Mallarmé

Une proposition qui émane de moi - si, diversement, citée à mon éloge ou par blâme - je la revendique avec celles qui se presseront ici - sommaire veut, que tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre... Le pliage est, vis-à-vis de la feuille imprimée grande, un indice, quasi religieux : qui ne frappe pas autant que son tassement, en épaisseur, offrant le minuscule tombeau, certes, de l’âme.

What about Haiti?

I am outraged and frustrated by the way the international community, including Canada and the US, has handled the humanitarian crisis in Haiti. Of all those hundreds of millions of dollars, indeed, billions of dollars concerned citizens of these countries have given for the relief effort, only a staggering 20% has reached the people of Haiti since the catastrophe in January. While the US State Department decides whether or not it should honour a promise it made of 1.15 billion dollars in aid, 442 people have died of a totally preventable cholera outbreak, and over 1.3 million are living in "tents." I put it in quotations because I can't justify calling these pieces of scrap materials "tents." A legal intern named Beatrice Lindstrom, who works and lives in Haiti describes it this way:

"But each time the rain falls, I still struggle to turn my mind away from Port-au-Prince’s internally displaced people, especially the hundreds of families living on the street out side my apartment in makeshift tents pulled together from tarp, scrap metal and sheets. For so many of Haiti’s IDPs, rain means no sleep. It means standing up through out the night. It means that the water will transform the floors of their homes into a muddy mess that seeps through their belongings and soaks their beds."

How many homes and shelters have our hundreds of millions of dollars help build for the displaced people of Haiti?: 19,000. And these shouldn't even be called homes. No they're referred to as "transitional wooden shelters." This doesn't even scratch the surface of the need in Haiti. I find it incredible that when the financial sector was threatened with collapse, literally billions of dollars were pumped into the very banks and financial corporations that helped bring about the collapse itself, and this happened in a mere fraction of the time it has taken to build 19,000 shelters, some 10 months after 250,000 people died and over a tenth of the population was displaced because of the earthquake in Haiti. It has become glaringly obvious what the interests of our governments are. While they will scramble like chickens clucking that the sky is falling during a financial crisis, making promises of big bucks to finance corporations (and delivering), once the initial shock of the catastrophe in Haiti was over, it's business as usual. As one of many people who donated to the effort in Haiti, I officially protest the use of only 20% of my donation. I wasn't giving to government or NGOs, I wasn't giving to marketing agencies to promote these same NGOs, or to their CEOs. I, along with literally millions of people, gave to the people of Haiti, every penny, to help ease their suffering and rebuild a life. Ok, realistically I expected a small part of my donation to be used for other purposes (salaries, logistical needs, etc), but only 20% actually reaching the people isn't good enough. It's criminal.

What about Haiti?