Haiti links: ‘a better energy future?’; critiquing Peck; alleged attack, fatal beating in Delmas 33 camp; more

1. “Can Haiti Chart a Better Energy Future?” Scientific American feature on energy, electricity, and related topics in Haiti.

2. A different and important take (fr) on Raoul Peck’s Assistance Mortelle.

3. Amnesty International: Protester allegedly ‘beaten to death by police’ following attack on camp in Delmas 33

4. “Haitian government: Welcome to Hugo Chávez International Airport,” in Cap-Haïtien. See my previous post about Chávez in Haiti.

PetroCaribe context from Jacquie Charles:

While #Venezuela erased $395M after quakein Petrocaribe that Preval administration wracked up, #Haiti has now wracked up $1B since 2010.

— Jacqueline Charles (@jacquiecharles)

April 19, 2013

Jokes from Charlie Petty:

Can’t wait to take off at Reagan and land at Hugo Chavez #Haiti #airports @tatewatkins @jacobkushner

— Charlie Petty (@chuck_petty)

April 19, 2013

5. Haitian PM Laurent Lamothe meets with Canadian cabinet minister Julian Fantino; “The problem with Fantino is resolved,” says Lamothe.

6. “BAHAMAS MILITARY STOPS BOAT CARRYING 30 HAITIANS”: “Authorities in the Bahamas say they have intercepted a rickety boat carrying 30 Haitian migrants, including five children.”

Last week, the Haitian consulate in the Turks and Caicos cancelled a National Diaspora Day event after “several vessels carrying Haitian migrants made landfall on TCI shores.”

Photo by me

Scraping by in Port-au-Prince

“hello mrs tate, how are you? i don’t hear from you.”

Every few weeks, my phone buzzes with an SMS from John. We met on the streets of Port-au-Prince shortly after I arrived in Haiti in 2012, a freelance writer with no assignment but my own. I’ve got no money, no contacts. But I’m American, and to John that’s a chance.

Americans were in the vanguard of an invasion of aid workers and peacekeepers and journalists that arrived after the January 2010 earthquake flattened the capital. Haitians at times loathe the newcomers, but Yankophilia is everywhere. You’re as likely to see Kobe Bryant or Jay-Z adorning the side of the tap-taps — ubiquitous, colorful trucks that bus people around the cities — as you are Toussaint Louverture or Jean-Jacques Dessalines, two of Haiti’s founding fathers.

That’s from a first-person piece I’ve just had published at Medium, a new-ish online publishing platform that’s the Twitter founders’ latest venture. Learn more about Medium here, and learn more about the Medium for Haiti collection here.

Photo by Jacob Kushner

What does Haiti export?

Data from 2010. Via the MIT Observatory of Economic Complexity.

Haiti links: NPR on Atis Rezistans; Durandis on cabinet resignations; Charles on Montas

1. NPR does Atis Rezistans. A few months ago, Amy Wilentz blogged about the Grand Rue sculptors, their recent L.A. exhibit, and the art-culture-penis-sculpture mash-up that they present to outsiders:

>One of the many difficult issues underlying In Extremis is the confounding of ethnography with fine arts, which has been the result of a long stretch of outsider fiddling in the world of Haitian religious arts and traditional crafts. You feel as you walk through the beautifully curated halls of outlandish and sometimes gorgeous works at the Fowler exhibit, that you are seeing something made by Haitians within their own culture, but much of the time, that’s not the case.

2. Ilio Durandis on last week’s cabinet resignations

3. “Michèle Montas looks to Haiti’s courts for justice in husband’s death.” Jacqueline Charles on the Jean Dominique case and more.

4. Will Delta be the next international carrier to establish vacation packages to Haiti?

Addendum: The Toronto Star interview with Richard Morse about his January resignation from his government post: “I left because of corruption in the palace, and infrastructure sabotage.”

>“Rather than fight the corruption,” he said, “I feel like they have embraced it.”

Photo by me

Getting ‘in line’ to come to America

“Most paths that do allow people to come to America make waiting in line at the DMV look like traveling by high-speed rail. One egregious example: a Mexican who wanted to file paperwork tomorrow to obtain a visa by way of her U.S. citizen sibling can expect to wait about 164 years. That Methuselah Line exists because of limits on how many visas can be granted to people of a given nationality in one year, part of an antiquated and inefficient quota system.”

That comes from a RealClearPolicy piece of mine published today about how convoluted our immigration system is, and how much it costs in terms of time and money to immigrate to the U.S., legally.

The current scheme dates to the 1960s, when it replaced a national-origin quota system that blatantly discriminated against a host of ethnicities and became untenable as a Mad Men Era gave way to a Civil Rights one. Today’s system uses two main channels to ration the number U.S. immigrants: family members already here, and employment. No more than 7 percent of the yearly visa allotment for employment- or family-based immigration can be issued to natives of any one country. So the system doesn’t account for factors like population and proximity to the United States—let alone demand and supply of workers – hence the aforementioned 164-year wait for a Mexican sister.

More fun with bureaucracy contained within, here.

Photo by mdfriendofhillary (cc)

Haiti links: ‘Humanitarianism in Haiti’ at Duke; France renews travel warning; reports on aid and rice; more

1. Humanitarianism in Haiti conference going on today and tomorrow, hosted by the Duke Haiti Lab. Quite the panel line-up, including Michèle Pierre-Louis, Jonathan Katz, Father Joseph Phillippe, Mark Schuller, Vijaya Ramachandran, and many more. Follow on Twitter at #haitiproject and watch the livestream here.

2. “France advisory against traveling to Haiti renewed”

3. A recent report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research finds, surprise, surprise:

>It remains unclear how exactly the billions of dollars that the U.S. has spent on assistance to Haiti have been used and whether this funding has had a sustainable impact. With few exceptions, Haitians and U.S. taxpayers are unable to verify how U.S. aid funds are being used on the ground in Haiti. USAID and its implementing partners have generally failed to make public the basic data identifying where funds go and how they are spent.

4. Oxfam America releases a policy backgrounder on “the rice value chain in Haiti.” The abstract notes that “foreign rice accounts for 83 percent of the supply of this main staple of the Haitian diet.”

5. Haiti’s finance minister Marie Carmelle Jean-Marie resigns

>Sources close to the minister told The Miami Herald that while she didn’t go into specifics about her reasons for quitting, she does point out that she no longer feels she has the support of her colleagues in her effort to provide responsible management of Haiti’s finances and economy.

6. Kids from my home state pack a shipping container full of beds to send to Haitian orphans, because beds aren’t sold in Haiti.

Photo by Ben Depp

Haiti links: rebuilding Haiti, democracy; 210 years since Louverture death; Frantz Duval reviews Raoul Peck; more

1. Bloomberg’s editors say that To Rebuild Haiti, Restoring Democracy is a Must, echoing The Miami Herald from last week.

2. 210 Years Since Death of Toussaint Louverture

3. Le Nouvelliste editor in chief Frantz Duval reviews Raoul Peck’s new documentary, Assistance Mortelle:

>Chaque étranger qui met les pieds en Haïti devrait en recevoir une copie et être astreint à regarder le documentaire intégralement avant de recevoir l’autorisation d’entrer sur le territoire.

4. In Memory of April 26th 1963. A Facebook page “remembering, 50 years later, those we lost to the Duvalier Regime.”

5. Haiti 0-3 USA: Under-17 CONCACAF Championship match in Panama City

>On a hot and humid evening in Panama City, Haiti started out as the more aggressive side. Jonel Desire found space behind the defense twice in the first 10 minutes, but he pulled his shot wide both times. His teammate Wisner Derival then should’ve put Haiti in the lead in the 16th minute when after exploited some miscommunication in the US backline. He sped past the defense and rounded the keeper, but somehow he missed an open net.

Haiti continues group play against Guatemala on Tuesday. In other soccer news, the Haitian national team will play Spain in a friendly in Miami on June 8.

6. In immigration news: Study Finds High Economic Cost of Immigration System. “Individuals and businesses devote 98.8 million hours to immigration-related paperwork annually, at a cost of approximately $30 billion.”

Photo by me. Sun rising Easter morning, near Saint Louis du Sud.

The unthinkable country

Pooja Bhatia in n+1 on the Pearl of the Antilles, Haitian Revolution, and Laurent Dubois’ Aftershocks of History:

The contradiction between revolutionary ideals and plantation practices provided an opening for Haiti’s own revolution, a 13-year-long war for human emancipation that began in 1791. Its success was improbable. Yet the island’s soldiers—dispossessed of kin networks, community, and a longstanding connection to the land—threw back Napoleon’s own army and emancipated themselves. They ushered into being the first black republic, in 1804, and the second republic in the hemisphere, after the United States. Haiti became a postcolonial state well before European colonial empires reached their zeniths. More than a century after Haitian independence, the concept was still too avant-garde for the American secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan. “Think of it,” he said, “niggers speaking French!”

In its time and for a long time after, the Haitian Revolution was “unthinkable,” in the description of the late Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot—for how could a system predicated on the non-humanness of blacks acknowledge their agency, let alone their strategic acumen or statesmanship? Outside Haiti, the revolution remained unthinkable for decades even after Secretary of State Bryan’s quip, at least until 1960s African nationalists found inspiration in C.L.R. James’ classic, The Black Jacobins, one of the first major outside accounts of the revolution.

Read the entire thing here.

Photo by me

Buying gas with a credit card: Chavez’s legacy in Haiti

Yesterday, Haiti began a three-day mourning period over the death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a “great friend” of the country, as Le Nouvelliste now calls him.

Many Latin Americans and people of the left have long set aside the repression and intolerance sown by Chavez to champion him “as a bulwark against U.S. economic and political dominance in the region,” as The Miami Herald puts it. In the paper’s article on Chavez’s legacy in the region:

“He was the great leader of the left in Latin America and advocated for a Latin American—and Caribbean—way of doing things as opposed to a U.S. way of doing things,” said Erick Langer, director of the Center for Latin Studies at Georgetown University.

Haitians love Chavez for the more than one billion dollars that Venezuela’s PetroCaribe program has given the country in recent years. It’s funded projects across Haiti, including power plants and airport runways, in addition to its main thrust: 14,000 barrels of oil a day that Venezuela sends Haiti on credit, most of which is burned to help produce the scant electricity Haiti generates. The government of Haiti pays for about 60 percent of the fuel now, with the remainder to be paid at 1 percent annual interest over the next 25 years. Also from The Herald article, on PetroCaribe:

In Haiti, for example, the savings from the Petrocaribe program financed 15 percent of Haiti’s meager $3 billion annual budget and account for 22 percent of the road and infrastructure projects, said Kesner Pharel, a leading Haitian economist.

“Chávez was the only guy giving money to Haiti without asking questions, and Venezuela is the only country giving credit to Haiti,” said Pharel. Without that help, he said, Haiti “will be in trouble.”

But if you’re buying gas on credit, you’re probably already in trouble. An AP report last July noted that after getting debt relief post-earthquake, Haiti’s “borrowing habits” had resumed: “Of the $988 million [in U.S. reconstruction funds] spent so far, a quarter went toward debt relief to unburden the hemisphere’s poorest nation of repayments. But after Haiti’s loans were paid off, the government began borrowing again: $657 million so far, largely for oil imports rather than development projects.”

The AP report also noted that since taking over in May 2011, “President Michel Martelly’s administration has borrowed $657 million, largely from Venezuela for basic fuel needs … Next year Haiti is expected to spend close to $10 million servicing those debts, according to the IMF.”

So those PetroCaribe imports are already saddling a financially-paraplegic government with millions in debt-servicing costs, let alone the bill-plus-interest that will come on that fuel one day. And the buying-regional-influence-through-oil-gifts diplomacy strategy doesn’t seem to be doing Venezuelans back home too many favors either. Again, from The Herald:

“Somewhere along the line … reality must set in,’’ said Anthony Bryan, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“Venezuela is currently giving away one-third of its oil production at below market prices: this includes loans-for-oil deals with China, and heavy subsidies in the domestic market,” he said.

With soaring inflation, a recent devaluation, high import bills, over-dependence on oil and shortages of everything from meat to toilet paper, the Venezuelan economy is in a downward spiral and the next president may be forced to concentrate more on domestic issues.

Chavez was “a leader that understood the needs of the poor”, as one particularly daft U.S. Congressman put it, who amassed a personal fortune of a billion dollars while handing out his country’s oil reserves to buy political clout and (at least some of) the people’s love at home and abroad. Haitians love him today. But will that love, or PetroCaribe’s import scheme, prove to be sustainable over the next 25 years?

Haiti’s bigger question over sustainability, however, comes by way of a detail from the AP’s report last year: “More than half of Haiti’s annual $1 billion budget comes from foreign aid.”

Photo from wikimedia commons

Txt relief: how SMS crowdsourcing contributed to emergency response in Haiti

A few months ago, I wrote a print article for Makeshift magazine’s communication issue about text message-based emergency response in Haiti that’s now online. It begins:

My name is Jean Wani my brother is working in unicef and I live in Carfour 11 Alentyerye I have 2 people that are still alive under the building! Send Help!”

This text message, originally sent in Haitian Creole seven days after the January 12, 2010 earthquake, reported one of the many ensuing emergencies. With this note and thousands of others like it, disaster relief entered the Information Age—in a country where Internet penetration falls under 10 percent.

Once sent, the message traveled through a global network of emergency responders, many of whom had never set foot in Haiti. The response was cobbled together by a group of people from disparate organizations, largely online. One of them was Ushahidi, a Kenyan organization originally created in response to Kenya’s 2007 post-election crisis. The group’s open-source mapping technology allowed residents to crowdsource information about ongoing riots and emergency needs via SMS.

After the earthquake in Haiti, Ushahidi and others rapidly developed and deployed an SMS response system to report and monitor needs. The system would connect victims with volunteers abroad analyzing reports, translators among the Haitian diaspora, and ultimately crews on the ground who could locate them and provide aid.

Read the entire piece, which contains photography by Ben Depp, here, and check out Makeshift’s entire communication issue, which contains pieces on messages sent into North Korea by balloon, Nigerian email scammers, how language affects saving, and much more.

Photo by Ben Depp