Even now,  I’m sure, so much of Haiti is breathtakingly beautiful.  There is something of an upside to the country not having had enough money or cachet to get utterly overdeveloped and paved over.  The mountains up above Miragoane, for instance, with their breezes that arrive from both sides of land, are cool, misty, piney, and clear-skied; meanwhile I’m sure that many of the little pocket beaches along the southern coast near Jacmel are still as magically warm and blue and seaweedy as I remember.

I’m sick to death of hearing about the ugliness of Haiti — and so much of the beauty goes beyond anything natural and is deeply cultural.  There is, of course, the painting tradition for which Haiti is rightly famous, and the sequin art is something staggeringly rich and imaginative, especially the beaded flags with their overlays of Catholic and Vodou imagery. The language, too, is quick and sly in its varigated meanings — Kreyol is a language stitched through with idomatic sayings, aphorisms and little riddles and English, with its sawdusty seriousness seems emberassingly awkward and stilted– and frankly, poorly developed — in comparison.

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.

===In response to the terrible devastation in Haiti, Anthropology Now is offering special coverage of events in Haiti. For the next few weeks, Press Watch will be a dedicated Haiti Watch. Elizabeth Chin, a professor of anthropology at Occidental College who has worked for many years in Haiti joins us as a Featured Special Report guest blogger.For her previous posts, Click on ‘Read More’ in Press Watch. We will also be tracking news coverage of anthropologist Paul Farmer and his work on the relief efforts. And we encourage all concerned readers to donate generously to Partners in Health, the organization Paul Farmer co-founded that is working on the ground in Haiti. Please contact us with links and news on Haiti that we can share with our readers.===

*Special Report blogger 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.*

Like anything having to do with Vodou — or Haiti for that matter — the songs song by Vodouisants are rich with multiple layers of meaning.  Pat Robertson’s vile and mean spirited remarks about Haiti having a pact with the devil (as if that would explain an earthquake 200 years after the revolution) have been dealt with handily by the likes of Elizabeth McAlister, who knows a great deal about Haitian music and culture, and by Gina Ulysse.

Here’s something from Liza:  http://interfaithradio.org/node/1218

Here’s something from Gina: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122567412

The Vodou songs are incredibly dense pieces of history and culture and life and emotion.  “Manman Mwen,” which you can hear being heard by Pierre Cheriza for a mere  .99 cent download from itunes, goes like this:

my rough translation:

But the song is ever so much deeper than it might appear.  It is being sung to Erzulie Dantor, the fierce mother, the dark-skinned woman who is represented in Christian iconography as the Black Madonna of Czestochowa.  She’s serious and dour looking, holding her son in her arms, her cheek bearing two long gashes still weeping blood.  This is a woman who will fight to the death to protect her children. Her symbol is a heart with a knife through it.  She doesn’t play around and she doesn’t tolerate betrayal.  But if she’s so strong and protective, how come in the song her children sound so lost, so afraid?  

Her children are calling to her, and the song is heart-breakingly sad.  I always think of abandoned children when I hear it, children calling out desperately for their mother to come to them, frightened and alone.  “Mother, O mother where are you?” the song says, over and over and over.  Well, that sense of abandonment comes from many quarters — the people who had been snatched up and thrown on ships, for instance, probably felt the need to cry out in just this way, and thinking of those ships crossing the wide, wide waters of the Atlantic, unimaginably wide, one can imagine why ‘waiting in the water’ was terrifying. 

But water has many other meanings and uses, and often in Vodou rituals people stand in sacred pools, under waterfalls, or pour water on themselves as purification and spiritual renewal.  So this also speaks of an expectant group of devotees, standing perhaps in one such sacred pool, eagerly awaiting Erzulie’s arrival.  They cajole — “Pwoche lakay o” — come into the house!  Perhaps they are joyful, saying come into the house, we are ready for you!  Perhaps they are cold and miserable and want their mother to return to them to enfold them in her arms, and cast her baleful stare upon anyone who might dare to harm her precious children.

Erzulie’s rage, and Erzulie’s passion are surely big enough to take on the work of avenging all of her children now suffering in Haiti.  Let’s hope her knife doesn’t come flashing in our direction, because we have inflicted much that is worthy of regret, much that requires atonement on an epic scale.

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.”

===In response to the terrible devastation in Haiti, Anthropology Now is offering special coverage of events in Haiti. For the next few weeks, Press Watch will be a dedicated Haiti Watch. Elizabeth Chin, a professor of anthropology at Occidental College who has worked for many years in Haiti joins us as a Featured Special Report guest blogger.For her previous posts, Click on ‘Read More’ in Press Watch. We will also be tracking news coverage of anthropologist Paul Farmer and his work on the relief efforts. And we encourage all concerned readers to donate generously to Partners in Health, the organization Paul Farmer co-founded that is working on the ground in Haiti. Please contact us with links and news on Haiti that we can share with our readers.===

*Special Report blogger 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.*

For many of us, Bob Corbett’s Haiti Mailing List is the go-to place for up-to-date information Haiti, informed discussion (much of it passionate), friendly updates, and for answers to nagging or arcane questions. (Click here to go to Bob’s website and here for prior posts on the mailing list.) Since the earthquake, the list has been unbelievably busy and I wonder if Bob has gotten any sleep. One of the most striking things – not surprisingly, I suppose – has been the way technology has shaped my ability to intimately feel and experience the earthquake’s aftermath. Over the course of several days, for instance, one increasingly frustrated nurse at a hospital in Milot, in Haiti’s northern area, was begging for patients. “We will light up the soccer field tonight with our headlights!” she announced, “and you can land a plane there!” It was horrifying and it was only one cry among many.

Thursday the 14th, one post urgently requested five satellite phones, for use by Haiti’s President, Prime Minister, Minister of the Interior, Chief of Police, and Ambassador to the UN. That might give some indication as to the state of Haiti’s infrastructure.

At 2:58 a.m. On Tuesday, the 19th an urgent message was posted to the list saying that a woman was alive and texting from beneath the rubble of the building where she was trapped. Later that day another post asked for a ‘miracle,’ and described in detail how to get to a school in Carrefour where at least 100 children were underneath its ruins. A third gave the location of an orphanage with 70 children ranging from months old infants to 17 years old, which had run out of food and water.

In Iran, during the political demonstrations, tweets and texts were a way for people to organize and resist. In this crisis, the barriers to organization are so profound it is hard to even comprehend. But when people are sending out desperate emails to get the top guys in government basic communication – those satellite phones – there’s a lot of work to be done. It’s the texts from the people trapped under buildings that are haunting me right now.

The other day Bob thoughtfully reposted the link to one of his early essays, “Why is Haiti so Poor?” Though written in 1986, it is still relevant.

Bob Corbett’s “Why is Haiti so Poor?”

]]> http://anthronow.com/press-watch/texts-from-beneath-the-rubble/feed 0 http://anthronow.com/press-watch/maps-of-haiti http://anthronow.com/press-watch/maps-of-haiti#comments Tue, 19 Jan 2010 05:01:02 +0000 Xiao Xiao http://anthronow.com/?p=567 Maps of Haiti - including links to newly updated maps: Haiti Earthquake Open Street...

===In response to the terrible devastation in Haiti, Anthropology Now is offering special coverage of events in Haiti. For the next few weeks, Press Watch will be a dedicated Haiti Watch. Elizabeth Chin, a professor of anthropology at Occidental College who has worked for many years in Haiti joins us as a Featured Special Report guest blogger.For her previous posts, Click on ‘Read More’ in Press Watch. We will also be tracking news coverage of anthropologist Paul Farmer and his work on the relief efforts. And we encourage all concerned readers to donate generously to Partners in Health, the organization Paul Farmer cofounded that is working on the ground in Haiti. Please contact us with links and news on Haiti that we can share with our readers.===

*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.*

Yesterday I went to a meeting at the Full Gospel Apostolic Church of God, in West LA. The small church, with its weirdly bouncy pews and awkwardly placed pillars, was stuffed to the gills with Haitians and with media representatives. The Haitians, as ever, were dressed for church, which to me is like being dressed for a wedding: beautiful suits complete with silk tie and pocket square and beaded dresses, fancy hats, girls in poufy gowns and barrettes in their hair and boys with little suits on. Also attending the meeting, which was organized by the church’s pastor along with an up-and-coming mover and shaker, Idor Laurent, was Congresswoman Maxine Waters. Some members of the Los Angeles City Council showed up, too, and a member of the State Assembly.

The Haitian community in Los Angeles is only about 10,000, broken up into two primary groups: the generally pretty well off ones who left Haiti in the 1970s, when Duvalier was still in power, and the more recent refugees who arrived in the 1990s, when political instability was extreme. These newer Haitians are on the whole from the less privileged element of Haitian society: not wealthy, not educated in Haiti, arriving speaking only Kreyol. The older group of Haitians, it seems to me, are Catholics while the newer ones are Evangelical Protestants. The newer immigrants live in the rough-and-tumble neighborhoods around or in South LA; the older ones are pretty well suburbanized.

As Black people who speak a foreign language, and whose culture is distinctly different from most of the African Americans around them in Los Angeles, Haitians here have often felt isolated, misunderstood, or both. Such big and little schisms weren’t on the radar screen yesterday, where the topic of solidarity was primary. There was a speech from Dr. Maulana Karemba, of the African American Cultural Center in South LA whose refrain was “We are all Haitian!” Members of a Nigerian Church, gloriously attired in spanking white robes, brought their own message of solidarity, as Nigerians, and on behalf of all of Africa. Maxine Waters of course had a great deal to say – from reestablishing her long-standing support of Haiti to a sly, “I don’t want to get political, but I’m Lavalas!” “Imagine what it could mean to a family in Haiti to get $50 a month,” she said.  She wants to start a kind of sponsorship program and urged people to save their money for something like that.   “So start saving your money now,” she said, “a dollar a day.”   After all the press had left, the basketball player Olden Polynice stood up – it was hard to miss since he’s 6′11”. He spoke about his continuing commitment to Haiti, and added, “by the way, I still am a Haitian citizen, and I’m proud of it.”

“Hot dogs for Haiti,” Richard Thiong, a Haitian with some Chinese in him, called out rather merrily, once the meeting has broken up. “Hot dogs for Haiti!” Round the back of the church, they’ve heated up hotdogs to sell to raise money. Actually, the hotdog is a weirdly appropriate choice, being a totally American and yet totally Haitian food. Many mornings in Haiti I’ve had ’spaghetti hot dog’ for breakfast. You can feed a whole lot of people on a pound of spaghetti, a few hotdogs, 1 habanero pepper, one green pepper, some scallions and a tad of oil – the ingredients for ’spaghetti hot dog.’.

I don’t know if it’s a Haitian thing or not, but laughing in these dark moments is something that my Haitian friend are definitely doing, when they’re not crying. “My mom thinks the TV is talking to her,” my friend Mona tells me from New York. “She’s got the beginning of dementia. And my sister, the one who lives in Haiti, she was here visiting when the earthquake hit, thank god. But you know what? Everybody is calling her every minute to tell her that her house fell down, and my sister is saying, ‘Don’t they think I already know that?’ She was so upset. So she went out to get her hair done so she wouldn’t have to talk to them. When she got back they were still calling, so she said, ‘You know what? I think I need to get my nails done!’ Yep, this is what she has to do because of that earthquake! Get her hair done! Get her nails done!”

Tip of the day: Don’t believe for a minute the ridiculous so-called reports about roving armed gangs, looting and ‘unrest.’ No doubt, there’s disorderliness and a disinclination to wait quietly in line, and no doubt people are going into fallen down stores to get food if it’s in there. Emails I’ve seen from people in Haiti right now say that the reports of crazy violence are utterly baseless.

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