Cholera Video

See this.

You Need to Read This About Broken Promises

Read this.

3,333 Stupid Deaths

As 2010 ends cholera marches on in Haiti.

See this article.

Haiti One Year Later

Photo by John Carroll

Good article in the Oregonian.

Fidel on Haiti

Photo by John Carroll
December, 2010

Fidel hints at parallel between Haiti, Cuba
Tacit message: Solutions won't come from abroad

In his latest "reflection," Fidel Castro appears to draw a parallel between Haiti and Cuba, hinting at the catastrophic effects of forcing a nation to globalize when it's simply not ready.

To do so, Castro takes on the voice of Brazilian diplomat Ricardo Seitenfus, who last year was appointed special representative of the Organization of American States in Haiti. Seitenfus was abruptly removed from his post last week, on Dec. 25, presumably for statements he made Dec. 20 to the Swiss newspaper Le Temps.

In his article, published Tuesday in Granma, Castro uses one of his preferred literary techniques: to select excerpts from other people's writings to make his own point. Here are some of the Seitenfus quotations he chose.

"Force is what defines international relations with Haiti, never dialogue. Haiti's original sin on the world scene is its liberation. The Haitians committed the unacceptable in 1804: a crime of lèse majesté for an impatient world. [...] The Haitian revolutionary model scared the big powers. The United States did not recognize Haiti's independence until 1865. [...] From the start, independence was compromised and the country's development blocked. [...]

"They want to turn Haiti into a capitalist country, a platform of exportation for the American market. That's absurd. [...] One part

of Haiti is modern, urban and looks abroad. [...] It is a country open to the world. [...] More than 90 percent of the educational and health systems are in private hands. The country has no public resources to operate a state-run system, even minimally.
"The problem is socioeconomic. When the rate of unemployment reaches 80 percent, to send a stabilization mission is unsustainable. There is nothing to stabilize." [Blogger's Note: The reference is to the United Nations' Stabilization Mission to Haiti, which has been there since 2004.]

"Haiti is not an international threat. We are not in a civil war situation. [...] For the U.N., the purpose was to freeze power and transform the Haitians into prisoners on their own island.

"Emergency aid [from abroad] is effective, but when it becomes structural, when it replaces the state in all its tasks it becomes a collective lack of responsibility.

"For the transnational NGOs, Haiti has become in a place of forced passage [...] of professional formation. [...] There is an evil or perverse relationship between the strength of the NGOs and the weakness of the Haitian state. Some NGOs exist only due to the Haitian misfortune.

"Faced with the massive importation of consumer goods to feed the homeless people, the situation of Haitian agriculture has worsened. The country offers free room to all humanitarian experiences. It is morally unacceptable to consider Haiti as a laboratory. Haiti's reconstruction and our promise of $11 billion [in aid] stoke greed.

"[Haiti] is the sum total of our dramas and the failures of international solidarity. We're not up to the challenge. [...] It is necessary to go to the Haitian culture, it is necessary to go to the land. [...] Nobody takes the time or wishes to try to understand what I would call the Haitian soul."

December 28, 2010 in Economy & Trade, Fidel Castro, The Americas | Permalink



Read more: http://miamiherald.typepad.com/cuban_colada/2010/12/fidel-hints-at-parallel-between-haiti-cuba.html#ixzz19Si1O9Cr

Failing Haiti

Photo by John Carroll
Southern Haiti


From: Isabeau Doucet

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/28/haiti-cholera-earthquake-aid-agencies-failure
Haiti: where aid failed

Why have at least 2,500 people died of cholera when there are about 12,000
NGOs in the country?

Haiti should be an unlikely backdrop
for the latest failure of the humanitarian relief system. The country is
small and accessible and, following last January's earthquake, it hosts one
of the largest and best-funded international
aiddeployments in
the world. An estimated 12,000 non-governmental organisations
are there. Why then, have at least 2,500 people died of
cholera,
a disease that's easily treated and controlled?

I recently went to Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, and found my Médecins
Sans Frontières (MSF) colleagues overwhelmed, having
already treated more than 75,000 cholera cases. We and a brigade of Cuban
doctors were doing our best to treat hundreds of patients every day, but few
other agencies seemed to be implementing critical cholera control measures,
such as chlorinated water distribution and waste management. In the 11
months since the quake, little has been done to improve sanitation across
the country, allowing cholera to spread at a dizzying pace.

Ten days after the outbreak hit Port-au-Prince, our teams realised the
inhabitants of Cité Soleil
still had no access to
chlorinated drinking water, even though aid agencies
under the UN water-and-sanitation cluster had accepted funds to ensure such
access. We began chlorinating the water ourselves. There is still just one
operational waste management site in Port-au-Prince, a city of three million
people.

On the one hand, Haitians were deluged with text messages imploring them to
wash before eating, while on the other they had to bathe their children in
largely untreated sewer water. Before the quake, only 12% of Haiti's 9.8m
people received treated tap water, according to the US Centres for Disease
Control (CDC).

The road to controlling a cholera epidemic has been paved by hundreds of
previous outbreaks worldwide. Yet, in Haiti, there are vast gaps in the
deployment of well-established control measures. Now the epidemic is
nationwide, making more than 120,000 people sick and killing at least 2,500.

In the face of this ferocious outbreak, investigations into its origin have
not been released publicly, even though this information is fundamental to
understanding the epidemic's behaviour.

Hypotheses of cholera's origin range from the contamination of the river
Artibonite by UN peacekeepers, through climate change to voodoo. In the
absence of transparency, fear and suspicion have provoked violence. The
population's anxiety is only amplified by catastrophic epidemic projections
by the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO), a sister of the World Health
Organisation.

PAHO's epidemic modelling has not led to effective aid deployment. Huge
amounts of aid are concentrated in Port-au-Prince, while scant support has
been provided to inexperienced health workers in rural areas, where cholera
is flourishing. MSF teams have found health centres with shortages of
life-saving oral rehydration solution, and clinics that were simply shut.

It is against this backdrop that many non-governmental agencies have
launched fundraising appeals, even while their post-earthquake coffers
remain filled. The UN's Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian
Affairs(OCHA) has repeatedly claimed that
underfunding of its $174m cholera appeal,
launched primarily to benefit private groups, is hampering the response –
despite the fact that Haiti is the top-funded UN appeal for 2010. As nearly
a million Haitians remain homeless in the face of a full-blown public health
emergency, arguments that existing funds are tied up in longer-term
programmes ring hollow.

The inadequate cholera response in Haiti – coming on the heels of the slow
and highly politicised flood relief effort in Pakistan – makes for a damning
indictment of an international aid system whose architecture has been
carefully shaped over the past 15 years.

Throughout the 1990s, the UN developed a significant institutional apparatus
to provide humanitarian aid through the creation of the Department for
Humanitarian Affairs in 1992, later renamed OCHA, all the while creating an
illusion of a centralised, efficient aid system. In 2005, after the Asian
tsunami, the system received another facelift with the creation of a rapid
emergency funding mechanism (CERF), and the "cluster" system was developed
to improve aid efforts.

The aid landscape today is filled with cluster systems for areas such as
health, shelter, and water and sanitation, which unrealistically try to
bring aid organisations – large and small, and with varying capacities –
under a single banner. Since the earthquake, the UN health cluster alone has
had 420 participating organisations in Haiti.

Instead of providing the technical support that many NGOs could benefit
from, these clusters, at best, seem capable of only passing basic
information and delivering few concrete results during a fast-moving
emergency. Underscoring the current system's dysfunction, I witnessed the
Haitian president, René Préval, personally chairing a health cluster meeting
in a last-ditch effort to jump-start the cholera response.

Co-ordination of aid organisations may sound good to government donors
seeking political influence. In Haiti, though, the system is legitimising
NGOs that claim responsibility for health, sanitation or other areas in a
specific zone, but then do not have the capacity or know-how to carry out
the necessary work. As a result, people's needs go unmet.

While co-ordination is important, it should not be an end in itself. It must
be based on reality and oriented towards action to ensure that needs are
covered.

In Haiti, the cholera outbreak will continue to claim lives for the
foreseeable future. What is clear, though, is that the aid community at
large has failed to prevent unnecessary deaths, in a population already so
tragically affected by one catastrophe after another.

Cholera Epidemic 2,707 and Counting

See this article.

Photo by John Carroll
Cholera Treatment Center
Port-au-Prince
December, 2010

A Problem Worse than Cholera

See this post in Crofsblogs.

(Photo by John Carroll, December 2010)

Haiti's "Christmas of Misery"

Photo by John Carroll

This article is for real.

What is the Solution for Haitian Elections?

Photo by John Carroll
December, 2010

Posted on Mon, Dec. 20, 2010

Solution for Haiti's election? Depends on who's talking

BY JACQUELINE CHARLES
jcharles@MiamiHerald.com

In a traumatized nation with a poor history of clean voting, Haiti's recent elections were a disaster waiting to happen.
There was -- and is -- pervasive lack of confidence in the eight members of the electoral council because some perceive them as being hand-picked by President René Préval.

Allegations of massive fraud were rampant even before polling stations opened for the Nov. 28 presidential and legislative elections, whose final results are yet to be released.

And the international community, which paid most of the $29 million tab for the elections, vacillated between paternalistic bullying of Haitian officials and a hands-off partnership.

Now that same international community -- unsure over what should come next as Haiti's electoral commission delays the final vote count while technical experts from the United States and elsewhere sift through tally sheets -- is faced with how to get Haiti back on track.

What everyone wants to avoid is a downward spiral into chaos that will hamper future efforts to help the quake-battered nation recover.

The way forward is not clear, and there are no easy choices. They range from an outright annulment of the vote with an interim government charged with organizing new elections -- in perhaps two years -- to a power-sharing agreement.

Among the ideas that have been suggested:

• Cancellation of this round of elections and Préval's early departure. So far opposed by the international community, this idea was put forth by 12 presidential candidates in a letter-writing campaign with Canadian and U.S. lawmakers launched last week.

• A second round with the presumed top three vote-getters: Former first lady and academic Mirlande Manigat, former government agency head and Préval pick Jude Célestin and musician Michel ``Sweet Micky'' Martelly, whose backers set the streets ablaze after the council said he had been edged out of a runoff spot by Célestin.

Brazil has pushed for this alternative. Questions have been raised about the constitutionality of such a move. Manigat opposes it.

• A new winner-take-all election with all 17 presidential candidates taking part and appointment of a new electoral council. Martelly put forth this idea. Some say it has little chance of winning favor.

• A runoff with Martelly and Manigat, courtesy of Célestin, who would voluntarily withdraw. There would also be a runoff for legislative seats with the likely outcome of Préval's INITE (UNITY) coalition controlling a majority in parliament.

• A second round with Manigat and Célestin, after which the winner would face questions of legitimacy.

• Formation of a coalition government with the opposition.

``We now have an electoral challenge that is acute,'' U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last week during a visit to Canada. ``The electoral challenge, the instability in the government, the lack of a clear way forward as to who will be assuming leadership responsibilities, requires the international community to act and provide technical assistance, provide support for unraveling the complexities and questions surrounding the election.''

The story of how Haiti and its foreign friends reached this dangerous impasse is a tale of good intentions by outsiders clashing with the harsh realities of a nation with weak institutions, a shattered government and a history of electoral fraud.

``We've had elections since 1987, and with the exception of 1990, all of them quite bad. I don't think we've made much progress,'' said Robert Fatton, a Haiti expert at the University of Virginia.

Even before the November vote, many Haitians doubted whether their country could pull off acceptable elections.

While a gentleman's agreement to postpone the vote might have worked in some other countries, it couldn't in a nation with a history of dictatorship and distrust.

A national survey of 1,275 Haitians taken on behalf of the United States Agency for International Development revealed that while an increasing number of Haitians planned to vote, respondents were equally split on whether the elections would be fair or not.

In fact, the survey showed that 39 percent of respondents interviewed between Aug. 18 and Sept. 2 believed the electoral council was corrupt. Overall confidence in the council had fallen to 56 percent in June of 2010 from a high of 78 percent the previous June.

Weeks before the vote, Colin Granderson, head of the joint Organization of American States-Caribbean Community observer mission, remarked that the main obstacle to good elections had nothing to do with the technical expertise or know-how of the council.

It had to do with ``the total lack of trust in the impartiality of the [council].''

Préval told The Miami Herald earlier this year that twice he had changed the council on the recommendation of various groups and opposition leaders. Each time, he said, the opposition complained about the new appointees.

Haiti watchers say Préval should have recognized that it was in his own interest and that of the country's to completely replace the council.

Others criticize the international community, especially the United States, for wavering on how to handle the election. The United States, for example, went from wanting to stack the council with technical experts to changing its mind days later, without explanation. Adding to the challenge: The entire United Nations electoral brain trust died in the cataclysmic earthquake.

Failure to change the electoral council, said Mark Schneider of the International Crisis Group, a Washington think tank, ``simply fed the view that the electoral process was never going to produce a fair result.''

``Now what may be the only way to get any agreed-upon next step is for a high level internationally respected panel to review or carry out a verification process and make recommendations for a way forward,'' Schneider said.

Yvon Neptune, one of the few presidential candidates not calling for a cancellation of the vote, said the provisional electoral council is not solely to blame for the mess.

``What we are seeing now in the electoral process is a reflection of Haitian society. You take all of the sectors that are involved in the electoral process, directly or indirectly, and there is a question of credibility,'' he said. ``We are a product of our history. It has been a history of turmoil. It has been a history of corruption.''

Since doing away with dictatorship 24 years ago, Haiti has struggled to build democracy and institutions up against inequities in wealth distribution, a lack of rule of law, overthrown governments -- and now a feeling of despair after the January earthquake.

A deadly cholera outbreak and largely invisible reconstruction effort have contributed to the general atmosphere of gloom and disappointment.

Meanwhile, the international community has wavered between wanting to allow Haitians to chart their own course and getting more involved in the details.

``However unpopular Préval may be, he represents continuity, which is the single most important thing the international community values,'' Fatton said. ``In other words bad elections will be tolerated in the name of continuity. The problem though is that continuity is not necessarily what Haitians want.''

Some argue that a political agreement is needed now -- not later.

With opposition to Préval far from monolithic, he remains the key actor in Haitian politics.

Still, some in the international community have given up on the man once viewed as Haiti's ``indispensable'' politician. ``Eighty percent of the Haitians voted against him,'' said one foreign diplomat, since his candidate, Célestin, got only 22 percent of the vote.

That reality along with the accusations of fraud by INITE, and the fear of violence in the coming days, has diplomats wondering about what will become of Préval. Will he, like most of his predecessors, exit into exile -- or will he become Haiti's elder statesman?

Eduardo Gamarra, a Florida International University professor and political analyst, said the most important thing over the longer term will be getting a credible government in place.

``But that credible government will have to come from among the three [top vote-getters]. The question is who among them is best able to help Haiti on that path -- a singer with no real record of administrating, a former first lady who is dignified but has no real record or a man who has run a government construction company with extraordinary ties to the old Haitian establishment and all that means?''

Cholera Vaccination in Haiti Not Ready Yet

Photo by John Carroll


Read this article from NPR.

Listening to Haiti, by Danny Muller

Great article by Danny Muller in Counterpunch.

Please read it.

Incredible Widnerlande

Widnerlande has her appointment with the US Consulate in Port-au-Prince at 7 AM Thursday morning (two days from now)!!

This appointment will determine whether this seven year old little girl is granted a non immigrant visa to fly to the United States on Friday for her heart surgery. Widnerlande's surgery is scheduled for December 23 in California.

Please go to this post by Maria detailing Widnerlande's six year wait for surgery.

The Poor Always Pay, by Beverly Bell

Photo by John Carroll


THE POOR ALWAYS PAY:

THE ELECTORAL CRISIS IN HAITI

By Beverly Bell

December 13, 2010


The start of Haiti’s most recent crisis came with ample warning. Most
Port-au-Prince residents scurried to their homes mid-afternoon last Tuesday,
certain of the violence and chaos which would ensue once the electoral
council announced which two presidential candidates would make it to the
run-offs. The trouble-makers didn’t wait until the 8:00 p.m. announcement,
but started throwing rocks and erecting barricades by late afternoon for
good measure. By nightfall, gunfire ricocheted around the capital and other
towns. Through Friday, the black smoke of burning-tire barricades rose above
the small crowds who rampaged through towns, destroying shops and other
structures, burning cars, and occasionally shooting people. Haitian Radio
Metropole reported five deaths.

The electoral council’s results were as transparently
fraudulentas
the vote
itself.
The only candidate with popular appeal, Michel Martelly, was excluded from
the run-off. The widely hated president René Préval’s chosen successor, Jude
Célestin, was inserted into the January 16 run-off along with Mirlande
Manigat.

Scrambling to get itself out of its jam, the electoral council announced a
recount, but both Martelly and Manigat have rejected this option.
Cancellation of the vote is a distant option. The council’s routes through
which to backpedal appear blocked.

Meanwhile, on Friday, Sen. Patrick Leahy, who sits on the Senate
Appropriations Committee,
calledfor
President Obama to withhold aid to the Haitian government and suspend
travel visas of senior Haitian officials until “necessary steps” are taken
to guarantee a democratic result. And yesterday, the United Nations,
Organization of American States, European Union, American, and four other
ambassadors in Haiti
urged the
government on to the next legal step, requesting that the 72-hour period in
which parties may contest the results begin today.

The weekend brought calm - partial on Saturday and broader on Saturday. Some
ventured out hesitantly after days spent house-bound to stock up on food or
view the destruction, but still motor vehicles and pedestrians remained
scarce. This morning dawned as just another Haitian day, except that schools
remain officially closed. But there are more electoral council announcements
on the horizon. No one knows what the coming week will bring, but calm is
not high on the list of options.

The only ones who stand to gain from the current upheaval are the candidates
vying for victory, and the demonstrators and agitators they have paid. Some
acts of violence and construction of road barricades appeared to be random,
enacted by thugs who control various neighborhoods or others who were
perhaps simply bored. Those grassroots organizations who normally sponsor
demonstrations against Préval sat this week out; these are not the
activities of an organized pro-democracy movement.

As always, it is the poor who have paid the heaviest cost. For starters,
those who live from the informal economy have lost days of the miniscule
incomes which barely keep their families alive. The small army of vendors of
phone cards who congregate at gas stations, the men who peddle long-expired
medications from red buckets on their heads, the women who sell imported
corn flakes or second-hand underwear, and all the rest were not to be found
on the deserted streets from Wednesday through the weekend, meaning that
their families lost the few cents they make on each sale.

Those living in shantytowns where much of the violence was concentrated
could not leave their homes out of fear. Neither could those living under
plastic tarps or tents on the streets or in internally displaced peoples’
camps in volatile neighborhoods; they, moreover, could not even retreat
behind walls or lock their door. Numerous women in these settings, among a
circle who call me whenever they can buy cell phone minutes, reported that
their meager supplies of food and water ran out after a day or two. With no
means to buy more even if they could have gone to the market, they ran to
neighbors’ homes in calmer moments to try to collect small gifts to sustain
their children – sometimes with more success than others. Hunger, every
woman told me, has been the norm since Wednesday.

Yesterday morning, for example, one of my daily calls was from Dieuveut
Mondestin. She is a widow who lives with four children and an infant in a
tarp-covered lean-to in the shantytown of Martissant. She has no nearby
relatives, no job or other source of support, no source of free or nearby
water, and no electricity. Dieuveut had just returned from two days in the
hospital, where she was watching over her dead husband’s father who had
cholera. I ask how she’s made out these last few days. “I can’t suffer
anything I haven’t already suffered, so I still have hope. But it’s been
hard, hard, hard, I tell you. There was so much shooting in my neighborhood,
there was nowhere to run. I haven’t had anything to feed my kids. They’re so
skinny, even little Larissa; you remember she was chubby. They’re just
sticks now.”

This past week has also provided the perfect conditions for a spike in
cholera, what Partners in Health calls “a disease of
poverty
” which impacts those without safe drinking water. With roads blocked and
all but a valiant few health care and sanitation workers at home, much of
the humanitarian coordination effort in Port-au-Prince and other parts of
Haiti was in “lock-down,” a high-level cholera response worker told me on
Friday. My inbox brought an urgent call for anyone who could travel to ten
camps to deliver the cholera-prevention essentials of water purification
tablets and bleach. Clean drinking water, another essential, also ran out in
many places early on in the days of mêlée.

Because sanitation workers could not get to the camps, toilets and garbage
overflowed to extremes. (For a chilling account, see Sascha Kramer's recent
article in Counter Punch
.) The
sporadic rains throughout the week, moreover, spread contaminated water and
sewage, perfect vectors for the disease.

One eye-witness told me that the group controlling the burning tires on the
central Champs de Mars Boulevard refused to let medical transport vehicles
through. The street barricades and lack of available drivers limited
possibilities of the cholera-struck to get to health care centers during the
window in which healing is possible, which in extreme cases is as short as
four hours. Lack of drivers for medical vehicles also meant that corpses of
many cholera victims remained in camps, bringing serious risk of
contamination.

The socially and economically marginalized will gain nothing for their
troubles, as no president sympathetic to their cause is forthcoming from
these elections. None of the 19 candidates has been outspoken or active on
behalf of the needs of survivors languishing in camps, or on behalf of a
reconstruction process or economic model which prioritizes the most
vulnerable. The unknown Célestin, from the party that has failed the
citizenry, is so clueless about state responsibility that he even told a
campaign crowd, “To counteract this illness [cholera] is a matter of hygiene
more than anything. Hygienic measures, the state can’t assume that… It’s a
personal and individual matter.” [1] The right-wing intellectual Mirlande
Manigat briefly served as first lady in 1988 to the figurehead civilian
president of a military dictatorship, but is otherwise undistinguished.
Michel Martelly has made public no policy agenda, though it’s hard to
imagine that he could effectively push through any policies. His notoriety
stems being a buffoon and carrousing musician, known for such
non-presidential antics as flashing his bare backside in public.

A vote for Martelly, several people interviewed for this article said, was a
vote against the standard political elite. Human rights lawyer Patrice
Florvilus said, “The [people] don’t know if Martelly will give them anything
different, but they know that they won’t gain anything from the suits who
are the current politicians. Martelly is a product of the vacuum of
alternatives. People need an alternative to the current conditions of their
life but they’ve been totally abandoned.

“So many have been under tents for eleven months with nothing coming to
them. They haven’t seen any of the international aid. They’re at the end of
their rope with their social problems. It’s such a shame that politicians
are using them for their own political profit.”

Regardless of who wins and how, the next president will come in with
constitutionally constrained powers. Since the parliament ceded its power in
April to the Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti, a 28-member
body whose membership is 50% foreign and whose co-chair is Bill Clinton, the
president holds little power over the country’s future beyond the right to
veto the commission’s decision. With the World Bank as the group’s fiscal
sponsor and all the international muscle around the table, even that veto
option is unlikely to translate to much authority. This constraint will
remain at least until the commission’s current mandate expires in August
2011.

The electoral debacle appears to have one other beneficiary besides whoever
wins the presidency. It is the boys who, for once in this super-dense city
with almost no recreational spaces, have had endless open streets on which
to play soccer. Block after block is full of fleet-footed kids moving
between the broken cinder blocks which serve as goals. On an outing to check
out the state of the streets, I called out to one group of boys, “The
elections gave you your soccer field. You lucked out!”

One called back, “No way! We’d rather have a free election!”


Many thanks to Allyn Gaestel for her research help.

*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.*
[1] Campaign speech of Jude Célestin, Port-au-Prince, November 25, 2010,
taped by Reuters journalist Allyn Gaestel.

--
____________________________
Rachel Wallis
Other Worlds
Media and Education Coordinator
www.otherworldsarepossible.org
202-557-1449

Cholera Claims Young Victim

Photo by John Carroll


Five days ago a 19 year old girl was admitted to our Cholera Treatment Center (CTC) with symptoms of severe cholera. She had been in another hospital but had been discharged and sent to our CTC.

I will call her Magda.

Magda had all the obvious signs and symptoms of cholera. She had severe vomiting and diarrhea, her eyes were sunk, she was barely responsive, and I could feel no pulses in her cold arms.

Her mother came with her and said that Magda was pregnant but everyone was unsure how far along and Magda was not able to help with history.

Magda received IV fluids full bore for the next few days, woke up, and she looked some better. But she was very weak as most people are who survive severe cholera.

Yesterday, on Sunday, when I was making rounds in her hot tent, Magda cried out complaining of severe pain in her pelvis. Shortly after, while lying on her cot, she screamed again, and a grey sack appeared at her birth canal. The sack, which was her gestational sack, burst open with the egress of blood and water.

Magda was obviously having a miscarriage.

As I assessed this situation, I saw that her IV catheter was no longer in the back of her hand but was lying wrapped in tape on the floor of the tent.

So I hustled out to the main supply area and got another IV catheter and a liter of fluid. When I got back, Magda was sitting on her cholera bucket in no apparent distress.

I bent down and was able to look between the upper rim of the bucket and her hips and saw a perfectly formed baby hanging straight down from the birth canal. I could only think of one thing with this horrible scene...a black lynching in the South.

The baby was a tiny little girl a little bit longer than the length of my hand.
Her mouth was gaped open and her eyes were also open and staring at the sides of her mother's cholera bucket. The baby's umbilical cord curved back up and ran back into the birth canal.

So I started an IV into the back of the Magda's right hand as she sat on the bucket with her head down, and I opened up the infusion full bore. We then transferred Magda back to her cot.

Magda's pain had diminished significantly and she seemed stable. I placed the aborted baby between her legs.

After half hour had passed, we were able to deliver the small placenta. The placenta and umbilical cord were dropped through the hole in the cholera cot, I quickly baptized the baby, and let it slip through the hole in the cot.

As the baby fell into the bucket with a thud, I asked myself if I realized that I just dropped a dead little human being into a filthy cholera bucket in a sweltering hot tent. I realized it but didn’t think this could hardly be happening in 2010.

The unborn little baby girl had her chance for about five months, safe in Magda's womb, until cholera killed her.

Magda's father showed up and watched all this from an adjacent cot. He was drunk on clarin and crying.

So I continued the fluids and added 20 units of Pitocin to stop the bleeding in the uterus.

Magda's blood pressure was a remarkable 136/80 and she seemed fine for all she had just been through. Nineteen year olds can withstand a lot.

The nurses removed the baby from the cholera bucket and wrapped it in a plastic baggy and gave it to Magda's mother to bury somewhere.

Will this baby be counted in the 2000 plus deaths that cholera has claimed in Haiti in less than two months? Probably not.

But she sure looked human to me.

Haitian Contractors Miss out on Aid

Read this article regarding where the contracts are going to "rebuild" Haiti.

The Cholera in Haiti is not the Same Cholera in the rest of Latin America

The V. cholerae strain responsible for the expanding cholera epidemic in Haiti is nearly identical to so-called variant seventh-pandemic El Tor O1 strains that are predominant in South Asia, including Bangladesh.23,24 The shared ancestry of the Haitian epidemic strain and recent South Asian strains of V. cholerae is distinct from that of circulating Latin American and East African strains of V. cholerae. Patterns of DNA from Haitian strains and V. cholerae strains in a large collection held by the CDC, as determined by means of pulsed-field gel electrophoresis, also suggested that the Haitian strains of V. cholerae are most similar to recent South Asian V. cholerae strains.3 Our comparative analysis of the H1 and H2 strains and three CDC isolates indicate that the Haitian cholera epidemic is clonal. Collectively, our data strongly suggest that the Haitian epidemic began with introduction of a V. cholerae strain into Haiti by human activity from a distant geographic source.

New England Journal of Medicine
December 9, 2010

Senator Patrick Leahy Urges US to Decrease Support of Haitian Government

This action by Senator Leahy may help. Please read this.

John Carroll's Five Stages of Cholera

John Carroll’s Five Stages of Cholera...That You Won't Find in The New England Journal of Medicine


Stage V:
This is the worst stage. Patient appears cold and lifeless. His eyes are neither fully open nor completely closed. When an IV is started he doesn’t budge.

The doctor’s sphincter tightens and he is very, very distressed.


Stage IV:
Patient has palpable carotid pulse but no brachial or radial pulse. Patient barely responds to any stimuli.

The doctor is very distressed.


Stage III:
Patient has brachial pulse, but no radial pulse. Patient will look at doctor and respond appropriately at times.

The doctor is kind of distressed.

Stage II:
Patient has both radial and brachial pulses and has warmed up some. Patient conversant most of the time.

The doctor is happy.

Stage I---Patient has all pulses back and sits on edge of cot. And when asked how he is the patient replies, “ I am weak and my stomach hurts”.

The doctor is ecstatic with happiness.

Cholera Vaccine

See this NPR article.