[RSCT] Teaching about Haiti

[sarah knopp]

Hey all,
Jessie Hagopian, a RIFF'ed, RS-sympathetic teacher  from  Seattle was in
Haiti when the earthquake broke out.  Here's the interview with him.  Also,
a packet of articles including an interview with Paul Farmer.  The packet
was not really originally geared toward students.  But the first article has
a great and concise story of US culpability in the wrecking of Haiti's
infrastructure.

Best
Sarah
Witness to a nightmare

January 18, 2010

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Jesse Hagopian, a teacher in Seattle and contributor to SocialistWorker.org,
was in Port-au-Prince with his 1-year-old son to visit his wife when the
earthquake hit. His wife, an aid worker, works until the evening on most
days, but by sheer luck, she came to the hotel where they were staying early
on Tuesday--just minutes before the quake struck at 4:53 p.m. This spared
Jesse and his family agonizing hours or days trying to find one another amid
the chaos.

Within hours, the hotel where they were staying became known as a place
where some medical help was available, because another hotel guest happened
to be an emergency medical technician. Jesse got a crash course in treating
severe injuries--broken bones, head wounds and more--as people desperate for
help kept arriving.

Jesse spoke with Eric Ruder via telephone from Port-au-Prince on January 15
and 16 about the crisis unfolding around him. On Sunday, he and his family
were able to travel from Haiti to the Dominican Republic.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

CAN YOU describe what you're seeing in Haiti?

YESTERDAY, WE drove around downtown Port-au-Prince, and some of the
adjoining cities. It's hard to describe, because there's just no reference
for it in the rest of my life. But the first thing you notice is that
everyone's wearing a mask. People are coming from different cities and
different neighborhoods to search for their relatives, and the stench is so
bad because there's so many dead bodies that everyone's got a mask on.

There are people looking through the rubble, and the rubble is just so
expansive. Huge buildings have collapsed, and everything's made out of
concrete, so it's just concrete slabs and concrete bricks, just littered all
over the ground and all over the street, and countless scenes of people
digging through them, looking for loved ones.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of bodies that aren't claimed. We saw a lot
of instances of bulldozers coming and picking up bodies, and throwing them
into the backs of trucks. They're trying to clear the streets of dead bodies
because it becomes a public health issue. But it's going to be very
challenging for a lot of families who don't have closure and don't know what
happened to their family members.

One of the things that you also notice when you go through the streets is
that everyone's out there on their own. There was very little of the
government or the UN in the efforts to find these bodies or help the
injured. During our drive, we only saw the UN in front of the place where
their headquarters used to be. It had collapsed, and we saw lots of soldiers
guarding that area. I didn't see anybody distributing aid.

Half of the hotel that I was staying in collapsed--the half I wasn't in,
thankfully. And the half I was in, there were cracks all over the place, so
it was dangerous to remain there. We have our 1-year-old son with us, so we
definitely didn't want to just sleep outside if we could avoid it.

Thankfully, my mom had a friend here, and she had gotten in contact with him
right when we got to Haiti, before the earthquake. He came and found us,
knowing which hotel we were staying in. That was very lucky, or else we'd be
sleeping outside. And he has this phone that we're talking on now, so
without that, we'd have no contact to let our families know what was going
on.

I WAS in Gaza last summer, and when I saw the news picture from Haiti, I was
struck by how much it looked like Gaza. Like you've described--big piles of
concrete and twisted rebar and broken bricks everywhere you looked.

THAT'S IT. That's all they build with. It's terrible construction in an
earthquake because it's so heavy. It just crushed people. Nothing is
reinforced enough to withstand a very strong earthquake, so the devastation
is so massive.

If the UN mission here was really about helping the people of Haiti, this
would be the best place in the world to have an earthquake--not that you'd
want one anywhere, but you'd have a huge peacekeeping force that could help
with the injured and rebuild the country.

But instead, in the course of a day or two, so many people died needlessly
because they didn't get a bandage on their head wound. My hotel became a
makeshift hospital, and so many people were coming there because we had one
nurse. That was all we had--no supplies and no other help. If someone had
dropped off a box of bandages, it could have saved more people.

I just read that the new estimate by local officials is 200,000 dead. I had
originally read 50,000. If people who are still trapped don't get water,
this number is actually conceivable. I saw so many huge buildings downtown
just collapsed, and the quake happened just before 5 p.m. on Tuesday--so
many of those buildings had people in them.

If that number of 200,000 is reached, it will be one of the 10 deadliest
natural disasters of all time.

Of course, it's not simply a natural disaster. It's a natural disaster on
top of the disaster that U.S. imperialism has imposed on this country for
decades, backing one dictator after another in the interest of maintaining a
source of cheap labor for U.S. corporations.

WHAT DO you think of the Obama administration's response so far?

ON SATURDAY, Hillary Clinton flew into Haiti to oversee the relief
effort--supposedly. But I think her trip to Haiti tells you all you need to
know: They had to shut down the airport for three hours so she could land,
which meant that no actual aid flights could come in.

And this happened at a really critical time, because we're right at that
point where every extra ounce of water matters. At this point, people who
have been without water are facing imminent death. But they stopped the aid
shipments so Clinton could give a canned speech from Haiti about how much
the U.S. is doing to help.

And in any case, the U.S. government is sending more boots on the ground and
more guns to help with "law and order." But this isn't what the Haitian
people need. They need people with shovels, and people to give them water.
And of course, "law and order" is threatened by the lack of aid. Emphasizing
troops over aid creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that will lead to serious
bloodshed.

ON SATURDAY, an article about the Haiti crisis in the *New York Times* said
that the historic "neglect" of the Haitian people has at least made them
"resilient." To quote the *Times*, "Although protesting is a national
custom, so is surviving on little. That national ethos, the Haitians'
ability to scrounge to find enough to fight their hunger pangs, is being
tested in full by the current crisis."

RIGHT. IN other words, we've been screwing them for so long, they should be
used to it by now.

It's such racist garbage. It's a little softer than the Rush Limbaugh
statement that we've already helped the Haitian people with our taxpayer
dollars, or Pat Robertson's idea that this is retribution for a pact made
with the devil. But it's coming from the same racist attitude that these
people are used to these kinds of conditions, so they'll be fine. But nobody
can deal with the horror that I've seen here.

When I heard that statement from Pat Robertson, after all the stress I'd
been under, that just kind of broke me. I had to yell. That this earthquake
was payback for kicking out the French during the Haitian Revolution? I hope
that Pat Robertson can be dropped in one of the neighborhoods here, and let
the people have at him.

It's hard to even respond to that kind of idiocy, but I just got finished
reading CLR James' *The Black Jacobins*, and it's one of the most inspiring
stories I've ever read about ordinary people taking up arms, liberating
themselves and taking control of their own affairs.

And then there's people like Pat Robertson, who wish Haiti was still a
colony, where they could just directly enslave people and make money off
them.

In any case, the U.S. needs to tell its soldiers to drop their machine guns
and pick up shovels and start digging people out. I've seen a lot of stories
predicting that violence and looting could break out, and that's a real
possibility, if they don't get people food. But it doesn't have to be that
way. The way you impose order isn't with machine guns, but by giving people
food.

On Friday, they gave out only 8,000 packets of daily food rations, and the
UN says that some 8 million are needed this week. People are drinking water
contaminated by the rotting bodies, so there's a public health disaster
looming that could create another wave of deaths among those who survived
the quake.

SOME U.S. officials say they fear distributing food because it could create
riot conditions. But what happens if the food isn't distributed?

WE KNOW what happens. My wife was here a year ago and had to be evacuated
because food prices rose so high that people were eating mud. That can only
go on for so long until people decide to go into stores and take what they
need in order for their families to survive.

They need to marshal the world's wealth to come help--now. The idea that the
world's most powerful country--one hour away by plane--is being stopped by a
clogged airport is asinine. It's infuriating.

THE ESTIMATES are that the six largest U.S. banks paid out a total of $150
billion in compensation to their employees for 2009. So the $100 million
pledged to Haiti by the U.S. is 0.05 percent of that.

ABSURD. I also just read that a couple in Arkansas hit the lottery for $100
million, but that's all the Obama administration can find to help Haiti.
Basically, the Obama administration is orchestrating one of the largest
catastrophes in world history.

The Haitian government is in collapse--figuratively and literally. The
presidential palace caved in on itself. And it's not like the government was
healthy before the quake struck. In 2004, George W. Bush deposed
then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and greatly weakened the connection of
people to the resources of the government.

With the local government in collapse and the international players more
interested in "law and order" and contracts for their corporations, there
just aren't enough people and infrastructure to deliver the aid that people
have so generously dug out from their own shallow pockets.

WHAT ROLE has the UN been playing?

I REALLY didn't see them at all, even though the hotel I was staying became
a center where hundreds of people came for relief. No one, including the UN,
brought supplies to us.

The headquarters of the UN itself collapsed, and I believe that the number
one and number two UN officials in the country were killed, so they're
definitely dealing with a crisis of their own. But if they're here to try to
create better conditions for the people of Haiti, it seems like they would
have a faster response, not just to their own crisis, but to the broader
one.

Seeing so many dead bodies and so many people searching on their own and not
seeing any clinics set up or dispersal of aid or medicine of any kind
anywhere that we went--it really seemed like the Haitians were on their own
in the midst of one of the largest presence of UN forces in the world. That
just seemed like a huge injustice to me.

GIVEN THE levels of desperation, how is the security situation?

I THINK the devastation is so dramatic that people are in shock. At this
point, a few days into the crisis, people are still just looking for their
loved ones and trying to dig out people from the rubble. It hasn't yet
reached the point where the level of desperation has become such that
there's the kind of riots that happened a year ago when food prices jumped
so high.

At least it doesn't feel that way to me right now. But how long can you go
without proper medical attention? There are millions of people who are
homeless. What do you do when you have millions of people homeless? You have
to have a coordinated effort to address these problems, and you have to
start taking care of them in a timely manner, or you know that people will
have to take matters into their own hands and use any means necessary to
find the water, food and shelter they need. There's bound to be some sort of
revolt.

And with the sort of political repression that exists in Haiti--for example,
the largest and most popular political party in the country is banned from
participating in elections that had been set for later this year--it seems
like that type of tension really could come to a boiling point.

WHAT HAVE you been doing since the earthquake hit?

OUR MAKESHIFT aid station was featured in the media. In fact, it was the
front page of Yahoo News, so hundreds of people just started coming.

I had a young kid die right in front of me, simply because we had to wait
hours before we could get to him--because there were so many other people in
line. And I don't have any medical training, you know? I shouldn't be the
one to work on him!

It's just been so crazy that it's hard to even describe. I just learned how
to do things--just like anyone would if they had to. We were lucky that
there was this one EMT who had some medical training, and he got totally
overwhelmed with the number of cases--he just started assigning things to
us. My wife and I and a couple other people at the hotel wanted to help out,
and so we just tried to attend to people with the worst injuries. It's
horrible to think about--beams had fallen on people's skulls and caused
massive bleeding, people lost their eyes and limbs and everything.

I went through the hotel and got all the sheets off the beds and then ripped
them into strips, and we used those to stop the bleeding. We broke up the
chairs in the hotel and found whatever sticks we could to use as splints for
people's broken limbs. We just did whatever with what we had, because no aid
was being delivered.

Then I found out that the EMT who headed this whole operation at the hotel
got so exhausted that he tripped at night and broke his ankle. So now he
can't continue, and they have no help now.

CAN YOU describe the conditions that people have to contend with? In the
news coverage I've seen, it looks like a lot of people are living under a
tarp spread between two trees.

YES, THAT'S how most people are living. Those blue tarps are everywhere. The
people who are lucky have a blue tarp draped over them and are living under
it. The food and water situation is going to become a crisis. There's some
available at hospitals, but there are long lines for everything, whether
it's gas or water or food.

At one point when we were driving, we thought the street had been blockaded,
but it turned out it was just a gas line that was very long. There's some
water available at different stations like that, but some of the pipes have
obviously ruptured, and the infrastructure was very weak to begin with.
People are just scavenging and doing whatever they can to eat at this point.

It all seems so absurd, though. There's been an occupation by the UN since
2004, and they developed *no* infrastructure? Even if there's a bottleneck
at the one major airport, there are coastlines--you can bring boats in. And
you have the Dominican Republic next door--you can get aid there and bring
it across the border.

This is an hour from Miami, right? It's right next door to our country.
We've mobilized ridiculous amounts of weapons and supplies and soldiers to
the Middle East to invade countries, right? I really think they could figure
out how to make it happen.

I'm sure there are difficulties. Haiti's an extremely poor country, largely
because of U.S. imperialism and Western domination, and that presents real
challenges for distributing aid. But I can't accept any excuse given by the
media for the U.S. not being able to get more help here, given that the U.S.
is able to marshal huge resources around the world when it wants to occupy a
country.

IN 2009, the U.S. spent about $12 billion a month on its wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and now, they're pledging $100 million in aid to deal with this
crisis. That's less than 1 percent of what they were spending each month on
military occupations.

YES. THERE are millions of people homeless here, which sounds big. But when
you put it in the context of how much they're spending on war, how much
they're spending on bank bailouts or bonuses for executives, it just doesn't
make any sense. That $100 million isn't anywhere near the amount that's
going to be needed to address rebuilding homes for the population that
survived, and healing the people who are injured.

It was a natural disaster that hit Haiti and created this awful mess, but
it's really the unnatural disaster of decades of poverty that made the
natural disaster so horrible. Homes made from the cheapest possible
materials are going to fall, and they're going to hurt a lot of people.

The lack of infrastructure to deliver aid is a result of the poverty, and
that wasn't just an accident, but something that was orchestrated by several
different governments over time. In the 1820s, Haiti had to pay reparations
to France because it won its independence, and France lost all its
"property," in the form of slaves. Today, Haiti owes money to the
International Monetary Fund. The IMF has offered loans to Haiti to deal with
this crisis--so it can be plunged even further into debt. It's absurd.

And Barack Obama has selected Bill Clinton and George Bush as the main
people who are supposed to solve the problem? We saw how well Bush did in
New Orleans--it's not a serious attempt to help people here. It seems much
more like a publicity stunt to say, "We're doing what we can," and
meanwhile, millions of people will suffer.

THAT EARLY history of Haiti is remarkable in so many ways. The U.S.
initially supported the Haitian uprising with arms and money, because it saw
the rebellion as a way to eject the French. But once the revolution was
successful, the U.S. opposed it, because America was concerned that the
revolution would set a very bad example for Black slaves in the southern
U.S.

WHAT I love about Toussaint L'Ouverture is how he would make alliances with
the British here, and then the French here, and the Americans there, but he
always knew that they were interested in maintaining their own advantages
and exploiting Haiti however they could.

So he would make alliances when it suited him to beat the other imperialist
power, but he never was lulled into thinking that they were actually going
to defend Haiti and try to fight for the end of slavery.

I think that the outpouring of support for the people who are suffering here
in Haiti is really beautiful, and it shows that people want a better and
different kind of world--and they're willing to give up things to get there.

But the problem is that a lot of the institutions set up to deliver the aid
aren't concerned about building a better world. They're more worried about
their own institutional security, not upsetting the status quo in Haiti. In
one way or another, their efforts reinforce the grip of the current
president, who is himself a servant of U.S. interests.

So you have a situation where all this money can be raised, but if it goes
to private contracts for corporations to rebuild Haiti, then it's really
more about them rebuilding their bottom line. This happened in Iraq, with
big contracts to Halliburton, and we saw how well that worked. Iraqis still
don't have electricity, and meanwhile Halliburton is fabulously wealthy.

A similar kind of thing happened in New Orleans, where huge devastation
became a huge opportunity to privatize. Everything down to the schools are
privatized, and unless we collectively demand otherwise, the same dynamic
will happen here in Haiti, where U.S. corporations see this as an
opportunity to get all the funds that people are donating.

So I hope that we can help shed some light on the devastation that's
happened here, and help be part of the process of raising the money and the
medical supplies that are needed here. But we can't just leave it in the
hands of the institutions that have already driven Haiti into poverty. We
have to try to fight for an alternative, where the aid actually goes to
people and not just these corporations.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

http://socialistworker.org/print/2010/01/18/witness-to-a-nightmare
 What you can do

Donations and aid are desperately needed in Haiti. Here are some
organizations with connections to the grassroots movements in the country.

The Haiti Emergency Relief
Fund<http://www.haitiaction.net/About/HERF/1_12_10.html>[1], organized
by the solidarity organization Haiti Action, delivers
resources directly to grassroots organizations. It was founded in 2004 after
the coup d'etat that forced President Jean-Bertrand Aristide out of office.

For more information, including a telephone contact, go to the Canada Haiti
Action Network <http://canadahaitiaction.ca/> [2] Web site.

The Zanmi Lasante Medical Center <http://www.pih.org/home.html> [3] is
located in the Central Plateau of Haiti and delivers health care through a
network of clinics. The health center survived the earthquake and delivering
aid to the disaster zone. You can donate to the center through the U.S.
non-profit organization Partners in Health <http://www.pih.org/home.html>[4].

SOPUDEP is a pioneering school <http://www.sopudep.org/donate> [5] in
Petionville. The resources of the school and its teachers are being
mobilized to assist the neighboring population. You can support the school
via the Canadian-based Sawatzky Family
Foundation<http://www.sopudep.org/donate>[6].

  On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 8:37 PM, <bbpdx at aol.com> wrote:

>  Dear Rethinking Schools friends,
>
> All of us have been stunned by the immensity of the devastation in Haiti as
> a result of the earthquake -- compounded by centuries of colonialism,
> slavery, exploitation, racism, U.S. occupation, dictatorship, and
> intervention. I encourage you to use this listserv to post resources,
> stories, and questions about teaching the history and contemporary reality
> of Haiti. Toward that end, Teaching for Change has posted a collection of
> resources at its site. (Thanks to Deborah Menkart for assembling these, by
> the way.) Click on http://www.teachingforchange.org/publications/haiti.
> Just posted today is a pdf of Teaching for Change's 1994 booklet, "Teaching
> About Haiti."
>
> The best ongoing source of analysis that I've found has been Democracy
> Now!, which had several excellent shows last week. On Friday, TransAfrica
> founder Randall Robinson, offered a brief thumbnail sketch of the history of
> Haiti that might be used in class. One thought would be to contrast the
> coverage of Democracy Now! with the coverage of, say, the ABC Nightly News
> with Diane Sawyer. ABC has featured lots of heart rending on-the-ground
> stories, but has raised no questions about why Haiti is so poor, why so many
> people from the countryside have flocked to the cities -- in short, they've
> treated the catastrophe there as if history is irrelevant. Democracy Now!
> has also featured lots of eyewitness reports, but these have been grounded
> in historical context that helps make us aware that this is not purely a
> natural disaster.
>
> A few other teaching resources/ideas:
>
> -- In the Rethinking Schools book, Rethinking Globalization, the first
> essay we include is Jean-Bertrand Aristide's "Globalization: A View from
> Below" (p. 8) that describes the impact of Haiti's incorporation into the
> global economy.
>
> -- One place to begin looking at Haiti with students would be with the
> original inhabitants of the island -- the Tainos. Columbus describes them as
> well fed, prosperous, happy -- "the best people in the world," he writes at
> one point. Spanish priests remarked that they'd never seen Tainos fighting
> with each other -- in stark contrast to life in Spain. (See materials in
> Rethinking Columbus.) So how does Haiti go from being prosperous and
> tranquil to being perhaps the poorest country in the Americas? That's a
> question that students could take up. One resource that I've used is the
> comic history "Colonialism in the Americas: A Critical Look." (See
> http://www.zinnedproject.org/?s=colonialism+in+the+americas.) A page of
> this is adapted in the "Teaching About Haiti" booklet.
>
> Finally, in the interests of getting teaching material out, even in rough
> draft form, attached is a role play that Rethinking Schools editor Linda
> Christensen developed several years ago. It is focused around independence
> from France and the French demand for financial compensation. It's still in
> draft form. There are not "instructions" included for completing the role
> play, but you could use any number of Rethinking Schools published role
> plays as a "template" for running this one. A number of teachers in the
> Portland area have used it successfully.
>
> Rico Gutstein of Teachers for Social Justice in Chicago recently posted a
> note to this listserv urging people to support the Haiti Emergency Relief
> Fund at: http://www.haitiaction.net/About/HERF/1_12_10.html. Please give
> what you can.
>
> Again, please post teaching ideas about Haiti, even if these are not
> fleshed out.
>
> Best,
>
> Bill Bigelow (bbpdx at aol.com)
> Rethinking Schools
> www.rethinkingschools.org
>
>
> --
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