While planning the relief event, I could not see the magnitude of our efforts – I was simply too busy. The total weigh-in of donations was undoubtedly impressive, but with no prior experience in planning disaster relief events, I pondered how I acted so quickly and without reservation. It was difficult to see where my actions stemmed from. Was I motivated out of human compassion or more so because of my profession? Or, was it a combination of both? Or, perhaps something else? Then I recalled why I was drawn to the field of anthropology – other cultures, people, and my own place within the world. Simply put, I recognized anthropology fulfills my sense of human interest and compassion. I have never considered myself an applied or public anthropologist per say because I think it is essential for all anthropologists to engage beyond professional rigor, academic or otherwise. It behooves us to harness our knowledge and skills within the scientific community and share it with others. As an anthropologist, I represent a field that is oftentimes misunderstood by the general public, so working outside the academy is essential for me and as I assert here, for the profession itself. Irrespective of the sub-field, public engagement is critical for anthropologists because we all strive for better understandings of the human condition. Without such engagement, our specialized skills and knowledge are only meaningful within the profession – a profession that values, above all else, the entirety of humanity. Public engagement ensures anthropological advancement by offering anthropologists the opportunity to learn and help others while honing their skills.

Humanitarian efforts move people toward action and I observed this with many people in the greater Valdosta area. Public outpouring made me realize even more clearly the importance of community and global solidarity in extraordinarily difficult times. My role as an educator aided me in cultivating and soliciting assistance from others at the university and beyond, and my role as an engaged cultural anthropologist provided me the necessary insight to work successfully with and for diverse populations. Whether serving as an educator, researcher, or humanitarian, a common thread is that my motivations are grounded in moral obligation. By moral I mean living, working, and adhering to the values within a cultural group, mine and otherwise. This sense of moral commitment is a responsibility we all share and one the American Anthropological Association supports as illustrated in the recently approved Code of Ethics (2009). Being an anthropologist is more than working in a traditional research setting or within the university. Only by extending our skills outside the academy, do we truly experience the full breadth of anthropological engagement. Consequently, utilizing anthropology in the public sphere has affirmed my compassion for people and my passion for the field which together permeates every aspect of my personal and professional lives.

This ends our 2 part series by Dr. Melissa A. Rinehart. Click here to read Part 1 if you missed it on Friday. Also, keep an eye out for a companion photo essay illustrating Valdosta’s Haiti water and food relief event – coming later this week!

Dr. Melissa A. Rinehart is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Georgia. With a specialization in Native American Studies, her work bridges ethnographic and historical methodologies. As an ethnohistorian, she has several areas of interest including the removal and boarding school eras, language shift and revitalization, identity and performance, and indigenous resistance. Ongoing research projects include Native American participation at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and a book project concerning a former Catholic Indian boarding school, St. Joseph’s Indian Normal School, in operation from 1888 to 1896, in
Rensselaer, Indiana.

While trained as a cultural anthropologist, I also work within linguistics and have worked as an archaeologist. This freedom to be more holistic in my research is, I feel, one of anthropology’s strongest attractions. Combining this with anthropology’s hands-on field research with Native American communities, I find it immensely meaningful to teach anthropology in the university and conduct research that is beneficial to others. Giving back to the community, for which anthropological research relies on, is always a concern. This is especially the case when longstanding oppression has taken a toll in communities, such as Native Americans, that not only face socio-economic, but health-related concerns. In spite of these longstanding problems though, Native American communities have continuously demonstrated their resiliency. It is this connection with Native American peoples and issues that drew me to the victims of the earthquake in Haiti earlier this year. I know no one in Haiti and have never been to Haiti, but as a cultural anthropologist and even more importantly as a humanist, I recognized the need to apply my knowledge and skills somehow.

Clean potable water has been a problem in Haiti for some time and although there are efforts to curtail continued environmental devastation, eroded land makes agriculture difficult. Socio-economic issues, such as imported commodity foods sold more cheaply than those produced in Haiti are coupled with cyclical poverty and result in significant food insecurity for many Haitians. They, too, are an oppressed community, but one marked with historical resiliency. I felt compelled to do something more for Haitians given their devastating circumstances, so organizing a water and food relief effort became evident. I envisioned organizing anthropology students from Valdosta State University (VSU) in south Georgia to collect rice, beans, and water for victims. Rice and beans are two important staples for Haitians, and consequently two affordable food sources for most Americans. Recognizing students have limited funds, I felt physical donations consisting of inexpensive bags of rice, beans, and bottled water made more sense than soliciting monetary donations. I also worked collaboratively with colleagues, administration, and student organizations from VSU as well as the American Red Cross and Second Harvest Food Bank. What began as a simple idea of collecting food and water grew into a city-wide relief effort. There was extensive media coverage including television, radio, and print media; and I began a Facebook group. Social networking quickly proved useful because it was an easy way for students and others from the community to post questions, concerns, and commentary about Valdosta’s response to the Haiti earthquake. It also enabled me to keep everyone abreast of continuing developments regarding the relief event.

The relief event took place ten days after the earthquake struck. We set up a drive-thru in the VSU baseball stadium parking lot to facilitate donation activity and the turn-out was remarkable. The American Red Cross’s disaster relief team collected monetary and blood donations, and Second Harvest Food Bank supplied a crew for collecting, palleting, and trucking donations to storage. Additionally, over 50 students from an area middle school volunteered. In all, we collected 35,000 pounds of food and water equivalent to 17 tons. Second Harvest Food Bank trucked 1/3 of the donations to Miami, Florida, where the State Department then flew the shipment to Haiti. The remaining 2/3 of the donations were picked up by the Feed the Children organization and then flown gratis by FedEX to Port au Prince where the shipment was immediately trucked to and distributed at the Feed the Children refugee camp housing 15,000 Haitians.

End of Part 1, look for Part 2 of this special 2 part article this coming Monday!

In the meantime, check out these other links about VSU’s rice, beans and water drive for Haiti:

VSU Continues to aid Haitian Disaster Relief Efforts

WCTV-TV article

Dr. Melissa A. Rinehart is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Georgia. With a specialization in Native American Studies, her work bridges ethnographic and historical methodologies. As an ethnohistorian, she has several areas of interest including the removal and boarding school eras, language shift and revitalization, identity and performance, and indigenous resistance. Ongoing research projects include Native American participation at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and a book project concerning a former Catholic Indian boarding school, St. Joseph’s Indian Normal School, in operation from 1888 to 1896, in Rensselaer, Indiana.

Still ranting about our naivete in the face of Haitian poverty.  One of my good friends was telling me about a story she’d heard where a woman was being treated on the USS Comfort for two legs and an arm all of which needed to be amputated.  Now that medical ethics have caught up at least to the idea of informed consent, the surgeon asked her for her permission to do the amputations.  She did not grant the permission.  The surgeon was taken aback.  The woman’s point was that in Haiti, for her to even imagine being able to work or make a living with just one arm was pointless.  Her position was not one arrived at from depression or lack of get-up-and-go, it was, rather, a pretty rational assessment of her options. Why go through the additional trauma and fuss of the amputations when, as far as she could figure, she then wouldn’t be able to feed herself and would die slowly of starvation afterward? Once again, given some bad options, she took the least bad one and did not have the amputations.

This is among the kind of harsh realities that Haitians must always face.  In a  moment where I was trying to get my students to really understand what the conditions are like, I pointed out that there are no ambulances, no paramedics, no fire departments.  “How do you get to the hospital when you need to?” they asked.  How indeed.  You get there as you can — walking, being carried, or more likely you just don’t get there.

And then there was the ridiculous and vile op ed piece that showed up in the Wall Street Journal the other day, the one written by some joker who spent two years running USAID in Haiti during Duvalier’s regime and never managed, as far as I can tell, to learn anything at all about Haiti.  For instance, he pooh poohed the analysis of those who point to the mulatres of Haiti and the ways they have swung their power and influence around by saying that Papa Doc wasn’t from that class and he was president!  Which completely ignores the way that Haitian politics and commerce have long worked, which is that the Negres like Papa Doc have the presidency and the mulatres have all the businesses.   So no, the mulatres don’t run the government but because they have all the money, and since the government has virtually no income — 80% of its budget is international AID money — the government (corruption aside) isn’t exactly always ‘in charge’ in the ways one might imagine.  It is also of course maddening that this guy claims that Vodou “has no ethics” whatever that means, which again bespeaks a pretty spectacular lack of knowledge about what he’s talking about.  His main expert informant is — get this — his son in law who is Haitian and who he makes sure to note has a degree from Harvard which I suppose confirms that he is also smart.  This is such a fantastic mini-model of the whole USAID problem, at least in Haiti.  For USAID, Haiti is pretty much a punishment assignment and the US staff are basically working as hard as they can to get out of there and into somewhere ‘good.’  So rather than working to understand Haiti, Haitian culture or Haitian language, the whole ethos of USAID (and yes there are some great people who work there so I”m not trying to smear the entire place) is about impressing Washington so they can get the hell out.  Now it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that impressing Washington and doing the right thing for Haiti just might not be exactly the same thing.  So they’d also have these really dumb, paternalistic policies.  For instance, when having trainings or other events for local Haitians, USAID doesn’t pay for food.  This might seem like a small thing, but remember that quite often to get peasant leaders to come from their villages to the regional center might mean a five hour walk each way for them.  “They’ll just be coming for the food,” was the excuse.  Darn right.  Heck I won’t go to faculty meetings where I work except for the free lunch.  And how many food-laden receptions are these very same people going to on a regular basis?

Getting back to the Wall Street Journal thing, most offensive from the anthropological point of view is that this guy blames it all on culture, which again, he clearly knows nothing about.  He can’t seem to tell the difference between Africa (which I wonder if he thinks it’s a country) and Haiti, and claims that because Barbados is doing OK this is proof that Vodou is the problem.  Does the guy have the slightest notion of religious practices in Barbados?  Clearly not, ’cause all that anglican looking stuff is not all it appears to be on the surface, that’s a fact.

I almost hate to put the link up, but here it is, see for yourself how ridiculous this thing is. Makes me nostalgic for something even remotely based in reality, no matter how right wing.  Shame on the Wall Street Journal, really.  What a lazy thinker.  It’s a great example of lazy thinking, and a great example of exactly what I hope my students will never do.  Be as right wing as you want, kids, just be smart and disciplined and use stuff like actual evidence to support your argument.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704533204575047163435348660.html#articleTabs%3Darticle

Where do I even begin to explain what I’m thinking and feeling about how children are appearing in the coverage, being responded to on the ground, and what’s actually happening to kids in Haiti?  When I’m feeling sour (like right now) I think, well, Haitians don’t have pets so unlike Katrina where we covered all the puppies and kittens, we’re focusing on the helpless kids.  As a way of avoiding the real issue.

My main research focus is kids, so I take them very, very seriously.  In a hilarious moment in class the other day, when I was pushing my students to examine why they found the idea of childhood sexuality so unthinkable, one student blurted out, “Well to me an 8-year-old child isn’t even, you know, HUMAN!”  It isn’t surprising that given the very particular ways we think about children and childhood in the wealthy world that is Europe and the US (that is, the bulk of the aid-giving nations currently in Haiti) most people newly on the ground are utterly unprepared to confront, much less understand what kids lives are like there.

Haiti is a place where three year old kids routinely work as child domestic servants, doing hard physical labor from hauling water to cooking food, washing laundry, and scrubbing floors.  Plenty of kids are on the streets, whether temporarily or permanently.  And to ‘us’, they appear out of childhood — that is, they seem to be ‘children without childhood,’ a term I could never hate enough in a jillion years.

I’m disgusted by all the journalism I’ve been reading that emphasizes issues like ‘neglect’ and ‘abuse’ of children.  No doubt, life in Haiti is friggin’ hard.  And it’s hard for everybody, kids included.  What often looks like abuse to us rich people is, in reality, the reality of being truly, truly poor.  As most Haitians are.

The real problem is of course the poverty.  Haitian parents whether rural or urban find themselves more often than not quite literally unable to feed their kids.  So they have a couple of options.  Keep them and watch them die before their eyes; send them to another better off family so they can eat and maybe get educated; put them in an orphanage.  In case you haven’t noticed, these are all bad choices.  How does one diagnose abuse or neglect under those conditions?  Is it neglectful to be so poor that you and your children are starving?  Is it abusive to give your child to another family because if he or she stays with you death is on the horizon?

The current brouhaha over the supposedly naive and only well-intentioned missionaries from Idaho is just the tip of the iceberg.  I’ve been happy to hear it called child trafficking.  Many orphanages have been essentially trafficking in Haitian children for some time now.  Certainly there can be no doubt at all that some substantial portion of children in Haitian orphanages aren’t what most people would consider orphans.  They have families and they have one or even both parents.  They are in orphanages because they are poor.

Our helping dynamic, which focuses on the child (like the cute puppy) depends upon a surgical view of the child that denies the context in which that child was produced (as poor and Haitian) and made available (for adoption).  When we focus only on the questions of ‘neglect’ and ‘abuse’ but not on the loss of 80% of Haitian rice production and the concomitant doubling and tripling of the price of imported rice, we fail to pay attention to — or take responsibility for — the nightmarish conditions that force parents to give up their children in the hopes that they might simply live.  And part of the horror is that the luxury of hoping that your child might live a ‘good’ life is even more remote.  More likely, when children go to live with families as what are known as ‘restavek’ their treatment is really dreadful.

I’m not someone to stand up for the rights of anybody to take advantage of anyone else, but on the other hand, the harshness of much of Haitian society, and its violence, needs again to be understood in the context of poverty that is so soul-scraping that the mortifications of the flesh are a mere bagatelle.  Confront the poverty.  Really confront it.  Then those parents suddenly might appear not as abusive but something else.

Here’s one clue — even before the earthquake, many of the Haitian orphanage sites had this really creepy message.  Say you were looking at a kid and clicked on the picture to learn more.  Pretty often there would be a tag line that said something like, “Yannik is not in residence at the orphanage, but should you be interested in her, more information is available.”  Subtext: this child has a family, but the family is so poor they are hoping you will adopt their child so she can live to grow up, go to school, and have a life.

Why do people think they are doing a good deed if they take these parents up on this act of desperation?  Fix the poverty.  Let kids stay with their families.  That’s got to be the commitment.  Children shouldn’t be Haiti’s most valuable export.

At the moment I’ m being a little dumbfounded at what strikes me as a generalized lack of interest in actual Haitians, and a huge interest in imaginary Haitians.  The objectification thing.  There are a ton of events going on here in Los Angeles, each put on and designed for its particular micro-selection of the population: the hipster edgy art people, the world music people, the art lover elderly people…It shouldn’t be surprising that people would mobilize the networks they know best when they put on events where’ they’re trying to raise money for Haiti.  What’s missing in most of them, as far as I can see,  is much of an effort to learn anything about Haiti (except for the earthquake which is, so to speak, the tip of the iceberg), or to engage with the local Haitian community.  I’ve had any number of  conversations and have been in any  number of meetings where my efforts to get people to talk to an actual Haitian person, or consider involving a real Haitian are met with blank stares, non-commital murmurings, or, simply, are ignored.

There are a lot of things at work there.  Here in LA most people aren’t even aware that there is something that might be called a Haitian community, so I suppose the attitude or assumption that including Haitians isn’t necessary is understandable, even if it isn’t excusable.   I admit that I suspect that there are uglier things beneath it.  For one, it’s a lot more fun to “help people” if you don’t actually have to deal with them in 3D.  Or worse, have to negotiate what they might think or feel that isn’t contained in your own imaginings of who they are.  All of that is sticky, sticky business.  Keeping one’s ‘helping’ activities hermetically sealed means protecting  one’s view of oneself as good, as knowing, as powerful.  Collaboration, however, means opening oneself up to not knowing — and really, most people in the U.S. don’t know diddly about Haiti and never even heard of it before two weeks ago.  Keeping Haitians out of their own engagement with its disaster is a way of ensuring that they never WILL know diddly about Haiti, and that they never will have to confront, either, the complex history and politics in which they, unfortunately, are implicated whether they like it or  not.

Take the upcoming interfaith service that will be held at Occidental.  No Haitians needed, thank you.  We can emote and pray for your wholeness without you!  we can do it in 15 different spiritual traditions, too!  Never mind that there are many Haitian religious leaders who would love the opportunity to speak about their culture, their nation, their families, their homeland and to communicate the depth of their love and appreciation for this place that, to most in the U.S. at this moment, appears as nothing more than a scene of devastation and ugliness.  Never mind that these same Haitian religious leaders are Seventh Day Adventists and Evangelicals who aren’t exactly either welcome or represented on Oxy’s campus.   Never mind that some of them got here not too long ago, refugees who speak with accents and have antiquated, formal manners most of us haven’t seen in living memory.  To engage with all of that, however, requires letting go of one’s belief in oneself as being the point, and letting go of that idea is something eminently unpleasant for so many Americans who believe in the power of one.

Yes, there is a lot of ugly, nasty business going on down there and it’s certainly not a bad thing for ‘us’ to feel bad about it and to want to do something about it no matter how incohate and disorganized (and utterly ineffectual) that desire might be.  But it’s way too convenient for ‘us’ to chalk up the devastation and ineffectiveness of those emotive efforts  to corruption and lack of development and all that other crap that we use to explain why the poor and disenfranchised did it to themselves.

What including Haitians means, at every point along the way, is facing ourselves, and taking on the responsibility for understanding that we are not the calvalry riding in on white horses to save the day, not saviors, not even witnesses most of the time but navel gazers.  Unless Haitians are included in  whatever the effort is — spiritual wholeness, raising money — I’m afraid it’s just self-serving bullshit.  We need to get off those high horses, put our feet upon the dusty and muddy earth where all those Haitians are living right now, and put our shoulders to the wheel.  And maybe it’s us who should be taking direction from them.

Just an idea.

At my daughter’s ballet class the other day, I got talking with one of the moms about Haiti.  She was telling me about some people at her church, people who go often out of the country and do volunteering and stuff, and what she said, basically, was that in Haiti, they’re not being helpful to volunteers.

I’m afraid my response was a little too snippy to count as polite.  “Well that might be because I heard that last week a bunch of volunteers showed up at the airport asking for water and supplies,” I said, “and the first responders weren’t exactly thrilled at having these folks expecting water when all these Haitians who had JUST BEEN IN AN EARTHQUAKE kindof needed it more than they did.”  Ok, well the second part of my response is more what I wish I’d said than what I actually said.  But I did get the point across.

Lots and lots of people have been seized by the urge to do something and, perhaps unfortunately, because Haiti is so much closer to “us” than Sri Lanka, people really were just jumping on planes to the Dominican Republic and getting themselves to Port au Prince, all ready to help.  Unfortunately they hadn’t thought it through much further than that.  Many didn’t have their own supplies.  Or a place to stay.  Or contacts.  Or facility with Kreyol.  Or useful skills and expertise.  Or, let’s face it, common sense.

The impulse is understandable and even noble.  But it’s the kind of ‘helping’ impulse that not only gets people into trouble, but causes trouble for others.  The urgency of doing something is hard to resist and there was a sort of massive surge of compassionate, anxiety and adrenalin-fueled energy that took hold of so many of us in the first week or two.  In my heart I’m thanking the people who resisted that impulse and who recognized that their desire to help needed to be couched within a realistic assessment of their ability to actually be helpful.

That energy has ebbed a bit, the stories of Haiti have migrated first ‘below the fold’ on the front page of the paper, and now right off the front page altogether.  The need has hardly lessened.  Just the other day a message came through and someone observed that the streets are full of amputees.  Somehow that image stuck with me with incredible force, because I realized that the streetscape of Port au Prince, and the  entire nation, will be transformed for an entire generation not just because the skyline will never be the same, but because for the next few decades, the streets will be full of people with missing limbs, a living embodiment of the literal and figurative dismemberment that Haiti has suffered here.

Myriam Merlet, Magalie Marcelin and Anne Marie Coriolan, founders of three of Haiti’s most important women and girl’s advocacy groups, are confirmed dead in the aftermath of the recent Haiti earthquake.

Myriam Merlet was until recently chief of staff of Haiti’s Ministry for Gender and the Rights of Women and continued to serve as a top advisor. She was also one of the founders of Enfofamn, an organization that raises awareness about women through media, collects stories and works to honor their names.

Magalie Marcelin, also a lawyer and actress, established Kay Fanm, a women’s rights organization that deals with domestic violence, offers services and shelter to women and makes microcredits, or loans, available to women working in markets.

Anne Marie Coriolan served alongside Myriam Merlet as a top adviser to the women’s rights ministry. She founded Solidarite Fanm Ayisyen (Solidarity with Haitian Women, or SOFA), an advocacy and services organization.

In honor of these women and to continue the legacy of their work and advocacy groups, please visit the sites below that link to information on Enfofamn, Kay Fanm, and Solidarite Fanm Ayisyen (Solidarity with Haitian Women, or SOFA). (Note: some page are in French but can be translated by Google if needed.)

http://www.kayfanm.info/

http://www.oxfamsol.be/fr/Solidarite-Fanm-Ayisyen-SOFA.html

http://www.dwafanm.org/international.htm

http://www.dwafanm.org/partners.html

http://www.dd-rd.ca/site/

http://www.peacewomen.org/contacts/americas/haiti/hai_index.html

Additional Links:

A document Haitian Women’s Rights Organisations worked on (available only in French):

Pour la cause des femmes, avançons !
Un modèle de plaidoyer dans la lutte des organisations de défense des droits des femmes haïtiennes

(Onward for Women! An Advocacy Model in the Struggle Waged by Haitian Women’s Rights Organisations)

CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/01/20/haitian.womens.movement.mourns/index.html?hpt=C2

More on Myriam Merlet:
http://mongoosechronicles.blogspot.com/2010/01/myriam-merlet.html

The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/22/earthquake-kill-haiti-feminists

Women’s E-News:
http://www.womensenews.org/breaking-news

Women’s Media Center:
http://womensmediacenter.com/blog/2010/01/she-wanted-women-to-hold-their-heads-high-haiti-mourns-the-deaths-of-three-womens-rights-leaders/

Have you noticed how incredibly clean everybody looks in the footage on Haiti?  The only people who appear unkempt, on the whole, are the foreign reporters.  Well that’s an exaggeration of course, but not much of one.  Really — look closely at just about any picture or video from the earthquake aftermath and all the Haitians are miraculously clean.  Their clothes look freshly pressed, their sneakers shiny.  If Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, I think we can also safely say that Haitians are also the snappiest dressers in the western hemisphere.  What’s more amazing is that Haitians can manage to dress beautifully with the most meager resources.  I’m left wondering at the moment: where the heck are they finding those spotless clothes?  Even in normal times, clothes and laundry are a major enterprise but now the effort required to be so fantastically clean now must be even more daunting.  Maybe it’s a small thing, but somehow I don’t think so.  Their ability to dress beautifully is simply awe-inspiring.

Bathing two and three times a day is normal.  You know how many of us Americans like to point at certain people (countries unnamed!) who don’t bathe enough, don’t wear enough deodorant, and are generally scuzzy in personal hygiene?  I’m pretty sure that WE are those stinky people, though no Haitian would be rude enough to even hint at that.

There are virtually no stores in Haiti where you can buy new clothes.  Nearly every piece of clothing in Haiti comes from abroad, generally part of the large mass of secondhand stuff that is traded globally.   The secondhand stuff sold in the streets is called “Kennedy,” a term that arose when President Kennedy shipped huge amounts of aid to Haiti.  Now the stuff is more often called “Pepe” and covers anything secondhand (which is nearly everything): stereo components, cars, shoes, underpants, McDonald’s toys.  When clothing manufacture (and sweated labor by Haitians) was still a viable business, there was a nice trade in factory rejects on the streets, but this has long dried up.  The massive influx of secondhand goods helps to ensure that local businesses like tailors and seamstresses have virtually no chance.  The wealthy simply shop outside of the country, in the Dominican Republic or Miami.  There is not one mall in Haiti, and before the earthquake, the Caribbean Market was the largest in the nation, with a massive array of — get this — SIX cash registers.

A personal note for the day — after nearly two years of not teaching Haitian dance, I did a class today, as a benefit for the St. Joseph’s Home for Boys, which was flattened in the earthquake.  I miss dancing a lot.  That’s one thing I realized.  We raised $185! St. Josephs trains some of the boys in folkloric dance and has a wonderful dance troupe, which is why we decided to support them.  Here’s a link: http://www.heartswithhaiti.org/

Meanwhile, I’m still trying to figure out how to get that container to Miragoane.  Going to sic a sorority on making the hygiene packs, which we will try to ship to Miami in a week or two, and then on to Miragoane — before the container — to test the waters.  Somehow a sorority seems like the right group to get to do the task.  One of my favorite students is a member, which doesn’t hurt.

*Elizabeth Chin is an anthropologist who has studied Haitian Folklore dance for over 20 years, both in the US and in Haiti. Currently a professor at Occidental College, she has been spending time in Haiti since 1993, sometimes doing fieldwork and sometimes not. She will return to Haiti in May to assist with the relief effort.*

My friend Sharon in D.C. Called me to tell me that in Miragoane, the people from Port au Prince have already started showing up. As people have been saying since the quake hit, “everybody has someone in Port au Prince.” The reverse of that is that everyone in Port au Prince has someone outside of Port au Prince. Most people in the now ruined capital are recent immigrants, or within one or two generations of living in the countryside. Now they’re going back to their home villages, towns, and cities, in huge numbers, arriving pretty much with whatever they had on when their lives fell to pieces about ten days ago. So now the impact of the crisis spreads. Our friend Garry, a Miragoane man-about-town, former mayor, community organizer, and vodou priest, is now attempting to feed at least 500 who are now camping out in their home villlage of Paillant. Sharon, for her part, has found out that there’s a boat leaving Miami for Miragoane in a few days and has found someone who will buy 100-lb sacks of rice if she sends him the money, and get them on the boat, so that Garry can try to feed those people.

Back here in LA, I’m watching stuff pile up in the Ti Georges restaurant in the hip-and-trendy neighborhood of Echo Park (where my dad has lived for 30 years so it’s a kind of ‘home’ to me), and wondering how I can get all that stuff to Miami so that it can get on one of those boats headed to Miragoane. (Well it turns out that the diplomatic corps from Central America showed up at the restaurant last night, and the Dominican Embassy, who also had a representative there, carted it away!)

Miragoane is the third-largest port in Haiti, and wasn’t damaged in the quake. So here’s what I’m envisioning: we can locate some shipper who will get the stuff to Miami free or cheap, magically get it on the ship with few complications, and get the stuff to Miragoane so that Garry and his associates can get it to all the people showing up from the devastated place that seems like the 7^th circle of hell.

There’s my other friend Kate, who teaches at the University of Miami – she’s on tap to coordinate as much of this as possible, possibly collecting stuff locally which would be much more efficient. They need simply everything: food, tents, mattresses, clothes, teachers, doctors. I can’t even attempt a comprehensive list.

One of my former students answered one of the ‘hail mary’ emails I sent out to everyone I could think of, seeking connections to a freight shipper. “I know a shipper!” she wrote. It’s even more fitting that she went to Haiti with me once, years ago, on a study trip, and that in her life now as a fiction writer, she’s worked on a piece in which Haiti figures significantly. Well I haven’t talked to the shipper yet, but I have my fingers crossed that he’s going to make this thing happen.

And making it happen is rather an amazing thing. We’re not an organization – we’re just a bunch of people with phones, with a little money or credit we can tap, and with relationships. But wouldn’t it be amazing – what if, what if we really could round up so much of the stuff that has piled up in LA at churches and stores and homes where Haiti is on the radar screen, and get it to Miami, put it on the boat, and Garry will pick it up, and it will make a difference to all those people who miraculously survived the carnage in Port au Prince, and made it out, made it back to their families.

Click here for the original Boston Globe article about Partners in Health accompanying this video.

Check out Partners in Health’s website – http://www.standwithhaiti.org/haiti – for updated news and information on how you can support those affected by the recent earthquake.

Partners in Health is co-founded by anthropologist-physician Paul Farmer. From their website, in their own words:

About Partners in Health

“PIH has been working on the ground in Haiti for over 20 years. We urgently need your support to help those affected by the recent earthquake.

Partners In Health (PIH) works to bring modern medical care to poor communities in nine countries around the world. The work of PIH has three goals: to care for our patients, to alleviate the root causes of disease in their communities, and to share lessons learned around the world.

Based in Boston, PIH employs more than 11,000 people worldwide, including doctors, nurses and community health workers. The vast majority of PIH staff are local nationals based in the communities we serve.”