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Please join The WIP Thursday, August 5th at 9am PDT for a live chat with CARE Policy Analyst Milkah Kihunah. This chat is the first in a series of live chats on the International Violence Against Women Act (I-VAWA) that The WIP is hosting prior to the September release of the film Tapestries of Hope. Tapestries of Hope is the story of Betty Makoni’s Girl Child Network, a safe haven for girls in Zimbabwe who are victims of rape because of a widely held belief that sex with a virgin cures AIDS.

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“We’re mobilizing people in the camps and the shantytowns to let them know that getting housing is a right. Our vision is to make the problem of housing a focal point of people’s struggle,” said Reyneld Sanon of the Force for Reflection and Action on Housing (FRAKKA by its Creole acronym).

Grassroots groups in Haiti are developing strategies to respond to one of the greatest lingering crises of many after the January 12 earthquake: homelessness for 1.9 million people whose houses crumbled or were too damaged to occupy. FRAKKA represents one initiative, though still fledgling, to unite grassroots groups and residents of internally displaced people’s camps to win their human right to housing. (For another initiative by the Support Group for the Repatriated and Refugees, see “The Right to Housing in Haiti.”)

• Thousands of internally displaced people live in cramped structures on smog-filled medians between thickly trafficked highway lanes. Photo: Beverly Bell. •

Dotting almost every street and open space in Port-au-Prince, and stretching as far as two hours’ drive out of town, are 1,300 formally recognized camps and many more unrecognized ones. Shelter for this nation of refugees occupy even the most unlikely spots, such as median strips on highways and fields near former dumping grounds of dictators’ bodies. At times, camps comprises no more than a few shaky lean-to’s overtaking a sidewalk; at other times, they cover vast terrain and contain tens of thousands of survivors. The shelters are built with whatever people can find, from cardboard boxes to Styrofoam trays, from plastic advertising banners to strips of imitation Arabic rugs. They offer little to no protection from the pounding night rains, thieves, or rapists.

Sanitary conditions are all but nonexistent. Some offer no latrines at all, while others provide putrid port-o-potties. Standard ‘bathroom’ procedure involves plastic buckets which are then emptied in communal spaces. When it is available at all, getting water with which to wash can involve standing in a long line in the tropical sun. Flies, mosquitoes, and other health risks are ubiquitous.

Loune Viaud, the Haiti Operations Coordinator of Partners in Haiti, told me, “Fortunately, we haven’t had any of the epidemics we’ve all been expecting. We’ve had a few cases of diphtheria, which are normally very rare.” She leaned over to knock on the wood of a window sill. When I asked about a spike in post-earthquake HIV rates, she said, “We don’t yet know, but with all the rape and promiscuity in the camps, there’s no way there couldn’t be.”

Violence and physical insecurity are endemic. The State Department renewed a travel advisory after four Americans were killed in Haiti in three months (though almost as many Americans, 3.6, are killed in a typical week in my town of New Orleans, where the population is only about 5% of the island nation’s). Yet the violence primarily impacts those living in camps and on the streets. The cause of the spike in crime can be found in the proximity and vulnerability of victims, since everything the displaced own is in their makeshift shelters, which have no locks or often even walls. Surrounding families in the camps are as many as thousands of strangers. Women’s and girls’ bodies are similarly unprotected and easily accessed, aggravating high preexisting levels of gender-based violence. The spike in crime can also be traced to growing poverty, frustration, and alienation.

One unemployed woman living in a tent in the shantytown of Carrefour told me, “On the street, in the tent, there is no security. Only God.”

In interview after interview I’ve conducted over six months, people have regularly cited the following priorities for their security: a functioning national judicial system, responsive Haitian police, and fulfillment of basic needs. (The responses do not include, notably, greater U.N. ‘security’, as those troops have been involved in many acts of violence against the population. See “United Nations Attacks Refugee Camp, Protests Mount”). But more than anything, they report, they want and need permanent, secure housing.

Two months into hurricane season, no national or international agency appears to have any plan; except for some 28,000 temporary shelters donated by aid agencies – usually just a fancier tent - the only response has been to move Haitians from one tent city to another. A rainstorm on July 12 provided just one indicator of what might happen in the case of a hurricane. Ripping through camp Corail, a bleak desert plain at the foot of a denuded mountain, hundreds of tents were flattened. Corail is one of the few sites where the government and international agencies took any action around internally displaced people, relocating them form their home-made tents elsewhere to commercial tents there.

Here’s another example of emergency preparedness. Amidst current conditions of desperation, tents and other emergency supplies are being withheld and stockpiled for a future humanitarian crisis - at least by international NGOs like Concern International, if not the United Nations itself. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, in its Weekly Facts and Messages for June 22, wrote "Contingency planning: Plans for the hurricane season already in place by the international response in Haiti include pre-positioning of emergency supplies.”

Over and over in my conversations with camp residents, they ask, “Do they think we’re animals?”

The question can’t be conclusively answered, but some indicators reveal negligence at best, and high disdain at worst. Food aid has been suspended since the end of March, except for ‘food for work’ programs whose benefits typically flow to friends and family of insiders. Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive is reported to have called for the closure of some camps. Forcible governmental removal of residents from camps is on the upswing. The U.N. apparently tried to negotiate a three-month moratorium on expulsions with the Haitian government, but the government only held off for three weeks.

Cheryl Mills, chief of staff for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, said on May 10, “We've been trying to incentivize people to return to their homes, particularly if their homes have been adjudicated as safe. But people seek to remain in the temporary communities because, as surprising as that might seem outside of Haiti, life is better for many of them now.”

It’s hard to miss the parallel between Mills’ comment and that of former First Lady Barbara Bush when she visited evacuees from New Orleans in the Houston Astrodome just after Hurricane Katrina. "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this – this is working very well for them."

Mills’ statement is also akin to popular talk among some middle- and upper-class Haitians, and U.N. and NGO employees of ‘false victims.’ ‘False victims’ are those whose lives weren’t fully destroyed by the earthquake and who therefore, apparently, should not be entitled to any benefits. These are people who didn’t lose their own houses but who go hang out at the camps to get whatever aid might be distributed. As I’ve heard it described in an upscale Pétion-ville club and other places far removed from the suffering, these ‘false victims’ are making out like kings from the crisis.

What’s the standard for being a ‘real’ victim? That one lost everything but the clothes on one’s back? That one is a corpse still lying, flattened, in one of many buildings across town that now serves as a mausoleum?

And what would it mean if people’s daily lives were so devastated that they had to go to crowded, muddy, inhumane refugee camps for an upgrade?

Beyond Mills’ and other’s insensitivity around the tremendous needs that all destitute people in Haiti face today, she is flat wrong. Most cannot return home for one of at least three reasons. First, the sites that held most of the cement-block houses that were destroyed during the earthquake remain covered in hills of rubble, so much that no tent can be erected there. Hiring a crew to clear and cart away that rubble can cost upwards of US$50, an impossible figure for most. Second, of those houses that are left standing, many are seriously cracked or otherwise damaged. Third, many families who were renters were kicked out by landlords immediately after the earthquake.

“Aren’t we all Haitians? Is any one of us more a person than anyone else?” one former street vendor inquired. She lost her husband, one-room home, all belongings, and the merchandise through which she made her living in the earthquake, and now lives with three children and a niece in a tent made of four sapling trunks and a ripped blue plastic tarp.

“Since January 12, it’s gotten so serious that we have to make this the focus of our work. Even the Haitian Constitution, Article 22, says that the state has an obligation to provide good housing to people,” said Reyneld Sanon, one of the coordinators of the aforementioned housing advocacy group FRAKKA. Formed two months after the earthquake, FRAKKA is a coalition of about thirty groups, including youth, community, workers’ rights, popular education, and children’s right organizations, plus organizations and leadership committees from camps. While the coalition’s size and strength are still humble, it is representative of a new trend to organize around permanent lodging.

“We’ll take advantage of this moment to remind people that in 1985, Mexico had an earthquake. People organized themselves and forced the state to get them housing to live in,” Sanon continued.

“The problem of housing has always been there. If you look at the slums before January 12, those weren’t houses that anyone should have been living in. As the proverb says in Haiti, ‘These houses can fool the sun, but they can’t fool the rain.’ And the problem isn’t just in Port-au-Prince; it’s a national problem. Peasants need houses, too. If you travel around the county, you can see the status of peasants’ housing. You can see that everyone in the country need better housing.

“People know that we have a state that doesn’t work for them. Generally, the state in this country just works for a small sector who are sucking the people dry, that’s in the employ of the bourgeoisie. The people don’t know they have things like the right to free schooling and to health care, and that the state has to give that to them, since they’ve never gotten these things. But they’ve already paid for them with their taxes and even with foreign loans, because it’s the people who are going to pay those back.

“One of the activities we did on May 1 was a training session with about 30 representatives of different organizations. We gave them two documents, Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 22 of the Constitution. We went into the camps and did meetings with small groups and one-on-one to talk to them about their rights.

“Then we’re doing consciousness-raising on the necessity for people to unify and fight for housing. This leads us to mobilization, where people can take the streets on a regular basis to get their needs met. Sit-ins, too: we already have a calendar of days to do sit-ins in camps and shantytowns.

A press release by FRAKKA from July 27 recognized that, “The definitive solution to the problem of housing is tied to questions of decentralization, management of the nation, and agrarian reform.” I might add a commitment by the government and international community to meet the needs of all. But in the meantime, the statement reads, “We must mobilize… to demand our rights to get good housing and quality of life.”

Thanks to Mark Schuller, Melinda Miles, and Nicole Phillips.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Welfare of people, Dana, charity is the words which depict the previous concept of social work. But new concept of professional social work and social workers changed the scenario. And also the way of thinking of people towards this profession. At present social work study covers in its syllabus of all the aspects of society. If we coin the name multidimensional core, than it will also do the justice with it because it’s based on the holistic approach of society covering the area of urban and rural development, family and child welfare, medical and psychiatrist and also the personnel and industrial management. By this it cover the more than half aspects of the society. Yes I said half of the because still it is the matter of tantrum that we can’t measure or weight the social work. So which we cannot be measure or proof in the laboratory than how it would be a science? And because of this mind set we always take the social work studies and its area at the second level. Even though in this advanced era, students give their predilections to the hi-tech and scientific studies which they can proof in the laboratories and able to measure and record it.
Well in spite of this on the other side social work study is an inevitable area of higher studies but here is the only peculiarity occur on the ground of mind set. This is complicated to modify or alter.
Here in this article my only notion is that it is not always necessary to measure or weight the good things which we cannot and which are really acceptable and good for the human being and for in other aspects also.

Profession of social work is not easy task to tackle, first of all it catches the attention of individual that how social work can be a profession? As per my aspect it will be the first and foremost question which rises in the mind of our hoi-polloi? Professional social workers have to work in the multidimensional areas without any prejudices and biases? Now of course again after this statement question occur what is the need of professional social worker? What are the needs of it? And social work is a thing which any one can join and do by their own and deliberately and voluntarily so what are the needs of professionalist in it? These are some general question which rose in the ‘human brain’, and it is normal condition to arise.
If we describe it in a general speaking term, than social work is nothing but it is the one way to help the people to make help themselves.
It is the general criteria of social work by the social scientist. And when we pitch on the word ‘professional’, than it added a tinge, in the statement ‘professional social work’ and professional social workers’, word professional in itself consist the professionalism. Now professionalism here stand for perfection in the arena and a professional of that area should be well acquainted with the tool and technique of his /her area of working.
Because those who are the professional and withhold the proficiency in their arena of work naturally are able to perform better instead of those who are the volunteer and providing their services in a form of charity or Dana. And in my notion this is the simple and to the point answer of hundreds of arising questions.

In 2003, several weeks before the start of the Iraq war, I wrote an article on the impending war in which I warned against the terrible humanitarian consequences that a war against that country would unleash. I never imagined that they would be much worse than the nightmarish scenario that I painted in my article.

A recent article by Drs. Busby, Hamdan and Ariabi in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health describes the consequences on the civilian population of the coalition forces’ attack on Fallujah in 2004. Their conclusions are based on a study they conducted in January and February of 2010, in which a team of researchers visited 711 houses in Fallujah and obtained responses to a questionnaire in Arabic on cancer, birth defects and infant mortality.

Among their findings are dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukemia years after the attack on that city. The infant mortality rate was 80 per 1,000 live births, more than 4 times the rate in Egypt and in Jordan, and some 9 times the rate in Kuwait. After 2009, the infant mortality rate increased even more markedly, to 136 deaths for 1,000 live births.

Already in 2005, Iraqi doctors in Fallujah stated that they were being overwhelmed by the number of babies born with serious defects, and they also reported on the high number of cancer and miscarriages suffered by the city’s population. The rate of babies born with heart defects is said to be 13 higher those born in Europe.

Professor Chris Busby, an expert in the effects of radiation on humans said that uranium particles can alter the DNA of sperm and eggs from contaminated adults and cause a multitude of birth defects in any baby they conceive. A doctor in Fallujah quoted by Inter Press Service stated, “I can say all kinds of toxic pollution took place in Fallujah after the November 2004 massacre.”

The U.S. military, which at first denied it had used white phosphorus as an anti-personnel weapon in Fallujah, later retracted that denial and admitted using it. However, the Pentagon argues that white phosphorus doesn’t poison people but burns them. In consequence, it is covered by the protocol on incendiary weapons, which the U.S. hasn’t signed. While Saddam Hussein’s use of white phosphorus against the Kurds was severely criticized, the same criticism should apply to the use of white phosphorus against civilians in Fallujah.

In addition to white phosphorus, depleted uranium (DU) munitions, which contain low-level radioactive waste, were extensively used in Fallujah. According to the Pentagon, 1,200 tons of DU have been used thus far in Iraq.

Reports covering the U.S. offensive on Fallujah state that widespread human rights abuses were committed, including indiscriminate violence against civilians and children.

Writing for The Independent Patrick Cockburn says, “In the assault US commanders largely treated Fallujah as a free-fire zone to try to reduce casualties among their own troops. British officials were appalled by the lack of concern for civilian casualties.”

A documentary produced by RAI, the Italian state TV, shows a series of photographs from Fallujah corpses with the flesh burnt off but clothes still intact, a finding consistent with the effects of white phosphorus on humans. I am reminded of a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa “You and I are Disappearing,” whose first stanza says,

The cry I bring down from the hills

belongs to a girl still burning

inside my head. At daybreak

she burns like a piece of paper.

Dr. César Chelala is an international public health consultant.

While sitting in a dark, humid room at a war wounded camp on the outskirts of Freetown, one of the residents asked a question: If there is suffering, is there peace? As we walked around this camp, and many others, that question crossed my mind more than once.

In 2002, following the end of the civil war in Sierra Leone, tens of thousands of people were left dead, the country was torn apart, and most of the population had been victimized. Camps were set up throughout the country, created for specific victim groups - child soldiers, war widows, sexual assault survivors, and, most notably, amputees. Amputations were a common occurrence throughout Sierra Leone, used mainly as a way of punishing those seen as enemies of the Revolutionary United Front and as a way to prevent others from turning against them.

• A child plays outside of a house in a camp for amputee victims and their families outside of Freetown, Sierra Leone.  •

In theory, these camps offer an environment for survivors to reclaim their lives and draw strength from others who experienced similar atrocities. However, these camps can also detract from the healing process, creating an environment of perpetual victimhood and a separation of these victims of violence from the rest of the population.

In Grafton and Hastings, on the outskirts of the capital Freetown, communities have been created around the various identities of victimhood and suffering, including war wounded, war widows, and amputee groups. Within these groups, there is a sense of deprivation when compared to other segments of society. More troubling is the sense of deprivation that these groups feel when comparing themselves to each other. Although all suffered violence, either directly or indirectly, during the course of the civil war, there is a hierarchy of victims in Sierra Leone. The war widows express frustration that they did not receive the same benefits as the war wounded and amputees. The war wounded think that the amputees are getting the best treatment.

When it comes to material gains, it appears, at least to an outsider, that the amputation survivors have received the most aid. The houses in amputee camps are better, more solid structures than the housing we saw in the war wounded camps.

The thread of commonality that binds these various groups is that they are separate from the larger society. These camps are located outside of urban centers, away from hospitals and employment opportunities. Outside of Freetown, we spoke to one young man trying to better his circumstances through education, all the while being bound to a wheelchair. He expressed frustration that it costs nearly $10 to travel to and from the university every day and often taxis will not stop for him because they do not want to deal with the wheelchair and the room that it will take up in the car. In addition, $10 a day can be five to ten times what someone in Sierra Leone makes in a day, which in turn makes this cost unbearable for most. Because of this, many war survivors are limited to the camps that have been created for them with no access to the outside.

The separation from the rest of society perpetuates the atmosphere of victimization in Sierra Leone. Through the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration process following the ceasefire, many ex-combatants on both sides were provided with job training. This was not done for survivors of violence. They are dependent on the aid that they receive from the government and from international aid organizations, and if that aid does not cover their living expenses, many are reduced to begging on the streets. The victims of this war cannot overcome the structure of their society.

Not all victims of violence from the civil war live in these camps. One reason that was discussed was that there aren’t enough houses in the camps for all the people who survived the war’s atrocities. As stated before, the living conditions in these camps are relatively better than those outside of the camps. This does not negate the fact that choosing to live in these camps will most likely lead to an increased level of poverty for these survivors. They find themselves in a catch-22, with their victimhood being perpetuated by the current structural violence within Sierra Leone, which does not allow them to move beyond their current level.

Despite all of this, there are plenty of reasons that people choose to live in these camps, despite the hardships that such a situation provides. I spoke with a man in a camp outside of Kenema in the eastern region of the country. After proudly showing me his prosthetic leg (which is not a common item for amputee victims to have), I asked him why he stays in the camp if it is so difficult to make a living and improve his life and his children’s lives. He responded with: “We survive on hope. Hope that someone will help us.”

Amanda Pope was in Sierra Leone for a two-week course led by Dr. Pushpa Iyer of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Amanda’s blog is part of a series of reflections by Dr. Iyer and her students on the challenges to building peace in this war-ravaged country. -Ed.

About the Author:
Amanda Pope graduated from the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey, CA with a Master of Arts in International Policy Studies in May, 2010. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, OR in 2008 after majoring in International Relations and Russian Language and Literature. While at the institute, Ms. Pope's specialization was Conflict Resolution and she traveled with 13 other students and Dr. Pushpa Iyer to Sierra Leone to study the challenges that this country has faced in their peacebuilding process since the end of the civil war in 2001. Ms. Pope currently resides in Washington, D.C.

During our first few days in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, many describe the need to forget and move away from a haunting past. Their optimism is unexpected because we had drawn certain conclusions about their collective trauma and the country’s history of violence. In contrast, as we make our way through different parts of Sierra Leone, it becomes apparent that many locals are reluctant to let go of their traumatic past. Their memories tell the story of mutilations and scars that are shocking indications of the barbarism and violence that plagued Sierra Leone during its decade long war. One woman, a war widow, described in excruciating detail the events that unfolded on the day her husband was killed and she was shot and raped. This is only one of many stories shared with our group on a Saturday morning in Grafton, a small town outside of Freetown.

• Motorbike rider driving the streets of Bo, Sierra Leone 2010 •

They all painted a blood soaked picture of horrific proportion. It was evident that those willing to openly revisit the past with us foreigners, in reality are outsiders of mainstream Sierra Leonean society. The amputees and war affected men and women we visit reside in camps on the outskirts of the city. As we visit more of these camps in three eastern districts of the country, we noticed that this seclusion is the norm. It seems clear these victims of war are forced to live away from the optimistic residents of Freetown.

The villagers of “Peace Town”, a town outside of Makeni where a peace agreement was signed, have witnessed little progress since the war ended. Diamond mine workers in Tongo, a small, remote town, are victims of a parasitic social structure that dehumanizes and deprives them of basic dignity. We are told that many of the mine workers are former combatants with the Revolutionary United Front, the armed group that fought the government. Unable to find other sources of employment they continue to work in the mines in hopes of striking it rich some day. The day we visit the mines, five men have died due to illness and inhumane working conditions. Their physical suffering and the psychological trauma of their violent past are not addressed through the government’s peacebuilding programs and are mostly dismissed by a society consumed in meeting its own immediate, basic needs.

During an interview with Search for Common Ground (SFCG), an international non-governmental organization, we learn about the challenges to reintegrating ex-combatants. One of the reintegration programs for the ex-combatants provided them with motorbikes, which they use as taxis. Soon however, there were clashes between law enforcement and motorbike drivers. Society in general and law enforcement in particular quickly categorized the motorbike drivers as being rash and aggressive because of their past life as combatants. Instead, as SFCG points out to us, creating awareness of road rules and laws could make the task of reintegration and acceptance easier. Stigmatizing the ex-combatants is not the solution to the problem but it is done because of the lack of a deeper understanding of their problems. This is particularly poignant if one understands that many of the ex-combatants were children, as young as seven years old when they were captured by rebels and forced to fight the war.

Who were the victims, who were the perpetrators?

These are the visible divides among the people of Sierra Leone. The conflict created many divisions between rural and urban communities, between amputee and ex-combatant, between men and women, and between youth and society. On the surface, each of these groups of people seem to have opposing experiences, however, they share similar grievances.

In Sierra Leone everyone is a victim. While the ex-combatants and the war victims claim victimhood for different reasons, both are warranted in their feelings of having had no control over how their lives took shape during the war. Besides, with little access to psychosocial counseling, trauma has a crippling effect on all.

Today, a decade since Sierra Leone’s brutal war came to an end, the challenge of reintegrating and reconciling victims and perpetrators still remains. The wounds inflicted by years of violence continue to sever this nation’s fragile social fabric. It is very clear to us that ex-combatants and war victims share a similar predicament; both are confronted with overcoming stigmas, alienation, and trauma that prevents their acceptance into communities.

Reintegration and reconciliation in Sierra Leone are complex endeavors. The ‘victims’ – ex-combatants and the war victims - need acceptance, need identities that go beyond their wartime experiences. The paralyzing collective memory of violence needs to be confronted to create a sustainable and integrated future.

Rishna Gracie was in Sierra Leone for a two-week course led by Dr. Pushpa Iyer of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Rishna’s blog is part of a series of reflections by Dr. Iyer and her students on the challenges to building peace in this war-ravaged country. -Ed.

About the Author:
Rishna Gracie was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and has lived in Iceland, the U.S. as well as, Brazil. She received her Bachelor’s degree in International Relations from Mills College and her graduate degree in International Policy Studies with a concentration in Conflict Resolution from the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Recent research missions to countries like Sierra Leone and Gaza have inspired her to focus on issues concerning gender in underprivileged societies. Ms. Gracie desires to work with communities that fail in meeting its basic needs and urgently need assistance. At this time, she is looking to expand her efforts to working with community-based organizations focused on furthering sustainable reconciliation between groups in the United States.

Colette Lespinasse is director of the Support Group for the Repatriated and Refugees (GARR, by its French acronym) in Port-au-Prince. Here are her thoughts on solutions to the crisis in which 1.9 million homeless people are still living in precarious tents and other makeshift structures, six months after the earthquake and almost two months into hurricane season. Colette talks both about the need for the government to guarantee the human right to housing, and how grassroots organizations can create homes in livable communities.

We hear that in the camps there are groups who have started organizing themselves to assert their demands around housing as a right. They’re thinking about alternatives and starting to put pressure on the government to respect those rights.

• Colette Lespinasse says "It’s possible to confront the housing problem if there is political will, if there is mobilization, if there is solidarity." Photo: Beverly Bell.  •

The first thing to do is some education so more people understand that housing is a right. Second is to help people organize to demand these rights from the state. We need a popular movement to mobilize around the question of housing. I think the work that lies before us in the next year is to organize these different groups into a larger movement in Haiti. Because the government isn’t talking about it at all. But a great mobilization of people would make the government prioritize this.

I don’t think there’s a country in this world that can lift itself up if the people themselves don’t mobilize first. We saw this after the earthquake: the group who did the most, who responded and mobilized, was the Haitian people. And they did it without any leaders. Today the leaders of the state haven’t yet called upon the Haitian people, either within the country or in the diaspora. And that’s the greatest resource we have. That’s where the leaders could find solutions for many problems that exist today.

There have been a bunch of [international donor] conferences – at least four - that have been held about Haiti, but the real conference needs to happen here with the people, with all the grassroots sectors: peasant farmers, people from the shantytowns, etc. The government could say, “Look at these problems we have, we can do this, we can’t do this.” And the people could say, “This is what we can do.” This would let us have consensus amongst ourselves.

People need somewhere to live to stay out of the rain, so they don’t get sick, so they don’t get wet, so they can sleep at night. That’s their right. It’s the same as having the right to eat; people need to eat or they’ll die.

This right was already violated in Haiti before the earthquake. When you look at the [precarious] kinds of houses we had, that’s why so many people died during the earthquake. But that right has been even more violated since the earthquake. The situation displaced people are living in, especially in Port-au-Prince and other cities that were touched by the earthquake, is unacceptable. These are not conditions in which anyone should live, like living in the mud after it rains, on top of each other, under a bunch of tents where air doesn’t circulate. There are people in camps right near us who’ve died; they’ve had a heart attack in the night where they couldn’t breathe. Also, the police have been kicking people out from under tents in order to make them go live under [a new set of] tents.

Right now, there’s no social protection for people who’ve lost all their means, who don’t have purchasing power anymore, nor for those people who have become more vulnerable, such as children – there are a lot of children who have lost their parents – nor for people who’ve become handicapped. There are a lot of people who can’t work anymore, who’ve lost a limb, and they’re relying on others now.

Hunger is a big problem, too, since they cut off all the food distribution after March 31. As far as potable water goes, too, there has been a bit of an effort, so people can find a little water to drink - even though they’ve announced they’re going to cut that off, too, that people will have to buy water from now on.

We can also tell you that we’ve recorded many cases of violence, especially violence against women, like men beating their wives and cases of sexual abuse in the camps.

There are camps that have 60,000 people, 70,000 people. That’s a town. The police have to organize themselves somehow to watch over these communities, but they’re nowhere visible. People are complaining that they never see the state authorities visiting the camps.

We need a special program of protection so that those people can live. The government bears primary responsibility because the Haitian people depend on them, and they need to safeguard the rights of their people. The others – the U.N., other international organizations – they can come give support, but they can’t take the place of the state. Sometimes we wonder if the government really exists. You don’t see it, you don’t hear its voice, you don’t see it in action.

At the international level, there are funds that would allow people to find housing without spending a lot of money on interest. For all the money the international community claims they have for Haiti, for all those promises of funds, they ought to invest it in housing.

We in GARR are looking for partners from other countries, like community organizations in the Dominican Republic and other parts of Latin America who have put pressure on their own leaders to fix these problems. We’re learning about the experiences of organizations in other countries, the solutions they’ve found for housing.

For example, there’s an international movement called Desalojos Zero, Zero Evictions. It says that the government doesn’t have the right to evict people, to throw people out of a place if they have nowhere else to live. The same movement promotes people getting homes because that’s their right.

[Beyond what the government and international community should do,] we at GARR want to pursue something called mutual aid housing. It’s cooperative aid, where the very poor pool their money together and pull their internal resources together to resolve their own problems. The Haitian government could also get foreign funds to put land at the disposal of homeless people. Families could contribute to building their houses; they could find financial support to buy building materials so they could begin to rebuild, doing cooperative construction with their own labor. The state could give them means – either low-interest credit, or giving people access to international funds.

Mutual aid housing isn’t just housing. It’s the creation of communities, because we need houses plus the means to live. People would have services like education and health, and the means to start small businesses. We’ve seen places where people have done this and everything is cooperative. People come together to create schools, kindergartens, etc., and you end up with a village in which people support one another in order to live. That’s the idea we’d like to promote.

In Puerto Rico there’s a group that does cultural activities, and they’ve already raised $30,000. With $30,000, we could build three or four houses to serve as a model. We could expand this, with the Haitian diaspora and with solidarity organizations, to show that it’s possible to confront the housing problem. That is, if there is political will, if there is mobilization, if there is solidarity.

And another thing: there are people who want to make their knowledge available to this movement. We’ve found a retired professor in Puerto Rico who goes into communities and helps people create construction plans. Universities here could become part of this movement, helping communities with their knowledge so we wouldn’t have to pay a bunch of engineers. We could pay two or three specialized builders, and then with the strength of the people, we could purchase materials to help solve the housing problem.

Also, people could put the brakes on what we don’t want, for example speculation around housing. We hear there are a lot of big foreign companies who want to come build houses because Haiti has become a huge market. We propose that those mutual aid houses, residents couldn’t sell them or engage in speculation with them.

I hope that organizations that are in solidarity with the Haitian people will begin to mobilize more. People in Haiti can’t take this anymore. We’re hoping for ongoing support from everyone who supported us just after the earthquake. There must be a movement to place more pressure on the U.N., to ask them what they are going to do here, because they have great responsibility for what is going to happen. Everyone, please continue to follow what happens here in Haiti, because now is when we need you most.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

It cannot be denied that the recent World Cup helped focus on one of the world’s most popular sports. And it cannot also be denied that psychology plays an important part on who is going to be the winner.

During the World Cup, the Algerian team prepared for its matches by watching the legendary movie “The Battle of Algiers.” The movie, which depicts the fight of Algerians against the French ruling their country, perhaps helped them to a reasonable performance during the Cup.

The Brazilian team, which was on the way to what the players thought was a certain victory, particularly after the first goal against the Dutch, saw their hopes crushed after the Dutch tied the game and went on to win it at the end. Here psychology played against the Brazilians.

Psychology also played against the Argentinians, who, led by the legendary Diego Armando Maradona were convinced they were going to be among the finalists. An early goal by the Germans, a couple of minutes after the start of the game, was a factor in their poor performance and the ultimate 4 to 0 defeat of their team.

Thinking about that psychological effect brought to my mind an event that happened years ago. My town’s basketball team had been on a losing streak, and the players’ mood could be said to be underground. Never before in the history of the club had they had such ruinous performances.

The officials at the club were desperate. They talked to the players, they offered them incentives, they threatened to fire them, all to no avail. The team continued losing. This happened until finally one of the officials had a brilliant idea on how to improve the situation. Why not use the services of a psychologist to better the team’s morale?

The one finally chosen was a friend of mine, known to all by the nickname “Rabbit” obviously because of his uncanny resemblance to that animal. My friend was a hardworking but down to earth professional. I knew he was going to do his best to improve the team’s performance.

In effect, during a long holiday the players were called back to work with my friend. He used several techniques to lift the players’ spirits. Movies, music, pep talks, role playing, everything was tried and nothing seemed to work. When the season resumed, the team continued losing every single game. The fans were disappointed and the club officials were furious with my friend.

One day, I was doing errands downtown when I met the Rabbit. I couldn’t help asking him how things were going. “Terrific,” he answered. “Come on, Rabbit,” I told him, “what do you mean, terrific? Your team has continued losing every single game since you became their psychologist.” “That is correct,” he answered, unperturbed, “but now my job is done. Now, when they lose a game, they at least feel good about themselves!”

César Chelala is a writer on human rights and foreign policy issues.

Russia has one of the world’s most serious epidemics of injection drug-use, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNAIDS. It is estimated that Russia has two million injecting drug users (IDUs), 60-70% of whom have HIV-related illnesses. In the past decade, the number of HIV-infected people has increased from an estimated 100,000 to over one million.

Sharing syringes by injecting drug users is the most prevalent cause of HIV transmission in Central Asia and Eastern Europe, where it is responsible for more than 80 percent of all HIV infections.

The Russian authorities have come under strong, widespread criticism for their policies aimed at dealing with the IDU/HIV epidemic. Education to control drug abuse has focused primarily on the promotion of drug abstinence. In addition, officials have relied on criminalization as the main deterrent. That approach has created obstacles to effective addiction treatment and HIV prevention.

Another policy, which has proven effective in other countries, is “harm reduction.” This approach, one dismissed by the Russian authorities, puts prevention of HIV infection and transmission first and features needle exchange programs and treatment with substitute drugs taken orally.

It is estimated that eighty percent of those Russians who are HIV positive became infected by using contaminated needles and syringes. However, despite the proven efficacy of harm reduction strategies in HIV prevention, the Russian authorities have failed to take advantage of them. A 2004 UNAIDS survey found that funding for needle and syringe exchange programs in Russia fell by 29 percent between 2002 and 2004 while the incidence and prevalence of infection and numbers of IDUs was on the rise.

Harm reduction strategies involve providing access to the drug methadone, needle exchange program and addiction counseling. While detoxification is widely available throughout Russia, more comprehensive, longer term treatment remains unavailable in many parts of the country. This failing is critical because research has shown that detoxification by itself is not effective treatment.

Russian law prohibits opiate-substitution therapy (OST) employing oral dosing with methadone or buprenorphine. Use of these drugs, however, has been shown to be the most effective approach for dealing with opiate dependence among IDUs. Although UN agencies strongly support their use in prevention and treatment, these substitute drugs are effectively banned by Russian health and law enforcement officials, despite the fact that OST with them has been shown to reduce HIV prevalence and the risk of HIV transmission. It also has proven to reduce the numbers of IDUs, according to the World Health Organization.

Although it has been proved that appropriate psychosocial counseling is essential for a successful drug addiction treatment, Russian officials also fail to offer such counseling during and after detoxification treatment.

The close relationship between injecting drug use and HIV infection stresses the need for effective drug addiction treatment strategies. As stated by Human Rights Watch, “If Russia doesn’t take steps to address the problems of its drug dependence treatment system it runs the risk of continued and increasing spread of HIV, and even drug resistant HIV strains, due to lack of access by drug users to antiretroviral treatment and their suboptimal adherence due to poor quality drug dependence treatment programs.”

Dr. César Chelala is an international public health consultant and the author of “AIDS: A Modern Epidemic,” a publication of the Pan American Health Organization.

“I fought in the war with the Civil Defense Force. I had been a hunter and I had experience with community mobilization. I didn’t need much training to fight. I thought there was no other option but to fight.” An employee at Bo Peace and Reconciliation in Sierra Leone spoke frankly to our research group. He was a distinguished middle-aged man who spoke in an authoritative manner. He was the first ex-combatant we had knowingly encountered.

“How does your past dictate your role and aid your work at Bo Peace and Reconciliation?” I asked. He confidently explained that he has always been a mediator; leadership comes naturally to him, and his personality is what got him where he is today. This strength is what earned him a leadership position in the Civil Defense Force (CDF). He had even represented the CDF in the first peace talks in Bo.

• Image of the bush, Sierra Leone. Photograph by Meredith Benton. •

All the projects that Bo Peace and Reconciliation had worked on were remarkable, as was hearing from an ex-combatant. However, I was perplexed and angered by yet another panel of employees of a community-based organization where few female staff members presented to our research group. There were three women on the panel at Bo Peace and Reconciliation, but only one spoke minimally.

At the closing of the group interview, I approached one woman who had not been given an opportunity to speak. She was a soft-spoken, articulate woman probably in her 30’s. We only had a short time for our conversation, but the combination of my intense interest in what she had to say and her explicit desire to be heard, worked in perfect harmony.

“I am interested in women’s needs post conflict in Sierra Leone,” I asserted. Immediately she smiled and began her story, always assuring we were making eye contact. She knew her personal story would be of interest to me. Leaning in to speak to me discreetly, she disclosed, “I was abducted by the rebels and was with them for three years. I had to walk hundreds of miles. I had to wrap my feet to protect them. I had to find my own food because the rebels didn’t give us much, if anything. If we disobeyed, they would take your eye.”

She was one of many women who had been captured and forced to stay with the rebel forces while the fighters ravaged the country, destroying everything in their path, burning villages and killing those who tried to defend their communities. Sometimes they would inhabit a village while waiting for more artillery, gathering food supplies or training new, young recruits. In many cases, young women were kidnapped, made wives of the commanders, raped, and impregnated. Others were forced to cook, serve, and carry heavy supplies long, grueling distances, their lives always threatened.

She went on to explain that she had received job training through the United Nation’s Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration Program (DDR) and earned a certificate through the Institute of Commercial Management (ICM) whose headquarters are in London. The fact that she was a beneficiary of DDR surprised me considering one criticism of the program was the exclusion of women who had been forced to be with the rebels because participation required handing in a weapon. Had she not benefited from DDR, she might have been categorized as war wounded and received housing and a mere $85 in reparations, as some rape victims, war widows, war wounded and amputees had. The government is still formulating the plan for job training for women as the next step in delivering reparations, nine years after the war.

I was honored to meet someone who had the will to go on and who had found an occupation that was meaningful to her. She was living with dignity and hope even after experiencing torment and war. Women in Sierra Leone have important stories to tell and make valuable contributions to society. Women need to be heard by students, their communities, and their governments alike. In the words of a Sierra Leonean Parliamentarian, Dr. Bernadette Lahai, “Women and development are synonymous.”

Sierra Leone is the 17th country to create a Country Action Plan to implement United Nations Resolution 1325 that urges gender mainstreaming in post-conflict countries and peacebuilding initiatives. This is a promising indication of the inclusion of women in Sierra Leone’s future.

Shauna Kelly was in Sierra Leone for a two-week course led by Dr. Pushpa Iyer of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Shauna’s blog is part of a series of reflections by Dr. Iyer and her students on the challenges to building peace in this war-ravaged country. -Ed.

About the Author:
Shauna Kelly is a 2011 MPA-International Development candidate at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Shauna presented at the NGO sector of UN conferences including, the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, UN Habitat II Conference, Istanbul, Turkey, UN Conference on Teaching about the United Nations, New York, NY, leading participants through a process of envisioning a better future. She is currently an intern at the International Action Network on Small Arms in New York helping to coordinate NGO participation at the UN BMS4 and Arms Trade Treaty.

The following is an excerpt from Azam Haj Heydari's book The Price of Remaining Human.

I think however much I speak of and write about Khoemeini’s ideology, that my father and brother were so devoted to, and however much I explain how this ideology makes a human so cold-hearted and emotionless to one’s family, wife and children, I still haven’t said enough. My father never showed any emotions or kindness. He believed if you give a child a kiss, it will become impudent. I don’t remember him kissing me or my sister even once. In those days, I didn’t understand the roots of these behaviors. I didn’t understand why my father and brother not only were so wretched, ruthless and senseless to me and my sister, they treated my poor mother in the same merciless manner, a mother who endured so much hardship for them. In those days I didn’t realize that misogyny, as the heart and soul of the Middle Ages-minded mullahs, is the source of such conduct.

My mother’s quick death was the result of such misogyny and lack of emotion.

My mother was complaining about pain in her chest for a few days. Although, as we all knew well enough that there would be no doctor until her sickness became serious, neither she herself nor us even thought of taking her to a physician. Until one day when she became seriously ill and fainted in the house yard. I ran to her and tried to help her up and take her inside, yet I couldn’t because I was too small. I ran inside and told my brother that mom had fainted in the yard. He carelessly said she had probably eaten some stale food or something, nothing to worry about. My father, who always thought of “going to heaven”, was reading the Quran at the time and continued to do so not giving a damn about my mother/acting completely indifferent to my mother’s condition. When I saw they had no reaction and my mother’s life or death literally meant nothing to them, I begged my neighbor’s wife for help. With the help of my older sister and after some delay, we took my mother to a hospital near our house. She had suffered a heart attack and needed to be transferred to a special heart hospital, yet we were too poor to afford the expenses. Therefore, my mother was hospitalized in that government hospital near our house which was short in special equipment for the treatment of heart patients. This woman, who had gone through much pain in her life, suffered two more heart attacks in the next 5 days and passed away. All this took place while my brother was financially well off and could easily afford her transfer to a special hospital and save his own mother’s life.

With my mother’s death, my sister and I lost our main supporter and pressures of life started to seriously increase on us. Our only companion that partially filled the void of my mother for us was my sister Mahin who was 11 years older than me.

The events and activities of the 1979 revolution in Iran were mainly led by the youths. They were the brave and fearless who were in the frontlines in every scene and sacrificing their blood day in and day out. After the victory of the revolution, this time these dauntless patriots were killed and massacred in prisons not by the Shah, rather by Khomeini and his henchmen. Everyone remembers September 8th, 1978, known as “Bloody Friday”, where Tehran witnessed a blood bath. I remember quite well that my father and brother on that day didn’t allow us, the younger members of the family, to go and join the protests, due to the fact that Shah’s regime had announced martial law and everyone knew that day was different from anything ever seen before.

On that day, I couldn’t stand staying inside my home. I was near my doorsteps crying and begging my father and brother to allow me to go and join the people. Yet they wouldn’t allow it, saying it was too dangerous and I would get killed. In those days, although I was a 20 year-old young woman with a diploma education, I didn’t dare to leave my house and do anything without their permission, always fearing the certain consequences. However, when I heard the news about people being killed, men and defenseless women with their children in their arms, and also seeing those who participated in that demonstration, I deeply regretted it. I kept on blaming myself for not going and waiting for my father and brother’s permission.

On that day, I felt something changing inside. From the next day, I started to participate in demonstrations without my father or brother’s permission.Of course, I still did this secretly, going and coming back in a way before they returned home. Little by little, I could feel my confidence build up by participating time and time again in public protests and meeting men and women who were ready to go the limits and pay the ultimate price for freedom. Growing up as an insulted woman under cruelty, I found all my suppressed wishes coming true in the revolution and its slogans. I thought I found the “Missing Link” of my life in the revolution, and the endless ranks of the people in the protests. All this was due to the fact that not only mentally, but also physically I was always literally held captive in my own home. My world was limited from my home to the school near our neighborhood.

The only profession that my social and family status allowed me to ever even think about was teaching. Therefore being a teacher, especially in a girls’ school where I wouldn’t be in contact with unfamiliar men, was allowed in my father’s opinion. Also, the income coming from this profession was a serious help for our poor family and my father naturally couldn’t oppose. Yet I do have to say that I personally was very fond of teaching because I loved the kids and I was always looking for ways to help them, especially those of poor families.

I came to realize how such a poverty, much deeper and more excruciating than I ever faced, was destroying the lives of millions in Iran. Such poverty and deprivation that first and foremost victimizes women and girls. I have chosen to fight against the dictators ruling my country for the freedom of such deprived children, and the people of my country as a whole. My struggle will continue till the day I will be able to bring freedom to my people.

Azam grew up in the slums of south Tehran. Her father, a religious fanatic, was a supporter of hard-line mullahs opposed to her education. Supported by her mother, an educated and clairvoyant woman, she obtained her diploma. At 13, she narrowly escaped a forced marriage with a mullah. In 1978, Azam, then 20, joined the People's Mojahedin. She became actively involved and met other oppressed women who had been involved in anti-Shah demonstrations. She spent seven years in prison, eight months of it squatting, blindfolded, in a cage. Tortured physically and psychologically, Azam refused to collaborate as her interrogators demanded and chose to resist. She fled her family to fight the fundamentalist mullahs and now she is residing in Camp Ashraf in Iraq, home to 3400 members of the Iranian Resistance.

On May 23, 2010, Mordechai Vanunu, whom Amnesty International calls a “prisoner of conscience,” was again sent to prison for a new three-month sentence, accused of violating the terms of his previous release. Previously, he had been in prison for 18 years, and spent the first 11 years in solitary confinement. According to Amnesty International, the restrictions placed on him were not parole, since Vanunu had already served his full term. “They arbitrarily limit his rights to freedom of movement, expression and association and are therefore in breach of international law,” said Amnesty International.

Vanunu is a former Israeli nuclear technician who, in 1986, revealed details of Israel’s nuclear program to the British press. While working as a technician at the Negev Nuclear Research Center, he became increasingly concerned about Israel’s nuclear weapons program and possible Israeli nuclear strategies in case of war. The information he revealed was published by the Sunday Times. In it he estimated that, at the time, Israel had produced more than 100 nuclear warheads.

He was afterwards lured to Italy by a Mossad agent, where he was kidnapped by Israeli operatives. He was transported to Israel where he was tried on charges of treason and espionage, and condemned to 18 years in prison, in a trial conducted behind closed doors.

Although he was released from prison in 2004, he was subject to several restrictions on his speech and movement. He was arrested several times for violating those restrictions. According to Israeli officials, his last prison sentence is the result of his violating the conditions of his 2004 release from prison.

Acknowledgment of possession of nuclear weapons has considerable practical importance for Israel. By denying possession of such weapons, Israel avoids a US legal restriction of funding countries which have a rapid increase of weapons of mass destruction. Presently, Israel receives more than $3 billion a year in military and other aid from Washington.

Although Vanunu is widely reviled in Israel and by many Jews living overseas, he is vastly admired by peace loving people throughout the world. In 1987, he received the Right Livelihood award and in 2001 was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Tromso, in Norway. In 2005, he was awarded the Peace Prize of the Norwegian People.

Daniel Ellbersg has called him “the preeminent hero of the nuclear era.”

Despite his ordeal Vanunu remains defiant. In a poem he wrote entitled “Buried Alive,” in which he compares solitary confinement to living in a grave he wrote, “...Now iron gates, doors, grills, cement in this concrete world solidifying me. Only my mind, my spirit is free- free to remember why I am in prison but not prison for my spirit, they cannot chain my mind.”

Writing in Haaretz, Yossi Melman, its intelligence and military affairs correspondent, stated, “In a proud country that is celebrating its 60th anniversary, which purports to observe the judicial and moral norms of the enlightened world, one might have expected it to take courage and allow Mordechai Vanunu to be free, once and for all.”

Dr. César Chelala is a co-winner of an Overseas Press Club of America award for an article on human rights.

For as long as I can remember, I have been terrified of cab drivers. The thought of entrusting my life to one stranger for the duration of the itinerary, under the premise that they will receive payment upon my safe arrival, can be a bit daunting. After all, unless you engage your driver in conversation, you will know nothing about their life. The good or the bad. If you’re anything like me, you might walk away with their taxi identification number. But what if you knew that your cab driver had witnessed the death of his mother? What if you knew that he had killed hundreds of people? What if he had murdered your family? This is the situation I was faced with in Sierra Leone.

• The motorbike is a common form of transportation in today's Sierra Leone. Photograph by Meredith Benton. •

Motorbike riders are a characteristic part of the landscape in today’s Sierra Leone, particularly in Freetown. During my initial ride through the city, the first of many, my eyes bumped along the roads, following the clusters of young motorbike riders, clad in western style t-shirts and jeans, who were engaging in conversation, usually with each other, or watching for their next client. A scene that began as a seemingly background aspect of my stay soon turned into one of the most threatening images of my trip. Whenever we mentioned the motorbike riders during interviews and conversations, the response was almost always the same, “the motorbike riders are the ex-combatants.” This statement would be accompanied by an even more telling furrowed brow, a firming of the lips, or wholly disapproving eyes. Current local opinions of motorbike riders in Sierra Leone describe them as “dirty,” “violent,” and “a public threat.” We soon learned that when Sierra Leone’s brutal eleven year war ended in 2002, a group known as the Bike Rider’s Association (BRA) was created to help transition ex-combatants into the workforce as motorbike riders. These ex-combatants, many of whom had been child soldiers, had been drugged and forced to amputate the limbs of innocent civilians and murder indiscriminately. As we were able to confirm with national organizations such as Student Partnership Worldwide, few ex-combatants received any type of psycho-social counseling services after the war, and these organizations are not equipped to provide such services and as a consequence, are not interested in prioritizing the issue. Ex-combatants therefore not only entered the workforce, but rejoined society after years of unaddressed experiences of trauma and violence.

Those who were not alive or present for the war or its immediate effects, such as myself, might find it easier to identify an ex-combatant as both perpetrator and victim. However, in a place where the complexity of the war issues has made justice difficult to render and where few have faced the law for their war crimes, a persistent sense of unrest and a lack of closure finds people fraught with unplaced blame. As a result, ex-combatants are marginalized, even by the police. According to Defense for Children International (DCI), an unsurprising “70% of ex-combatants don’t want to be identified.” Another local organization, Help A Needy Child, has started a countrywide program that is working to create activities to help them explore their past. Still, the focus in both civil society and the government appears to be on keeping the ex-combatants occupied and introducing conflict resolution skills to address immediate issues, such as police and motorbike rider confrontations.

What role could untreated yet identifiable issues of trauma be playing in conflict in Sierra Leone today? According to the website of a popular Sierra Leone newspaper, www.awoko.org, as recently as 2009, the Sierra Leone police enforced a by-law banning motorbike riders from plying what they call the Central Business District (CBD) of Freetown. One of the strategies used to enforce this law involved the placement of nails on boards and throwing these under the tires of bike riders who break the rule. One critique of this approach was that it proves the motorbike rider issue has escalated to an unmanageable level if this has emerged as the best solution to the problem. Sierra Leone is not at war, but if my experience has affirmed anything, it is that the absence of war is not peace. One villager remarked, “Victims suffering. Is that peace?” The more time we spent talking to communities and trying to identify the challenges to peacebuliding that have emerged since the war, the more I realized that many of the factors that helped trigger the rebel war in Sierra Leone are still present. According to the Center for Accountability and Rule in Sierra Leone, the country is “close to the problem situation that led to the war” and COME Sierra Leone says, “the possibility of the recurrence of violent conflict is great.” Issues of poverty, corruption, and organization persist. These factors, coupled with the weighing tension among the people of Sierra Leone as a result of fragile overlaps of perpetrator and victim categories, create an environment not unlike that which existed at the onset of the war. There is a great need for psycho-social services in Sierra Leone. The experience of war is recent and the memory of the people is enhanced with every charged encounter and unaddressed emotion. Peace and reconciliation will be irreconcilable until the people of Sierra Leone are provided with tools with which to confront the clinging shadows of their past along with the challenges of their present.

Sughey A. Ramírez was in Sierra Leone for a two-week course led by Dr. Pushpa Iyer of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Sughey’s blog is part of a series of reflections by Dr. Iyer and her students on the challenges to building peace in this war-ravaged country. -Ed.

About the Author:
Sughey A. Ramírez was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. As the daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants, her Latino heritage has greatly influenced all aspects of her life, including her academic career. In May 2010, she completed her B.A. in International Studies-Sociology/Anthropology with a regional focus on Latin America at Middlebury College in Vermont. She is interested in pursuing a career in the areas of Public Health, Human Rights and Development. Previously, she worked with the UNICEF funded local NGO El Abrojo in Montevideo, Uruguay and hopes to expand her experience to other Latin American and African countries.

Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen (Heads Together Small Producers of Haiti) is one of Haiti’s two national peasant farmer movements. The oldest peasant group in Haiti, it was born in 1970 under the Duvalier dictatorship.

Annesy Vixama, former member of the national Coordinating Committee of Tèt Kole:

• Caption: Small farmers want both to feed their families and feed the nation.  Photo: Salena Tramel, Grassroots International. •

For a better life for the peasant agricultural sector, we need many things. One thing that’s important in this country is integrated agrarian reform. Most of the land is in the hands of large landowners, the church, the state. Many, many peasants have no land to work, even though land is the base of their lives.

The Haitian state needs to take its responsibility and launch an integrated agrarian reform. That means not just giving peasants a little plot of land, but accompanying it with credit, fertilizer, and transformation of their products, where people can transform their goods from cocoa to chocolate, from corn to cornmeal, from fruit to jam, from manioc to cassava, et cetera. [Among small farmers’ challenges is lack of roads and transportation to get their produce to market, and warehouses to store their goods until they can be sold, all resulting in the spoilage of much of their harvest. Transformation offers preservation of the food as well as diversification of products to sell.] This would give peasants possibilities.

It’s not just that. What chance do peasants have to pay for school for their children? Schools aren’t available for them. They cost a lot and they’re far away from the homes. This causes such problems for small producers, and sometimes they even have to sell land to pay tuition. Sometimes they have to sell land to take care of other obligations like a marriage or a funeral, too.

If peasants weren’t abandoned, if the state assumed its responsibility, all this wouldn’t be happening. An integrated land reform would help get the harvest to market and with what they sell they could take care of their families. We need agrarian reform to guarantee health, education, food, security of their land.

A second question is reforestation. The environment is disappearing. Peasants have to cut trees to live. I’ve passed by the homes of very motivated peasants, but they’re so hungry they have to cut branches off their trees to make wood charcoal. They know it’s not right, but they don’t have any other resource. You go by another day, they’ve cut another branch. You pass by again, the whole tree is gone. They cut it just so they can eat.

I know peasant groups who are planting some trees around them, who are doing soil recovery, but these are little activities, they’re not a national project. It’s not sufficient. If they don’t do reforestation… I don’t know. We’ll perish.

Food sovereignty is very important, too. We’re in big danger today. For a country to remain sovereign, it has to be able to feed itself. Today in Haiti with the neoliberal policies, with the opening of free trade barriers to foreign markets and the invasion of our markets by foreign products, peasant agriculture has declined. This has had big consequences on the peasant sector and our whole country. It’s meant that a lot of peasants have had to abandon agriculture to go to the city or to other countries.

Peasants are struggling a lot for sovereignty, in food and in politics. Food sovereignty would guarantee that the country could feed itself each day.

The project of Monsanto, for example [which has just donated 475 tons of seed to Haiti]… Monsanto invades countries with GMO and hybrid products, and those countries lose their right to conserve their own seeds. They become dependent on these international entities. It’s an act of assassination.

The traditional products of peasants, like corn and peas, have been in development here for more than 200 years. When a company decides on its own, or in complicity with a few politicians, to come in to profit off of peasants, it’s a crime. It’s a crime against food sovereignty, against the peasants’ rights. It’s a crime against humanity.

The state has to change from attending to international businesses that are acting against the majority of the people and start attending to the peasants.

Rosnel Jean-Baptiste, national coordinating committee of Tèt Kole:

Since Tèt Kole’s founding, land reform has always been at our heart. Land reform would let people have land to work and to live on. This is especially true since the drama of the earthquake, that more than anything else in our history has put tears in our eyes. It’s caused hunger and poverty to grow, too.

Right now the rural population can’t survive. People can’t grow as they should because they don’t have any support. Re-envisioning Haiti means investing in the agricultural sector. That’s the only way that farmers can survive and that we don’t have to depend on others. That means land reform, decentralizing the capital, bringing services into the countryside, and supporting agriculture.

The population has no access to social services. If you want education you have to go to Port-au-Prince. If you want health care, or a job, you have to go to Port-au-Prince. That’s why in the neoliberal plank, with the growth of the assembly industry, the whole population has headed to Port-au-Prince.

Decentralizing the country away from the capital isn’t just sending a state representative into each rural section like they do now, but bringing services into the countryside and helping people find jobs there. It means doing agrarian reform so people can live there.

If the government hasn’t been able to do anything after [the earthquake of] January 12 to resolve the problems, I don’t think they’ll do it for us now. It’s up to us to us, social movements, to put our heads together to change the situation of the country.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

In recent times, China has greatly improved the health status of the majority of its population — while also maintaining a sustained economic expansion. Some of these achievements have been a model for developing countries worldwide. Gains in the health sector, however, are being curtailed by the environmental consequences of the rapid economic expansion of the country. To continue the country’s economic growth — while at the same time protecting people’s health — is one of the main challenges facing Chinese authorities today.

In the last two decades, China has had average economic growth of 9.4%. For the last 50 years, it has also made impressive advances in public health by improving access to health care and tackling infectious diseases with remarkably good results.

The average life expectancy is now 71.8 years, up from 35 in 1949. Immunization coverage is over 95% for those under age one.

From 1960 to 2003, China’s infant mortality rate fell from 150 to 30 per 1,000 live births, and the under-five mortality rate dropped from 225 to 37 per 1,000 live births. Both rates are used as indicators of access to basic health services. At the same time, there has been a sustained increase in the number of community service networks, which provide basic health services to the population.

UNICEF has found that since 1978, the number of health facilities in China has increased by 82% and the number of health staff by 88%. In spite of these improvements, significant challenges for maternal and child health care remain. For example, emergency obstetric and newborn care is deficient, particularly for people living in remote areas. Child mortality rates in remote areas are several times higher than those in urban areas. Also, many poor rural families and migrants in China’s urban areas simply cannot afford health services.

Gains in the health sector are being curtailed by the environmental consequences of the rapid economic expansion of the country. Progress on environmental issues has not been as sustained, particularly the effect of environmental pollution on children. Children's vulnerability to pollution stems from differences in their physiology, growth characteristics and diet.

Vulnerability to environmental hazards is also related to their developmental stage. Children differ from adults in their degree of exposure to those environmental hazards, on how contaminants are absorbed and distributed in the body, and in their capacity to transform and eliminate different chemicals.

Water pollution is a serious environmental concern. Sewage and agricultural wastes contaminate water supplies and provoke a host of waterborne illnesses. In addition, rivers that are used as a source of drinking water are contaminated with heavy metals such as lead, cadmium and arsenic from industrial discharges.

UNICEF reports that China is one of the countries in the world most seriously affected by arsenic contamination. Several studies carried out on the effects of drinking arsenic-contaminated water show serious effects on children’s intelligence and intellectual development.

Toxic compounds in air and water affect the health of children and adults alike. However, because children are still growing and their immune system and detoxification mechanisms are not fully developed, toxic agents have a more serious impact on them than in adults.

Exposure to high levels of lead at an early age, for example, is responsible for children’s low intellectual development. Lead poisoning is probably the most serious chronic environmental illness now affecting children.

Chinese authorities have been trying to limit the damage caused by environmental pollution and have set guidelines in a document entitled "Priority Activities for Sustainable Development." However, despite new policies and regulations, compliance remains low.

It is estimated that 40% of Chinese cities suffer from medium to high levels of air pollution. According to a World Bank assessment, projected health effects of air pollution in urban China by 2020 will include: 600,000 premature deaths in urban areas, 20 million cases of respiratory illness per year, 5.5 million cases of chronic bronchitis and health damages valued at 13% of Chinese GDP.

To overcome the effects of pollution and a contaminated environment, China needs to continue developing energy-efficient technologies and implementing cheap and environmentally responsible transportation systems.

Even more critically, China needs to enforce its own environmental regulations. Its future generations — and future prosperity — are at stake.

Dr. César Chelala, MD, PhD, is an international public health consultant.

I decided to go on a field trip to the West African state of Sierra Leone in January 2010 because studying societies in conflict -- Africa’s in particular -- has been one of my interests. However, it was not an easy undertaking for various reasons. I was aware it would be both emotionally heart-wrenching and physically taxing, especially if we were to see many war affected areas and war victims.

But the whole trip was worth it in a lot of ways. The best parallel I can give here is my personal experience of misrepresentation of the conflict in my country, Sudan. Often, it is presented in mere black and white, even sometimes in academia. This is what has made me aware not to be under the illusion that I am well informed about any conflict just from studying secondary sources -- a fact my graduate studies also emphasized. That is why I constantly remind myself to be cautious with my opinions about any conflict I have studied through sources other than first hand experience.

• The Tongo Diamond Mines – the birth place of war in Sierra Leone. Photo taken by the author.•

Indeed, prior to the trip I had read quite a bit about the civil war in Sierra Leone. But a trip to go and witness first- hand testimonies from war survivors could not be substituted with anything else. Also, the conflict in Sierra Leone has been one of my interests mainly because it happened concurrently with the Sudanese civil war. I remember the time when one of my commanding officers in Sudan spoke of wars being fought by young boys like us. Sierra Leone was one of the civil wars mentioned. And so, in retrospect, I remember I was then an upbeat supporter of the Revolutionary United Front because they were rebels against the government just like the Sudan People’s Liberation Army of which I was a participant. Little did I know then about the mission, ideology and the purpose of the war the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) was fighting.

Meant to prepare us for what we should expect, the video documentaries we watched prior to our departure signaled the harsh reality of the past. They were also meant to foreshadow the current state of Sierra Leoneans awaiting us. Precisely, if one were to anticipate what to expect to see in people’s faces, it would be gloom or deep sadness. As we arrived, this was the case in some situations. The effects of the war were visible everywhere in many forms, despite 11 years of calm following the signing of a peace agreement between the RUF and the Sierra Leonean government that ended the war. The burden of the past is being carried around every day on the streets of every town in Sierra Leone by the fingerless and half armed: the war amputees are the living testimonies. Moreover, one doesn’t have to be on a mission to study post-conflict Sierra Leone in order to learn about what the war left behind. The desolated structures brought to ashes during the war are ever-present evidence.

However, despite visible struggles on the streets, the day-to-day struggle to meet even the basic needs, I saw a special trait of human resiliency, typical of a people who have just emerged from a bad experience. This seems to be a pattern, but one that is not always understandable to those outside the horrific experience. The people of Sierra Leone seem to enjoy life and are as happy if not happier than anyone from the rich countries.

As I remember, any fatigue I had in the evenings after returning from the day was more so a physical exhaustion than bad feelings from stories of the day. Not that I didn’t hear horrific war stories on a typical day -- instead the whole day was indeed made easy as the result of being cheered up. In other words, the good feelings I had were a reflection from the people, especially the cheerful and ever welcoming kids we encountered at every place we visited. Consequently and over time, our expectations of sadness, bitterness and gloom in Sierra Leone diminished as the days continued on. We came to expect that we would be always welcomed with smiles and cheers.

A visit to a diamond mine in Tonga was a turning point in our experience. We arrived under a searing sun, accompanied by a number of authorities, police detectives and journalists. People instantly reacted with anger, waving and shouting that we should not go anywhere near the piled up sands that were everywhere like a sand dune one would see in a desert. We were speechless.

No wonder the reaction of the miners on our visit to the diamond mine turned out to be less welcoming. The crux of the Sierra Leone Conflict was to control natural resources - the diamond mines. We shouldn’t have expected anything less than the harsh reception. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to me when the harsh reaction to our visit and the obvious suspicion was coupled with a guy who wants to persuade me to become his partner, seemingly trusting that I would be making a better deal with him.

Mawuor Dior was in Sierra Leone for a two-week course led by Dr. Pushpa Iyer of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Mawuor’s blog is part of a series of reflections by Dr. Iyer and her students on the challenges to building peace in this war-ravaged country. -Ed.

About the Author:
Mawuor Dior was born in Southern Sudan. He was separated from his family as the result of the civil war in 1990. He fled to Ethiopia were he briefly stayed, but soon was forced back to Sudan when Ethiopia and Eritrea went to war in 1991. He then spent four years internally displaced at Sudan-Uganda border, and eventually made it to a refugee camp in Kenya 1995. He lived in a refugee camp called Kakuma, Kenya, for six years prior to his resettlement into the United States in September 2001.

Mr. Dior attended Colorado Christian University, Colorado, where he graduated in 2007 with a degree in social sciences with emphasizes in global studies and history. In May of 2010, he graduated from the Monterey Institute of International Studies, with a degree in International Policy Studies and specializing in Conflict Resolution.

Folk tales, Greek tragedies, age-old epics, and fables: stories are human currency, traded between people to forge friendships and alliances, to preserve cultures and warn against the pernicious cycle of history. Stories pop up like weeds; they persist, they survive.

But what about the stories that come to us not through words woven together by mothers and fathers at bedtime, or images projected as quick flashes of color on a movie screen? What about the stories we can actually hold in our hands? These, though sometimes vulnerable to physical wear and tear, can be just as long lasting and often affect us with the dual power of material and emotional weight.

A candle can be just this sort of story made manifest when one traces the candle back—from wick to wax to mold—to the one who created it. “In each of the candles that I make,” says Wafa, “a part of my story goes there.” Wafa, an Iraqi widow supporting four children, is one of forty-four women entrepreneurs in Baghdad working with Prosperity Candle, a new social enterprise that invests in women living in distressed areas of the world who are enthusiastic to start their own businesses producing distinctive candles for local and international markets. When you buy a Prosperity Candle, the sturdy pillar does more than burn bright: it comes with the name of the woman who made it, so that each woman may have the chance to tell her story.

In partnership with non-profit organization Women for Women International, Prosperity Candle has now successfully completed a year-long pilot program in Baghdad, Iraq. The forty-four participating women entrepreneurs were equipped with candle-making kits and trained by the Prosperity Candle team in the basic process of creating candles in the safety of their own homes. The women have responded enthusiastically to a business opportunity that is simple to learn, requires incremental investments in low-cost equipment, and can be easily expanded to employ dozens of people in their communities.

During the pilot project, Nazahat, one of the Iraqi entrepreneurs, exceeded all expectations by creating 226 candles in about two weeks, earning the equivalent of twice the average wage in Iraq. “I want the entire world to know what an Iraqi woman can do,” she reflects. “I trust that I will change my life to be better than before.”

We all want to tell our stories. Wafa and Nazahat, along with forty-two others in Baghdad, have the unique opportunity to transport their respective tales out of Iraqi war zones and into our homes, where they burn on through the night. Through Prosperity Candle, sisters, mothers, widows, and wives are given the means to unite and ward off the darkness with a million points of light—each a symbol of hope, transformation and empowerment through enterprise; each a story to be held in our hands, to be felt and passed on as we share the light.

On April 9, 1948, 120 fighters from the Irgun and Lehi Zionist paramilitary groups attacked Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem, a Palestinian-Arab village of approximately 600 people. During the assault, around 107 villagers were killed, including women and children. In addition, several villagers were taken prisoner, and were later jeered, spat at, and stoned.

According to most accounts, those villagers lived in peace with their Jewish neighbors from nearby villages. Some of them, from the Givat Shaul Orthodox community just across the valley, tried to help the Deir Yassin villagers during the Irgun-Lehi combined attack. After the attack, the Irgun and Lehi troops began pillaging the houses and corpses, stealing money and jewelery from the survivors, reported the Israeli historian Benny Morris.

“I saw the horrors that the fighters had created. I saw bodies of women and children, who were murdered in their houses in cold blood by gunfire, with no signs of battle and not as the result of blowing up the houses…I have seen a great deal of war, but I never saw a sight like Deir, Yassin,” declared Eliahu Arbel, Operations Officer B of the Haganah’s Etzione Brigade, who arrived at the scene on April 10.

The news of the massacre sparked terror among the Palestinian-Arabs and were an important factor in encouraging them to flee from their towns and villages afraid of the Jewish troop advances. “They ended up expelling people from all of Palestine on the rumor of Deir Yassin,” declared later Mohammad Radwan, a survivor of the massacre.

Haganah and the area two chief rabbis condemned the killings and the Jewish Agency for Israel sent Jordan’s King Abdulla a letter of apology, which the King rebuffed. At the time of the attack Menachem Begin was a leader of the Irgun, although he wasn’t personally involved in it.

On December 4, 1948, Albert Einstein was the most prominent signatory of a letter to the New York Times by a group of Jewish intellectuals on the occasion of Begin’s visit to the United States. Part of the letter reads as follows “…It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin’s political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents.”

“…The public avowals of Begin’s party [The Freedom Party] are no guide whatever to its actual character. Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.”

“A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin…Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin. The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party.”

In the Deir Yassin massacre 107 Palestinian-Arabs villagers, including women and children, were killed. Four of the attackers died during the attack. During Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, that took place during the winter of 2008-2009, 1385 Palestinians were killed, among them 762 non-combatants, 107 women and 318 children. 13 Israeli were killed, 10 combatants and 3 Israeli non-combatants, according to B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization.

In September 2009, a UN mission headed by Justice Richard Goldstone conducted an investigation of the Israeli offensive and its consequences. The Israeli Government denied him any collaboration to carry out its task, as I heard him personally state this in New York. In his report, Judge Goldstone accused both Palestinian militants and Israeli Defense Forces of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.

Given that the Israeli forces conducted the Cast Lead Operation attack in clear disproportion of forces and against unarmed civilians, what would Albert Einstein have said about it?

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

Our bus cruised down the bumpy dirt road and I stared out the window admiring the landscape. The cool ocean breeze blew through my hair and in these moments I was left alone with my thoughts. Sierra Leone is blessed with dazzling beaches, rolling hills, and a lush green landscape. It has also been cursed with war, brutality, and greed. A constant haze hangs over the country, like a remnant of the sins the land and her people have witnessed.

In 1991 there were many reasons to go to war. A corrupt government had left the people poor and illiterate. There was an overwhelming sense of frustration and anger over the situation in the country. Many wanted change. In Liberia, Charles Taylor had begun his revolution and the violent forces spilled west into Sierra Leone. They took advantage of the desire for change and followed their own desire for wealth to the diamond mines. In our meetings, we heard many legitimate reasons for wanting change, but the violence that ensued from this desire for change was unexpected and vicious.

• School girls walking home in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Photo taken by the author.•

At war’s end, change had not come to the country. Sierra Leone had regressed. Along with poverty, illiteracy, and lack of development, Sierra Leone was now in shambles. The rebels had burned whatever they touched. Vast amounts of the population had been displaced. Many had been directly affected by the war. The people we met with were much in agreement; the war had left the country worse off. As we drove around the cities, signs of the war were everywhere. But out on this country road lining the ocean, the burnt out and destroyed buildings were absent. Away from the towns, it felt almost as if the war had not occurred. It looked as if these trees and mountains had not witnessed war, like blood was not spilt on this land. But would this place know war again?

I had been troubled by this question when we met with students at Fourah Bay College days earlier. As we listened to them tell us all the causes of the war, I just kept thinking, all of these factors still exist in Sierra Leone today. Poverty affects an overwhelming majority of the people; illiteracy rates are extremely high; the government is plagued by corruption and an inability to instill change; and the region is highly unstable. It is a convergence of factors that creates a situation where war is not just possible, but highly likely.

There is one subtle difference between the Sierra Leone of today and that of 1991. The country has experienced war. The people have seen the repercussions of war. Even though nine years have passed since the final peace agreement was signed, remnants of the war remain. Signs of the war’s destruction are everywhere, standing like monuments and warnings for future generations. Those who lived through the war say that all Sierra Leone wants is peace. Even though the problems the country faces seem insurmountable, the people do not want any more violent conflict.

Even though we heard so many voices say that conflict will never again touch Sierra Leone, a fear grew in me. These adults who reassured us are not the future of Sierra Leone. The future of Sierra Leone is the children who are growing up in an environment where access to food and water is limited. My fear grew more persistent when we asked adults if they speak with their children about the war. They gave us a lackluster response. Several times, the answer was that if the child asks they would tell them. Otherwise they would learn about it in school.

I was hopeful when we spoke with university students who expressed faith in reforming the current system through nonviolent action. They reiterated the importance of good governance, and in those moments I had hope. They spoke of the dangers of corruption and of the needs for opportunities for employment; for government responsibility; and for free and fair elections. I had hope that these students will be the future leaders of Sierra Leone, and they will be the change that the country so desperately wanted and needed.

As our bus raced down those dirt roads, I reflected on all that we saw and heard during our meetings in Freetown. On the dirt paths out in the provinces the country seemed at peace, and in the stillness I could almost picture a way forward for Sierra Leone.

Veronica Beebe was in Sierra Leone for a two-week course led by Dr. Pushpa Iyer of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Veronica’s blog is part of a series of reflections by Dr. Iyer and her students on the challenges to building peace in this war-ravaged country. -Ed.

About the Author:
Veronica Beebe was born and raised in Fresno, CA. She graduated from the University of California Santa Barbara with a degree in Political Science and Religious Studies. After finishing a year at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, she will be starting this fall at American University pursing a Master's degree in U.S. Foreign Policy. Currently, she is an intern at the U.S. House of Representatives.

Haiti during the World Cup is much like my hometown of New Orleans was during the Superbowl. Don’t try to make plans with anyone to do anything during a game. (In the more cash-rich New Orleans, the ban on non-game-related activity stretched back a day or two before a game, because there was food and alcohol to be purchased and a feast to be cooked.) I make the mistake of trying to go to a cell phone office during that time; employees sit hypnotized in front of the big-screen TV, unwilling to be distracted by clients.

When Argentina, a favorite in Haiti, loses the soccer match, I can finally conduct my business and leave the store. People are pouring out from their tents and houses with a thing or two to express about Argentina’s loss. A group of skinny men parades in bikinis and wigs. Noontime drunks shout nonsense at each other. Throngs of mourners dance through the streets of Port-au-Prince, waving Argentine flags and palm fronds. Among them, loyalists still smarting from Brazil’s loss wrap cloths with that country’s flag around their heads.

• An image from lost days in Haiti. What was left of this house, which bore the sign "bienvenue" or "welcome" over its front door, collapsed shortly after the photo was taken.  Photo: Tory Field.•

“Thank God it’s almost over,” my friend Maryse, director of a special education school, said this morning. “Argentina’s the last team in the competition that anyone here really cares about, so all this madness will have to stop.” Four Haitians died in arguments after the loss of the Brazilian team some days prior.

“Soon,” a young construction worker on break from hammering outside my window said, “the [political] demonstrations can resume.” They stopped at the start of the World Cup; people suddenly had more important things to do. Once the World Cup is over, too, the popular educator Ricardo assured me, the electricity that has been guaranteed during the past month will go back to its standard state of irregularity. It’s the same every four years, he said. “We’ll be back in a blakawout, black-out.”

From the cell phone store I catch a taxi to a women’s meeting. Collective taxicabs are identified in two ways: the red ribbon hanging from the rearview mirror, and the decrepit state of the vehicle. They are usually the oldest and most beat-up cars on the road, and it’s not uncommon that a key part gives out or a many-times-repatched tire blows definitively while en route. When that happens, the customers simply patiently climb out and pay the driver, then catch another cab.

I establish up front that I’m not going to be ripped off. “Listen, I know it’s one zone. I’m just paying a fare for one zone.”

“It’s two zones,” the taxi driver replies.

“No, cheri. To Avenue Lamartinière it’s one zone, 25 gourdes. Don’t give me the price you make up for blan, foreigners.

He gives me a circumspect look. “But aren’t you a blan?

As usual, everyone in the cab is sharing stories about evenman la, the event. You hear the word all day long. (In New Orleans, four and half years later, the same is true of ‘Katrina.’ My friend Grant, a writer, said that his dream is to go just one day without hearing the word.) Six months later, with a little distance and a lot of moxie, many of the stories of misery have evolved into dramatic tales, complete with humor. The driver and the four other passengers wedged into the little Nissan are laughing loudly at one such account.

I tell them I am amazed that they can laugh. The man against whom my thigh is jammed says, “If you stay traumatized all the time, it’s not good for you. You have to find joy to diminish it.”

In some ways, everything has changed since the earthquake. Almost one in seven are living in streets or camps in wretched conditions. No comprehensive, or even piecemeal, plan for addressing homelessness has been revealed by anyone in power, except to move them from one tent city to another. Hurricane season is underway, but no preparations have been made to protect those living under bed sheets or pieces of nylon.

Food aid has been suspended except as “food for work.” Water aid is soon to be suspended, too, since Haitian businessmen have complained that it is undermining their profits. Many of the free clinics that were created in the humanitarian outpouring after the disaster have closed up shop.

Imagine that six months after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleanians were still trapped in the Superdome and the Arena. Imagine that they were not given food or even, usually, drinking water. That they shared filthy port-o-potties with thousands and that they had to stand in long lines in the hot sun to get buckets of water for bathing. That they had no electricity or lighting to speak of, not even flash lights. That the government had never announced a plan to get them out of there and back into homes, or even checked to see how they were doing.

Normal conversations are markedly different after the earthquake, so many of them reflecting the loss of hundreds of thousands of friends and family members, and of an even higher number of homes. For example, in a clinic, a little girl I’d never seen before approached me and said, a propos of nothing, “My mother died. My little sister’s name is Timarie. Did your house get crushed?” No. “My house got crushed.”

And this: I was sitting in on a meeting in a refugee camp - the only blan present - when an elderly woman planted herself in front of me. In a flat voice resounding with loss, she said, “I have one son, a strong young man of ten. He lost his foot in the earthquake. What are he and I supposed to do? A ten-year-old with a stump.” Before I could compose myself enough to respond, she turned and walked away.

A commission, half-composed of foreigners, today has formal oversight over Haiti and its reconstruction. (See “Foreign-Led Commission Now Governs Haiti.") It was elected by no one and accountable to no one. It issues no reports, gives no State of the Union address. There is no number to call to learn its position on a given topic or to register one’s opposition. I’ve heard numerous people here bitterly refer to U.N. Special Envoy Bill Clinton, co-director of this Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti, as ‘president of Haiti.’

But in many ways, Haiti is the same as it ever was. The elected government and its associates – what is sometimes referred to here as the political class – are, as always, apathetic in the face of desperate citizens’ needs. One young woman said to me “the Haitian government is deaf, dumb, and mute.” Ricardo commented, “From the first second after the earthquake, the government fled. Not the first minute, the first second.”

As they’ve been for many decades, demonstrations are (excepting, as mentioned, during the World Cup) one outlet for the anger of marginalized Haitian citizens, who have no other advocacy options within the formal system. Citizens regularly take to the streets to demand housing for the displaced, good education, and support of national agricultural production. They have recently protested violence by the U.N. security mission, non-payment of wages to state workers and teachers, and the introduction of toxic Monsanto seeds, among other complaints.

Grassroots organizations still meet regularly to develop their strategies for political change, as they have throughout history. Across the country on any given day, small groups perch on broken chairs under tarps in refugee camps, huddle amidst rubble in the courtyards of earthquake-destroyed schools, or sweat under thatched-roof gazebos. Despite all, they remain convinced that, as the slogan adapted from the World Social Forum says, another Haiti is possible – or at least that they can win more justice than they currently have. They are developing pressure points for housing rights and protection against rape for those in camps. Some plan information campaigns aimed at sweatshop workers, others programs to politicize youth. The agendas are seemingly endless.

Haiti is the same in much more plebeian ways, too. No one on the block where I’m staying can breathe for two days because of the thick and putrid smoke from wood charcoal being made up the ravine. Flies and the mosquitoes change shifts at sunset and sunrise, while sweat pulls 24-hour shifts. Pigs forage in garbage piles downtown. For a few cents, people purchase from street vendors meals of sugar cane, or fried bananas, or cassava bread and peanut butter with cayenne. They wear shoes cracked down the middle of the sole that, most anywhere else, would have been thrown away long ago.

Boys fly homemade kites and girls carry water. Motorcycles zip by with as many as five people on them. Salesmen stand at the front of buses and display jars of dark liquid which they tell their audience will cure fibroids, high blood pressure, and eczema. Little boys stand facing out from the walls to urinate, men stand facing towards the walls to urinate. Women pull thin flowered handkerchiefs from their bras and slowly unwrap them to produce crumpled gourd notes.

People insist on giving you a cup of coffee as though they had nothing else to do in the world. Women walk through the streets with baskets on their head, chanting in loud voices, “I got peas, I got carrots, I got cabbage.” Pedestrians pause on the sidewalk to wipe the thick dust off their shoes with a little scrap of toilet paper, though the shoes will become filthy again momentarily. Men sit on chairs in sidewalk barber shops, getting shaves. Girls flap down the streets in backless sandals, swinging their behinds. Neighbors break up coupling cats, because who needs more kittens?

As always, to disarm hostile situations, many make their voices supplicatory and call each other cheri. In crowded streets, people anger easily and laugh easily. They engage in gestures of great tenderness and harsh meanness. They show impressive generosity and rip off the most vulnerable.

Now it’s Saturday night, and neighbors do what they do everywhere that is big on community and short on funds: gather on stoops and curbs to talk. Mirlene, who used to cook for a friend of mine, walks up the street to meet me. We haven’t seen each other since the earthquake, so we arrange ourselves on a curb, tuck the excess cloth of our skirts under our knees, and begin with the only possible topic: the event.

While we’re talking, a couple of men come join us. I offer them my condolences for the loss of Argentina. One lifts his hands heavenward and says, “We’re resigned.” Then: “We’ve lost the battle, but we haven’t lost the war.”

“Spoken like a true Haitian,” I tell him.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

In mid May, a group of women, living in New York and Boston, who have been writing together for the past eight years, chose to sit together and write their responses to the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. They found that their passions coalesced around the subject in surprising ways.

LIZ GOREN

Can you believe it, combing birds? Getting the slick off a stupid bird! People are something. Heck, what’d they do after Katrina for us - shove us into the stadium, no water, nothin’, leaving us to fend for ourselves. And now they got us combing oil off bird feathers.

Prisoner 2876 has a real name but going by his number is just fine with him in this place. Keep your head low, sign up for things like this. Anyway, this might just be the way to get the hell out of here.

It’s his turn to try to hold the pelican. He watches the guard watching him. He’s never held a bird before. Weird, man. Feeling the neck, so thin, right in his hand.

Suddenly 2876 starts seeing things again. Abandoned houses everywhere. The water rising, him sitting on the roof top. His aunt. Just lying there. People running. Cops chasing them. Sticks, shouting.

‘Looting’ is what they called it. ‘Surviving’ is what he calls it.

Holding this damn bird in his hand. Watching the guard out of the corner of his eye watching him. Then suddenly another “flashback” – that’s what the counselor called it - the sound first, then seeing the whole storefront glass shatter. Heck, he was just going to try and sell that TV for food. All that stuff would’ve gotten ruined anyway. Somebody else would’ve got it if he didn’t. Holding that TV, not much bigger than this here bird.

He pushes it out of his mind. Tries to maneuver this thing. Hey, whatever it takes, that’s what Prisoner 2876 will do, to get the hell out of here. For August Lefevre, of Ward 9 City of New Orleans, to finally make it back to the bayou where he belongs.

Liz Goren is a practicing psychotherapist teaching at NYU whose work is dedicated to bringing a psychoanalytic perspective to the major cultural issues of our time. Her book Beyond the Reach of Ladders, coming out for the anniversary of 9/11, is the story of her experience as a therapist with firefighters who survived the World Trade Center. She lives and writes in New York City and Vermont.
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LINDA LUZ ALTERMAN

The first thing we did when we arrived was to go on the “Katrina Tour”. This was a sobering bus trip through the city with a local guide, a black man named Jake, born and raised in New Orleans, who had lived through the horror of Katrina. He told us the story – his story and the city’s story.

The tour started in the heart of the city right down by the river. As we drove through the town he showed us the water line, a dark gray band that told how the water rose further and further up the buildings; how long the water had stayed high. Where the watermark rose higher, the neighborhoods became more and more run-down. In some places, the line reached 15 feet. For three hours we drove around the neighborhoods of the city, past the broken levees, out to the Lake Pontchartrain, through wealthy neighborhoods and poor, past dead malls, dead apartment buildings, hospitals that lay abandoned. We saw homes with holes punched out of the roofs where people had escaped their attics. We saw a roof with a picnic table, a bike, branches and other debris still sitting exactly where the water had left them.

Jake pointed out the “tattoos” on the doors – big fluorescent orange X’s painted by the National Guard soldiers who had checked every house and marked the date and time, the number of people found alive in the home, the number of people found dead, and whether or not there were any pets. Everywhere we went, we saw FEMA trailers filled with many generations living cramped together.

I think back to my brief time in New Orleans now as I hear about the latest devastation to befall the area. The city and its people are just beginning to turn around, just beginning to get on their feet again. Last week, I heard Brian Williams interview three brothers, born and raised in New Orleans; they make their living from fishing. The youngest brother had just bought his first boat and was about to start his own business. He told Brian, “We didn’t grow up wanting to be police officers or lawyers. Our daddy was a fisherman and our granddaddy, too - that’s what we always knew we were going to be - we were going to be fishermen.”

Linda Luz-Alterman is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Cambridge, Mass. She is an Instructor in Psychology in the Dept. of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis; she teaches and writes on unconscious communication and the therapeutic relationship.
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ANNABELLA BUSHRA

Annika’s new kitchen counter
swirls of sand and pink and stone
smooth and oily, oozing and glistening
shapes shifting
a fin becomes a sail and then the spine of a dune

Today I heard there is a ten mile long plume
deep, deep under the waters of the Gulf of Mexico
It must be traveling and swelling
where is it going?
Does it swell like those long balloons as they are blown up?
Unconstrained by a membrane, it might actually be morphing
in three dimensions, from a manatee to a camel,
amoebic pseudopods pinching off as giant globules of oil
to end up on a Molokai beach as a tide of tar edged with lacy chartreuse algae
on the feet of children to be scraped off by patient parents,
followed by a scrubbing with benzene-soaked rags
the children all the while mesmerized by the crust
of sand on the shiny tar, the yellowish brown stain
on the scraped heel, and the magic of erasing
it all with a pungent solvent made of oil.

Where does it come from they ask
from the sea? From an ancient forest?
Torn open by man’s digging, seeking, sucking the juice out
from this earth.

Annabella Bushra teaches psychoanalysis, writes, and practices psychology in New York City. She is particularly interested in issues of diversity, and is active in working toward a better understanding of our obstacles to accepting Otherness.
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ANITA HERRON

In special centers, volunteers carefully clean birds’ oil-soaked feathers. Despite such efforts, many of these rescued birds will die. Nearby, a dead bird washes ashore, already suffocated. Years ago boat people migrated to the Gulf coast, settled into the beautiful delta region that reminded them of home and became fishermen. Now, their livelihoods in jeopardy, they are urged to help with cleanup efforts.

“Ridiculous to compare the Deepwater well explosion with the Valdez disaster,” an op-ed piece proclaims, noting that the 1989 spill involved millions of gallons! But that article was written only a couple of weeks after the explosion, and for over a month now nothing has worked to close the well. The enormity becomes unimaginable, as the newest estimates of oil pouring into the ocean range from hundreds of thousands to millions of gallons.

The ocean is so huge, so deep, we demand it absorb all waste, absorb it all with no impact. Early last summer for a few weeks, black patches appeared on the normally white New Jersey beach I’ve enjoyed for 60 years. For years now the ocean has come closer and closer to the dunes, significantly reducing the span of beach, as the barrier island shifts shape according to its natural rhythm. The once high dunes are eroding rapidly these days, no longer providing certain protection. “Beach replenishment” has been the township’s effort to thwart the ocean currents and fierce winter storms, to protect the properties of homeowners who’ve insisted on building just feet from the edge of fragile dunes.

Was the black film somehow related to the earth and sand poured onto the shrinking dunes? Garden residue from those beachfront homes? Or oil, leaking from unknown sources?

Anita Herron is a psychoanalyst in private practice in NYC. She supervises at New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and teaches and supervises at the Mitchell Center for Relational Studies. As often as possible, she plays cello in chamber music groups with friends.
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ALEXANDRA WOODS

My nephew and niece are out at parties. Jim has made dinner. As we sit down to tilapia, baby potatoes and slim green beans, Jim starts joking around. He’s imitating teenagers hunching over their Blackberries, doing a two fingered tap dance. “Hi”, “Hi”; “How are you?” “Great.” “Wachadoin?” “Nothing. You?” He captures our bemusement. We are laughing and laughing. My sister’s once familiar giggle turns to tears. Jim says quietly, “It’s tension release…it’s the medication.” Our tempo slows.

Jim shifts course. “I was watching a program last night on Public TV. One of those old guys from Harvard or Yale was talking with that kind of voice where you just know he’s telling the truth.”

Jim is not given to taking anyone’s word for things. I wonder where he’s going with this.

”The man said that the oil spill will never be cleaned up. Never. And the people at BP know that. It’s a joke.”

We are way beyond the range of our usual topics.

I reply, “People in New Orleans are saying the air is starting to smell bad.”

My sister is acutely aware of lights, and tastes and smells; the wrong sensation can tip her into days of paralyzing pain. She quietly says, “That’s terrible.”

We talk briefly about the safety measures that were neglected or broken. The great concrete lid that merely stirred up the ocean floor. The people mailing packets of human and animal hair to sop up the oil.

“I hear they’re planning to plug the hole with golf balls.” We snort, and stand up to clear the dishes. My sister is looking tired. It is time to move to something else.

The earth is hemorrhaging. Dark gouts are spewing out of a pipe. They mix with hazy ocean water, diffusing, spreading. I have watched the video many times. Orange-red swaths fan the water’s surface for miles. Fisherman across the entire Gulf are pulling in their boats. Just last week, I learned that most of the oil-soaked birds cleaned after Exxon-Valdez did not survive. No images to comfort us, no relief.

Alexandra Woods practices psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in New York City. She is also concerned with the relationships between built and unbuilt environments. Her consulting firm, Green ResNYC, promotes energy efficiency in residential buildings. She is an avid kayaker.
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JILL SALBERG

I have an appointment in June to have the roof of my house shampooed. It sounds so silly, so girly almost, like the people who pride themselves on their “manicured” lawns. But my roof has become part of a growing trend in Westchester County of roofs that have fallen prey to the polluted air, heavy rains and whatever else is causing things to start growing on shingles. Moss and lichens have taken off on the roof’s shady side, and there is a small but nonetheless growing weed-type tree near the skylight in my kitchen.

Last week I read a review in the New York Times of a book that states that we’ve altered the environment of this earth beyond the point of reparable damage. We have permanently changed and broken a unique balancing of eco-systems, always in flux, sometimes in harmony but mostly abundant for human and animal needs. I gasp silently inside myself as I realize how vigorously I defend against knowing this. Often on the margins of my awareness, it remains a steady anxious presence. I am angered by our hubris, by scientific grandiosity that believes our ingenuity will always produce the fix, the cure that is needed in any eleventh hour.

And yet, I find my own comfort in swallows that return to their nest in an eave above my front door, a nest I refuse to dislodge despite the mess that lands on my front porch. I am delighted to see my lilacs bloom, notwithstanding the oddness of this spring, the flowers arriving a month too early. The bees have returned and are busy at work in the garden. All this pleases me – all the while that my allergies have returned with a vengeance, crippling me and forcing medications that barely help keep my airways open. I am often awakened at night by spasmodic coughing fits, desperate to breathe some air.

Jill Salberg in private practice in Manhattan and also teaches and supervises at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Her published writings have been on Freud's Jewish identity, gender roles as protest, and on ending treatment. Her newly released book is: GOOD ENOUGH ENDINGS: Breaks, Interruptions and Terminations from Contemporary Relational Perspectives.
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MELANIE SUCHET

Juniper was 6 years old. She was walking home from kindergarten, alone, as she had insisted; a man, a nice looking man, in a car, asked her if she wanted a ride home. She knew she should not accept. She said no. He talked some more to her. He said to her that her mother had told him to come and find her; he wanted to take her on an exciting adventure. No one had said anything to her about not accepting adventures. What if she missed something that could change her whole life? She got into the car.

“I couldn’t tell anyone what was going on. I was scared he would come back to get me. I didn’t know if my parents were part of it, if they did know him and maybe they had sent him. I was so scared that the garden hose was a device to spy on me. I couldn’t walk by it; I thought it would attack me.”

He had locked the doors immediately. He forced her down. She did not know what was happening. Was this part of the adventure? Then there was something large in her mouth and it was gushing. Stuff was spilling over, pouring into her and onto her. He had his head back. She knew this would be her only chance to get out. She moved her face near the door handle. She pulled it with all her might and flung herself out. Her two library books fell out of the little satchel still attached to her back. She felt terror that her mother would ask her where the books were and why had she not gone back to get them?

“I spent so much time putting the pieces together. Watching what other people did, how they did things with each other so that I could create a system that worked. I was simulating a brain. I was an engineer, figuring out how each part fitted with another, how to stop the flooding, to make sense of the world, to feel safe again.”

Melanie Suchet practices and teaches psychoanalysis in New York City. She is particularly interested in new ways of writing creative nonfiction. Her psychoanalytic pursuits cover the areas of race, gender, sexuality and diversity. She is also committed to activism and social justice.

One can fight oppression with violence or one can fight oppression with education. Hema Konsotia, a 32-year-old Indian woman, has chosen the latter. She is helping to change a situation affecting an estimated 165 million Indian Dalits. Also known as “untouchables”, they are a mixed population of numerous caste groups all over South Asia. Although the caste system has been abolished under the Indian constitution, there is still widespread discrimination and prejudice against Dalits, particularly women.

Dalits are frequently denied such basic rights as education, housing, property, freedom of religion, choice of employment and fair treatment before the law. This situation led Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to draw parallels between “untouchability” and apartheid in 2006. As a result of discrimination, Dalits are denied full participation in Hindu social and political life.

In rural India, where caste origins are more apparent and Dalits often remain excluded form local religious activities, many upper caste members believe that Dalits will pollute the temples if they go into them.

Every 20 minutes a crime is committed against Dalits, according to a 2005 government report. Although distressing in itself, this figure probably represents a fraction of all crimes against Dalits, since most of them remain unreported for fear of reprisals from the police or from member of the upper castes.

For several years now, Hema Konsotia has been working to change that situation. She is a union activist and college graduate, leader of Delhi’s sewage workers and their wives. For the last 10 years she has been working to empower them and make them aware of their rights while improving their education through mobile education centers she created in Delhi.

A woman of strong character (when a worker was repeatedly disrespectful to her she held him by his collar and slapped him in the face) she has the unwavering support of her mother, who had been through an abusive marriage herself. “My mother is my secret guru,” she told a reporter. Hema is determined that Dalits, particularly women, will not suffer what women of previous generations did.

And they certainly need her help since a situation of centuries of discrimination has affected theirs and their children’s health and quality of life. For most Dalits, good health care is unaffordable and inaccessible, and generally their experience of health care is limited to emergency care.

The maternal mortality rate is a reflection of accessibility and quality of health services. Prenatal and neonatal care is extremely limited. As a result, complications from pregnancy and childbirth are the leading cause of death among women of reproductive age. Because most Dalit women are poor, their health status is usually worse than statistics suggest.

The maternal mortality rate is 560 deaths per 100,000 live births (that same rate for industrialized countries is 13 per 100,000.) But for every woman who dies during pregnancy and childbirth, approximately 20 more suffer injuries, infections and disabilities that may seriously affect their health. Anemia, which is frequent among poor women, predisposes women to sepsis and hemorrhage during delivery.

Child statistics are equally distressing, since 56 children per thousand who are born alive die before reaching the age of five, a rate that compares with five children per thousand in industrialized countries. In addition, both women and children, particularly among the poor, experience an alarming rate of physical and sexual abuse.

In January of 2007, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women concluded that Dalit women in India suffer from “deeply rooted structural discrimination.” Proud and determined, Hema Konsotia’s work with Delhi’s poor has already made a difference.

César Chelala is an international public health consultant and a co-winner of an Overseas Press Club of America award for an article on human rights.

This blog was co-written by Tory Field.

One of the many effects of poverty in Haiti is that desperate parents regularly give away their children in the hope that the new family will feed and educate the children better than they themselves can. Instead, the children usually end up as child slaves, or restavèk. In a country which overthrew slavery in 1804, today anywhere from 225,000 to 300,000 children live in forced servitude. They work from before sunup to after sundown; are often sexually and physically abused; and usually go underfed and uneducated. (For more information, see “Slavery in Haiti, Again.”)

The numbers are soon likely to explode due to the hundreds of thousands of children left orphaned or abandoned by the earthquake. Guerda Constant with Fondasyon Limyè Lavi, the Light of Life Foundation, an organization dedicated to ending the child bondage system, said, “I can’t figure out what kind of future this country will have with so many kids in the street right now, without parents.”

• Tens of thousands of children left abandoned and orphaned since the earthquake are at risk of becoming slaves.  Photo: Tory Field.•

Guerda’s organization is among a small but growing network which is committed to abolishing slavery and to ensuring that all Haitian children receive love, care, and education. Many strategies are at work towards these ends.

The first is to get the government to pass a law prohibiting child slavery and prosecuting those who keep slaves. Haitian law outlaws forced labor, but restavèk labor is, in practice, condoned. It is not investigated, prosecuted, or punished. A June, 2009 UN press release concerning restavèk noted the “absence of comprehensive legislation protecting the rights of the child” and “the weakness of the judicial system in ensuring prosecution, fair trail and adequate punishment of perpetrators.”

A bill which would outlaw trafficking of adults and children, both across the border and within the country, has been in the hands of the Parliament for some time. The International Organization for Migration and other organizations worked with the government to ensure that the language of the bill met international norms. But the bill has not yet been voted on, and the Parliament has been inactive since it turned power over to an international commission in mid-April.

Guerda said, “It’s important that the government make a political decision on this situation. We need a law and a national plan [of implementation]. Then many NGOs who want to work on child protection in Haiti could know what to do and how to do it.”

And Malya Villard, co-coordinator of the Commission of Women Victim to Victim (KOFAVIV), a children and women’s rights organization, said, “Everyone who does violence against a girl or a child should be judged and condemned. We have to have a state that has justice so it can put an end to this. If the state doesn’t take responsibility, nothing will change.”

A second strategy includes educating parents about exactly what may happen to the children they give away. Helia Lajeunesse, a rights advocate with KOFAVIV, says, “We encourage parents in the countryside who think they’re doing their child a favor to do everything within their means not to give their child into servitude.”

A third strategy is to change national awareness about the rights of children, which are not universally recognized in Haiti. Malya said, “Children are an object, garbage, for many people.”

Today in Port-au-Prince, a few billboards sponsored by national and international organizations show cartoons of a sad little girl scrubbing a floor; a thought bubble above her head shows her merrily headed to school. Last May, the Restavèk Freedom Foundation hosted a national “I am Haiti Too” conference, which brought together more than 500 people, the largest such meeting to date.

One level at which the awareness campaign operates is with the families who have restavèk in their homes. The Restavèk Freedom Foundation, for example, hosts meetings to dialogue with families who keep restavèk about their treatment of the children, challenging the assumptions that many of them grew up with.

Another level of awareness-raising is happening within communities, encouraging members to involve themselves in the children’s well-being. Helia explained KOFAVIV’s work in this regard. “We’re getting neighbors to know they have a responsibility. We say, if you hear someone beating a child in their home, go tell them to stop. Tell them, ‘This is a human being and you need to treat them well.’ When we can’t confront the person directly because we’re worried about what will happen to the child as a result, we put a tape recorder outside the violator’s window to record them beating the child, then we take that tape to the radio station. The family hears it on the radio and hopefully gets ashamed and gets a different level of understanding about its treatment of the child.

“We’re seeing people change the way they’re treating restavèk children,” she said.

A fourth strategy is to work for improvement of the economy, especially in the rural areas which are home to unmitigated poverty, to undermine the incentive behind giving children away. On this issue, anti-restavèk activists are joined by peasant farmer and allied movements who are working to prioritize rural agriculture so that small farmers can have an adequate livelihood. The movements are also calling for the decentralization of services and budgetary expenditures, in part to create good schooling for children. Although primary school is supposed to be free and compulsory, even before the earthquake 55% of school-aged children were not going to school. And what schooling does exist in rural areas offers notoriously poor education.

A fifth strategy involves direct intervention to nurture restavèk children. This not only restores wounded and neglected young victims, but also helps break the stranglehold of the system. The Restavèk Freedom Foundation, for example, employs nine child advocates who partner and meet regularly with children, encourages the restavèk families to allow these children to go to school, and finances school fees and uniforms.

Changing the national system is a painfully slow process. “We now have more people who consider child servitude a crime.” said Guerda, “But at the same time it’s like there are so many children and there are so many things we [advocates] have to do, sometimes you don’t feel like anything happens in a kid’s life.”

Yet change is occurring, thanks to the small but dedicated organizations. Those groups are increasingly organized and united. The Down with the Restavèk System (ASR by its Creole acronym) network, born out of a 2000 conference sponsored by the Fondasyon Limyè Lavi and the U.S.-based Beyond Borders, is one network connecting the relevant groups.

Helia said, “It’s an enormous struggle, but just like I’ve learned and am speaking out, everyone will become aware this system has to end.”

For more information and to become involved in creating a slavery-free Haiti, check out the following (partial) list of groups.

Beyond Borders (U.S.) and Limyè Lavi Foundation (Haiti) work in partnership for a national child rights movement to demand the Haitian government take a stand against the exploitation of children. They also educate parents about the dangers of the restavèk system, mobilize and connect grassroots groups working on the issue, and address the root causes: the poverty and lack of quality education in rural areas which prompt parents to send their children away. Together the groups have also hosted conferences, marches and, in 2008 and 2009, a National Day against Child Servitude. They also coordinate the Down with Child Servitude Network, or ASR. www.beyondborders.net

The Commission of Women Victim to Victim (KOFAVIV) is an organization of former restavèk and rape survivors who have banded together to ensure that no child or woman ever again experience these horrors. KOFAVIV engages in advocacy; provides support to children at risk; and publicizes the brutality of the system through community meetings, trainings, public marches, and media campaigns. KOFAVIV has no website, but many articles about their work can be found in this column series, at www.otherworldsarepossible.org/alternatives/another-haiti-possible.

The Restavèk Freedom Foundation, formerly the Jean Robert Cadet Restavèk Foundation, focuses on working with the families who keep restavèk to change the way they treat children and to encourage them to send the children to school. The foundation pays for the children’s education and otherwise watching over their needs, and builds awareness of the problem within Haiti and globally. www.restavekfreedom.org

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Tory Field is an organizer, farmer, and Program Associate at Other Worlds.

George W. Bush is among the five least accomplished U.S. presidents, according to a new survey by the U.S.’s top 238 leading presidential scholars. They have been polled by the Siena College Research Institute’s (SRI) annually for the last 28 years. While president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who led the country from 1933 until his death in 1945, ranked first in overall accomplishments, former President Bush ranked worst among modern presidents –and the fifth worst in history.

According to the Survey of U.S. Presidents the top five, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, are Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

The presidential scholars ranked the U.S. Presidents on six personal attributes (background, imagination, integrity, intelligence, luck and willingness to take risks); five forms of ability (compromising, executive, leadership, communication and overall abilities); and eight areas of accomplishment including domestic affairs, economic, working with Congress and their party, appointing supreme court justices and members of the executive branch, avoiding mistakes and foreign policy.

If one analyzes just the Bush administration approach to foreign policy, health care and human rights one may consider among the biggest foreign policy blunders the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The Bush administration blatantly ignored the advice from Gen. Eric Shinseki, who had estimated that several hundred thousand troops would be required to secure Iraq. Even more seriously, the war against Iraq was based, from the beginning, on false premises.

Vice President Dick Cheney repeatedly stated that Iraq was “the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11,” in spite of the fact that there was no evidence for such assertion. The bipartisan 9/11 Commission itself found that Iraq had no involvement in the 9/11 attacks and no collaborative operational relationship with Al Qaeda.

Compounding the wrongness of the approach towards Iraq is the right to initiate a preemptive war, flaunting international law. The 2006 updated National Security Strategy of the United States had established that, “….The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction –and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. There are few greater threats than a terrorist attack with WMD.”

As was clearly demonstrated not only did the government of Iraq not have any WMD, but at no point it could have been considered a threat to the United States, given the obvious difference in military capability between both countries. This was no impediment for former President Bush and his closest associates to continue using that rationale for the war against that country. That war and the justification for engaging in preemptive wars are among the most serious and damaging foreign policy decisions of the Bush administration.

If one analyzes the Bush presidency regarding its approach to health care one can find a policy of disregard for people’s health and support for corporate interests, which is, after all, only a reflection of the Bush administration decisions on almost all economic matters.

The Bush administration blocked efforts to allow Medicare to negotiate cheaper prescription drugs for seniors thus negatively affecting their health and quality of life, while simultaneously depriving American taxpayers of savings from the very marketplace competition touted by White House economists. The administration also went to court to block lawsuits by patients who had been injured by defective prescription drugs and medical devices. In addition, the General Accounting Office conducted a study that concluded that the Bush administration created illegal, covert propaganda to promote its industry-supported Medicare bill.

The Bush administration record on human rights is dismal. Who can forget the photos of prisoners’ abuse in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq carried out by the U.S. Army and other U.S. governmental agencies and that have tainted forever the image of the U.S. as a defender of human rights? To compound the magnitude of the abuse, Janis Karpinsky, a commander at Abu Ghraib estimated later that 90% of the detainees in the prison were innocent.

Recently Physicians for Human Rights has uncovered evidence that indicates the Bush administration conducted illegal and unethical human experiments and carried out research on detainees in CIA custody. In addition, medical personnel engaged not only in torture of prisoners but also in the crime of illegal experimentation, activities in clear violation of the Nuremberg Code.

It would be naïve to think that all negative aspects of the Bush administration are the responsibility of former President Bush himself. He obviously is the face for members of his administration and others who were influencing policy decisions. But the ultimate responsibility falls on him. And he is the one that will have to respond to history for his actions.

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

The World Bank is reviewing its strategy for Africa, which is outlined in the Africa Action Plan.

The strategy is being reviewed against a backdrop of changes in the global economy, in Africa and the World Bank.

As part of its review and preparation, the Bank is consulting with a wide array of stakeholders to seek their views and input.

The process, outlined in our Consultations Plan, is expected to be finalized in late 2010-early 2011. You can help by sharing your views on how the Bank can best support Africa reach its development goals.

To read more about progress on the current action plan, please click here.
They would like you to answer the following questions:

1. What do you see as Africa’s development challenges and what role do you see the World Bank playing in supporting African countries, especially post-conflict and fragile states, build more resilient and globally competitive economies in the 21st century?

2. How can the World Bank help build skills for African workers, promote job creation, especially for young people in post-conflict and fragile states, and empower African women to create and run successful businesses?

3. What do you think the World Bank should do to improve intra-African trade, foster regional solutions especially for infrastructure such as energy, while ensuring that climate change issues are taken into account and Africa’s competitiveness with the rest of the world improved?

4. How can the World Bank foster social protection mechanisms that protect the most vulnerable Africans from economic and health shocks (HIV/AIDS, malaria, maternal mortality, road accidents, etc.)?

5. What can the World Bank do to boost demand by citizens, by journalists, media outlets and civil society organizations for good governance and accountability?

6. What other suggestions or comments do you have?

You can email your answers to Africaconsult@worldbank.org or submit your answers through the World Bank website by copying and pasting the URL below into your web browser.

http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/AFRICAEXT/0,,contentMDK:22578261~pagePK:146736~piPK:146830~theSitePK:258644,00.html

For more information visit http://go.worldbank.org/R2L5D0USC0

Would you like to attend a child friendly, free and fun family event this 4th of July weekend? Well, if you’re in the Baltimore area you can, if not, it will soon be coming to a US city near you soon.

The 2010 Lego games tour began today in Baltimore city. The tour promoting the new Lego board game line, features life size adaptations of classic and new Lego characters. It is located right in front of Port Discovery Children’s Museum at 35 Market Place, Baltimore, MD 21202

Walk through the labyrinth, climb to the top of the Ramses Pyramid and defeat the Mummy King, outsmart the Minotaur in Minotaurus, race to the finish line in Race 3000, win great prizes and enjoy great music.

From the young to the old, the event is a fun family event everyone can enjoy for free.

Lego wants you to build, play and change. Create and customize your own gaming experience. Play your own way!

For more information including the full schedule, visit http://games.lego.com/en-us/News/ReadMore/Default.aspx?id=196275

This blog was co-written by Tory Field.

“I’m struggling to end slavery because I know how I suffered,” said Helia Lajeunesse, a former restavèk, child slave, who is now a children’s rights advocate.

Today there are an estimated 27 million slaves in the world, according to the research of Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves. This is more than at any time in history, even including during the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

In Haiti, the only nation ever to host a successful slave revolution, 225,000 to 300,000 children live in forced and usually violent servitude in a system known as restavèk, literally “to stay with.” The numbers are at risk of rising dramatically because of the hundreds of thousands of children who lost their parents or were abandoned after the earthquake. In addition to likely trauma, hunger, and health problems, unaccompanied minors are at threat from adults who may take advantage of a source of free labor. Unprotected girls are also at risk of what amounts to sex slavery, as rape of restavèk girls by the men and youth in the household is common.

The system usually works this way: A parent who cannot afford to feed or educate a child may give him or her to a better-off relative, neighbor, or stranger who promises to provide care and schooling. The families giving up children are usually from the countryside, where poverty is unrelenting. The children are as young as three, with girls between six and 14 years old comprising sixty-five percent of the population.

Restavèk children toil long hours and rarely go to school. They are regularly abused. They usually eat table scraps or have to scavenge in the streets for their own food, sleep on the floor, and wear cast-off rags.

They are not chained or locked up. One reason the children usually stay is the threat of severe punishment – often including beatings - if they are caught trying to escape and are returned to the family. Another reason is that they have no other source of food and shelter. Survival and safety options for street children in Haiti are not good, though some restavèk do escape to live on the streets.

Alina “Tibebe” Cajuste described her childhood as a restavèk this way: “This is a sad, sad story to the world. A woman who used to come sell in the market told my mother to give me to her. My mother had no support, so she had to.

“What did this woman make me do? I had to get up before 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning to make the food, sweep the floor, and wash the car, so that when the family woke up everything would be ready. Then I had to wash dishes, fetch water, and go sell merchandise for her in the countryside. When I came back from the marketplace, I would carry two drums of water on my head, so heavy, to wash up for her. Then I’d go buy things to make dinner. And I couldn’t even eat the same food as her. If she ate rice, I only got cornmeal. I didn’t even wear the same sandals or dresses as her child. My dresses were made out of the scraps of cloth that were left over from what she sold in the marketplace. I couldn’t even sleep in a bed.”

Among the trials she recounted of her life as a restavèk, Helia Lajeunesse recounted this: “One day I was coming back from delivering food to the child of the house, which I had to carry on my head to her at school every day. There was a man holding a school under a coconut tree. He called to me, ‘Come be part of this school.’ I said, ‘No, I can’t, because when I go home my aunt will beat me.’ He said, ‘You should come.’ I went. Now when I went home, I said, ‘There was a man holding a school, so I attended today.’ The woman said, ‘What? You went to school?’ I said, ‘Yes, and could you please give me a little pencil and a notebook?’ She asked me what I thought I was doing, and started beating me.

“Poverty and misery made me not know how to read and write, or count in my head, until I was a grown-up.

“I escaped three times and went to different homes, four in all. But each time I suffered as badly or worse than before. I was abused so much. Misery was killing me.

Still, many years later when Helia’s husband was murdered and she could no longer feed her five children, she said, “I was obliged to give four away, even though the youngest was only three years old. I only kept one who wasn’t even a year old then.”

Later, however, she went to a child rights training by the grassroots groups Commission of Women Victim to Victim (KOFAVIV). “That gave me consciousness and I went and got my children back. I said to myself, no matter what, I am going to keep my children. Now I’m with my four children [one of her five died in the earthquake]. I’m their mother, I’m their father.”

The system has long been widely socially accepted, and its neutral-sounding name has rarely been replaced by the more appropriate term of slavery. But efforts are underway to change this.

Today Tibebe and Helia are part of a group of restavèk survivors who are raising visibility of and opposition to the system. Their group, KOFAVIV, is among a small but growing child protection network. The two women have traveled as far as Washington, D.C. to speak out. They conduct trainings in children’s rights and have helped organize two marches where thousands of women wore T-shirts saying “I oppose the restavèk system. And you, what are you waiting for?” They are also part of a diverse global movement of people working to supplant commercialization and degradation of human life with dignity and rights.

For more on the work to end child servitude in Haiti, and how you can help, see the upcoming blog post “A Second Slave Rebellion in Haiti,” on July 15th.

Tory Field is an organizer, farmer, and Program Associate at Other Worlds.

Listen to the June 27th broadcast of Sundays at Five by clicking the play button below.

Kate and Jessica discuss current issues, including the new film Gasland and the latest developments in the Gulf oil spill. It’s also the 40th anniversary of San Francisco’s Pride Festival. Jessica attends the Frameline Festival, San Francisco’s International LGBT Film Festival and encourages listeners to attend the upcoming San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

About the Broadcast: The WIP’s Executive Editor, Kate Daniels teams up with identical twin sister Ali Daniels to present Sundays at Five, a weekly radio broadcast on KRXA, Monterey Bay's Progressive Talk Radio station. The twins share stories and discuss topics ranging from campaign finance reform to the phenomenon of Facebook. Tune in every Sunday from 5-6 pm PDT or listen online. Podcasts of previous broadcasts are available on The WIP Talk.

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