A difficult journey that begins in hopelessness and shame for thousands of women in Ethiopia ends in a productive new life in this award-winning documentary airing in its television premier on NOVA. Filmed in a starkly beautiful landscape, the film juxtaposes the isolated lives of village women who are outcasts because of their medical condition, with the faraway hospital that offers a miracle after a long and arduous trek—a "walk to beautiful."
The feature-length version of this film took top honors at the 2007 International Documentary Association Awards Competition, where it was named Best Feature Documentary. It also won the People's Choice Award for Best Documentary at the Starz Denver Film Festival, the Audience Award at both the San Francisco and St. Louis international film festivals, and the Best Human Rights Film Award at the International Documentary Festival of Barcelona. [Hear about the making of the film from producer Mary Olive Smith.]
The film tells the personal stories of rural women who make their way to Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, seeking treatment for obstetric fistula, a life-shattering complication of childbirth that was once common in the pre-industrial United States but that is now relegated to the poorest regions of the world. (For more on disparities in women's health worldwide, see Two Worlds.)
Women with small pelvises, whether through malnutrition, overwork, or because they married too young, are most at risk, since there is often not room for the baby to emerge during birth. The result can be an obstructed labor that may last up to 10 days, a stillborn child, and a trauma-induced hole, or fistula, in the vaginal wall that produces chronic incontinence. (For more information, go to Anatomy of Childbirth.)
The women profiled in "A Walk to Beautiful" are treated as virtual lepers in their villages, where they are shunned by family and made to live alone. One women admits to contemplating suicide.
Through chance they learn that there are other women who share their affliction, and that the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital exists to help them—if they can manage to walk for hours to the nearest road, find public transport to the capital, and then search out the hospital in a strange and forbidding city. Once there, they enter a haven that they never imagined, surrounded by women like themselves and a medical staff of Western and African doctors who treat them like human beings, not outcasts.
The story of this experience is told through the women's own eyes and voices. There is Ayehu, 25, living in a makeshift shack behind her mother's house where she has hidden for four years. Almaz, also in her 20s, has suffered from a double fistula for three years. For Wubete, 17, early marriage and her small physical stature left her with bladder damage that makes her case especially difficult.
"My husband and I came to Ethiopia in 1959," says the hospital's cofounder, Dr. Catherine Hamlin, who is from Australia. "The previous gynecologist that we replaced said to my husband, 'The fistula patients will break your hearts.'"
And so they did. Dr. Hamlin's husband died in 1993. But she is still there. (Read a wrenching yet hopeful interview with Dr. Hamlin.) 
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The Christopher Tower Poetry Prizes 2011 :: Simplicity
Press release
Christ Church, Oxford announces the 2011 Christopher Tower Poetry Competition on Monday 1 November
The Christopher Tower Poetry Competition, the UK’s most valuable prize for young poets, is once again open for entries, and this year students between 16-18 years of age are challenged to write a poem on the theme of ‘Simplicity’.
Launched in 2000, the Tower Prizes are already established as among the most prestigious literary awards for this age group. The first prize is £3,000, with £1,000 and £500 going to the second and third prize-winners. In addition to individual prizes, the students’ schools and colleges also receive cash prizes.
The entries will be judged this year by poets David Morley, Frances Leviston and Peter McDonald. The 2011 competition will build on the success of earlier competitions - previous prizewinners such as Caroline Bird, Richard O'Brien, Charlotte Runcie, Anna Lewis, Helen Mort and Annie Katchinska are now gaining further acclaim in other competitions or within the publishing/ writing world.
The competition is open to all 16-18 year-olds who are in full or part time education, and students and schools can find out more information about the prizes and associated future events atwww.towerpoetry.org.uk/prize, or email info@towerpoetry.org.uk or call 01865 286591. The closing date for entries is 11 March, 2011.
Photographs
Click here to view a selection of photos from the 2010 Christopher Tower Poetry prize giving.
Display a poster
Download A4 poster of 'Simplicity' (188kb)
The A4 poster is available for display in schools, colleges and libraries and the entry form can be downloaded here.
If you would like additional entry forms or posters, or to find out more about the Christopher Tower Poetry Prizes, please contact Tower Poetry
Tower Poetry,
Christ Church,
Oxford, OX1 1DP
Tel: 01865 286591
or contact us >
Scholars Say Chronicler of Black Life Passed for White
By FELICIA R. LEE
Published: December 26, 2010
The introduction to this new edition of “Cane” drops a bombshell.
Renown came to Jean Toomer with his 1923 book “Cane,” which mingled fiction, drama and poetry in a formally audacious effort to portray the complexity of black lives. But the racially mixed Toomer’s confounding efforts to defy being stuck in conventional racial categories and his disaffiliation with black culture made him perhaps the most enigmatic writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
Now Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard scholar, and Rudolph P. Byrd, a professor at Emory University, say their research for a new edition of “Cane” documents that Toomer was “a Negro who decided to pass for white.”
They lob this intellectual grenade in their introduction to the book, which W. W. Norton & Company is to publish next month. Their judgment is based on “an analysis of archival evidence previously overlooked by other scholars,” Mr. Byrd and Mr. Gates write, including Toomer’s draft registrations and his and his family’s census records, which they consider alongside his writings and public statements.
Toomer’s racial complexity has long been intriguing to critics and scholars, but Mr. Gates and Mr. Byrd’s assertion about his identity is certain to spark debate. Richard Eldridge, a Toomer biographer, said recently that he had not read the new edition — and will stand corrected if its case is persuasive — but that Toomer never “passed” in the classic sense of pretending to be white. Rather, he said, Toomer (whose appearance was racially indeterminate) sought to transcend standard definitions of race.
“I think he never claimed that he was a white man,” Mr. Eldridge said. “He always claimed that he was a representative of a new, emergent race that was a combination of various races. He averred this virtually throughout his life.” Mr. Eldridge and Cynthia Earl Kerman are the authors of “The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness” published in 1987 by Louisiana State University Press.
Jean Toomer, author of “Cane,” in an undated photograph
Toomer’s life — he was born in 1894 and died in 1967 — traversed many shifts in American racial politics, including times of soul-sapping racial oppression. And while he ended up writing other poetry, essays and drama, “Cane,” published in the Jim Crow era, was a sensation in its time and remains his contribution to the American literary canon.
The book includes sketches of city life, portraits of rural women and a loosely autobiographical section titled “Kabnis” about a conflicted, racially mixed man. Toomer’s experimental mesh of forms and lyrical language made black experiences “the metaphor for the human condition” and modernity itself, Mr. Gates and Mr. Byrd write. In a recent interview Mr. Gates called “Cane” the most sophisticated and “blackest” book of the Harlem Renaissance, a movement it helped catalyze.
Yet this new edition of “Cane” documents that over the course of his life Toomer variously denied ever living as a black person; called himself racially mixed; and said he was a new kind of American, transcending old racial terms. Toomer did not want to be featured as a Negro in the marketing of “Cane” and later did not want his work included in black anthologies.
Archival research reveals a clearer picture, said Mr. Gates, the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard: “Everyone on his family tree was black and didn’t claim to be anything else. Only Jean tried to cross over.”
The 472-page Norton volume includes the first edition of “Cane,” Toomer’s letters, essays, his autobiographical writing and more than 20 interpretive essays about Toomer and the book. It is intended to follow up the first Norton critical edition, published in 1988, and to take Toomer scholarship into the 21st century.
The volume uses official documents collected by Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak, a genealogist who helped untangle Michelle Obama’s ancestry and who has worked with Mr. Gates on his PBS television shows about family roots.
Toomer’s maternal grandfather, P. B. S. Pinchback was the first black lieutenant governor of Louisiana (during Reconstruction) and was briefly the acting governor, in 1872 and 1873. Toomer, though, theorized that his grandfather (the son of a white father and a racially mixed mother) only claimed to have Negro blood to ally himself with newly enfranchised black men.
The book includes census data showing that Toomer’s parents and grandparents always identified as black or mulatto, and Mr. Gates said they identified that way culturally as well.
Toomer’s official record stands in marked, and sometimes confusing, contrast. Registering for the draft in 1917, he was identified as a Negro, as he was in a 1942 draft registration document. But 1920 and 1930 federal census reports identified him as white. In 1931, when he married a white woman, both bride and groom were identified as white on the marriage license.
Mr. Gates and Mr. Byrd contend that because Toomer’s birth place was incorrect on the 1920 report, someone else might have responded on his behalf. But in 1930, they argue, it is likely that Toomer furnished the details himself. Tellingly, a 1934 article in a black newspaper quoted him as saying that he did not really know whether he had “colored blood.”
And while he was registered as a Negro for the draft in 1942, he had been living as a white man for years in Bucks County, Pa., with Marjorie Content, his second white wife, Mr. Gates said.
“He was running away from a cultural identity that he had inherited,” Mr. Gates said. And this came with consequences: “He never, ever wrote anything remotely approaching the originality and genius of ‘Cane,’ ” Mr. Gates said. “I believe it’s because he spent so much time running away from his identity.”
“I feel sorry for him,” he added.
In an interview Mr. Byrd, a professor of American studies at Emory, said the new research “resets the starting point for discussions about Toomer’s racial background, and its influence on his art.” (Mr. Byrd said that Toomer’s art and time were also consumed by his involvement as a teacher of the philosophy of G. I. Gurdjieff, the Russian psychologist and mystic.)
Thousands of African-Americans since slavery times grew weary of the struggle of being black in American and decided to pass, Mr. Gates said. But “it is difficult to think of someone who constructed such a complex artifice trying to justify that decision to others but also to himself,” he said of Toomer.
Mr. Gates and Mr. Byrd write that Toomer’s rejection of racial labels and racial essentialism may find an intrigued (and even receptive) audience among a new generation of readers in the age of Obama.
The new edition reintroduces Toomer and his role as one of the first writers to move beyond the idea that any black ancestry makes you black, an assumption on which the racial pecking order is founded, said William L. Andrews, a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Farah Jasmine Griffin, a literature professor at Columbia University, said the census information would be useful in her teaching but didn’t alter her views of Toomer or “Cane.”
“The bottom line,” she said in an e-mail, “is that he wrote his most powerful, provocative and beautiful book during a period in which he was actively identifying himself as partially black and discovering and claiming to honor that part of his identity.”
“Unlike many others,” she added, “because of the way that he looked, he could choose to deny that identity later in life.”
Given Toomer’s views, Mr. Andrews said, he probably felt no need to inform people about “the African strain” in his heritage. “If people didn’t ask,” he said, “I expect he didn’t tell.”
TED Talk by Tony Porter: A Call to Men
December 23, 2010
Everyone should watch this video of Tony Porter as he delivers a talk in DC earlier this month on masculinity. Masculinity, in its simplest terms, is “what it means to be a man” in a given society. Porter does a great job of sharing his personal narrative of growing up and fathering and how they have forced him to rethink what it means to be a man. Because of work of folks like Tony Porter, Jewel Woods, Mark Anthony Neal, Daniel Black, Byron Hurt and many others I’ve been pushed to rethink what manhood is and to find/develop healthier models of masculinity. I’m pleased to announce this summer I’ll be working with the non-profit A Long Walk Home to develop and implement a program in Chicago that deals with these very issues. We’ll be working with Black male youth on being allies in the struggles against sexual violence and gender oppression, while providing these young men the scaffolding to be advocates for their selves and peers. But more to come on that later. In the meantime, please click and share widely!!
If you can’t see the video, click here.
Hat tip to E. Mari Morales-Williams for sharing this with me.
About
UptownNotes is written by Dr. L'Heureux Dumi Lewis. To Learn more about my writing, speaking and research please visit professorlewis.com.
Bi-racial children in the Ukraine -
"Family Portrait in Black and White"
Spotted on Blackgermans
"Family Portrait in Black and White" is a compelling film of Russian/Canadian Filmmaker Julia Ivanova about a group of bi-racial/black orphans in the former Soviet republic Ukraine.
Forced to constantly defend themselves from racist neighbours and skinheads, these children have to be on guard against the world that surrounds them.
The film is still in production, but will have its World Premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival
Short synopsis: Olga Nenya, from a small Ukrainian town, is raising sixteen black orphans in a country of Slavic blue-eyed blonds. The reality of growing up as a bi-racial child in Eastern Europe, a rare and truly visible minority, is not for the faint of heart. While Olga is on a crusade to save her children from the unjust world, she is also determined to shape their future according to her own, sometimes limited vision.
Long synopsis: Olga Nenya has 27 children. Four of them, now adults, are her biological children; the other 23 are adopted or foster children. Of those 23, 16 are bi-racial. She calls them "my chocolates," and is raising them to be patriotic Ukrainians. Some residents of Sumy, Ukraine, consider Olga a saint, but many believe she is simply crazy.An inheritance from the Soviet era, a stigma persists here against interracial relationships, and against children born as the result of romantic encounters between Ukrainian girls and exchange students from Africa. For more than a decade, Olga has been picking up the black babies left in Ukrainian orphanages and raising them together so that they may support and protect one another.
The filmmakers interview Neo-Nazis in Ukraine reveals the real dangers for a dark-skinned individual in the street. These white supremacist youth joke about their evening raids and how police seem to let them do it. Prosecutors are not particularly determined to give strict sentences to racially motivated crimes, and young thugs can get away with probation for beating someone nearly to death.
Olga sends her foster children to stay with host families in France and Italy in the summers and over Christmas, where they are cared for by charitable families who have committed to helping disadvantage Ukrainian youth since the Chernobyl disaster. Olga's kids now speak different languages, and the older girls chat in fluent Italian with each other even while cooking a vat of borscht. But Olga doesn't believe in international adoption and has refused to sign adoption papers from host families that wanted to adopt her kids.
"At least when the kids grow up, they'll have a mother to blame for all the failures that will happen in their lives," she says.
See more information about the film and mixed race at www.mixedracestudies.org
See official website of the film at www.familyportraitthefilm.com
And see film synopsis in pdf at www.interfilm.ca
UN fires Ricardo Seitenfus for Advocating for Haiti
By Leogane Magazine on December 25, 2010After an interview with the Swiss journal “Le Temps” where he pointed the finger at the international community as Haiti’s main progress stoppers, Ricardo Seitenfus, was relieved from his duty as the Special Representative of the Secretary General of the OAS, which shows that the truth must not be known by Haitians and whoever is advocating for Haitians is the enemy of the International community; thus will be severly reprimanded.
“Haiti is not Iraq, Haiti is not Afghanistan, Haiti is not in a war situation, and Haiti is not an international threat” he said but since 2004, there have been over 10.000 Casques Bleus on the soil of Haiti.
Ricardo said that the presence of MINUSTAH in Haiti is counter-productive.
Ricardo told “Le Temps” that the biggest mistake of Haiti was to become free and independent in 1804; something that pissed off France and portrayed Haitians as being rogue.
Haiti is also paying the price for being so geographically near to the United Sates that waited until 1865 to recognize the independence of Haiti.
“UN mission in Haiti is to freeze the government and to transform Haitians in prisoners of their own island. The international forces in Haiti shape the relationship between Haiti and the international,” he continued.
“The Occident is a colonialist, racist, and a world of slavery that based its richness on the exploitation of third world countries, he also reported.
The United States through the intervention of the United Stations never knew how to treat Haiti and that is the reason they are applying the article 7 of the UN charter to deploy thousands of troops to Haiti in order to protect their own interests.
“In spite of many international aids that the country receives, Haiti is the breathing proof that the UN mission has miserably failed,” he affirmed when questioned about NGO’s roles in Haiti.
The international community is armed with the desire to remake Haiti but they should come to the conclusion that, after the cholera breakout that followed the earthquake of 12 January, they had led the country toward the wrong direction.
The perverted and the distorted relationship and the inefficacity of the Haitian government are the main causes of Haiti’s slow disaster recovery.
NGOs are in Haiti to benefit from the “malheur of Haitians.”
Ricardo told the reporter about the NGOs’ mistakes after the earthquake that the import of food, good, water, etc had negatively affected the local production. Due to the lack of assertive leaders and the absence of laws in Haiti, it was a great opportunity for NGOs to see Haiti as a laboratory where they could come test their latest technologies.
“The throw of big numbers (about $11 billions) for the reconstruction attracted NGOs who decide to go to Haiti not as humanitarians but as businessmen,” he blatantly said.
Haiti’s situation is a challenge that we (UN) cannot comprehend because we fail to comprehend the Haitian’s soul. Haiti is the worst of the world and there are too many entities trying to help the country. Their help lead to nothing but chaos.
Haiti needs doctors, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, etc because Haiti is too complex to quickly jump in it like we know who Haitians are and what their needs can be.
Ricardo pleaded that “compassion is necessary but charity should not be the engine of international relations” and January 12 showed him that there was a great potential for Haitian solidarity because on the day of the earthquake, he witnessed how each Haitian became the Good Samaritan for each Haitian.
“We need to rethink how we do business in Haiti as well as offering better exportation opportunities for Haitians. It is the independence, the sovereignty, fair trade, and the respect for others that should be.” he suggested.
After this lengthy interview with “Le Temps,” that displayed how poorly the UN has been mismanaging Haiti since 1990, Ricardo Seitenfus, who was two months shy from completing his diplomatic duties in Haiti, was called back by his parent government. He was fired and his diplomatic future is currently uncertain.
Bobb Q Rousseau
© 2010, Léogâne Magazine. All rights reserved.
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PORT-AU-PRINCE -- Gaunt and unshaven, Paul Waggoner stepped out of his closet-sized cell at the Haitian National Penitentiary in downtown Port-au-Prince this past Monday for five minutes of casual banter, tight hugs and handwritten fan letters.
It had been more than a week since Haitian police jailed the 32-year-old Florida native on kidnapping charges, and he still couldn't believe he was locked up. After all, he came to Haiti to help.
``Frustrating,'' said Waggoner, a native of DeFuniak Springs in Florida.
Waggoner is accused of kidnapping a 15-month-old boy after the father brought the baby to a hospital for urgent medical care. Waggoner, a former carpenter who ferried medical supplies for relief groups, and others say the baby died of several illnesses, and the father failed to claim the body before it was cremated.
Waggoner's story highlights how international relief workers with good intentions have clashed with Haitians after the January earthquake pummeled Port-au-Prince and other major cities.
When the 7.0-magnitude quake wiped out almost all local institutions, a parallel one popped up with full force: a thousands-strong community of foreign do-gooders. While no one denies that international relief organizations saved countless lives by bringing much-needed water, food and medical care, many Haitians believe their presence in post-quake Haiti has fomented tension between foreigners and locals.
CULTURE GAP
Foreign aid workers have been accused of dressing inappropriately, driving up the cost of living, and breaking rules to get things done.
Just weeks after the Jan. 12 quake, police arrested a group of Idaho missionaries on kidnapping charges after they tried to bus 33 Haitian children to an orphanage in the neighboring Dominican Republic.
``We have to think hard about our actions when we leave our countries to go somewhere to help,'' said Julie Schindall, a spokeswoman at Oxfam International, a relief group handling sanitation.
Before the earthquake, the number of nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, in Haiti was as high as 10,000, giving the country one of the highest number of private, nonprofit aid agencies per capita in the world. Today, the number is believed to be much higher because not all NGOs register with the Haitian government. They vary in size and scope from the United Nations peacekeeping force to mom-and-pop operations, similar to the one run by Waggoner.
The influx of foreigners is evident throughout the country.
Large white SUVs marked with NGO logos contribute to the knot of traffic in Port-au-Prince, a city with too few streets for three million people.
The arrival of so many foreigners has proved to be a mixed blessing: Relief workers have employed cadres of drivers, interpreters and security guards, boosting business for rental car companies and restaurants. But some perceive aid workers to project an air of entitlement and superiority, less than mindful of cultural norms.
``People in Haiti are very concerned about relief workers and how they act and how they dress,'' said Karl Jean-Louis, executive director of the Haiti Aid Watchdog, a nonprofit monitoring the flow of humanitarian aid into the nation.
Jean-Louis said some aid workers offend their hosts by frequently showing up to government meetings in T-shirts, shorts and even flip-flops, paying little attention to dress codes in a country where officials often wear suits.
``It's very inappropriate,'' said Jean-Louis, who is organizing a Jan. 4 conference in Port-au-Prince to discuss the impact of international aid. ``People should know better.''
The friction between foreigners and Haitians has become violent. In November, reports surfaced that a United Nations peacekeeping mission had failed to maintain its septic tanks and could have been responsible for bringing cholera into the country, which has killed more than 2,500 people. Protesters called for the peacekeeping mission's departure as they lobbed rocks at U.N. troops and bases in cities in the northern and western parts of the country.
Two weeks ago, after officials released disputed elections results that unleashed two days of unrest in Port-au-Prince, volunteers hiking in the hills south of Port-au-Prince encountered a group of locals who pointed their fingers at them and yelled, ``cholera.'' Volunteers in the back of a pickup truck traveling to the quake-battered town of Leogane met the same response.
``They were a little unnerving, but that's all it was,'' said Aaron Mason, a spokesman for All Hands Volunteers, a nonprofit building schools and compost toilets in Leogane.
The Waggoner case also serves as a poignant reminder that Haiti has had a long and complicated relationship with the outside world since a slave revolt against the French secured the country's independence in 1804. In the world's first black republic, the foreigner is viewed at once as a savior and a saboteur.
Experts note that post-disaster tension between aid workers and survivors is almost inevitable, from Haiti to the Gulf after Hurricane Katrina.
``When there's a prolonged crisis such as a natural catastrophe or war, there's a tremendous amount of psychological trauma,'' said Dr. Irwin Redlener, a professor at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness. ``Relief agencies naturally make expectations around security, material goods and recovery. But when those expectations are unmet, resentment develops.''
Josiane Hudicourt-Barnes, an educator whose mother opened the Haitian Community Hospital as an outpatient clinic in 1984, remembers how foreigners from the United States, Sweden and U.S. Virgin Islands stepped in to perform operations at the hospital when the shocked staff failed to show up immediately after the quake. In one incident that irked local staff members, American volunteers broke the door to a blood bank.
``In an American view: `I'm trying to save a life and I'm going to get that blood,' '' said Hudicourt-Barnes, who served as a liaison between foreign medical workers and hospital administrators.
BABY DISPUTE
Waggoner's problems at the Haitian Community Hospital, she said, came after hospital staff returned and declined to take responsibility for the baby that had died. Hospital staff refused to sign the death certificate, she said.
The medical director could not be reached for comment.
Waggoner and his supporters -- they've set up a legal defense fund on the group's website -- believe the charges are bogus and that the father is trying to extort the defendant. The father could not be reached for comment.
When he's released, Waggoner hopes to continue relief work in Haiti.
``Maybe this was the most fulfilling work he's had,'' Hudicourt-Barnes said. ``This whole situation gave him a higher purpose than being a carpenter.''
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Haiti marks six months since a massive earthquake shook the already poor nation. Billions of dollars have been donated to help the country rebuild but half a year later, the impoverished island nation still is dire straits. RT spoke to rapper and activist Immortal Technique, who recently spent time in Haiti. He argued that there is no long term vision in Haiti, referring to the nation as a military and police state run by the United States and the UN.
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By Martha MendozaAP National Writer / December 12, 2010
"You can imagine that if we can't win the contracts ourselves, we become totally dependent on foreign companies and nonprofits, and there is not much hope in that," he said. "We may not have the extended capacity of a U.S. company, but we are respectable. We keep good books and records, we have foreign suppliers, we have good credit, we pay our taxes and our customs dues."
Out of every $100 of U.S. contracts now paid out to rebuild Haiti, Haitian firms have successfully won $1.60, The Associated Press has found in a review of contracts since the earthquake on Jan. 12. And the largest initial U.S. contractors hired fewer Haitians than planned.
There are many reasons for the disparity. Among them, US AID is more familiar with some U.S. contractors and gave out some no-bid contracts out of urgency, and fears the corruption that is rife in Haiti. On the Haitian side, there is a limited understanding of U.S. government practices.
But using foreign aid to give local companies contracts is one of the most important aspects of reconstruction, says Clare Lockhart, chief executive officer of the Institute for State Effectiveness.
"You can't just provide manual jobs. You need to contract with companies so that the middle tier managers and owners of companies have a stake in the legal system and rule of law, and ultimately a stake in the success of their political system and their economy," she says.
Of the 1,583 U.S. contracts given so far in Haiti totaling $267 million, only 20 -- worth $4.3 million -- are going to Haitian-owned companies. And an audit this fall by US AID's Inspector General found that more than 70 percent of the funds given to the two largest U.S. contractors for a cash for work project in Haiti was spent on equipment and materials. As a result, just 8,000 Haitians a day were being hired by June, instead of the planned 25,000 a day, according to the IG.
The contractors, Development Alternatives Inc. of Bethesda, Maryland, and Chemonics International of Washington D.C., which received more than $31 million each in no-bid contracts, responded to AP in an email saying that together with several other contractors, they had employed 25,000 Haitians a day. Now, they said, 10 months after the earthquake, "priorities have evolved beyond a focus on temporary employment," a program that has paid Haitian workers $18 million in wages.
US AID says it is committed to increasing the amount of contracts going to Haitians.
"We already are engaging with Haitian communities to make them aware of how they can partner with us," said Janice Laurente, a spokeperson for US AID.
Economists say giving contracts to local businesses creates jobs, which help build the private sector. Also, most donors would rather see local businesses thrive than foreign companies profiting from a disaster.
Harvard Business School economist Eric Werker, who researches foreign aid, says the spillover effects go beyond the aid itself.
"Some are obvious, like salaries and profits that stay in the local economy, but there are also ways to increase capacity of local firms by giving them progressively larger contracts," says Werker.
But there are many hurdles to signing a contract with Haitians.
The first is a no-bid process: 25 percent of the contracts went directly to U.S. contractors without even giving Haitians a chance to bid on them, sometimes because the needs were so urgent there wasn't time to go through a formal bidding process. In addition, some government requests for local Haitian subcontractors and expertise are published only in English, limiting access for many Haitians who speak Creole.
Also, at times of catastrophe, it can be easier to use an established contractor with a strong record than a previously unknown local one. The Haitian economy was so decimated by the earthquake that it was hard at first even to get wood or tarps for shelters without importing them. Now, even though there are Haitian companies providing many products and services, the pattern of using foreign ones continues.
And finally, it's more complicated to contract directly in countries like Haiti, where corruption is rife. There has been price-gouging among some would-be Haitian contractors.
The unprecedented promise of $9 billion in aid, with the U.S. as a top giver, at first raised hope of rebuilding and even of a new and brighter future for the tragedy-prone island. But fewer than 10 percent of those funds have made it past the "promise" stage.
While Chemonics and DAI are the largest single recipients, the bulk of the funds have gone to beltway contractors as well: firms in Virginia received the most funds of any state, $45.3 million, followed closely by Maryland, $44.6 million. Another $31.7 million went to companies based in the District of Columbia.
The U.S. foreign aid contracts to Haiti since the earthquake have gone to an array of almost entirely U.S.-based goods and services, from bullet-proof vehicles ordered Nov. 18 by the Centers for Disease Control from a Miami-based firm to $24,000 in dental supplies for U.S. Navy medical providers in June from a Chesapeake, Virginia, firm. Yet bullet-proof vehicles and dental supplies are available from Haitian companies, according to the nonprofit Peace Dividend Trust.
"Frankly, it's a shame and a serious opportunity lost," says Edward Rees of the Peace Dividend Trust. His organization put together a business portal, offering everything from security services to catering, and is training Haitians on how to bid for contracts and grants. "No one is systematically tracking how many contracts have gone to Haitian companies."
The lack of local spending in Haiti is similar to that in most other countries receiving U.S. aid, although economist Werker said Haiti is likely at the low end of the spectrum. But Rees contrasts Haiti with Afghanistan, where -- backed by Peace Dividend Trust -- U.S. Army General David H. Petraeus ordered his commanders to "Hire Afghans first, buy Afghan products, and build Afghan capacity."
The results in Afghanistan are encouraging: A recent study found that 37 percent of $2 billion in annual international aid is now being used to buy locally-produced Afghan goods and services, up from 31 percent a few years ago.
The AP review focused on contracts from the U.S. government, which spent an immediate $1.1 billion in U.S. humanitarian assistance after the earthquake, and promised another $1.15 billion for reconstruction. In November, the first $120 million of the pledged reconstruction funds were tranferred to the World Bank-run Haiti Reconstruction Fund, according to the State Department.
In addition to government aid, more than $1 billion has come from nonprofit charities, most of which try to buy local, said Samuel A. Worthington, president of InterAction, the largest alliance of U.S.-based international nongovernmental organizations. He represents nonprofits managing about 90 percent of the U.S. donations that were directed to Haiti after the quake.
Worthington says there is no system to count how much has gone to Haitian-owned companies.
"There is a very strong bias to ensure as much local procurement as possible, and as much spending in the local economy," says Worthington. "Our bottom line is to serve as many people as possible and get the best price, to spread those dollars."
Daniel Ellsberg
Scott Horton Interviews Daniel Ellsberg
Scott Horton, June 09, 2010Listen to the Interview
Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, discusses Specialist Bradley Manning‘s arrest for passing classified information to Wikileaks, the unfortunate negative connotations of the “whistleblower” moniker, how Obama has decriminalized torture, 260,000 possible sources of embarrassment for the State Department and the Obama administration’s eager prosecution of whistleblowers.
MP3 here. (33:12)
Daniel Ellsberg is the author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
In 1959 Daniel Ellsberg worked as a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation, and consultant to the Defense Department and the White House, specializing in problems of the command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans, and crisis decision-making. He joined the Defense Department in 1964 as Special Assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Affairs), John McNaughton, working on Vietnam. He transferred to the State Department in 1965 to serve two years at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, evaluating pacification on the front lines.
On return to the RAND Corporation in 1967, he worked on the Top Secret McNamara study of U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68, which later came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. In 1969, he photocopied the 7,000 page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; in 1971 he gave it to the New York Times, the Washington Post and 17 other newspapers. His trial, on twelve felony counts posing a possible sentence of 115 years, was dismissed in 1973 on grounds of governmental misconduct against him, which led to the convictions of several White House aides and figured in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon.
December 22nd, 2010
“An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.” Victor Hugo
There is much agitation about Wikileaks on the chattering channels in the US and elsewhere. The politicians are up in arms, many commentators are aghast and the legal eagles are pontificating. The press is having a field day, at least as regards the stories it can publish from leaked material. But all of them seem to be missing the import of what is happening.
History is on the march.
There’s a strong analogy in this with the Diet of Worms and the doomed attempt by Pope Leo X to silence Martin Luther.
Let’s eliminate some of the noise that is currently clogging the air.
The Battle That Was Lost
There was a brief attempt by the US government and its allies to try to close Wikileaks down. If we think of this as an information war, then the first battle in the war ended in a terrible defeat for the US. Here’s how it went:
Anything short of closing Wikileaks down was defeat, and the US government went down to defeat in days. It was difficult, of course. The US Government needed, for political reasons, to be seen to be doing something, so it did a few ineffective things. Maybe more could be done.
The Lutheran Current
In war, if you don’t have a clear understanding of what victory amounts to, you are in trouble. It is tempting to suggest that the US government is in deep trouble for that reason alone. However, it’s a mistake to see the US government as a specific side in this war. This is an info war and info wars take place between power structures not countries. It’s the US power structure, not the US itself, that currently has a side in this war. Info wars are, by their very nature, civil wars between groups of citizens that live under the aegis of a given information control structure. One side wished to conserve it, while the other wishes to change it.
Martin Luther triggered an info war. On one side were power structures that were based on controlling information in the way that it had been traditionally controlled. On the other side were revolutionaries who believed that those power structures needed to be replaced and information made more freely available than before. The initial battle was over the Bible. The Roman Catholic Church in Europe controlled the Bible. When printing presses appeared its control was weakened. The Gutenburg Press began business in 1450, the Diet of Worms was 70 years later in 1521.
Following The Diet of Worms, Pope Leo X issued a “fatwa” proclaiming it legal to kill Luther, but Luther simply retired to Wartburg Castle at Eisenach where he lived incognito, but also protected, translating the Bible into German. And of course, Luther wasn’t alone in translating the Bible. Others began to do the same. The Catholic Church not only lost its monopoly on the Bible, it also lost control of which language it was published in.
Nowadays, this doesn’t sound as big a deal as it really was. At the time the Bible was regarded as the foundation of truth and knowledge. Very few other books existed; just the Greek classics of Plato, Aristotle and others. Those too were held in very high esteem.
Without the Protestant movement, Henry VIII of England would probably not have dared to rebel against Rome and set up his own protestant Church of England. Much later the English monarch, Charles I would be beheaded by the protestant Oliver Cromwell. Europe quickly divided between Protestant and Catholic countries, and the monarchies were gradually replaced either by democratic republics or democracies that relegated their monarchs to figurehead roles. The Diet of Worms had momentous consequences.
A War On Two Fronts
The US power structure cannot behave like the Soviet Union once did. It cannot roll into Prague with columns of tanks and install a different government by fiat. The Prague they seek to conquer is a virtual super-hydra. Strike it down and a hundred identical mirrors rise up from nowhere. Even if you destroy it entirely, other virtual Pragues will no doubt be established.
The infowar is now being fought on two fronts.
In the Media
The ranks of the leaker-friendly side in this war are quickly growing in number. Many professional journalists have stood up in Australia to protest their government’s poor protection of Assange, its own citizen – and the public seems to be on its side. Similarly a whole host of UK journalists have stood shoulder to shoulder with Assange. Only in the US, where the press has become remarkably docile, is there a shortage of Wikileaks support in the main stream media, but this will change if the first amendment becomes the heart of the debate – and it probably will.
Wikileaks is spawning imitators quickly. At the last count there were 7 infoleaks sites; BalkanLeaks in the Balkans, BrusselsLeaks in Belgium, Indoleaks in Indonesia, Rospil in Russia, Tunileaks in Tunisia, Open Leaks (a splinter from Wikileaks) and Wikileaks itself. Most of these sites have mushroomed up in the past few weeks. There will be more.
It is likely that the idea of stealing information and leaking it “as a public duty” has become viral. The number of actual leaks is likely to increase. And this could spell disaster for any organization, government or otherwise, that has inadequate information security and also has something to hide. Information security was never a big area of investment for most organizations and it clearly wasn’t a priority for the US Army. Many more embarrassing leaks will occur from many places before any real semblance of information security is common.
The tide seems to be running with Wikileaks. There are details in this that ought to worry the US government if it is seeking to preserve any semblance of the status quo.
Information Technology
The attempt to close down Wikileaks revealed genuine areas of vulnerability for Wikileaks and any other operation that wants to operate with impunity:
The very idea that US government can control the Internet for its own ends is worrying to many people, not necessarily because of the present situation, but because of situations that may arise in the future.
The natural reaction is to create a secure virtual infrastructure that makes such action impossible. This is probably achievable with a series of technical innovations. (Whether it is will determine the course of history) The innovations would include:
It would also require some minimal legal protection for such systems. That, in turn, requires a government that will champion the kind of freedom that Wikileaks seeks. Whether such a a government will step forward is hard to know, but if any, Iceland is probably the candidate.
We will probably see such innovations come to pass – provoked by the current confrontation.
It’s A Far Wider Conflict Than You Imagine
The infowar is real, but the protagonists are not as I have thus far described them. The US may be sore right now with Wikileaks, but this is about power structures. The US government is merely one of the power structures that is under the threat of “looser transparency” Almost all governments are under the same threat. Corporations that base their business models on corruption and extreme lobbying are also under threat. It may even be that the current world economic systems (national currencies and the world banking system) will be challenged.
The last great info war was enabled by the introduction of printing. It gave rise to a whole host of effects that were unpredictable at the time, but logical in retrospect. Its revolutionary nature was not appreciated at all at the time. However the following consequences can be laid at its door:
The schism in the Roman Church, the fall of the monarchies of Europe, the rise of democracy; the introduction of paper money, modern banking, insurance, limited companies, stock markets and other financial markets and much greater international trade; the birth of newspapers, literacy, the publishing industry and universal education.
This infowar did not begin with Julian Assange and Wikileaks, it began with Tim Berners Lee.
The previous infowar did not begin with Martin Luther and his Ninety-Five Theses, it began with Johannes Gutenberg.
Ultimately, it seems inevitable that other power structures will be drawn into battles in this war: the governments of China, Russia and Iran, for example.
