Haiti: WTF?

get ready for another shameful few years of gitmo dudes

this shit is gonna morbs me right up

urgh. btw thanks for the donation push, gbx. pih is great (i used to work at their US-based project). i also gotta rep for Oxfam America. first of all b/c my wife works there. second b/c they're v. good and v. efficient. they have a presence in haiti supporting & working with grassroots projects, and their focus in the immediate aftermath of the quake is simple: get clean water to the people. http://www.oxfamamerica.org/

will check it out thx CG. did you know my pal j3ff k4hn (wrote the huffpost ed upthread)? he's worked in Haiti for a while but I think his time with pih was domestic. woulda been five years ago I think?

What I'm wondering now is what is going to happen a month from now when most immediate health/resource needs have been taken care of? Where are people going to go? What exactly is going to happen? This seems like a really scary no-mans-land

xp. the name rings a bell, gbx. program i worked in was based in codman square; and i didn't get to know all the folks working in pih's HQ.

Stevie I wonder the same thing. xp

yeah that is the $900m question.

ALL infrastrucure will have to be rebuilt in a city of four million. I don't have numbers, but I infer from the coverage that basically most buildings have collapsed and those that remain ought to be considered highly unstable and should be knocked down prophylactically. The streets are impassable and filled with the dead. Water is coming from...the country? Deforestation has iirc made Haiti a pretty arid place. Which also compromises the indigenous food supply (tho for all I know they've been importing food for ages per the usual World Bank schema).

If hundreds of thousands have died in the last week, that many again can expect the same if foreign powers don't make a concerted effort to
a) accept refugees. likely permanently.
b) aggressively rebuild (tho here you get into some shock doctrine territory)
c) keep the peace during the very likely to be violent scramble for resources.
d) forgive the debt incurred by this AND the one that has already accrued.

Otherwise, well, man.

also Stevie while I have heaps of faith in the medicos and orgs down there providing aid, there is no way haitis health problems are going away in a month or even six. Disasters always pull a train of secondary health problems, most (iirc) water related. Overlay that on a population that has a horrifying AIDS rate (and associated problems with TB) and you've got health problems to occupy a generation of physicians.

Part of me thinks that the best thing for Haiti would a diasporic (not a word?) release valve. Damaging culturally but while no one likes an immigrant, I still think many would be better of grudgingly accomodated by Western healthcare systems than they would by the nonexistent system in now and future Haiti.

lol tho of course this won't happen

oh God :(

the more I learn the more saddo I get about this whole thing

OMFG @ this: http://blog.nj.com/njv_bob_braun/2010/01/a_father_in_haiti_works_to_fin.html

well that's horrible

I dunno but this is affecting me way more than other recent horrible things (of which there is an unending supply). it's infuriating

Journalist friend of mine told me earlier that a senior UN official is briefing that Haiti is essentially uninhabitable, and will be for the long-term foreseeable. He stopped short of the "and so should be abandoned" stuff that was bandied about after Katrina, though. Can't find a cite of it anywhere online.

Really said Haiti as a whole and not just Port-au-Prince?

I was wondering about that myself- was the rest of Haiti devastated like p-a-p?

Yeah, I asked that too, and he seemed positive it was Haiti in general.

There are certainly many refugees heading from the capital to more inhabitable parts ... and cruise liners docking.

I suppose the thinking being that if you abandon Port-au-Prince the rest becomes pretty untenable - the second-largest city after it had about 100,000 residents.

the justifications in the cruise story are so blindly self-serving it's like a bad black comedy dystopia.

the only reason i can see why ~Haiti~ should be abandoned and not just PAP would be because, yeah, the city with half the country's population no longer functionally exists, and the rest of the country may not be able to pick up the slack. still, v strong words imo

and yes, the cruise ship justifications are pretty....well, kinda lol, mostly despicable

though i guess if i were already ON said cruise, i could see the human need to rationalize your existence, cuz otherwise it could be some bleak times w/r/t your self-worth

this might be of interest but i haven't listened to it and don't really feel like it :-/

oh i thought it was a longer thing, n/m

fucked up shit this century, mang, we've seen one major, classic city effectively destroyed by nature and now it's happened to an entire country.

very impressed by gbx's fundraising.

What I'm wondering now is what is going to happen a month from now when most immediate health/resource needs have been taken care of? Where are people going to go? What exactly is going to happen? This seems like a really scary no-mans-land

― kate moss and heavy machinery in a dessert (Stevie D), Tuesday, January 19, 2010 8:51 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

yeah. the narrative coming from the left (see morbius upthread) is that this will be another case of shock doctrine. so if the us does try to help build (rebuild, up to a point) infrastructure, it'll be evidence of imperialism. but in the land of the sane, disengagement would be monstrous.

btw would recommend reading Pathologies Of Power if yr feeling like you want to get more angry

and thx, nrq, but all i did was send an email and have a willing donor to match

but yr right: the threat of the Shock Doctrine might be real, but disengagement of any kind is 100% not an option afaiac

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/01/18/world/americas/0118-haiti-assess-maps.html#tab=0

maybe this was asked and answered already, but was there any major damage or any damage at all in the DR?

not that i've heard. the DR isn't far (30 miles??) but i think the areas closest to the fault are sparsely populated

also god that boston.com big picture stuff is heartbreaking

heavy, nsfw

holy. that picture doesn't look real.

j fucking c at that picture

fuck

oh my god, that is breaking my heart

that is the world as it is, right now

haiti, wtf

jesus

From a 2008 article:

The Haitain (food) crisis is so extreme it forces people to eat (non-food) mud cookies (called "pica") to relieve hunger. It's a desperate Haitian remedy made from dried yellow dirt from the country's central plateau for those who can afford it. It's not free. In Cite Soleil's crowded slums, people use a combination of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening for a typical meal when it's all they can afford. A Port-au-Prince AP reporter sampled it. He said it had "a smooth consistency (but it) sucked all the moisture out of (my) mouth as soon as it touched (my) tongue. For hours (afterwards), an unpleasant taste of dirt lingered." Worse is how it harms human health. A mud cookie diet causes severe malnutrition, intestinal distress, and other deleterious effects from potentially deadly toxins and parasites.

Another problem is the cost. This stomach-filler isn't free. Haitians have to buy it, and "edible clay" prices are rising - by almost $1.50 in the past year. It now costs about $5 to make 100 cookies (about 5 cents each), it's cheaper than food, but many Haitians can't afford it.

Big aftershock being reported.

Those boston.com photos are (as always) astonishing and some of the captions are beyond WTF.

A man pulls the body of an earthquake victim from a coffin in order to steal the coffin at the cemetery in Port-au-Prince, Friday, Jan. 15, 2010

jesus christ. it's apparently 6.1 (which is very serious). fuck.

xpost

Still coming to terms with those photos. Sitting at my desk with tears in my eyes. So fucking useless and so in awe of people who drop everything to go and actually do useful stuff instead of what I do.

Fuck.

everyone is useful to those around them, dude, i wouldn't worry too much about it. unless of course you're designing earthquakes in which case shame on you, ned, ~shame on you~

news seems to indicate that the aftershock was more frightful than it was destructive---most buildings went down in the initial quake, and the vast majority of people appear to have had the good sense to avoid the ruins since then. i hope

Violinist Romel Joseph spent 18 hours trapped in the rubble, reciting every concerto he'd ever played...

http://www.miamiherald.com/486/story/1436927.html

DV's meta comment: when I was in Portugal last weekend, there was a lot of TV news about Haiti, with CNN being the only English-language channel. I was struck by how emo their coverage was - everyone was going on about how they *felt* about the earthquake, whether it was anchorpeople, local correspondents, politicians, representatives of aid agencies, whatever. The other news coverage seemed much more like it was reporting stuff that was going on, though they were all talking in foreign so I can't be sure.

I am also interested in the suggestion that Haiti's descent into terrifying violent lawlessness is a bit overstated: The myth of Haiti's lawless streets

This story is also interesting: Haiti escaped prisoners chased out of notorious slum

i think in general "violence in the streets" following disasters is overstated. cf the looting thread