Two of my favorite directors, who happen to be awesome women, premiered their new films at Sundance: Nicole Holofcener screened Please Give and Lisa Cholodenko debuted The Kids Are All Right.

• Catherine Keener and Oliver Plattat in Please Give. Photo taken by Piotr Redlinksi © 2008, Property of Sony Pictures Classics. •

• The whole gang sitting down for lunch in The Kids Are All Right. Photo taken by Suzanne Tenner and courtesy of the Sundance Film Festival. •

Like Holofcener, Cholodenko creates some of the best female characters around! Her latest film The Kids Are All Right was one of my favorite films of the festival! In the course of 104 minutes, I laughed, cried, and then laughed some more. Annette Benning and Julianne Moore play a lesbian couple whose teenage children find their sperm donor (Mark Ruffalo). Benning and Moore have great chemistry as a middle-aged couple threatened and confused by Ruffalo’s introduction into their lives. Cholodenko's script and direction perfectly capture the cultural zeitgeist! The Kids Are All Right is absolutely charming!

What makes Sundance so special is the access to filmmakers. My favorite part of the festival is the post-screening Q&As with directors and casts. There is just something so interesting about hearing the “talent” discuss their creative process, and a charming antidote about on-set tomfoolery never hurts.

In their respective post-screening Q&A, Ruffalo and Hoffman both acknowledged that the fun in directing your own movie is that you get to pick your own cast, and therefore work with your friends. This creative freedom made both actor/directors almost giddy post-screening. Working with your friends on a project you truly believe in sounds likes a pretty good gig!

In an unexpected celebrity sighting, as I was leaving the theater after seeing Sympathy for Delicious, I saw Ron Livingston of Office Space fame. He seemed a bit crabby as he was looking for a restroom. Or maybe it is just disconcerting having people stare at you thinking “I know that guy is famous for something” as you’re trying to find a restroom. Just as I realized who Ron Livingston is, he was whisked behind a black curtain by a volunteer. Oh to be famous!

* Movie posters courtesy of the Sundance Film Festival.

There are education critics out there who have what some might consider an extreme view on the intentions and damages caused by the public school system -- in both its present and past incantations. They believe that the education system is designed to break down innate creative genius, and replace it with the ability to follow directions, be subservient to authority, and learn to preform boring tasks with little to no complaint or questioning.

I try not to think this way. Instead, I choose to believe that the task of educating billions of children -- all with their different needs, different backgrounds, and different ways of learning -- is so great, and the needs to consider so vast and untamable, that even the best intentions can go awry.

How to best ensure all children receive an equal level of education when some are homeless and some live in mansions? When some speak English and some do not? When some want to learn how to build engines, and some love to read literature? How to homogenize the non-homogenizable so that everyone learns equally, equitably, and thoroughly?

Meetings are held. Arguments are had. Plans are made. Laws are implemented. Panels convene. Experts are consulted. Studies are completed. Money is given. Money is taken away. Libraries are made. Libraries are closed. Libraries open up again. New theories are produced. New buzz words are created. Teachers are re-trained. Class sizes are reduced. Class sizes are blown up again. Teachers are hired. Teachers are laid off. And on, and on.

It takes a herculean show of effort. So I feel bad sometimes, being critical. Like it's wrong of me to judge any of this when it's amazing that it happens at all, that as contentious as we humans are with each other, we manage to pull together an education system for every single child living in the United States -- and provide it to them free of charge.

But I try to teach my students that one of the most important skills they can nurture in themselves is the ability and willingness to question -- and so I live by example, even though it often feels safer not to. Never stop questioning your education, I tell them. Ever. I started questioning mine when I was five years old, the year I started Kindergarten, and I'm not about to stop now. I hope they won't either.

• Matt Bush and Sean Marquette in HIGH School. Photo by Neil Jacobs, Still Photographer. Courtesy of the Sundance Film Festival. •

• Michael Chiklis in HIGH School (note the hair and moustache). Photo by Neil Jacobs, Still Photographer. Courtesy of the Sundance Film Festival. •

Now it’s time to go back to some serious documentaries and dramas…

The words "State Standards" will be appearing frequently in this blog. If these two words make you nauseous, I apologize in advance -- but State Standards are a reality that all public school teachers must live, breathe, and sleep with. Relationships have been known to crumble over teacher devotion to these Standards. Spend an afternoon with the right kind of teacher, and it soon becomes clear that many of them having been sleeping around -- with their book of State Standards. It's not pretty. The State Standards are insidious. We can not ignore them, no matter how much we wish we could.

This brings me to one of the most disturbing trends I see in public education -- the consistent attempt to make meaningful things that, in essence, are not. Standards are to be written on the whiteboard at all times. Standards are to relate to the lesson being taught, and students should be made aware of the standards attached to their lessons. This is in case any government spies happen to come into the classroom (I'm not kidding), and in case they question any of your students and ask them the dreaded questions, "Does your teacher teach to the Standards." Your students must answer, "Yes." If they do not, terrible, unspecified things could happen to you.

Teachers live in fear of many things -- parents, principals, pink slips, reassignments, benefit cuts -- now, they also live in fear of being busted for not taking the Standards seriously. If you don't take the Standards seriously, then your students will not do well enough on the STAR test (you know, that infamous yearly spate of testing that makes elementary students pee their pants and barf, and destroys low income schools). If your students do not do well on the STAR test, then the government spies will take over your school and destroy it further, (I'm not kidding).

Depending on how badly the administration is breathing down your neck, many teachers actually opt to give their students packets that contain the Standards in their particular subject matter, (each subject has its own elaborate set of Standards). This packet of Standards is now seen as an automatic justification for what the students are being forced to learn. This is a wonderful tool for teachers, actually. No longer must they feel guilty for lulling their students to sleep with empty, boring content! They can just point to the Standard on the board and say, "This is why you need to know this! Because California thinks it's important!"

In my experience, this explanation means a whole heck of a lot to your average American teen. I once made my students read Romeo and Juliet backwards, then I had them attempt to translate the entire book into Polish using a shared English/Polish dictionary. Whenever they questioned me, I just pointed to the Standard on the board and they settled right back into the lesson with looks of almost sage contentment on their faces.

It's kind of a relief actually -- to be freed of responsibility for deciding what to teach. Not creative? No problem! Don't care about your subject matter? Who cares?! All you need to worry about is getting your students to do well on the STAR test, and you're path is paved with...well, maybe not gold, after all, our country has weapons to build, but at least stainless steel, or maybe aluminum. Something cheep, but shiny.

Tonight, while walking down Main Street back to my hotel, I felt particularly inspired by the creative energy of the festival. There is something truly remarkable about seeing great art in a space with hundreds of other people whose reactions only enhance your experience. I love the sound of a crowd roaring with genuine laughter, or a collective uneasiness as everyone holds their breath fearing what will happen next. Seeing a movie with an engaged audience is an experience that cannot be mimicked watching a DVD at home alone, trust me.

• Director Josh Fox in Gasland. Photo courtesy of the Sundance Film Festival. •

But I restrained myself and saw another documentary instead.

I have been looking forward to Diego Luna’s directing debut Abel for weeks. In his endearing opening remarks, Diego Luna admitted to being extremely nervous for his film’s first screening with an audience. Since the Eccles theater seats over 1,200 people, and the place was packed, it was quite a coming out party.

• The cast and crew of Abel at tonight’s premiere. Photo by Jessica Mosby. •

If anybody had any doubts about the influence of corporations in the United States political life, a recent Supreme Court ruling should dispel them. In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court decided, reversing itself, to allow unlimited corporate spending on political campaigns. The damage that this ruling will have on the country’s democratic process should not be underestimated.

The influence of money on US politics is not new. Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor, was able to run successfully for office three times thanks in part to the personal funds he infused into his political campaign. The impact of this Supreme Court decision is even more drastic, allowing corporations to invest as much money as they want on political campaigns, deciding in fact the outcome of the elections.

As Senator Russell Feingold, democrat from Wisconsin, has pointed out, this ruling “…means that Wall Street banks and firms, having just taken our country into its worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, could spend millions upon millions of dollars on ads directly advocating the defeat of those candidates who want to prevent future economic disaster by imposing new financial service regulations.”

The amount of corporate money influencing the outcome of elections is staggering. During the 2008 election process, Fortune 500 companies reported profits of over $743 billion, while $2 billion were spent by candidates and political parties during that election. Those profits are just part of the story, since the money corporations have in their treasuries are several times higher than that reported amount.

In its ruling, the Court ignored long standing principles that for over two centuries had gained the public’s respect for its decisions, including the principle of stare decisis, compelling the Court not to depart from its own precedents in the absence of exigent circumstances. In a dissenting opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens stated, “I am not an absolutist when it comes to stare decisis, in the campaign finance area or in any other. No one is. But if this principle is to do any meaningful work in supporting the rule of law, it must at least demand a significant justification, beyond the preferences of five Justices, for overturning settled doctrine.”

Until this decision, corporations and unions were banned from spending their treasury funds on broadcast ads, campaign workers or billboards urging the election or defeat of a federal candidate. After World War II, that prohibition was extended to labor unions. The Court’s conservative group stated that the corporations had the same right to free speech as individuals; therefore, the government could not stop corporations from spending money to help their favored candidates.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion and the most moderate voice among conservatives, stated that “The government may not suppress political speech on the basis of the speaker’s corporate identity.” What Justice Kennedy failed to mention is that this decision will be able to tilt the outcome of U.S. elections to corporate interests, including multinational and foreign corporations.

Although the damage to the democratic process caused by five out of the nine Justices may be mitigated (e.g., by shareholders directing corporate boards of directors to pledge not to use company money to influence elections), allowing corporate money to influence the electoral process has gravely undermined our democracy.

Cesar Chelala is a co-winner of an Overseas Press Club of America award.

The chaotic growth of today's cities can no longer be ignored. The great challenge is how to improve the quality of urban life by ensuring harmonious growth. Cities can--and should--learn from the experiences of other cities with similar characteristics. This effort requires not only the participation of urban planners but public health and environmental experts, politicians, and fundamentally, the communities themselves. Only when these actions are carried out will it be possible, perhaps, to reach that almost ideal situation heralded by Hippocrates some 2,600 years ago: a balance between the human organism and its environment.

When observing the chaotic, burgeoning growth of the modern city, the more erudite of urban planners will reminisce wistfully on how different it is from its ancient Greek counterpart, the polis, which Italian architectural historian Leonardo Benevolo once described as "dynamic but stable, in balance with nature, and growing manageably even after reaching large dimensions."

The rapid and uncontrolled sprawl of today's cities breeds anxiety not only among urban planners and architects. Experts in the field of public health are alarmed as well, for the apparent randomness of the urban dynamic is robbing the population of its basic health and well-being through unregulated environmental pollution, shrinking green areas, inadequate housing, overburdened public services, a mushrooming of makeshift settlements on the outskirts lacking in both infrastructure and services, mounting anomie and the sheer numbers of neighbors who do not know neighbors.

Beijing, a city of over 17 million inhabitants, exemplifies this social alienation. Until the early 1980s, the Chinese capital was constructed as a multitude of siheyuans, or one-story complexes built around a common courtyard that were inhabited by three or four families who shared a single kitchen and water spigot. These courtyards were connected by narrow streets called hutongs that formed a grid from north to south and east to west.

This open structure greatly facilitated contact between neighbors, encouraged the sharing of resources, fostered relations between contiguous families, and enabled the elderly to care for children and share with them their passion for songbirds. Because of these characteristics, these almost idyllic structures were described as "collections of small rural villages."

Until the mid-1980s, only a few skyscrapers disrupted the harmony of the landscape. Today that panorama has the look and feel of the ultimate modern city, where, with few exceptions, these "small rural villages" have been supplanted by sterile, towering skyscrapers. This striking change is not limited to external structure; it has also dramatically altered the fabric of human relations.

Physical isolation has led to an increase in crime, destroyed the local sense of solidarity, and contributed to the fragmentation of what were once cohesive family groups. As the distance between home and the workplace has also increased considerably, workers now find themselves devoting what was once valuable family time to exhausting commutes in overcrowded buses or subways.

According to Chen Xitong, a former mayor of Beijing, "the capital is growing increasingly ugly and it is steadily losing its Chinese character. Most of the modern high-rise buildings, with their boring concrete facades, look like dominoes set down in the landscape without plan and without imagination."

This situation, of course, is not limited to China. In many Latin American cities, old colonial mansions of considerable historic and architectural value are being replaced by huge apartment buildings unrelated to the character of the neighborhood. A new kind of war is being waged in cities throughout the world: Esthetics vs Profits.

- In this blog series, Dr. Cesar Chelala explores the many challenges presented by urbanization, the impact of urban migration, challenges to health, and challenges of providing clean water. - Ed.

Cesar Chelala, MD, PhD, is an international public health consultant and a writer on human rights issues and foreign affairs.

• Director of the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program Cara Mertes; CEO of the Skoll Foundation Sally Osberg; Nobel Prize–winning economist Muhammad Yunus; and To Catch a Dollar Producer/Director Gayle Ferraro. Photo by Jessica Mosby. •

It’s easy to get caught up in the glitz and the glamour of Sundance. While walking to the Canada party (as in a party to celebrate Canadian films at the festival), I had to walk around a crowd trying to catch a glimpse of The Runways’ stars, Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning, through the Bing Bar’s large glass windows. Waiting outside in the cold just to see a celebrity at a film’s premiere party is not how I want to spend my Sunday night. But to each his (or her) own!

At the To Catch a Dollar press conference today I was in the same room, and actually rather close, to a real celebrity: Nobel Prize–winning economist Muhammad Yunus. The press conference was particularly inspiring as Yunus spoke proudly of the documentary, which chronicles his first American branch of the Grameen Bank in Queens, New York. The attendees (Sally Osberg, CEO, Skoll Foundation; Cara Mertes, Director, Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program; and Gayle Ferraro, Producer/Director of To Catch a Dollar) all spoke of exciting new collaborations between social entrepreneurs and documentary filmmakers. Ferraro developed To Catch a Dollar as part of the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program, and it might just be the first film in a new genre of documentary films focused on social entrepreneurship. And Muhammad Yunus might just be my most exciting celebrity sighting of the festival!

If you can't make it to Park City for the annual Sundance Film Festival, festival films are now available to watch home! This is so exciting!

YouTube has partnered with the festival to make feature films available for $3.99 per movie. The films are available until January 31st. In addition to films from this year's festival, 2009 Sundance hits are also available - including The Cove!

And for cable subscribers, additional 2010 Sundance films are available on-demand. I recommend the awesome documentary The Shock Doctrine.

Now you don't even have to leave your house and brave the snow to watch the films that make Sundance such an amazing and thought-provoking experience!

I say this every year, but there are just too many movies to see! Add the parties, press conferences, and discussions, and you barely have time to eat and sleep! Friday morning, it started snowing and it hasn’t stopped. I, thankfully, bought new snow boots, which makes trudging from place to place much easier. While other people walk around the slush and ice puddles, I walk right through without a second thought.

• Snow falling on Main Street. Park City, Utah. Photo by Jessica Mosby. •

The snow has also meant that fewer people are frequenting Main Street during the day (my celebrity sightings have been rather weak this year) and the lines for parties are not nearly as long as previous years. I actually made it into the GEN ART party Friday night after waiting for less than 10 minutes, although it felt much longer because I was waiting in the snow and couldn’t feel my hands. Part of the wait was spent near Ian Ziering of Beverly Hills 90210 fame. Or just “Ian” as he is referred to by members of his entourage, as in “Yeah, we’re at the GenArt party with Ian…it’s the only party worth being at tonight.” Who knew, Ian Ziering still had an entourage? Once I was inside and warm, I found myself sandwiched between Ian Ziering and the band The Fray, that is until a bearded member of the Fray made a path for me.

• Too many films! Photo by Jessica Mosby. •

Between celebrity sightings, I’ve seen six films. This is fewer than I had planned and hoped to see. My screening schedule has been thwarted by my inability to get a waitlist ticket (Waitlist: 4, Jessica: 0). I have a theory that the snow is driving more people into the theaters, thus making waitlist tickets very hard to come by. At least I take solace in the fact that the New York Lounge always has fresh bagels, popcorn, and cider to help me recover from the cold and my waitlist rejection. After having completely given up on seeing HOWL and the film's star, I saw James Franco at another screening. And yes, he is just as charming in person!

Documentaries are having a particularly strong year at the festival, and I’ve had the good luck to see my top picks. My two favorites thus far are Restrepo and Waiting for Superman. I can’t stop thinking about Restrepo; footage of Afghanistan and the daily life of American soldiers stationed there is so incredible. The fact that the camera person survived filming, when some of the American soldiers captured did not, makes the documentary all the more extraordinary. The film is so intense and so worthwhile.

Thanks to an early distribution deal, Waiting for Superman is one of the most talked about documentaries of the festival – and it totally lives up to the hype. The documentary takes a candid look at the American public school system’s failings while balancing profiles of individual students with input from a wide spectrum of educators, journalists, teachers’ unions, and education-minded intellectuals. Post-screening, I was surprised at how moved and emotional I felt leaving the theater. Waiting for Superman might just be the call to action for America’s public school system.

Tomorrow brings another day of exciting films! I’m feeling a bit more confident that it might be my lucky day in regards to the waitlist!

• Festival Director John Cooper and Sundance Institute President and Founder Robert Redford at the annual press conference. Photo by Jessica Mosby. •

Today marks the first official day of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. I am in Park City with my press credentials and new snow boots! Today was mostly spent tending to business. I picked up my press packet, spent hours finalizing which films I’m going to see, and attended the annual press conference with Robert Redford.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to see any films. The two opening night films – HOWL and Restrepo – were both sold out and the waitlist was a bust. But I have plans to see both films over the weekend, so that eases the disappointment.

After realizing that I wasn’t going to see any films tonight, I strolled Main Street weighing my options. I was pleasantly surprised to find Joseph Gordon-Levitt at New Frontier on Main talking about his project (hitRECord.org) and introducing himself to everyone as “Joe.” So charming.

Tomorrow (January 21) marks that start of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival! I will be there for the third year in a row. So, please check back daily for regular blog updates!

When you store your brains in your weaponry, then every situation is a security threat. US military in Haiti, hyper-vigilant about securing emergency relief, obviously missed the central purpose - get the supplies out to save lives.

When the Wall Street Journal presents Cubans as heroes and US soldiers as paranoid idiots, you know the screw-up must be off the scale.

"Benoit Leduc, operations manager for Doctors Without Borders in Haiti, on Monday said "hundreds of lives" were lost because five of its planes carrying surgical teams and equipment weren't allowed to land and were diverted to Santo Domingo.

"Several countries and other aid groups also have complained that the U.S. military has refused to let some of their supply planes land at Haiti's crippled airport.

""It's a question of physics," says Capt. John Kirby, a U.S. military spokesman in Haiti. "The airport is the only way in, it only has one runway, and there are literally hundreds of flights trying to make it in." " - (Charles Forelle, Jose de Cordoba, and Joe Lauria, Wall Street Journal, January 17th, 2010)

Here's a suggestion. Give planes carrying doctors, and medical supplies, landing priority over those packed with soldiers. Like the two massive C17 military transport aircraft currently blocking the airport runway.

The U.S. military is reluctant to move shipments out of the airport without a security escort, sometimes causing added delays. "Twenty containers go out, but you have to have about 100 heavily armed soldiers," says Gilberto Castro, emergency response director of transport company Deutsche Post DHL, which is handling hundreds of tons of aid.

Right. Because food packages and bottles of water and bandages and painkillers need to be protected from starving, wounded people.

Yet a team of Cuban doctors were seen Monday treating hundreds of patients without a gun or soldier in sight. The deputy chief of mission at the American Embassy in Haiti, David Lindwall, said the U.S. had done a lot, but that some teams and supplies "aren't getting out as broadly as we'd like because of security" concerns.

Hmm. Did he happen to notice that relief teams from Cuba, Iceland, China, half-a-dozen other nations, are out there saving lives? Without security? Could that be because they see Haitians as fellow human beings, not rabid jackals they need to protect themselves from?

The Guardian's Ed Pilkington reports from Port-au-Prince:

Day seven of the catastrophe, yet wherever we go we are still surrounded by crowds of people living on the streets pleading with us for water. A few miles away at the airport huge quantities of supplies are stacked high in the sun. Under a deal finalised between the heads of relevant parties on Sunday night, US troops will be responsible for securing the incoming supplies at the airport, and then moving them to four central distribution hubs. One of those hubs is at the national football stadium in downtown Port-au-Prince and another at a golf course near the US embassy.

Ah yes - the Superdome Solution. It worked so well for Hurricane Katrina. Listen up, all you wounded, traumatized Haitians! Yes you, camped in the ruins of your home surrounded by your last remaining possessions. Yes you, keening in the rubble for your dead loved ones. Yes you, still frantically digging for survivors. A message from the US government: Just Let Go and head for a Hub. The US Marines are here to give you a Fresh Start!

Like Katrina survivors, when you finally return to your home or neighborhood, you'll likely find that bulldozers have completed the job begun by the earthquake. That foundations are already being laid for high-rises and luxury hotels, office blocks and swimming pools, for the influx of crisis entrepreneurs, aka Relief Workers. They'll be around for a decade or two.

And if you happen to be too injured to move, have infants or immobile elders you can't carry, if you just can't bring yourself to leave the bodies - bad luck. We've all got to make difficult decisions in disasters. Were you really expecting the relief to come to you? We've only got 10,000 troops here, lady! You want us to whip out maps and highlighters, mark off neighborhoods and just send our guys out with supplies? Whaddaya think we are - Cubans? It's dangerous out there. We may have assault rifles, but we've heard about your Voodoo.

Paranoia. Incompetence. Preemptive criminalization of disaster victims. Militarism-gone-mad. Secure the water against the starving. Force survivors to trek to the food and medical aid. But at all costs, keep the soldiers safe.

Shailja Patel is an award-winning Kenyan writer, theatre artist, and political activist. www.shailja.com

Happy Belated New Year! I'm so happy you made it to the New Year. We should be thankful we made it because so many people didn't.

It's the beginning of the year and as we all lists of New Year’s resolutions we hope to implement. I hope one of your new year's resolutions is to conserve water, go green/recycle and save energy.

If you were not too concerned about how dire the global warming situation is, consider the following.

1n 1910 we had over 150 glaciers. We now have fewer than 30!

The snow on Mt. Kilimanjaro will be gone soon due to global warming

By 2050 we could lose more than one million plants to extinction

75% of the annual increase in CO2 is due to burning fossil fuels

Global warming will lead to more severe floods and droughts

By the end of the century the North Pole may no longer be frozen

Right now the entire planet is out of balance – Bob Corell

The seas will continue to rise and displace millions of people

Do your part to support this cause. Recycle; conserve water, energy and whatever else you can.

Don't be an architect of the world’s misfortune. We can still turn the negative tide around now. Join me in reclaiming the world!

Our first impulse when we see a disaster of this magnitude is to help in any way we can as individuals.

However, if we take a moment to assess the big picture, we can often have a much greater impact when we leverage our collective power to lobby governments and international bodies.

I recommend Haiti Action as an excellent source of information and on-the-ground-reporting on grassroots organizing for justice in Haiti:

www.haitiaction.net

I've put together a ten-point list of progressive action for Haiti, based on the work of Haiti activists and progressive analysts.

1) Grants, not loans.
2) Keep corporations and corporatist policies OUT of Haiti. Stop disaster capitalism in its tracks.
3) Cancel ALL Haiti's debt to the Inter-American Development Bank.
4) Let Aristide return to Haiti.
5) Lift the ban on Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas political party.
6) Rip up the neoliberal Clinton-Obama program for Haiti: boutique tourism, sweatshops, privatization, deregulation.
7) Get the guns out, get the aid in! Stop the militarization of this disaster by the US.
8) Allow all Haitians in the US to work, and remit money home.
9) Release all 30,000 Haitians held in US jails for deportation, and grant them Temporary Protected Status.
10) Demand that France repay the $21 billion it extorted from Haiti in 1825, by warships, to "compensate" France for loss of Haiti as a slave colony.

It should be noted that progressive opinion is divided on the integrity and effectiveness of Aristide as a leader. However, there is no reason to maintain a ban on the Fanmi Lavalas political party, since collective organizing at this time could be vital to the survival of hundreds of thousands of Haitians.

On the subject of humanitarian aid:

Not all aid is equal, as we all learned from the fiasco in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

And far from being the "pitiful helpless victims" depicted by global corporate media, ordinary Haitians are mobilizing in amazing ways, with virtually no resources, while governments and international aid organizations remain paralyzed by bureaucracy. They are turning their homes into hospitals, sharing their meager supplies of food and water, while 3 days after the earthquake, international aid is stockpiled at the airport.

This just in from Sokari Ekine, creator of the award-winning blog, BlackLooks:

In August 2007, I visited Haiti to meet with Lavalas women. The trip was organized by Haiti Action, and I was able to meet many other activists on the ground as well. One of the women I met and stayed with was Rea. She is now using her home as a hospital and they are using whatever they can to tend to peoples' needs. Thousands of other Haitians are doing the same. Meanwhile, the aid agencies sit at the airport. Port-Au-Prince is quite a small but densely populated place. To say the aid agencies don't know how to go in, or have to wait - for what I am not sure - is stretching things a bit far.

This underscores the importance of getting any assistance directly to Haitians, and organizations:

- that have a track record of working effectively in Haiti,
- that are Haitian-led, or partner with Haitians as equals
- that already have infrastructure and operational networks in Haiti
- that are committed to justice and genuine democracy for Haitians

With this in mind, here is a list of organizations recommended by Food First:

1) Partners in Health -- Founded by Dr. Paul Farmer, this nonprofit health delivery program has served Haiti’s poor since 1987. Donate for earthquake relief HERE.

2) Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) -- Doctors Without Borders was working in Haiti prior to the quake with a staff of 800. HERE is a report on January 13, 2009 with a link to their donation page.

3) Haiti Action -- Haiti’s grassroots movement – including labor unions, women’s groups, educators, human rights activists, support committees for prisoners and agricultural cooperatives – will attempt to funnel needed aid to those most hit by the earthquake. Grassroots organizers are doing what they can with the most limited of funds to makea difference. Please take this opportunity to lend them your support HERE.

4) Grassroots International -- has a long history of working with organizations on the ground in Haiti. Grassroots has committed to the extent possible to, “provide cash to our partners to make local purchases of the items they most need and to obtain food from farmers not hit by the disaster.” This people-to-people transfer is vital to circumvent the aid industry and support Haiti's economy. Support their efforts HERE.

"Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love." - Martin Luther King Jr.

I am Hanif and just became 29,
No no! Don’t look down here, you won't find me!
I am the one who’s looking at you from the blue sky
I am a shining star in the darkest night
And I am longing for the sun rise
My heart is still burning from hotness of the bullet,
The bullet which dressed me in red of my blood.
I wonder, desiring for freedom is a crime today
So I’m the biggest criminal!
The darkness saw the desire flame in my eyes
Now I am the star, watching you from the above

The situation in Iran is of concern to everyone. We are witnessing everyday the savagery that ended with at least 20 killed by shooting and the running over of the people by police vehicles. This was due to the nation-wide uprising that started following Iran's sham election and came to a turning point in the day of Ashura against the dictators ruling in Iran and will never end until freedom and peace reach Iran.

• Me and my brother, Hanif. •

Today I am witnessing in Iran the same oppression that occurred in the past in Ashraf, which means shooting straight at my fellow residents, running over them with military vehicles, beating them with batons and exploding tear gases. I was injured in the face during the attack on July 28 by the Iraqi forces and my brother Hanif got shot in his heart. What was his crime? Did they kill him just because he did not want to leave his home? Or, because he was seeking freedom for Iran?

Today we see the main reason that the Iranian regime has an open hand in killing, executing, and oppressing us. It is because of the western countries' appeasing policy towards the Iranian regime and their silence about the future threats to Ashraf residents as opponents to the regime in Iran. The mullahs's excuse to oppress us is that the PMOI members have been designated as terrorists in the US FTO list. This designation is only to appease the mullahs in Iran. We should not forget that the PMOI was removed from the black list in Europe and England after seven European court rulings. This clearly shows that the designation of the PMOI by the US State Department, which has yet to be removed is an injustice and is the outcome of collusion with the Iranian mullahs.

The time has come to make a change in Iran. The only way to end the dictatorship in Iran is to support the Iranian people's uprising. The US should stop its appeasing policy towards the mullahs. The name of the main opposition in Iran which is the Mojahedin must be removed from the US list so there would be no more excuses for the Iranian regime to oppress and kill its opposition inside and outside of Iran. My younger brother Hanif was killed because of the terrorist label against the PMOI by the US that has justified his killing without any punishment.

Ms. Asefeh Emami
Resident of Camp Ashraf - Iraq