Friday, May 28, 2010
This Baby is Starving Today
Meet Clifford.
He lost his father and his house in Soleil during the earthquake.
Clifford now sleeps on the streets of Soleil with his mother.
The last time Clifford ate was two days ago when he ate a little corn, flour, milk, and sugar mixed together. This is called "la bouillie".
Clifford is 18 months old and weighs about 16 pounds.
He is irritable and pushes my hand away when I attempt to examine him.
He is dying and simply wants to be left alone.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Dedicated to Colin Kenny
Colin, thanks for all your great work assuring TPS for many Haitians.
This 16 year old girl brought her sick baby to clinic today. They are living behind the hospital in Soleil under a sheet propped up by wooden poles.
I have still not examined even one patient that has not been displaced by the "evenman".
Things are seriously bad here is the most optimistic I can be.
Heurese's Survival Saga Continues
If you follow this blog at all, you may know about Heurese.
Heurese is a 31 year old Haitian female that has survived two heart surgeries, abandonment by OSF-SFMC in Peoria, four tropical storms, Haiti's gangs, the UN soldiers and the epic earthquake on January 12, 2010.
Heurese told me today that she was outside her shack in Carrefour talking to a friend the night of the quake. They heard a loud noise and watched shacks as they collapsed. They heard people screaming from everywhere.
Heurese said she knew for sure that it was an earthquake and thought for sure that she lost her two young children as they were headed home from school with her sister Jenny. However, Jenny and the kids showed up two hours later, afraid but not physically hurt.
Her cell phone did not work so Heurese, her kids, Jenny, and another sister Vita huddled in the street and stayed there for four days. Their brother showed up four days later and they all went to their mother's home in Bainet on Haiti's southern peninsula.
Today Heurese is in cosmetology school in P-a-P and sleeps in a pup tent with Jenny.
Heurese has survived again.
The Road to Health
A typical vaccination and pediatric development dossier at clinic in Cite Soleil.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Tent City Adjacent to Airport in Port-au-Prince
Hundreds of thousands of people are living like this.
This lady and her children live 90 minutes by air from Miami.
Does this make any sense to you?
Haitian Orphan Roberson Survives Quake
I thought some good news was needed at this point.
Five year old Roberson makes his point.
UN Clashes with Haitian Students
(Photo by John Carroll, May 26, 2010, Cite Soleil)
U.N. Clash with Frustrated Students Spills into Camps
Ansel Herz
PORT-AU-PRINCE, May 25 (IPS) - United Nations peacekeeping troops responded to a rock-throwing demonstration by university students Monday evening with a barrage of tear gas and rubber bullets in the area around Haiti's National Palace, sending masses of displaced Haitians running out of tent camps into the streets, according to witnesses.
"That child was gravely injured in the face! It was miserable, they were throwing gas everywhere," said Junior Joel, a young man hanging with friends at night outside the palace - still partially collapsed from the January earthquake.
Three volunteer doctors from the NGO Partners in Health who were working in the emergency room of the General Hospital said they treated at least six individuals with wounds from rubber bullets.
"They were bleeding," Sarah McMillan, a doctor from New Hampshire, told IPS. "There was a little girl with a big laceration on her face. It needed about 10 stitches. She'll probably have a scar."
The girl was discharged from the hospital and could not be found in the tent camp as of publication time.
Thousands of families are crowded into the public squares in the Champs du Mars zone around the palace, after the earthquake killed at least 200,000 people and drove nearly two million from destroyed neighbourhoods.
A coalition of political organisations called Tet Kole, Haitian Creole for "Heads Together", has staged protests in the area for the past month, demanding the resignation of President René Préval over his handling of the post-earthquake crisis.
The walls of the Faculty of Ethnology school are dotted with graffiti denouncing Préval and the United Nations. Students said they gave Brazilian peacekeeping troops stationed in jeeps outside the campus the middle finger sign late Monday afternoon.
When the troops tried to enter the campus, angrily calling students thieves and vagabonds, the students showered them with rocks. As the soldiers fled, they fired three bullet rounds in the air and one of them struck the front-facing wall of the school, students said.
When the troops returned in bigger vehicles, Frantz Mathieu Junior said he ran to hide in a bathroom, but the soldiers kicked the thin wooden door open. Junior said he was forced to the ground and kicked repeatedly, then taken away. He says he was force-fed while in detention.
The students showed IPS on Tuesday the cracks in the wooden door and the bullet hole next to a second-storey window. After Junior was taken on Monday, they took to the streets in an angry protest, throwing more rocks.
Edmond Mulet, the head of the peacekeeping mission - known by the acronym MINUSTAH - issued a statement blaming an unnamed student for "the provocation" of throwing stones at a patrol, but apologising for the troops' intrusion on university grounds to seize him.
U.N. troops never fired any bullets or tear gas on Monday, said MINUSTAH spokesperson David Wimhurst. He said only pepper spray and rubber bullets were used to quell an out-of-control protest.
CNN crews heard gunshots, smelled tear gas and saw gas canisters littering the area surrounding the palace. According to witnesses from the surrounding tent camps, U.N. troops blanketed the area with tear gas and fired rubber bullets at 6 p.m. on Monday.
"Everyone ran because nobody wants to be around when there's so much gas," Joseph Marie-ange, a 24-year-old mother of four, told IPS. "They're abusive. They shot the gas in here and the children and elders were falling, everyone was feeling the effects."
Hours after the protests and swirling gas dissipated, Levita Mondesir trudged with her three-month-old baby towards the General Hospital's exit.
"We live in Place Petion, across from the Ethnology school," she told IPS. "The students came, then MINUSTAH released the gas. When I got back to the camp, everyone was running, so I ran too."
"I tried to cover my child and told the other children to lay down under the bed," she continued. "There was smoke and the kids and people were falling. My baby wasn't responding, I was worried he died. I was crying and others helped me take him to the hospital."
She caught a motorcycle taxi to the hospital and received a reserve ticket for her baby to be x-rayed the next day. Tines Clerge, her husband, said he can't continue living there now. "I can't stay at Chanmas anymore," he told IPS.
The opposition protests continued Tuesday afternoon in Chanmas. Scores of U.N. troops and Haitian police ringed the national palace with barricades. The demonstrators accuse President Préval of seeking to grab power by extending his mandate past the original end date. Parliament approved the extension.
Some are also upset with the Haiti Interim Recovery Commission, which directs the spending of nearly 10 billion dollars in aid money. A majority of the commission members are foreigners, though Préval has a final veto on all decisions.
"If they want to suppress the protest, why didn't they shoot the gas at the school where the students are?" asked Malia Villa, an organiser with the Haitian women's group KOFAVIV, who fled the Chanmas area Monday night. "How can they shoot it in the middle of the camp, where we have children and families? They say they're here for security in the country, but how can the government work with them now when they do this?"
"We can't continue to tolerate this anymore. It's revolting to us," she told IPS, throwing up her hands.
U.N. troops have been dogged by persistent accusations of abuse since their mission was established in 2004 after the ouster of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Incidents occurred in 2008 and 2009 in which Haitian witnesses said troops recklessly fired their weapons, killing or injuring civilians, while MINUSTAH internal investigations cleared their troops of wrongdoing.
Further political demonstrations are scheduled for Thursday, according to opposition groups.
*Ansel Herz blogs at http://www.mediahacker.org. (END/2010)
Haiti's Displaced Babies
Today we examined several hundred babies in a clinic in Cite Soleil. All were less than 5 years old.
EVERY mother told me that they had been displaced by the earthquake.
Some are living in tents and others are living in "tonels" made out of scrap wood, plastic, and junk, with a tarp for a roof.
The baby pictured above lives with his young mother. She told me that her tent had been started on fire by a "gang". Mother and the baby now live with a lady who took them into her shack in Soleil.
Haiti's Displaced Elderly
This is Yolande.
Yolande is 78 years old and escaped the earthquake in January with some leg injuries, but she just laughs and says they are healing "very well".
She lives under a large tarp across the street from an orphanage where I am staying in Port-au-Prince. Under the tarp is a little tent that she sleeps in with a daughter and grandson.
The blue tarp was donated by Buddhist monks.
Conditions inside this tent are quite miserable. The heat, humidity, flys, and rain drove me out quickly.
Yolande eats when her family can find little morsels of food or the orphanage manager gives her some rice and beans.
The Miami Herald had an article yesterday which reported that Haiti's elderly have been overlooked after the earthquake. According to the Herald, there are 200,000 people older than 60 years who are homeless in Haiti because of the earthquake.
And people like Yolande must eat to stay alive. Hard protein biscuits distributed by the United Nations are very difficult to chew when you have few teeth.
Yolande's spirits remain high as she smiles and waves hello in the morning. What will become of her and many other displaced elderly as Haiti's rainy season really takes off?
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Sean Penn's Testimony to Senate Foreign Relations Committee Testimony on Rebuilding Haiti
Here's today's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Please continue to support our neighbors in Haiti. - Sean Penn
Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, my name is Sean Penn. I have been in Haiti as Director and CEO of my NGO J/P Haitian Relief Organization, and have been on the ground in Haiti since the first week following January's earthquake. Since that time, my team and I have lived in a tent camp in the Bourdon area of Port au Prince, adjacent to and administering aid to a 55,000 person IDP camp, one of the largest ad-hoc camps in the country. My organization has been designated by the UN International Office of Migration as camp management for this IDP camp.
From our first days in Haiti, my team and I witnessed amputations without anesthesia or IV pain medication, things we soon were able to supply to hospitals and clinics throughout the city and the country. Limbs severed in spontaneously raised tent operating rooms, dusty and mosquito ridden. Limbs severed from children with tools more familiar to our local hardware store than to those we traditionally expect in the hands of surgeons. It is true that this stage of post quake trauma and drama has largely subsided.
Only 2 weeks ago however, a less tangible, visible or fundable emergency raised its head. Our camp clinic diagnosed what became the first confirmed case of diphtheria. I rode in the back of the ambulance while the patient was refused from several hospitals because the 15-year-old boy, Oriole Lynn Peter, was diagnosed with a disease for which those hospitals had no treatment capability. In this city of ruins, 5 fully functional hospitals have been allowed to close despite these emergent disasters, facing financial under-support and over-scrutiny. In many cases, the bureaucracy of international aid is protecting people to death. Diphtheria is among the first five things that an American traveling to Haiti is inoculated against, and yet, in this devastated country with hundreds of millions of American donated dollars of dedicated emergency aid and billions pledged for reconstruction, there were no isolation wards, few ventilators, and despite the all out last minute efforts of the American Red Cross, the administrations of every major hospital in the city, the dedicated and beyond job description effort of the commander of the US military forces in Haiti (Major General Trombitas), the WHO, USAID, and the CDC, along with a fractured Haitian Ministry of health, it took 14 hours between all of these organizations to locate a single patient dose of the immunoglobulin that would likely have saved this 15 year old boy's life had it been readily available.
As we rode through the rubble and traffic blocked streets in search of his care I held the ankle of an animated and normal 15-year-old boy who to his own knowledge was merely suffering from a sore throat and a bit of a fever. He couldn't have known that the grey hued bacteria would kill him within a day and a half and it did. Since that day, a series of diphtheria cases have come to light, including another one in our camp brought to our hospital four days ago. But diphtheria is only one of many diseases that threaten, in particular, the 1.8 million displaced today, living in compressed and unsanitary camps, where tent to tent construction would take one match to create the inferno that could incinerate thousands. In a city with nearly no access to electricity there is little fuel to run generators, few lights to generate, and the rapes of women and children occur at will. It will be the rain of this season that spreads the diarrheal diseases that globally finds its victims - 80% among children under 5. There are hundreds of thousands of them in Port au Prince alone. It should be said that while there are claims to grand programs of immunization it is the simple truth that most Haitians remain unprotected and that there is little evidence that those that have been immunized have records or access to establish boosters and follow up necessary with all immunizations. It should also be said that in a city the size of Port au Prince, as with all the densely populated areas in Haiti, the idea that, as in the case with the diphtheria immunoglobulin, a single warehouse maintains what little supply may exist is an unacceptable acceptance.
Prevention is difficult to get people excited about. But cold chains for the transport and preservation of these necessary immunizations and treatments must be established throughout Port au Prince and Haiti, as must stockpiles of the necessary remedies for the dehydration that comes with diarrheal diseases. It must also be said that the quality and training of pre quake health care in Haiti was already at a minimum and that with the death and flight of so many among the most capable in the Haitian medical community, that it will be some time before the international medical staff will be relieved of the humanitarian and training demand.
I come here today as a witness not only to a state of current emergency but also to the heroic efforts of United States and international doctors, soldiers and relief workers, of the NGOs in partnership and service with the great Haitian people and their government. I come here today in the hope that we will address, with bold clarity, the razor's edge upon which Haiti lies, so that all that our own country has given in sacrifice and service will not be washed away with this rainy season and leave bright and dancing Haitian eyes to go still in death from disease and flood, and God forbid the man made disaster of violent unrest. From President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton and Secretary of Defense Gates and throughout the policies and generosities offered to this situation to date, the United States can hold its head very high. The compassionate and no nonsense posture of our military has been moving and inspiring. But, with the official "emergency phase" declared over, as most of them redeploy into other struggles, we owe it to all of them and to ourselves in re-establishing the character of American foreign policy to stay the course in Haiti.
Make no mistake, this is a war against our ally and neighbor, and we have only this chance to show the world that we are willing to fight that war to save its victims and are not dependent on hating and killing their assailant. It is a war against the diseases and preventable disasters caused by nature and poverty. We must also not underestimate the likelihood, known to all of us on the ground in Haiti, of violent social unrest. As Americans, we should call on the Government of Haiti and on our own government, to acknowledge that a state of emergency still exists. To demand FULL TRANSPARENCY in the way that aid is distributed and accountability for how aid organizations advertise themselves in the solicitation of funds. Full and total transparency. Now is the time for all concerned parties to acknowledge that an "emergency phase" is simply an economic determination, and that the prevention of foreseeable human tolls on massive levels, in particular young children, cannot be summarily dismissed by the aspiration of a monumental reconstruction, offering empowerment, demanding independence and governance, or claiming it as a distraction from the rebuilding of a country that in many ways was never built in the first place.
The Haitian people are as strong and resilient as any I have ever seen. There are great lessons of character for our country to learn from Haitians. President Preval and his administration have proven in their pre-quake efforts the will of Haiti to overcome its devastating legacy. But to demand of them, or encourage their demand of a fractured society's independence prematurely, will be murder by another name. Issues of equity in distribution of aid are a fine aspiration, but when the emergency room has got a line out the door and the hospital pharmaceutical stockpile has not been inventoried, we have to find a way to treat patients while the counting is done and not leave them at the door to die on the street.
I am, and I believe I speak for all responsible aid workers, in full support of parallel planning in reconstruction and the nurturing of an independent peoples self reliance. But as we punish those who are lazy, punish those who are corrupt, so shall we kill the innocent and the willful. In an emergency, donors offer money and expect it to be spent helping people. I hope we are here today to encourage just that. Thank you.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
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