Thomas Sankara was stalwart in his uphill fight against neo-colonialism and white supremacy from his post as leader of the small West African nation of Burkina Faso. Yet in a story with Shakespearean overtones of intrigue and betrayal, he is overthrown—and murdered—at the behest of one of his closest comrades. Mixing extensive research in archival footage with a taut and gripping narrative, this documentary is an instant classic-in short: a masterpiece.
Gerald Horne, University of Houston
In this short video Portuguese singer Carmen Souza speaks about her third album “ Protegid” (which she recorded with Theo Pas’cal), her Cape Verdean roots, the “Rabelados” (Creole for ‘rebels’, or, ‘non-violent rebels of the Cape Verde Island’, as they are known these days) and jazz pianist Horace Silver (himself born to a Cape Verdean father).
Here’s a great live recording of her playing “Song for my father”:
We like our jazz.–Tom Devriendt
Sentinel Literary Quarterly Poetry Competition (January 2011).
Competition DetailsSubject: Poems may be on any subject or style and MUST NOT have been previously published, posted on a website or blog. Poems posted on members-only writing groups for workshop purposes as part of the creative process are not deemed to have been previously published.
Length: Maximum 40 lines per poem.
Entry Fees: £3.00 per poem, £12.00 for 5 poems.
First Prize: £150.00
Second Prize: £60.00
Third Prize: £40.00First Publication: The top three poems will receive first publication in Sentinel Champions - Selected Poems & Short Stories from the Sentinel Literary Quarterly Writing Competition Series. (This is a print magazine) Up to 15 poems, subject to quality, from this competition will be published in Sentinel Champions Magazine in August 2011.
Entries Deadline: 20th December, 2010
Results due: 31st January, 2011 announced in Sentinel Literary Quarterly magazine at http://www.sentinelquarterly.com
Judge: Mandy Pannett,
Competition Administration: Sentinel Poetry Movement
ENTER BY POST OR ONLINE
POSTAL ENTRIES
Poems must be in English Language and typed.
Author's name and address or any other identifying mark MUST NOT appear on any of your poetry pages.
PRINT your Name, Postal Address, E-mail Address and if you wish, Telephone number on a plain sheet of paper and place the paper in a sealed envelope.
Write "SLQ POETRY JAN 2011" followed by the Title(s) of your Poem(s) on the back of the envelope.
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In the subject line, type SLQ POETRY JAN 2011 Followed by your Transaction ID. You will receive an acknowledgement of receipt of stories within 48 hours.
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You may enter as many poems as you wish with the appropriate entry fees.
If you win one of the prizes in this quarter's competition, you will NOT be prohibited from entering next quarter's competition.
The judges read the poems without any indication of the identity of the authors. If the same poet wins more than one prize, in the interest of fairness we WILL award it.
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* Online entries must be received by midnight on the 30th of September 2010. Postal entries must be post-marked by 20th December 2010. E&OE | SLQ
Intersections/Fast Forward
An eclectic collection of short stories exploring love and loss in modern times, this book merges literary fiction and science fiction in one volume. What is the emotional tipping point, in a relationship or in a life, and are those moments altered by the technology we embrace? In Part I, men and women fall in love, fall apart, and struggle to find human connection through life’s passages. In Part II, characters confront the future possibilities of the actions we take now. Experience an iPod that reveals an affair, a malevolent GPS, e-mail from beyond the grave, an army raised from frozen embryos, addictive love, unrequited love, lost love, and endless love as people and technology cross paths in the stories of Intersections/Fast Forward. Available in hardcover and paperback from Xlibris.
Book trailer photo credits:
Ribbon photos - Andres Velasquez
Author photo - Suzanne Becker Bronk
All other photos - Sheila Scobba Banning
2010 Flash Fiction contests:
The Intersection of . . . .
Call for submissions:“The Intersection of . . . “ Flash Fiction contest offers four subjects for your contemplation and asks you to submit your most interesting 300 words, new or previously published, for any/all. The winner each quarter will receive $25.00 (US) and a signed copy of Intersections/Fast Forward , by Sheila Scobba Banning. Winners will be posted at www.scobba.com.
Guidelines: Up to 300 words, one entry per quarter sent within the given submission period. Send stories to webmaster@lastwrites.net in an e-mail with the topic (The Intersection of . . .) as the subject line, no attachments except PDF. We are not responsible for lost/unreadable submissions and reserve the right to award more than one prize in the case of rampant indecision. Entries sent outside the submission period will be deleted unread. Author retains all rights. Winners will be contacted by e-mail from scobba@aol.com for mailing/payment instructions.
Topic Schedule:October 1 - December 15, 2010
The Intersection of . . . Loss and Desire
The Intersection of . . . Food and Sex winner:
Bobby EversIn the afterglow she asked him "What do you want?" And he said "Eggs." and so she, kissing him, left the bed and walked with grace through the carpeted foyer, her makeshift office and into the kitchen. Her feet padded on the Ikea floor, catlike. He had bought her this floor tile. She would make him these eggs and he would love her. And she would be loved by him. She would keep herself beautiful for him. She would go to great pains for this. She poured olive oil in the skillet and began frying spinach and mushrooms she had on hand, bell peppers, onions. She sizzled them and she cooked them and turned them over with her spatula. His acknowledgement was audible. She was warmed adjacently. She broke eggs into a bowl and added milk and beat the eggs, turning them, wisking them. When the greens had cooked she separated them, the hot oil spitting. She'd never thought cooking for someone could be this sensual. She thought of him tasting, his breathing rhythms, satisfaction. She took responsibility. In the same pan, with the frier on, she, without thinking, dumped the egg very quickly to make omlette. The fluid was repelled by the heat, bounced out, sizzled and spat, and met her naked torso at a very high temperature. She contorted and screamed and fell to the Ikea tile floor, still holding the pan, where the hot egg and veggies crashed to the floor in a terrible sound. He came out concerned and held her and said "What happened!?" and she said "I burnt myself on the eggs," and he laughed and shooshed her and she was embarassed at her true lack of grace but he loved her all the more for it.
The Intersection of . . . Obligation and Passion winner:
Lindsay RoeThe old man walked in the rain. He walked in the rain and he tried to remember what it was like to be a boy walking in the rain. Mostly he thought it must be like falling into a tunnel and never quite coming out on the other side, just slipping forever through a surge of wetness and caramel apples and grass stains. Endless, exhilarating, smelling of ozone.
There were people behind him, calling to him. The rain ran down the backs of their necks and wound itself like twine from the points of their noses. It muddied their outlines and turned them a funny sea-turtle blue. A car suctioned past, pulling the old man's knees with it, sending him thump-thumping a little toward the side of the
highway. He watched the rain dance in the headlights as the car blew its horn. The noises—the horn, the shouting from the sea turtle people behind him—were rainy and wet like the mud under his bare toes. Squish squish squish, the music the earth makes when it sings in the shower.They wanted him back. He could tell that was what the strange muddied music meant. Some of them were waving their arms and sending little petals of water droplets blooming from around their elbows and the corners of their mouths. He should go back, he knew that. But he still didn't remember what it was like to be a boy walking in the rain.
So he took another step toward the highway while the rain fell on his face and the people yelled their meaningless music behind him. He smiled because the rain was cool on his face and he thought for a moment that being a boy must feel like this.
The Intersection of. . . Creation and Sorrow winner:
Jamie Hershing
Black and White ManEach time we fought (and we fought a lot towards the end) she would lock herself in the bedroom. I could hear her scribbling and sobbing inside, and it infuriated me more. Posterity would learn her side of events – I would be the imperfect man.
I broke the padlock on the diary after she finally left, and was shocked to find not words but drawings inside: Each page contained a feature; a hand, an eye, a lip – all so painstakingly sketched I wanted to cry.
My friends who have seen her since say she's happy now, with someone new, a black and white man with perfect features. He only exists in two dimensions though, so when he turns you lose sight of him for a second. But he always appears again, a mirror image of identical perfection.
The Chelsea Awards for Poetry & Short Fiction | Guidelines
Manuscript requirements
Manuscripts must be typed. Fiction must be double-spaced with standard margins; poetry must be single-spaced. The writer’s name should not appear on the manuscript itself. Instead, include in a single, separate cover sheet with title(s), name, address, telephone number, plus email address. No submissions or queries will be accepted by phone, fax, or email. Only previously unpublished work is eligible, and the manuscript should not be under consideration elsewhere, or scheduled for book publication within eight months of the competition deadline. Manuscripts cannot be returned. Manuscripts that do not conform to the guidelines will be destroyed unread.For the Poetry Competition: Submit 4-6 poems. The entire entry should not exceed 500 lines. The editors look for overall excellence; it is not necessary that the poems be related thematically.
Annual deadline: postmarked by December 15.For the Fiction Competition: Send only one work of fiction. The manuscript should not exceed 30 typed pages, or about 7,500 words. The editors welcome both traditional and experimental fiction.
Annual deadline: postmarked by June 15.Entry Fee
An entry fee of $15 is required, for which entrants will receive one copy of Chelsea. Please make fee payable to Chelsea Associates, Inc. (N.B.: be sure to notify editors promptly about any changes of address, since the post office will not automatically forward copies of the magazine.)Announcement of winners
Winners will be announced about two months after each deadline. Include an SASE for notification of competition results.Mail entries to:
Chelsea Awards Competition
PO Box 773, Cooper Station, New York, NY 10276-0773
REPORT AIR DATE: Dec. 10, 2010New Anthology Traces Rap's Lyrical Journey, Its Poetic Roots
Poetry Foundation provided funding for this projectJEFFREY BROWN: And finally tonight: from our political wrap to rap, the music, and maybe, rap, the lyric poetry.
Rap music, in the decades since it arose out of the Bronx in the 1970s, it's been embraced by millions as a vibrant new cultural form, and vilified for its profanity and celebration of violence. It has seen its stars killed and incarcerated or become entertainment moguls and international celebrities.
But it has not, until now, been presented quite like this, as lyric poetry, published by the prestigious Yale University Press in the new "Anthology of Rap."
Editors Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois, who recently came to Washington's Lincoln Theatre for a public forum on the poetics of rap, met as graduate students in Harvard's English department, where Shakespeare and Shelley tend to have pride of place over Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg.
JEFFREY BROWN: But, says Bradley, there was room for all.
ADAM BRADLEY, co-editor, "The Anthology of Rap": At night, at day, any -- between classes, whenever possible, we were listening to all the great rap artists of that period, mid- to late-'90s.
And I soon found out that I had a partner in rhyme who was also listening to the same things, even as we were taking courses in poetics, and, you know, the whole literary canon. And there was the kind of synergy that we both saw going on between those things.
ANDREW DUBOIS, co-editor, "The Anthology of Rap": As we were becoming teachers, you know, graduate teaching assistants, we realized that one of the ways that an art form gets disseminated and understood and appreciated is by having materials that make it available to people.
JEFFREY BROWN: Now, rap can be rough, and it is certainly often profane. But Bradley and DuBois say it offers what poetry always has: rhythm, complex rhyme schemes, allusive and metaphoric language.
As rapper Lauryn Hill put it once in a song: "I treat this like my thesis, well-written topic broken down into pieces. I introduce, then produce words so profuse."
ADAM BRADLEY: What we wanted to do with the anthology is to say that this is a tradition in full. Yes, it's related in profound ways to the broader tradition of Western lyric poetry. Yes, it's related in profound ways to the American songbook across all genres of music. And, yes, it's related in important ways as well to the African-American oral tradition of the toasts, signifying, the dozens. It's all there. But, finally, it's a tradition that can stand on its own.
JEFFREY BROWN: The pioneers of rap drew inspiration from rhythm and blues, and soul music. But rappers like Kurtis Blow seized upon a distinct beat and use of language. Decades later, he participated in the Washington event celebrating rap and told us he'd known early on that he and others were on to something.
KURTIS BLOW, musician: I just knew it was going to spread and it was going to be big.
JEFFREY BROWN: Did you think of yourself as a poet?
KURTIS BLOW: Of course.
JEFFREY BROWN: You did?
KURTIS BLOW: Yes, definitely. And we write our raps with meters. And, in poetry, you have to have a meter, you know, your A, your A, your A-B, your B-B. And then you repeat these meters when you continue your rap as you are writing. So, the rhythm, or -- or we call it the flow -- is so very, very important. But it is just like poetry.
JEFFREY BROWN: Rap and the larger hip-hop culture exploded in the late '80s and early '90s, with records selling in the millions. Perhaps not incidentally, the era also saw the rise of so-called gangsta rap, which extolled the life of gangs and guns, and provoked the huge rap on rap, the condemnation for its perceived misogyny and glorification of violence.
The new anthology doesn't shy away from this, but it does show that rappers always wrote about many aspects of life.
ANDREW DUBOIS: The important thing is that, when it is there, it makes no sense not to take it seriously and look at it without having a knee-jerk reaction. We could think of so many poets and dramatists and novelists whose materials by someone, anyone, might be considered utterly offensive.
JEFFREY BROWN: One rap star known for writing about social problems and much more is Chicago-born Common, who had a string of hits beginning in the mid-'90s and still going strong, even as he's branched out to act in films. At the recent Washington event, Common performed the first rap he ever wrote, at age 12.
COMMON, musician: Well, let me tell you about a trip a time ago. I was going there to run a cold-blooded show. When I was there, I saw some people jamming, too. They called themselves the Blond Hill Crew (ph). Dr. Ice, Romeo, and Master E, all of the Blond Hill Crew (ph) rapped into a team.
It was just me saying, hey, this is what I'm about. This is -- I'm just a cool little 12-year-old. And it was my way of -- at that time in my life, I don't know if I was always as expressive as I was through rap. So, you know how you pick something -- a person can have a shy personality, but you pick up something that you feel comfortable and confident in? That is what hip-hop was to me.
JEFFREY BROWN: In the afterward to this book, in this essay, you wrote that the anthology lets us see beyond the stereotype.
COMMON: Yes.
JEFFREY BROWN: What do you mean? What do you see when you look at all this?
COMMON: Well, I mean, you know, as hip-hop artists, especially coming from the black and Latino cultures, there's a lot of stereotypes that are put upon the inner-city youth and upon rap culture and hip-hop itself. And I think, when you get to dive into these lyrics, you get to see how much depth is really in what these people are saying.
JEFFREY BROWN: For their part, the anthology's editors believe that rap's rise has led to what they call a renaissance of the word that has infiltrated mainstream culture.
(MUSIC)
ADAM BRADLEY: There are grandmothers in suburban Wisconsin who are saying bling-bling, and don't know that it came from B.G. and Lil Wayne.
(LAUGHTER)
ADAM BRADLEY: There are people all over the world who have keyed in to the frequencies of hip-hop language and to the music that these artists have created, and for us, that's what we wanted to celebrate.
JEFFREY BROWN: Kanye as Keats? Lil Wayne as Whitman? The new anthology doesn't go quite that far, perhaps, but it does ask for recognition for rap in the poetic tradition.
New Book: Caribbean Erotic
ed. Opal Palmer Adisa and Donna Aza Weir-Soley
“The beauty of Caribbean Erotic is that it lifts the veils that curtain the many rooms of Caribbean sexuality; its genius is its skilful guidance through the lusty, bawdy, worshipful and spiritual wealth, as we lose our senses to find our selves.”
~Earl Lovelace
Caribbean Erotic is a revealing, wide-ranging and in-depth exploration of the many facets of the erotic in contemporary Caribbean literature. It includes poetry, short fiction and critical essays; work that celebrates desire, work that depicts realistically the psychology of, for instance, a woman whose desperate wish is that her abusive husband still desires her, and work that explores the role of fantasy in the erotic. Infidelity, self-respect, rape, self-love, lust and child-birth are other themes which are interpreted in the collection with honesty and insight.As an anthology, Caribbean Erotic is intended both to arouse pleasure and generate thought about what is, despite the touristic stereotypes, still a conflicted area of Caribbean literature and culture.Contributors:
Opal Palmer Adisa . Apanaki . Marion Bethel . Jacqueline Bishop . K. Brisbane . Nicole Cage-Florentiny . Christian Campbell . Yolanda Rivera Castillo . Chandis . Colin Channer . LeRoy Clarke . Afua Cooper . Edwidge Danticat . Carole Boyce Davies . teenah edan . Marcia Douglas . Suzanne Dracius . Aurora Ferguson . Jose Angel Figueroa . Ken Forde . Glyne Griffith . Eunice Heath-Tate . Jacqueline Johnson . Anthony Joseph . Rosamond King . Helen Klonaris . Randi Gray Kristensen . Christine Yvette Lewis . Audre Lorde . Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming . Shara McCallum . Stacey Miller . Nancy Morejón . Courttia Newland . Angelique Nixon . Paula Obé . Geoffrey Philp . Michelle Remy . B. Alison Richards . Luis Pulido Ritter . Sandra García Rivera . Colin Robinson . Kim Robinson . María Soledad Rodríguez . Linda María Rodríguez Guglielmoni . Heather Russell . Joy Russell . Sajoya . José Sanjinés . Dorothea Smartt . Craig Smith . Malachi D. Smith . Obediah Michael Smith . Eintou Pearl Springer . Lucía M. Suárez . Imani M. Tafari-Ama . Cheryl Boyce Taylor . Omi J. Maya Taylor-Holmes . Hanétha Vété-Congolo . Donna Aza Weir-Soley . Marvin E. Williams . Tiphanie Yanique.
“Just as the Caribbean evokes the scent of the sea and the taste of ripe papaya, so too does Caribbean Erotic, offering readers a sensual treat for both the senses and the intellect.”
~Mitzi Szereto, author of In Sleeping Beauty’s Bed: Erotic Fairy Tales
“What power. What grace. Here we find the body as landscape, the body as map and site of healing, opening, giving, taking, naming, renaming, and remaking. Here we find the language of the living body and the language of intimate desire ‘rubbing up’ to create this invaluable addition to the growing conversation about how we live, how we love, and how important it is that we remove the silence that shrouds the most intimate, most dear parts of our selves. Caribbean Erotic reminds us why we must never, as Adisa warns us, never again allow its existence to be taken for granted.”~Samiya Bashir, author of Gospel: Poems & editor, Best Black Women’s Erotica 2
About Opal Palmer Adisa
Opal Palmer Adisa is a Jamaica-born, award-winning poet, educator and storyteller. Anthologised in over 100 publications, she is a regular performer of her work throughout the USA and presently lives in Oakland, California, when she is not traveling.
***
Madagascar: The Future is Female, Cont'd
This beautiful IFAD report makes a nice addendum for the issue of the rural-urban movement of girls which we raised here. It connects a story about improved farm yields achieved by single mother and daughter small scale farmers, Séraphine and Maria, using improved seeds in rural Madagascar. But here's the rub.
According to IFAD's Rural Poverty Report 2011 the world's future food needs are expected to increase by 70% by the year 2050. But with more and more people seeking better opportunities thus leaving rural areas for cities, who will be left to implement farming solutions for increased yields and, most importantly, how do you keep girls in school (or attract those seeking better quality education to stay) since their labor is integral to how most rural farming gets done and its products processed?
Friday, Dec 10, 2010 09:43 ETThe media's authoritarianism and WikiLeaks
(updated below - Update II - Update III)
After I highlighted the multiple factual inaccuracies in Time's WikiLeaks article yesterday (see Update V) -- and then had an email exchange with its author, Michael Lindenberger -- the magazine has now appended to the article what it is calling a "correction." In reality, the "correction" is nothing of the sort; it is instead a monument to the corrupted premise at the heart of American journalism.
Initially, note that Time has refused to correct its blatantly false claim that WikiLeaks has published "thousands of classified State Department cables" and posted "thousands of secret diplomatic cables" when, in reality, they've posted only 1,269 of the more than 250,000 cables they possess: less than 1/2 of 1 %. It's true that they provided roughly 251,000 cables to five newspapers, but they have only "posted" and "published" roughly 1,200 of them. Time just decided to leave that statement standing even knowing it is factually false.
More significant is the "correction" itself. It applies to Time's clearly false claim of "a distinction between WikiLeaks' indiscriminate posting of the cables . . . and the more careful vetting evidenced by The New York Times." That is false because WikiLeaks' release of cables had not been "indiscriminate" in any sense of the word. As this AP article documents -- and as a casual review of its site independently proves -- WikiLeaks has done very little other than publish the specific cables that have been first released by newspapers around the world, including with the redactions applied by those papers.
So did Time correct its false statement by acknowledging its unquestionable falsity and pointing to the evidence disproving it? Of course not. Instead, they merely noted this at the bottom of the article: "Correction: The story has been amended to reflect the fact that Assange rejects claims that WikiLeaks has 'indiscriminately' dumped documents on its site." They also added to the body of the article a sentence noting that "claims that Assange has simply dumped the documents without reviewing them, much like a traditional editor would, have been disputed" because "Assange himself told TIME that each diplomatic cable his site has published has been vetted by his own team or by the editors of newspapers with whom he has shared the documents."
In other words, the most Time is willing to do -- when forced by public complaints -- is note that "some" people (i.e., Assange) "dispute" the Government's accusatory claims of "indiscriminate" document dumping, ones uncritically amplified by Time and countless other media outlets. The most they're willing to do now is convert it into a "they-said/he-said" dispute. But what they won't do -- under any circumstances -- is state clearly that the Government's accusations are false, even where, as here, they unquestionably are. Anticipating that this would be the "correction" they issued, I even emailed Lindenberger before it was posted and wrote:
One thing, while I have you - the appropriate correction needed is **not** a he-said-/he-said formulation ("we said 'indiscriminate,' but Assange denies this").
That WikiLeaks has (with a handful of exceptions) published ONLY what other newspapers first published is a VERIFIABLE FACT. AP reported it, and all you have to do is look on its website to see that virtually all the cables published were ones first published by the five partner newspapers.
To say "some say 'indiscriminate' while Assange denies this" as a correction is misleading. As a journalist, you should tell your readers the verifiable FACT: that virtually all of the cables published thus far by [WikiLeaks] were first published by these newspapers.
What was vital here was to have Time state clearly that the claim of "indiscriminate" dumping of cables is factually false -- not merely that Assange disputes it. That could then be used to quash this lie each time it appears in other venues. Of course, all of that fell on deaf ears, because my demand required that Time do exactly that which establishment media outlets, by definition, will rarely do: state clearly when the facts contradict -- negate -- claims by those in political power, especially when the target of the false claims is a demonized outsider-of-Washington faction like WikiLeaks.
The same exact thing happened when Time was finally forced in 2007 to issue a "correction" to Joe Klein's factually false statement (which he was told by GOP Rep. Pete Hoekstra) that the Democrats' FISA bill "would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans." Rather than admit what was 100% clear -- that Klein's statement was categorically false -- Time instead merely noted in its "correction" that "Republicans believe it can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don't."
That was Time's "correction" to a factually false statement -- some say yes and some say no: who are we to say which is true? we're just "journalists" -- and that's what they just did again in the WikiLeaks case (by contrast, The Chicago Tribune, which had run Klein's original Time story, issued a clear correction: "A Time magazine essay by Joe Klein that was excerpted on the editorial page Wednesday incorrectly stated that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act would require a court approval of individual foreign surveillance targets. It does not" -- that's what a genuine correction looks like).
The reason this matters so much is because this falsehood is at the center of both the propaganda war against WikiLeaks and the efforts to criminally prosecute it by claiming it is not engaged in journalism. Almost every radio and television show I've done over the last ten days concerning WikiLeaks -- and most media accounts I read -- have featured someone, somewhere, touting this lie, usually without contradiction: that WikiLeaks has indiscriminately dumped thousands of cables, whereas newspapers have only selectively published some.
As I wrote yesterday, WikiLeaks has every right to publish more cables than these newspapers decide to publish, and even to publish all of them -- if it does that, that won't change the legal issues one iota -- but since they haven't done that, media outlets have a responsibility not only to refrain from saying they have, but to state clearly that those who make this claim are spouting falsehoods. That's what "journalism" is supposed to be: stating what the facts are for one's readers and viewers. Time's "correction" explicitly refuses to do that (though the magazine's response is at least mildly better than the gross irresponsibility of The New Republic, which published at least two columns promoting this falsehood -- one by James Rubin and the other by Todd Gitlin -- and then did nothing other than publish a piece by Gitlin days later which devotes a couple of paragraphs to insisting he bears no responsibility whatsoever for his factually false statements and then the rest of the piece to attacking me for pointing them out).
* * * * *
Beyond the need to destroy this pervasive zombie lie about WikiLeaks' conduct in the diplomatic cables disclosure, the broader point here is crucial: the media's willingness to repeat this lie over and over underscores its standard servile role in serving government interests and uncritically spreading government claims. NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen has an excellent analysis today documenting how, in the wake of 9/11, they dropped all pretenses of checking those in political power and instead began explicitly proclaiming -- as The New York Times' chief stenographer and partner-of-Judy-Miller, Michael Gordon, suggested -- that "capturing the dominant view within the government was the job [of journalists], even if that view was wrong." As Rosen writes, "our press has never come to terms with the ways in which it got itself on the wrong side of secrecy as the national security state swelled in size after September 11th," and thus: "To understand Julian Assange and the weird reactions to him in the American press we need to tell a story that starts with Judy Miller and ends with Wikileaks."
That's why this cannot-be-killed lie about WikiLeaks' "indiscriminate" dumping of cables has so consumed me. It's not because it would change much if they had done or end up doing that -- it wouldn't -- but because it just so powerfully proves how mindlessly subservient the American establishment media is: willing to repeat over and over completely false claims as long as it pleases the right people -- the same people to whom they claim they are "adversarial watchdogs." It's when they engage in such clear-cut, deliberate propagandizing that their true function -- their real identity -- is thrown into such stark relief.
Just to underscore this point a bit further, consider this remarkable (and remarkably good) Editorial from The Guardian yesterday, which not only vehemently defends WikiLeaks, but -- extraordinarily -- also justifies the "denial of service" attacks from anonymous individuals around the world aimed at various companies serving the Government's war on WikiLeaks by depriving them of all services (MasterCard, Amazon, Paypal, etc.):
These companies all considered that their association with WikiLeaks damaged their brand image, a reflection prompted in some cases by a helpful call from the US state department. In essence they are trying to have it both ways: pretending in their marketing that they are free spirits and enablers of the cyber world, but only living up to that image as long as they don't upset anyone really important. . . . .
The hacktivists of Anonymous may be accused of many things – such as immaturity or being run by a herd instinct. But theirs is the cyber equivalent of non-violent action or civil disobedience. It disrupts rather than damages. In challenging the credit card companies and the web hosts in this way, they are reminding these businesses that their brand reputation relies not only on how the state department sees them, but also on how they maintain their independence in the eyes of their users. . . .
In times when big business and governments attempt to monitor and control everything, there is a need as never before for an internet that remains a free and universal form of communication. WikiLeaks' chief crime has been to speak truth to power. What is at stake is nothing less than the freedom of the internet. All the rest is a sideshow distracting attention from the real battle that is being fought. We should all keep focus on the true target.
The damage caused by the "denial of service" attacks on these companies has been trivial. Even a CNN article today -- which absurdly asks in its headline: "Is WikiLeaks engaged in 'cyber war'?" -- quotes Bruce Schneier comparing "the pro-WikiLeaks attacks on MasterCard and Visa to a bunch of protesters standing in front of an office building, refusing to let workers in. It's annoying, but it didn't shut down the operation." It was basically an act of civil disobedience -- aimed at protesting the collusive role these corporations played in trying to punish WikiLeaks despite no finding of wrongdoing -- which caused virtually no real damage.
Despite all that, it is impossible to conceive of any establishment media outlet in the U.S. uttering a peep of support for what those protesters did. The immediate consensus in the American political and media class was that these activists were engaged in pure, unmitigated destruction -- even evil -- and should be severely punished. That's because the greatest sin in our political culture is doing anything other than meekly submitting even to assertions of lawless and thuggish government and corporate power. If the Government and the largest corporations collaborate to lawlessly destroy WikiLeaks for the crime of engaging in threatening journalism, then you simply write polite letters to Congress or complain on your blog; what you don't do under any circumstances is resist or fight back using even symbolic gestures of disobedience. That's the authoritarian mentality pervading -- defining -- not only the establishment media but (as a result) much of the citizenry.
Just contrast the angry denunciations over these activists' simplistic, relatively innocuous denial of service attacks, with the apathy toward (or even support for) the far more sophisticated and damaging "cyber attacks" launched at WikiLeaks, which resulted in their permanent removal from any recognizable URL (and now can only be found through some impossible-to-remember numerical address; added: they are also now at wikileaks.ch). Whoever was responsible for those attacks aimed at WikiLeaks -- even if it were a government agency -- is acting every bit as lawlessly as the adolescent (though well-intentioned) activists responsible for shutting down MasterCard's website for a few hours. But it is only the latter transgressions that trigger any real anger.
Identically, note how few object to the fact that the DOJ is investigating the pro-WikiLeaks attacks, but not -- of course -- the ones directed at WikiLeaks. That's because we collectively believe -- with the establishment media leading the way -- that the most powerful authorities have the unfettered right to do whatever they want to anyone who is sufficiently demonized as Bad, while the worst sin is to do anything outside of approved (i.e., impotent) means to protest establishment power and authority, no matter how destructive and criminal the ends are to which that power and authority is being applied.
This is the same mentality that expresses such self-righteous outrage over the mere prospect that disclosures of the truth by WikiLeaks might hypothetically one day lead to the death of a single innocent person, while barely uttering any real anger over the massive numbers of innocents actually being killed right now by the U.S. Government. And it's the same mentality that purports to acknowledge the massive secrecy abuses, deceit and pervasive crimes of the U.S. Government, while demanding that one of the very few people who apparently risked something to do anything meaningful to stop all of that -- Bradley Manning -- be severely punished, or that Julian Assange be punished. This is authoritarianism in its classic form -- an instinctively servile loyalty to power even when it is acting corruptly, lawlessly and destructively -- and it finds its purest and most vigorous expression in those who most loudly claim devotion to checking it: our intrepid adversarial journalists.
UPDATE: For a slightly different but related service the establishment media dutifully provides to the Government, see this excellent Marcy Wheeler post from today, entitled: "Hatfill and Wen Ho Lee and Plame and al-Awlaki and Assange."
UPDATE II: CNN today spewed pure, absurd fear-mongering against WikiLeaks; Assange really is their new Saddam Hussein and WikiLeaks their new WMD. And just to underscore the contrast between how media outlets around the world behave, the French newspaper Liberation -- a mainstream center-left publication -- announced today that it was creating a "mirror-WikiLeaks" site and hosting it on their paper's website (its mirror site is here). It is even possible to conceive of a mainstream American newspaper doing that?
UPDATE III: The New York Times has a new article which, in the first paragraph, takes note of these facts:
For many Europeans, Washington’s fierce reaction to the flood of secret diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks displays imperial arrogance and hypocrisy, indicating a post-9/11 obsession with secrecy that contradicts American principles.
You don't say. Along those lines, former Bush OLC official Jack Goldsmith today said he agrees "with those who think Assange is being unduly vilified" and, further, is unable to see how WikiLeaks' conduct can be distinguished from either that of The New York Times (both in this leak and past ones), as well as "Bob Woodward, [who], with the obvious assistance of many top Obama administration officials, disclosed many details about top secret programs, code names, documents, meetings, and the like." He adds, with great understatement: "the U.S. government reaction to WikiLeaks is more than a little awkward for the State Department’s Internet Freedom initiative."
Haiti - Elections : Violence is not only partisan or political...
10/12/2010 14:29:26
Fueled by a great number of rumors, fear in the population is palpable. The Haitians fear and prepare for armed confrontation in the coming hours or the next days... While the candidates are launching appeals for calm to their supporters in the streets.
Rumors of distribution of weapons, money paid to gang leaders fueling this fear in the population. Especially, that beyond the political protests by supporters of candidates, it is obvious that these social disorders, have promoted the criminal activities (ransacking of homes, theft, assault passersby to ask for ransom, looting shops, murder etc...) that have nothing of political and which does not concern any the candidates who are opposed. The Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) announced Thursday afternoon that he would conduct an audit of the results of the first round of presidential elections, announce which is far from having made the unanimous... The three leading candidates from the elections are invited to attend the operation, said Dorsinvil Gaillot, president of CEP. An announce which did not prevent the situation from continuing to worsen in the country. The United States has again advised their citizens to avoid non-essential travel to Haiti, citing high crime rates, the cholera epidemic and social unrest. For its part, Canada has closed its embassy until further notice due to post-election violence. All flights to and from the capital were severely disrupted or canceled. The former commander of the paramilitary organization the "Front de résistance nationale (FRN)", Guy Philippe, has publicly accused all candidates to have cheating during the presidential, reviving even more the tensions on the ground, although this is not new, and widely observed and reported in the preliminary observation report of the National Network for the Defence of Human Rights (RNDDH) about the elections day on 28 November 2010. The candidate Michel Martelly, for its part, accuses the campaign manager of the candidate Célestine, Senator Joseph Lambert, to be at the origin of violences. In the circumstances and the confusion which reigns, everyone have interest to accuse his opponent and make him responsible for the crisis and violence. Make wear a T-shrirt of the opposing party at its partisans, is now the rule, in this way it is difficult to distinguish in the ground who is responsible... Criminals do not hesitate to use the same ploy.>via: http://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-1885-haiti-elections-violence-is-not-only-p...
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Violence in Haiti – GRAPHIC VIDEO CONTENT
By Carel Pedre
This post is not to accuse anyone. What you gonna see in this video can be a “montage” with people wearing presidential candidate Jude Celestin’s T-shirts. In my country unfortunately, everything is possible. But one thing is sure, one of my Haitian brother was killed because somewhere in Port-au-Prince, A man is paying thugs to kill their own blood, in order to retain power or take advantage of the chaotic situation.WARNING: GRAPHIC VIOLENT CONTENT.R.I.P Brother____________________
The birth of Carel Pedre, the journalist, began in 1995 as he took his first steps as a board operator at Melodie FM, a radio station in Port-de-Paix, Haiti. Knowing that he had what it took to move from behind the board, Carel pursued a position in front of the microphone. A year later he made his debut reporting the news as a DJ at Radio Etincelle, while still maintaining the experience he learned as an operator and flexing both biceps to do a little bit of everything, as a true professional should. In 1998, Carel’s hard work and perseverance made way for him to become the Program Director at Radio New Star, where he remained until 2000.
Relocating to the capital of Port-au-Prince to continue his education by majoring in Computer Sciences at L’ESIH, Carel’s aspirations of being a top-notch journalist never wavered. In April 2001, Carel was ecstatic to showcase his talent in another platform by hosting a myriad of shows at Radio Planet Kreyol, including Pawol Travay, translated Work Talk, Connexion, Generation X and Pulsations, all of which helped him earn a spot as a house hold name.
Further creating a public persona, Carel’s perseverance got him on one of the country’s more edgy and innovative radio stations, Radio One – 90.1, where his Morning Show ranked number one and led him to become Broadcasting Manager.
Walking proudly through several open doors, Carel flexed his muscles as a writer and editor of one of Haiti’s newest and youthful weekly newsletters, Spotlight Entertainment, which also guided him towards becoming the Artistic Director of Soley Sounds, a record label that has discovered the rawest, most popular talent in Haiti of the younger generation. Through all of this Carel has found the time to also lend a hand in promotion young talent as the Co-Producer and Host of Ayiti Deplogue, Haiti’s version of MTV Unplugged.
From Radio to Television Carel has done it all and in March 2007 he became the Ryan Sycrest of Haitian television as the host of Digicel Stars, a televised talent showcase that travels throughout Haiti to find hidden talents in all the crevasses of the nation.
Though everyone’s life changed after the devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake that claimed the lives of many and left Haiti gasping for air, Carel’s humanity resuscitated the country as he became the voice of Haiti by using the tools of new age technology like Twitter, Facebook and Skype to exhibit the plight of the country to the world only a few hours after the quake hit. For weeks after the catastrophe Carel utilized his media prowess to be interviewed by world-wide affiliates to continue spreading much needed information about aid and relief efforts throughout the country. Since, he has remained relentless to his civic endeavors as a vital part of the New Haiti Project, a collaborative effort to build a bigger, better, brighter Haiti.
Earning a plethora of accolades, including a Special Shorty Award by the Real-Time Academy of Short Form Arts & Sciences for his Humanitarian efforts, it is clear that the strength of mind, willpower and pure resolve that Carel has innately instilled within him will lead him towards greater things to come, as his wisdom, knowledge and flair for journalism continue to flourish.
>via: http://blog.carelpedre.com
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Violence in Port-au-Prince
December 11, 2010
Joegodson Déralciné and Paul Jackson
The streets of Port-au-Prince were still calm today, Friday. Joegodson went to Cite Soleil to stroll around. He talked with everyone he knew and others he didn’t.
People are extremely poor there. In the present situation, a few dollars can keep you or your loved ones alive.
Throughout Cite Soleil, everybody he spoke with was aware that Célestin is hiring. All you have to do is to join the protests and create chaos: sign up as an agent provocateur. In return, you get money and a gun. You don’t have to pretend to be a Célestin supporter. In fact, the intention seems to be to attribute the violence to Martelly supporters. We’ve seen this before.
Although the long-term goals are not shared with the recruits, it would seem that Célestin and Préval are recreating the 2004 post-coup situation that led to the MINUSTAH assault on the poor of Port-au-Prince. We have discussed it in more detail here and there. In short, they will create a situation whereby the authorities will claim that the heavily-armed MINUSTAH troops must restore order. Those soldiers will need little encouragement. They are bitter that the Haitian poor have not taken a liking to them. In keeping with occupations everywhere, the occupying forces and the subjugated population are headed for open conflict. Ignorance and arrogance combine to make the MINUSTAH troops foolish pawns in a deadly game.
And so the poorest people see that there are sides to choose. Some are turning their backs on their neighbours for dirty money. Others are supporting Martelly who defies the corrupt powers in their name. Today, Friday, he played his role well, refusing to cooperate with the recount. He continues to insist that the Electoral Council (CEP) resign and be replaced … but go forward. He argues that the CEP is responsible for the fraudulent farce that has brought us to this point. “You don’t report a theft to the thief,” said his spokesperson lucidly, underlining the absurdity of the CEP overseeing the audit. Many disenfranchised Haitians are looking for a champion to represent them in precisely that manner in relation to illegitimate authority.
There are many more perspectives in Haiti than those represented by Martelly supporters and recipients of Celestin’s largesse. Our guess is that the latter are only intended to legitimate the coming MINUSTAH counter-offensive. Money seems fragile in the face of the passion and pent-up anger of Martelly’s supporters. There is evidence that Martelly is looking to ride that violence to the presidency. However, there is also much support for a position that would displace the violence altogether: redo the elections from scratch within a constitutional framework that encourages open discussions and the inclusion of all political parties.
Joegodson worries that the country is on a fast track to civil war. It will be fought initially between money (Célestin) on one side and Martelly supporters on the other. There is a non-violent alternative that would teach the ‘international community’ an important lesson in democracy. But that will be difficult to realize in the present circumstances. Tragically, the violent options will play into the hands of those with the biggest guns. The money behind those guns is invisible to those outside of Haiti. For instance, Connie Watson of the CBC reported on the protests in Port-au-Prince today: “It’s really hard to know what’s happening,” she kept saying. No kidding? We imagine it would be tough if you don’t speak the languages of Haiti, are ignorant about class relations, and have no intimate contacts that might lead you through the local terrain. (In fact, the situation in Haiti is far more complex than we have allowed ourselves to report so far. We haven’t even touched upon the importance of vodou in this affair. We will.)
However, on the streets of Cite Soleil, money has a big mouth. The problem for Célestin is that he can’t recruit his violence fomenters if he doesn’t let his intent be known and pay up front. Joegodson watched such financial transactions today, on the streets of Cite Soleil. What is common knowledge on those streets is simply off the radar for a first world journalist staying at the Hotel Mentana, geographically in Port-au-Prince but a world away from Cite Soleil. In any case, that kind of reporting will keep Canadians safe from Célestin’s secret. And, when the MINUSTAH troops start firing, Watson’s colleague Paul Hunter will fall back on the analysis that framed his reportage of the election fraud: “Well, this is Haiti.” That tautology must mean something to Hunter. What can it mean to the viewers? Do CBC journalists come by this honestly, or does the corporation draw strict limits around what questions can be asked and what answers given?
And so, the media will help Canadians spin a made-in-Canada explanation to account for the violence in Haiti. Curiosity is the first line of defence against misinformation. Canadians should ask themselves if the story as presented is credible. If they need to rely on racist and chauvinist presumptions to reach the same conclusions as the establishment media (Haitians are violent by nature, Haitians are incapable of self-direction), then they should inform themselves responsibly.
Below are a couple of short sketches of Joegodson and Paul. We write these articles together, with considerable difficulties. We have developed our friendship and trust over the years. Since the earthquake, we maintain contact by telephone only. Joegodson has no access to Internet. When a friend from Europe donated the money to buy a camera after the earthquake, Joegodson was able to go to an Internet cafe to send the photos he took and you can see on this site. That was expensive. Since the camera was stolen in September, there has been no reason to waste money going to an Internet cafe. So, we continue our discussions by phone as often as possible. Unfortunately, that is expensive as well and Paul cannot keep up with the expense. So, there is much that we have to leave unexplored here for lack of means. In the future, if we can realize our plans, we will be able to work together to finish the book-length exploration of intercultural relations that we allude to from time to time in these pages.
These lines were written back in March 2010. Soon it became clear that media libre was Joegodson and Paul. However, some of the Haitians worked with us initially. They still support us. However, Joegodson and Paul have never received any money for their writings (December 2010). The other Haitians could not spare the time when they were scrounging to survive. So what is called media libre here is Paul and Joegodson.
Vilmond Joegodson Déralciné
me
I was born in Saut D’Eau in 1983. My father was working as a cultivator. However, the land was not very productive. His mother had taught him how to sew in order that he have a second trade. My mother was also a couturier. In 1988, my father left Saut D’Eau for Port-au-Prince to see if he could make a better living in the city. My brother and I were little and he put us both in one straw basket and filled a second basket with supplies to begin a new life in Port-au-Prince. We rode into Port-au-Prince on the back of his mule. He settled in Cité Soleil and began his new life as a tailor. Eventually, my mother joined him there.
I went to various schools in Cité Soleil. My parents had five more children. In 1999, my mother died. Since both my father and mother had worked hard as tailor and couturier to maintain the family, my father had no option but to send the youngest children to orphanages. My older brother Johnny and I had to withdraw from school and leave home. I still had two years before I would have finished secondary school, but instead I went to live with the family of my father’s little sister in Delmas 33 and to work in his furniture shop. For three years, I worked in his shop. I learned the trade well and became an imaginative furniture maker. The shop became much more profitable and my uncle hired a couple of apprentices to work with me. I continued to go to school in the afternoons, to try to finish secondary school. However, I was repeatedly sent away from classes because I could not pay the monthly school fees. My uncle refused to pay me enough so that I might pay to complete school. I suspect he wanted me to remain tied to the furniture shop. Finally, I left the shop.
In a sack on the side of a mule like this my brother and I first entered Cite Soleil in Port-au-Prince
In 2003, my friend Jetro allowed me to live in a room behind an abandoned medical clinic where he worked to guard the grounds. In 2006, I was out late one night with a couple of friends when I saw two blan, a man and a woman, staring at a big fire in the street near the clinic. I told my friends that I would try out my English on them and maybe I would find someone who could help me materially. I said, “Good afternoon.” They were surprised to see a huge fire in the streets in the middle of the city. I didn’t understand why they were surprised because that was how we always got rid of our garbage. Paul told me that in Canada there are people who are employed by the city to take garbage away from all the neighbourhoods. I thought that was strange.
Paul and I began to exchange languages. He taught me English in exchange for Creole. At first, we had to use French as our common language. In the process, we became good friends. I also introduced him to my friends and we went to different places outside of the capital. After Paul left Haiti, we remained friends and spoke often on the phone.
This is the clinic after the earthquake. Joegodson lived in what had been the cook's room on the grounds behind this abandonded clinic. This remaining structure tumbled in March under heavy rains and is now entirely flattened to rubble.
After the earthquake, Paul and I continued to talk and to write articles that Canadian Dimension Magazinepublished. Then we decided to write a book together. We created the story and began writing the chapters in Creole and English. In the meanwhile, Paul was telling me what Canadians read and heard about Haiti. My friends and I responded by researching the reality of life in Port-au-Prince and in the provinces. A number of my friends from different groups in Port-au-Prince joined me in wanting to communicate our own experiences. A few of us have christened ourselves Media libre. We mean by that a free media: not simply independent, but liberated. We want to research and to communicate the reality of our lives in Haiti after the earthquake. We have little access to Internet services. We have no computers. We seldom have electricity. We are not all literate. We speak Creole and sometimes French. We think we know our lives better than those who write about us.
Haiti’s motto is L’union fait la force, “in unity, there is strength.” However, what we want to do is to create a universal unity. We are not the same as Canadians. Paul and I discover our differences all the time. However, it is clear to us that we cannot be free in Haiti until those who live outside of Haiti understand that we have our own culture and our own desires, just as we assume that Canadians have.
We have no final destination in mind. But we believe that the truth leads in the right direction. It is to communicate the truths of our lives to those outside of Haiti that we embark on this project.
(translated from French by Paul Jackson)
Paul Jackson
I wrote One of the Boys: Homosexuality in the Military during World War II, now in its second edition with McGill-Queen’s University Press as well as several articles on Canadian foreign policy published in academic journals. I taught some courses on labour and Canadian foreign policy at McGill and Concordia Universities in Montreal, and worked in a number of jobs. In 2006, I spent five months in Haiti. I was fortunate to have met Joegodson during my second week in Port-au-Prince. We exchanged our mother tongues, English for Creole, using French as a common language. We became close friends. He introduced me to his friends and family and I was soon totally immersed in Creole and Haitian culture.
In Haiti, I stood out as different, a foreigner: in Creole, blan. Haitians and I related to each other according to our assumptions and expectations. I took their assumptions about me seriously and tried to be sensitive to how I was responding to them. This project is my attempt, with Joegodson, to discover the opportunities that exist between Canadians and Haitians for honest relations and mutual respect. Joegodson and I are aware that our personal and national histories are deeply rooted in a global system of domination constructed by the generations that precede us.
Underneath the illusions that order our national and personal lives, there is a deeper reality that must be the basis of interpersonal, international, and intercultural relations. My purpose is to help Joegodson and his colleagues in Media libre disseminate their research and writings to the North American audience. In my own writings on the site, I explore the obstacles in the way of honest exchanges between Haitians and North Americans from a Canadian perspective.
>via: http://heartofhaiti.wordpress.com/2010/12/11/violence-in-port-au-prince/
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Executive Director of Haiti's State University Hospital, Alix Lassegue, ouside the hospital in Port-au-Prince. The French-trained gastroenterologist is hoping for a government socialized health plan within four years.
LUCAS OLENIUK/TORONTO STAR
FERMATHE, HAITI
The newest member of Lovely’s family was born here last month, the cord yanked from around his howling throat.
He died, still unnamed, 15 days later.
No one knows why.
“Everyone’s sorry,” whispers his mother Lina Elistin, Lovely’s 25-year-old cousin, curled on a wooden chair in the family’s dirt yard. The last time I’d seen her, she was proud and pregnant. Now, she’s almost disappeared in layers of dirt-smudged clothing and sorrow. She keeps her eyes locked on the ground.
“I just stopped crying this week,” she says softly.
She had hoped to give birth in the local hospital. But her father Delius said it was too expensive. Instead, he hired a nurse to deliver the baby at home. The nurse didn’t make it in time.
Lina pushed out her thin child on Lovely’s bed, assisted only by her step-mother and a family friend. They used one of her father’s tailoring razorblades to cut the umbilical cord.
Fet ak kwaf. He arrived in a chokehold, which in Haitian folklore predicts a lucky life. But after a week, the little boy turned his head from his mother’s breast. He began to wheeze. Delius’s wife, Rosita and her sister Rosemene took turns comforting him — feeding him softened crackers and massaging his naked body with oil.
Lina was sleeping beside him one afternoon when the family discovered he’d stopped breathing.
Less than an hour later, Delius buried him in an unmarked grave. They had been waiting for his baptism to give him a name.
Everyone mourns. The weight of guilt is heavy, fueling blame. Rosita thinks Lina dropped him. Lina thinks an angry neighbour killed him with a voodoo curse.
But the real villains are ignorance and poverty. When I ask Rosita why she didn’t rush him to the nearby hospital, she says she didn’t think of it. When I ask Delius, he responds: “No money.” A bed there costs only $1.50 a day, but the lab tests and medicine are extra.
The baby’s death does not fully capture the tragedy of Haiti’s pitiful health-care system. Statistically, Lina should have died too.
Haiti is one of the easiest places on Earth to die — not from violence, although last week more than a dozen people were shot in post-election protests, but from easily treated illnesses.
Cholera, a disease cured with sugar, salt and clean water, is just the most recent example: It has killed more than 2,100 Haitians since October.
Almost six babies of every 100 die soon after birth. One in 12 won’t make it to age 5 — most succumbing to diarrhea and the flu. What child in Canada hasn’t had those?
More women die during childbirth here than in any other country in the western hemisphere. A lot more. For every 100,000 live births, 630 Haitian mothers perish — more than triple the number of mothers in Bolivia, which has the next-worst chance of survival (200 per 100,000). In Canada, only 7 die.
Most of those Haitian women bleed to death because, like Lina, they give birth at home.
“We are talking about 2,000 young women dying year after year because they don’t have the money to go to a hospital. For no other reason, they’re dying,” Christian Morales tells me from inside his small trailer-office in a barren field by the city’s airport. A naturalized Canadian, Morales has lived in Haiti for five years as the Pan American Health Organization’s health systems expert.
Haiti’s health-care system is a moth-eaten quilt of public and private facilities. Threadbare budgets mean even public hospitals charge patients for basics such as intravenous tubes and syringes, which most Haitians — living on less than $2 a day — can’t afford. Only one in 10 people here is covered by public health insurance.
Money often doesn’t buy care. A group of American doctors and nurses volunteering at the Haitian Community Hospital in Pétionville scrounged among themselves for $400 to admit Revaldo, a tiny 2-pound premature baby arriving at the hospital in the arms of his panicked father. His twin brother had died in their tin shed shortly after birth.
Two days later, I visited Revaldo and his exhausted mother, Fania Saint Juste, in a dim room they shared with two other sick babies — one with highly contagious pneumonia. Instead of being protected and warmed in an incubator, his tiny body lay under blankets on an adult gurney, warm air pumping over him from a heater. His face was tinged yellow.
Saint Juste slept slumped in a chair nearby. After prodding from Massachusetts pediatrician Gail Ryan, nurses showed her how to pump her breasts, and gave Saint Juste a rinsed-out plastic orange juice bottle to collect her milk for the baby. The bottle of breast milk was then left out, unrefrigerated, for more than a day.
“Babies this little tend to get infections. Their skin is thin, their immune systems are immature — nothing is ripe yet. That’s why breast milk is his best chance,” Ryan said, erupting in frustration. “How basic can you get?”
Had he stayed in his mud shed, Revaldo’s chances of survival were zero, Ryan said. Here, in this hospital, she pegged them at 30 per cent.
“Now with the cholera outbreak, I’d make them more dismal,” she says months later, when I reach her by phone in her North American office.
Revaldo survived the 10 days she helped pay for in the hospital. What happened to him afterward, she doesn’t know.
If there was a silver lining to the earthquake, it was this: hundreds of thousands of Haitians saw a doctor for the first time.
Public and private hospitals operated in the rubble. Haitian physicians bandaged people in their back yards. Hundreds of medical groups flooded in to perform Civil War-style surgeries — no antiseptic, no electricity, charts scrawled on patients’ bandaged stumps because there were no clipboards.
Ten months later, dozens of health clinics funded by non-government organizations continue to offer free, rudimentary medical care under tarps and in buses around the broken city.
It’s what happens next that is the big question.
In April, the health ministry proposed rebuilding the many damaged hospitals, and adding others throughout the country so that every Haitian will be within 30 minutes of a health facility.
The plan describes a new universal health-care system, extended first to the most vulnerable Haitians — young children, pregnant women, the elderly, amputees and the mentally ill — and eventually, to everyone.
All this is supposed to be underway in the next 18 months.
“Everyone’s in agreement that we need a social system, even before the earthquake,” says Dr. Jean Hugues Henrys, a health ministry member and the dean of the private Catholic Notre Dame University medical school. “The problem was finances.”
That’s not entirely true. Yes, the Haitian health ministry runs on an anemic budget of $30 million. But the country receives a monetary transfusion every year — $190 million in 2008 — from international donors for health programs.
Since the Jan. 12 earthquake, health-care spending has almost doubled from 2008, with donors pouring $460 million into health services — the exact amount the government says it needs to complete its 18-month plan.
The problem is leadership. Traditionally, Haiti’s health ministry has been a junior partner of the big international donors. The result is a patchwork, incoherent health-care system. Foreign-funded programs for patients with HIV and AIDS flourished, while public hospitals slumped with neglect.
Morales, the Canadian health systems expert with PAHO, gives this example: Last year, the Cuban and Venezuelan governments built six state-of-the-art diagnostic centres. The problem: there were few places to transfer the patients once they had been diagnosed. The centres were better equipped than the hospitals.
“And nobody said, ‘You know guys, this won’t work,’” says Morales. “That’s a huge problem.”
“This is one of the few areas where there are five main actors — USAID, CIDA, Cuba, UNICEF and thousands of NGOs (non-governmental organizations). They all have their own ideas. They all think they know what’s best to do.”
Bolivia is an apt model of what leadership can do. Fourteen years ago, its health statistics paralleled Haiti’s. Then the Bolivian government directed aid money into a health insurance scheme, granting free care to all children under 5 and pregnant women. As a result, the country’s infant and maternal mortality rates have been cut in half.
“At some point, it’s not a matter of money,” Morales says. “It’s what you do with that money.”
Push through the crowded green gates into the courtyard and the smell of urine becomes overwhelming.
The once-white buildings arranged around a wilting patch of trees and mud look like they’ve been hauled up from the ocean floor. They are mottled with grey and brown spots and, since Jan. 12, long curving cracks. Metal bars curl out from one wall like eyelashes. A thin river of grey water pulses down the gutter, as half-naked people bathe from buckets outside a smattering of beige pup tents.
A man pushes his shriveled father, dressed only in underwear, around parked cars in a wheelchair that looks like it’s been fished from the trash — leather seat and backrest replaced by a white plastic chair.
This is Haiti’s top hospital, the Hopital de l’Universite d’Etat d’Haiti (HUEH). It is the country’s biggest as well as its only teaching hospital and it is the only hospital in Port-au-Prince with a 24-hour emergency room. If leading presidential candidate Mirlande Manigat was hit by a truck, this is where she would be rushed.
Haitians call it the place to come to die.
Dressed in a starched white lab coat, Dr. Alix Lassegue cuts through the chaos with purpose. A French-trained gastroenterologist, Lassegue was once a top bureaucrat in the health ministry. Today, he’s the hospital’s executive director. He’s a man of procedure, pen-scribbled notes and quiet optimism. If he notices the disarray and filth around him, he doesn’t let on.
He stops between two parked cars outside the cracked surgical building and gently nudges a mound of grey sand with the toe of his dress shoe.
“This is it,” he says. This is where a group of American and French dignitaries gathered in late September to lay the foundation of a new $53.2 million hospital. This pile of sand, now adorned with an empty juice can, symbolizes hope.
“We are going to completely rebuild the site. It will be a modern hospital. We’ll have all the specialties, more imaging, more technical approaches, oncology, radiotherapy, a CT scanner and MRI, a pediatric ICU. It will be like CDTI,” says Lassegue, referring to a swank, private hospital five minutes away where the country’s first organ transplant was done last year.
The hospital was funded like a university dorm, hence its pathetic legacy. While Toronto’s Mount Sinai spends $445 million a year, HUEH’s budget is $5 million — 90 per cent sapped by salaries, which were both low and irregular. Top doctors here make $590 a month, when they are paid, so everyone — including Lassegue — has a private clinic, where they work two to three days a week.
In principle, treatment here was free. In practice, patients were sent across the street to private pharmacies to buy everything from surgical gloves to needles.
“I remember one lady suffering from heart failure,” recounts Dr. Louine Martineau, a doctor with Partners in Health who interned at HUEH. “The medication was only 25 gourdes (62 cents) for a bottle, but she couldn’t afford it and she died.”
The earthquake came as a mercy killing. It destroyed buildings that should have been bulldozed years ago. It also infused the campus with dozens of international medical groups who established the hospital’s first intensive care unit. Lassegue says the supplies they brought will last into next year. In July, the Red Cross raised staff salaries for the year to nearly match what NGOs are paying. And the French and American governments have committed to help the hospital for five years, by which time that mound of sand should be replaced by a new earthquake-resistant building.
But what are the chances of all that happening?
Private hospitals like CDTI — the Centre de Diagnostique et de Traitement Intégré — still haven’t been reimbursed for the care they provided after the earthquake. It has since closed, going bankrupt after three months of treating earthquake victims for free.
No headway has been made on the government’s plan for universal health care. The Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission approved a $20 million PAHO program to provide free health care for some patients, but didn’t fund it, so Morales is back to begging donors.
“It could take three or four years (to rebuild HUEH), depending on political stability,” Lassegue says. “But it will happen.”
Just across the dirt park, row upon row of babies cry and murmur from their rusty cribs in the hospital’s pediatric wing — now housed in a plywood bunker. Three of the babies were abandoned here by their parents, perhaps out of fear or poverty. “We don’t have time to hold or play with them,” explains Dr. Romy Morency, a sleep-deprived pediatric resident, rushing from the bunker in search of an IV tube. “There are so many kids here in bad shape.”
What will happen to them is beyond contemplation, Morency says.
Will the renovation plans help? Will they keep her at the hospital?
“Hell no,” she says, pulling a BlackBerry from her jeans to show a photo of her 3-year-old son. “I have a family to take care of. I’ll be long gone.”
There is a model for good health care in Haiti, for the rich and poor alike. To see it, you must leave the city, head northeast up into the desert mountains with their cacti and famers astride lumbering pack mules until you reach the dusty town of Lascahobas. At the end of the main road, lined with saloon-like stores, sits what could pass for an Oakville golf clubhouse: low-slung white buildings surrounded by manicured lawns and birds of paradise. People sit on benches under a trellis of white flowers awaiting prescriptions. No garbage, no pulsing gutter, no smell of urine. Yes, the hospital is basic, but it is clean and welcoming. Most importantly, it is free.
Officially, patients pay 25 gourdes (62 cents) as an admission fee, which covers all their treatments and medication. Most don’t pay even that.
The wards are packed with one comforting story after another: peasant women with bellies swollen from heart disease blessing the doctors; the farmer who donated his sugar cane and rice fields for the hospital contentedly recovering from malaria; 10-year-old Elmitha Felix sliding her crippled left foot up and down the hall, just like her physiotherapist taught her.
She arrived here from Port-au-Prince last March with what doctors thought was typhoid fever. Five days later, she slipped into a coma. Turns out she had tuberculosis meningitis.
“She’s the star,” says Dr. Louine Martineau, watching her do her exercises. “Here, we can actually help people. It’s not depressing.”
Most of the hospital’s $1.5 million budget comes from international grants and donations. But it is run with the approval of the health ministry, which pays a base salary for the staff.
“Rather than developing a parallel system to replace what the ministry can’t do, we’re trying to support what the ministry has the authority to do,” says Dr. Louise Ivers, the Irish-born chief of Partners in Health in Haiti who has spent seven years here. “That’s the only way to have a sustainable system.”
In nearby Mirebalais, backhoes are leveling corn and rice fields to make space for a larger version of this hospital — 320 beds and six operating rooms. It, too, will be government-sanctioned, but PIH-funded, treating the poor for free.
But what happens if, after the hospital opens in a couple years, Partners in Health can’t raise the $8 million it will cost to run it every year?
“There’s a Haitian proverb,” Ivers says, when I ask her if she is hopeful. “It says ‘As long as your head is not cut off, you have the hope of putting on a hat.’”
I am not hopeful. Health care will continue to be what it’s always been for most Haitians, I fear — a gift bestowed on the lucky and the rich. At least for the foreseeable future.
How many women like Lina will die for no reason? How many more babies will die from poverty? It is unconscionable.
I visit the Baptist Mission hospital in Fermathe, where Lina should have taken her baby, had she the foresight and the cash. Set behind an impressive stone church, it was built by American Christian missionaries as part of a complex of schools, a tree nursery, a 1950s-style American diner and a small museum with dusty displays of Haitian history and the perceived evils of voodoo.
The hospital is there to treat people’s souls as well as their bodies, Jean Angus, its business administrator, tells me. “Many of our patients meet with Christ at the hospital.” The chaplain runs a social assistance program, waiving fees for a handful of patients each year.
Had Lina brought her son here, he might have been among those lucky few.
But, given the cool reception the family received in June when I accompanied them here, he might also have been turned away.
“If we make a big publicity about our assistance program, we will go out of business because no one will have the means to pay,” Angus admits.
I take a tour. The hospital is small, but clean, and its two operating rooms look modern and well-equipped. There are four full-time doctors, a blood work lab, a dental clinic, a busy maternity ward and a small, quiet pediatric ward.
Compared to CDTI, a bed at the Fermathe hospital is cheap. But, like most private hospitals in Haiti, every service and treatment costs extra. When we came here in June, the consultation, blood work and medication for Lovely and three of her family members — they suffered urinary tract infections and Uncle Delius had his perpetually sore back X-rayed — cost me more than $50. That’s six months’ rent in a nearby apartment.
You can see why Lina’s family didn’t bring the child here. For them, the hospital might as well be in Canada, it’s so far out of reach.
But not anymore. After reading about Lovely, many Star readers sent me cheques for the family. So, I opened an account at the hospital and deposited $1,000. That’s a lot of money in Haiti. It should support all 12 family members for at least five years — covering lab tests, medication, dental work, even surgery.
The first family member who plans to go is Lina. She’s anemic, and has been light-headed and chilled since giving birth.
>via: http://www.thestar.com/article/905566--death-and-decay-in-haiti-s-hospitals
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December 9, 2010
By SASHA KRAMER
Wednesday morning, the day after the election results were announced, and the streets of Port au Prince are covered in a blanket of tire smoke. From Delmas 33 the sounds of gunshots and tear gas canisters ring through the air every few moments and on every street corner loud political discussions echo through the rubble which has been arranged to form road blocks. On the main streets, dumpsters have been overturned and converted into roadblocks. Public transportation has slowed to a standstill and businesses are shuttered.Though the source of the frustration is clear and the anger is justified, this political unrest has serious implications for the current public health crisis that Haiti is facing, as a cholera epidemic ravages the cities and countryside. Over 1 million people in Port au Prince's sprawling IDP camps are completely dependent on trucked water and clean sanitation facilities to protect them against cholera, which is transmitted through water contaminated with infected feces. The services provided by medical facilities and public health employees are critical for containing the epidemic through treating the sick, burying the dead and decontaminating infected areas.
Imagine the implications of several days without sanitation services in Port au Prince. An example, in downtown Port au Prince and Petionville the camps of Place Boyer, Place Saint Pierre and Champs Mars (home to over 15,000 people) rely on approximately 450 portable toilets for sanitation. These toilets are cleaned and emptied daily by a private company. With a small holding capacity and extremely heavy usage, many of these toilets will fill in 1-2 days if not emptied. Two days without desludging and the toilets of Champs Mars could be overflowing with over 5000 pounds of poop per day. Also, recent reports indicate that in downtown Port au Prince portable toilets are being overturned and used as roadblocks, some spilling their contents into the streets where tens of thousands of people have gathered to express their discontent with the CEP and the UN troops.In the most densely populated camps the only source of treated water is brought in daily by trucks. This is the water that people use to clean, cook and often drink. Several days without treated water and people will be forced to drink from unsafe sources, seriously increasing their exposure to cholera. What happens when the carefully placed hand-washing facilities run dry and the bladders are deflated?The other major risk is the lack of access to medical facilities and morgue services. Though many of the cholera treatment centers have managed to stay open, the long journey to them is blighted by the disruption on the roads. Those who do fall ill in the coming days may face a difficult decision about whether to travel to the hospital or remain at home, and for serious cases this could significantly increase the mortality rate (as was the case during the unrest in Cap Haitien several weeks ago when the mortality rate rose to the highest in the country). And what if people do die in their homes, as they have been daily for the past month? Who will come to collect the body? Will the men in the orange shirts arrive with their chlorine sprayers or are they too in the streets demonstrating against an unjust electoral process?So many questions, so many potential risks. It is heartbreaking that the situation had to come to this; that a lack of honesty and humility on the part of the UN regarding the cholera outbreak could lead to an escalation of frustration and anger during such a precarious moment in Haiti's history; that a corrupt electoral council could set the stage for unfair elections built on exclusionary policies when the country is still reeling from the earthquake and cholera; and that millions of dollars could be wasted on farcical elections at a time when over 1 million people are still homeless. This situation was avoidable and now it is untenable. It is unfair to ask those with a legitimate grievance to go home and accept the hand that has been dealt them, and it is terrifying to imagine a country blocked by burning tires and pent up frustrations where basic rights such as water, sanitation and medical care become increasingly scarce. And all of this in the time of cholera. Sasha Kramer, Ph.D. is an ecologist and human rights advocate and co-founder of Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods (SOIL). She is an Adjunct Professor of International Studies at the University of Miami. She can be reached at: sashakramer@gmail.com.
>via: http://www.counterpunch.org/kramer12092010.html
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Dazed and desperate, Sandrise Vital spent two days pinned beneath the rubble that crushed her spine, contemplating death. What would it feel like to die? Will her family know she's dead?
Vital didn't immediately know that it was an earthquake that caused the three-story government building where she worked in Port-au-Prince to crumble on top of her.
She thought the collapse was from poor construction -- as was the case with a school that collapsed months before.
She cursed the architects who constructed the Haiti Ministry of Commerce building. She pleaded with God, ``Let me go peacefully.''
Through staticy radio reception on her cell phone hours later, she learned that she -- like thousands of other Haitians -- was buried alive because of the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake. Vital tapped on pieces of rebar with a rock when she heard muted voices from outside. When her arms grew tired and her spirit weakened she welcomed death. ``I tried to kill myself maybe 20 times under there, I didn't want to live,'' she said. Holding her breath didn't work. Trying to cut off her own oxygen supply by tucking pieces of debris where she saw tiny capsules of light also didn't work.
She realized she was powerless to even commit suicide.
``I said, `Well, God you don't need my help,' '' she said.
She resigned herself to death, but continued to knock on the rebar in hopes someone would come back and pull out her body.
But her raps eventually drew a team of police officers and civilians who dug her out, chipping away at concrete blocks with hammers.
Vital, a law-school graduate who celebrated her 30th birthday on Wednesday, sustained injuries to her spinal cord and legs. Her extended family stateside pooled their resources to charter an air ambulance that brought her to Florida.
She spent two months at Memorial Regional Hospital South in Hollywood. Her left leg was amputated above the knee. The injuries to her spinal cord were extensive, and doctors told her she will never walk again.
``When they told me I was paralyzed, I didn't really understand, I didn't know it would be this bad,'' Vital said.
The used manual wheelchair the hospital gave her is old. The brakes work sporadically and the back support has already undergone three repairs since she received it. Without an electric wheel chair, Vital said, she won't gain the independence she craves.
She is living in Royal Palm Beach with her cousin's ex-wife, who took her in after hearing of her plight. The only time Vital ventures outside is for doctor visits or to go to Sant La, a social service agency in Little Haiti.
There is no ramp to her home, which means someone has to carry her outside.
``I don't go outside on my own,'' she said. ``I can't.''
For the holidays, Vital is asking for medical help. She said she is in constant pain.
She does not qualify for medical aid or any federal assistance because she was admitted to the United States on a tourist visa.
``With a tourist visa she's allowed to be a visitor and take in all the sights and that's it,'' said Gepsie Mettelus, director of Sant La, who nominated Vital for Wishbook.
``She hasn't been able to see a neurologist or a specialist. Without insurance, Medicare or something, no one wants to touch her,'' Mettelus said.
In Haiti, people with handicaps are hidden and sometimes abandoned by family.
Vital said she's heard stories of people in America like her, who are paralyzed but lead independent and active lives. Vital enjoys learning about new languages and computers. She would like to put her law degree to use and get a job someday.
``I love to learn. I would love to go to school or take classes somewhere,'' she said. ``In rehab, they said even if I'm handicapped there are many things I can do on my own.''
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/12/11/1969540/rising-from-the-rubble.html#ixzz17xB1R2QV
>via: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/12/11/1969540/rising-from-the-rubble.html
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