Haitian assembly plant workers was raised to 125 gourdes a day in September 2009 (USD $3.049 as of February 24, 2010).  The monthly minimum wage for FTZ workers in the Dominican Republic is currently 5,400 pesos a month (USD $145.397 as of February 24, 2010); see "El Comité Nacional de Salarios aumenta el salario de la zona franca," Notirevista.com, December 18, 2009.

11  James A. Morrissey, "Textiles and Apparel Will Play Key Role in Haiti Recovery," Textile World, February 9, 2010.

12  Marion Werner and Jennifer Bair, op. cit.

13  "Haiti: Maquila Workers March for Wage Hike,"Weekly News Update on the Americas, #1000, August 9, 2009; "Haiti: More Strikes Hit Maquilas,"Weekly News Update on the Americas, #1001, August 23, 2009.

14  Beverly Bell, "Raising Up Another Haiti," Common Dreams, Feburary 23, 2010; "Camille Chalmers: 'We Call for Solidarity Between the People,'" Anarkismo.net, Feburary 3, 2010.  See also PAPDA website, <http://www.papda.org/>.

---

David L. Wilson is co-author, with Jane Guskin, of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers (Monthly Review Press, July 2007) and co-editor of  Weekly News Update on the Americas.  He was in Port-au-Prince to interview Haitian activists about the UN development plan when the earthquake struck on January 12.

Annual Women Who Write

Poetry and Short Prose Contest

DEADLINE: May 30, 2010

Entry Guidelines

• Open to women writers 18 or older.
• Women Who Write will retain one-time publication rights, after which, all rights revert back to author.
• Prose limit 3,000 words.  
• Each poem or story must include a cover page with title of work, author name, address, home phone number, and valid e-mail address (if applicable).
• To identify each page of your work, use the title set <right> in the header along with the page number. For example: This is my Title - 1
• Other formatting:
  • Prose and Poetry
    • Microsoft Word .doc format
    • Times New Roman font, size 14
    • Double-spaced
  • Prose Only
    • text <left> justified
    • indent paragraphs one tab
    • double-spaced 
    • no extra space between paragraphs
    • only one space after period at end of sentence
    • default on all other MS Word settings
• $10 entry fee for initial poem or story submitted; additional entries in the same category are $5 each.
• Postmark deadline:  May 30, 2010
• Winners will be notified by mail or e-mail in August. 
• Members of Women Who Write are ineligible.
• Submissions will not be returned.

 

Send entries and entry fee to:

Women Who Write

P.O. Box 6167

Louisville, KY   40206

Awards and Recognition:

Short prose and poetry winners receive:

First Place..........$150 and five copies of the current anthology

Second Place.......100 and five copies of the current anthology

Third Place...........75 and five copies of the current anthology

Winners' work is published in Calliope, Women Who Write's annual anthology.

Winners read their poetry and selections from their stories at the awards program.

Copyright © 2005-2010 Women Who Write

Submission Guidelines Welcome to Passager! We look forward to reading your submissions, but we ask that you follow our guidelines closely. For example, please submit in accordance to the dates listed below. We publish two issues a year, an Open Issue, and a Poetry Contest issue. Guidelines for both appear below. Also, we urge you to become familiar with Passager before submitting work. Browse some past published work on this site, and visit our Subscribe page to order sample copies. You can also print these guidelines as a PDF.

QUICK LINKS Poetry Contest Open Issue Passager Books Publication Policies SEND TO Passager 1420 North Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21201-5779

2010 Passager Poetry Contest
FOR WRITERS OVER 50

Submit work: September 1, 2009 - April 1, 2010
Results announced for 2010 contest (projected date): July, 2010

Winner receives $300 and publication.
Honorable mentions will also be published.

• Reading fee: $20, check or money order payable to Passager
  Reading fee includes a one-year, two-issue subscription to Passager.
• Submit 3-5 poems, 50 lines max. per poem
• Introduce yourself with a cover letter and brief bio.
• Include name and address on every page.
• Include a Self-Addressed, Stamped Envelope (SASE) for notification of winners.
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If you need more information, send us an email: passager@saysomethingloudly.com, or call: 410.837.6047.

Send all submissions to:
Passager
1420 N. Charles Street
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Postcard Contest

Shady Side Review is having a postcard contest! We’re looking for your very best prose or poetry of 100 words or less. The entry fee is only $1.00 per submission.

What can you get for a dollar these days?

• A newspaper (but they don’t usually publish fiction unless you’re famous. Are you famous? Maybe your work is already in a newspaper then.)
• A bagel (but unless you carve your poem into the dough, your work does not appear here).
• Eternal fame and glory (this can be achieved by submitting your work that is one hundred words or less to shady side review’s annual (probably) postcard contest).

If you win the grand prize, you’ll receive a cash prize and ten glossy postcards featuring your work. Think of all the fun you can have mailing your friends and family postcards that, instead of featuring a predictable city skyline, will showcase your writing. As far as the cash prize goes, our grand prize winner will receive 20% of the submissions revenue. The more submissions we receive, the more money you win. So you know what that means, encourage your fellow writers, neighbors, cat, etc… to submit and compete against you for the gold (we should mention that you will not receive real gold unless you specifically request your winnings in Sacajawea dollars). Two runners-up, you can call them second and third place if you prefer, will receive 10 copies of their postcards, but no cash. Sorry. On top of that, yes, it does keep getting better and better, we will be handing out the winners’ postcards at AWP in Denver this year. Think of all that amazing publicity. So what are you waiting for? Submit!

Please include a cover letter with your name, e-mail, address, a short bio, and confirmation of payment through PayPal to Shady Side Review.When you’re ready, click on the “Pay Now” button below. You will have to know how many pieces you will be submitting at the time of your payment. It is $1.00 per submission, but you can pay for all your submissions at once. We hope you can do this math unaided, because there is no calculator function. Then, attach all your submissions (in their own files) to one email. In the body of the email, please include your contact information and a brief bio. YOUR CONTACT INFORMATION MUST NOT APPEAR ON THE SUBMISSIONS THEMSELVES. Sorry to shout, but we want to make sure you heard us.

Previously published work is NOT eligible, but multiple submissions and simultaneous submissions are encouraged.

All submissions should be mailed to ssr@shadysidereview.com.

Submissions must be received by March 17 at midnight.

Remember: You must attach all submissions to one email (sent to ssr@shadysidereview.com) and include your PayPal confirmation number in the body of the e-mail to be considered. Please note that each submission is $1.00. The quantity of submissions can be entered on the PayPal site.

Zimbabwe's forgotten children, struggling to survive

Zimbabwe: Digging for bones

 

By Xoliswa Sithole Producer, Zimbabwe's Forgotten Children

Zimbabwe, when I was growing up there, was the breadbasket of Africa and had one of the best education systems in Africa if not the world.

The healthcare system was great, too.

For a child born in apartheid-era South Africa, as I was, it was a land of opportunity. After my mother moved to Rhodesia, I received a first-class education, and graduated from university in post-independence Zimbabwe.

It is startling how quickly a society can fall apart.

My film, Zimbabwe's Forgotten Children, follows the stories of a number of children struggling to survive in the country today.

Zimbabwe has become a very hard place to be poor, and poverty is ugly. Conspicuous consumerism is very evident, and greed is also very visible.

I shot the film undercover, after getting a permit to make another film, about my childhood and how it has shaped me.

Esther with her mother and baby sister

I was raised as a child of the Zanu party. My stepfather's cousin Ndabaningi Sithole, founder of Zanu, was a prominent politician, and my cousin Edison Sithole the first doctor of law in southern and central Africa - he disappeared in 1975, abducted by Ian Smith because he was a human rights lawyer and political activist.

But while I was making this film the Zimbabwean government launched Operation Murambatsvina (Remove the filth) - a slum clearance programme that left thousands of people on the streets.

This made me resolute to make another film, about Zimbabwe's children.

I focus mostly on three stories.

There are Michelle and Grace, who live with their father Joseph. Joseph dreams of saving enough money to pay for his children's education, but for now they all work - by digging bones from a rubbish heap and selling them.

"What I am doing is child abuse really," he says. "They should not be working like this. It hurts me."

There is Esther, who looks after her mother as she dies of Aids, and also her younger brother, Tino.

After her mother dies, Esther's life becomes simpler. "It's much easier to look after Tino now, because I don't have to look after mum as well," she says.

Esther's case is not an unusual one in today's Zimbabwe. It's a common scenario.

 

Zimbabwe: Harare's street kids

There are also the street children.

When I lived in Zimbabwe in my twenties, there were hardly any street children in Harare.

Children are now not only living on the streets, they are giving birth on the streets. A second generation of street children is growing up.

The system was supposed to take care of its people, but it has failed.

In less than a generation, the country has changed beyond all recognition.

Xoliswa Sithole is a South African film-maker based in Johannesburg. She was awarded a BAFTA, for her role in producing the BBC/True Vision documentary Orphans of Nkandla, chronicling the effects of Aids in Africa. Zimbabwe's Forgotten Children can be seen BBC Four, at 2245 on Wednesday 3 March, or on the BBC iPlayer .

AIDG Blog [Appropriate Technology, Development, Environment]

10 things I learned from being in Haiti during the earthquake 

by Catherine Laine
February 9th, 2010

1. Everything I learned about how to react during an earthquake from growing up in California does not apply in developing countries. Forget standing in the doorway. Get outside and get outside fast.

Apartment Building on Delmas 33

Partially Collapsed building on Delmas 33

2. You can be in an impromptu IDP camp, your world can be turned upside down, but if your family is safe, you still can find happiness.

We (Marc Orel, Sasha Kramer, Wisnel Jolissaint, Paul Christian and myself) drove down to Port-au-Prince from Cap a few days after the quake. Our second stop after dropping off our things at Matthew 25 house and picking up our friends Elie and Berto was Jacquet where we found Marc Orel’s family all safely accounted for.

3. Humanitarian responses are far more chaotic then you would ever believe and logisticians are totally underappreciated.

A chaotic health cluster meeting at MINISTAH Log Base

In the early stages of the humanitarian responses, aid workers crowded in this room to get reasonable high-speed internet access. Télécoms Sans Frontières were responsible for setting up the internet.

4. Stories of looting and violence however rare are news. Stories of people banding together to help their communities however common are human interest pieces. TV news by design does not show a representative sample of life on the ground. It only shows what reporters think will maintain viewer interest and ratings with far too little regard of the larger scale effects that such practices will have on society at large.

Inside St Claire’s soup kitchen. After hearing so much about the trouble the larger agencies and NGOs were having with large scale food distributions, Sasha and I were very surprised when we visited this well organized and peaceful soup kitchen at St Claire. This feeding program, which has been in operation for 9 years, has been serving 2,500 to 5,000 people a day since the earthquake, according to Lavarice Gaudin. Though Father Gerard Jean Juste, a strong advocate of liberation theology who headed the church, passed last May, his staff and partners try to “carry on his legacy” of serving the poor.

Community members unload food to be distributed to sick patients and IDPs in soccer field behind Matthew 25 House.

Photo by Elie Happel

5. Music, art, and play are more important in crisis situations than people fully acknowledge. It takes more that food and water to nourish the human spirit.

Our friend Rosemond Jolissaint, serenades a small crowds before he and friends and family members are evacauted to Cap Haitien from Pap. (I’ll try to post an mp3 of my favorite song of his later).

Girl jumping rope at St Claire

6. People will allow you to take their photograph even when in despair if they think the story of their pain will help others or serve the greater good.

Mother and child at the field hospital at MINUSTAH logbase

7. There is no UN agency charged to deal with engineering issues before and after disasters in the same way that say the World Food Program or the World Health Organization deal with food and health respectively.

Engineering team inspects Matthew 25 House

Part of AIDG’s response to the crisis has been to recruit earthquake and structural engineers to assess buildings on the ground in Port-au-Prince. The 2 teams, one fielded in close cooperation with the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research at the University of Buffalo, assessed nearly 200 government buildings, schools, orphanages, residences and food distribution warehouses during their stay in Port-au-Prince. Above MCEER’s director, Andre Filiatrault, inspects the collapsed Ministry of Justice to determine whether it is safe enough to enter the basement to extract important legal records. I’ll be writing a lot more about these fantastic engineers in future posts.

8. You can ride in the back of a pickup in the middle of Champ Mars and not get mobbed or shot at or caught in a riot. I’m talking to you CNN. Their reporting, which largely misrepresented the situation here, is a big reason why some teams of foreign American doctors are not allowed outside the gates of the General Hospital without escort.

Dr Steven Keller in the back of the SOIL truck on his way to a community hospital.

9. Fate has a sick sense of humor.

The Petionville Club. Private Club. Members Only

Internally displaced persons camp at the Petionville Golf, Tennis and Country Club.

10. Even when the apocalypse comes, life goes on…

Having a friend braid your hair

and on…

Friends in Cap: Magistrat Jhonny Estimable (Mayor or Borgne and brother of AIDG’s Edline Estimable), Tony (SOIL), Paul Christian Namphy (SOIL, Oxfam), Marc Orel (SOIL), and ?

and on.

Waiting for a tap tap