Haiti: Building a stronger and more accessible society
The following is an interview with Gerald Oriol Jr., founder of Fondation J’aime Haiti and an advocate for disabled people in Haiti. The purpose of Fondation J’aime Haiti (I Love Haiti Foundation) is to implement a profound change in Haitian society by creating individual social and economic opportunities for Haitian youth, by removing barriers to individual choice. Gerald asserts that as many as 10 percent of Haitians are disabled, and that disabled people’s talents and skills are a great untapped resource for national development.
Gerald Oriol Jr. and Ethan Casey, Port-au-Prince, March 2010
During our three-week trip to Haiti from August 24 to September 13, we will be visiting Fondation J’aime Haiti programs and having further conversations with Gerald. These will be incorporated into Ethan’s new book about Haiti, Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti, and the video footage Ben will be producing on our return.
Watch Fondation J’aime Haiti’s four-minute video “Timoun Ke Kontan” (Children with Happy Hearts) on Facebook.
- Ethan Casey and Ben Owen
What is it like for you yourself, as a disabled person, to get around and do work daily in Haiti?
It is certainly a very challenging environment. The needs of people with disabilities are rarely considered in public works and construction. Most buildings lack ramps, the sidewalks are usually occupied with street vendors trying to make a living, there are very few parking spots reserved for people with disabilities – to cite a few examples. However, I must admit that I am very much fortunate. I have been able to overcome these barriers and participate actively in economic and social activities. I view these barriers in my life as an adventure, and I take it as a duty to fight to annihilate their impact in order to allow people with disabilities to have an active and fulfilling life.
Describe the work that Fondation J’Aime Haiti does.
Fondation J’Aime Haiti strives to provide development opportunities to disadvantaged youths. Furthermore, we aim to foster cooperation and understanding among communities in order to contribute to the emergence of a much stronger and more cohesive society. With that mission in place, we have implemented several programs, including a basketball and scholarship initiative. In regards to disability, we firmly believe that disability is first and foremost a social issue. If, as a society, we consider the needs of people with disabilities, there is no reason that this marginalized group of people can’t be productive and autonomous. To help raise consciousness, we have developed a radio and awareness program called The Voice of People with Disabilities in Action.
What sorts of programs would you like to see implemented, by either the government or NGOs or both, for disabled people in Haiti?
It is imperative that we develop an accessible environment. It is not acceptable, for instance, that a wheelchair-bound person must pay double fare for transportation (i.e. for himself/herself and the wheelchair) or that he/she can’t attend school because the sidewalks and buildings do not have ramps. Furthermore, I believe it is important that we put in place training and work placement programs. The vast majority of people with disabilities are living in abject poverty and do not have the professional experience to find adequate employment, nor the training to participate in income-generating activities. In addition, I cannot stress too much the importance of an inclusive educational system. Although specialized schooling might be needed in certain cases, the vast majority of people with disabilities can be integrated in regular schools with a minimum of arrangements and training for teachers. This will open doors to many, many people with disabilities and offer a positive experience to non-disabled children.
How can disabled people contribute to Haiti’s rebuilding and economy?
Under current conditions, Haiti does not have the resources to meet the needs of people with disabilities. Although this is a serious problem, it represents an opportunity to find alternative, out of the box, and sustainable opportunities. Indeed, the difficult economic situation makes the case for integration from a competitiveness point of view, as assistive services are extremely limited and underfunded. People with disabilities can be as effective as non-disabled people in the workplace, and in many instances even more effective. Furthermore, the integration of people with disabilities can offer a positive image of the country and even help reinforce solidarity in the country. Disability affects families from all backgrounds, rich and poor, and can offer an opportunity to build a better and stronger society, based on inclusive principles.
Seattle TV interview on Pakistan floods
This morning at 7:30 I went to the studios of KIRO 7 TV in downtown Seattle to be interviewed by satellite by BBC World about the floods in Pakistan. The KIRO producer, Bridget Turrell – whom I’d like to thank and congratulate for her initiative in helping bring awareness of the floods to Americans – asked me to give them an interview too. Anchor Chris Egert did the 6 1/2-minute interview, and they played a short part of it on the TV news at noon. The full interview is online here.
Pakistan Floods: Why Should We Care?
SEATTLE, AUGUST 13 – Yesterday a non-Pakistani friend here emailed me: “I wanted to ask you which you think would be the best organization to make a donation to for the current crisis in Pakistan. We usually give to MSF, but their website doesn’t seem to offer the opportunity to give specifically for Pakistan. Can you offer advice?”
This friend is British and greatly prefers British media outlets, but I need to believe that there are many Americans who also want to help flood victims in Pakistan – or who would want to, if they knew the scale and severity of the disaster.
Why don’t they know? We can, and I do, blame “the media,” but that’s unhelpful and ultimately a cop-out. Each of us individually has the opportunity and responsibility to be aware of every tragedy in our world, and we should be willing to exert ourselves to redress them. We’re all in this together. But the real problem is that there’s too much tragedy, and it’s happening too fast, and these days Americans are distracted and confused and worried about serious problems close to home, like our own jobs and mortgages.
This is understandable. But you need to know that all indicators are pointing toward an enormous, long-term human tragedy unfolding in Pakistan, and we need to do something about it, for several good reasons. The New York Times acknowledged one of these when – belatedly, in its first significant coverage of the floods that I noticed – it headlined an August 6 article “Hard-Line Islam Fills Void in Flooded Pakistan.”
A related point is that we Americans owe Pakistanis a measure of basic human respect and compassion, as well as gratitude specifically for the sacrifices they’ve made at our behest in several wars in Afghanistan. When we repay this debt, it will also redound to our benefit. “It’s high time we showed Pakistanis the best of America,” disaster relief specialist Todd Shea told me last year. “If you’re a true friend, you don’t run out on somebody when you don’t need them anymore. … Pakistanis don’t trust America anymore. We need to show Pakistanis who we really are.”
Todd Shea runs a charity hospital in the Pakistan-administered portion of the disputed region of Kashmir, where he has been working since the October 2005 earthquake that killed 80,000 people. He also responded urgently and effectively to the World Trade Center attack, the Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and the earthquake this January in Haiti. He’s currently on the ground in Pakistan, running medical camps and providing drinking water, food, and other relief. An August 11 update on his organization’s website suggests the scale of the challenge:
In a recent statement appealing for more aid to Pakistan, UN humanitarian chief John Holmes said: “While the death toll may be much lower than in some major disasters, taking together the vast geographical area affected, the numbers of people requiring assistance and the access difficulties currently affecting operations in many parts of the country, it is clear that this disaster is one of the most challenging that any country has faced in recent years.“
Thousands of people are camped out on roads, bridges and railway tracks – any dry ground they could find – often with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and perhaps a plastic sheet to keep off the rain. ”I have no utensils. I have no food for my children. I have no money,” said one survivor, sitting on a rain-soaked road in Sukkur along with hundreds of other people. ”We were able to escape the floodwaters, but hunger may kill us.” …
There is a desperate need to send more well-equipped medical teams to the flood-hit areas to prevent the further spread of disease. The victims of the flood have lost everything and cannot cope with potential epidemics on their own.
I’m writing this article because I live and work between two worlds: the mainstream North America that I come from, and the Pakistani immigrant community. My job is to help bridge the gulf in awareness and sympathy between those worlds. What I’m seeing right now is that Pakistani-Americans and their admirable and effective nonprofit groups are jumping once more into the breach, as they always do. And, as always, they’re confined – and confining themselves – to soliciting funds from each other.
The flooding is “well timed” in the sense that the fasting month of Ramadan has just begun, and many Muslims will be directing their annual zakat charity contributions toward flood relief. Pakistani-Americans are generally an affluent community, but there’s a limit to what they can do. Wealthy Pakistanis in Pakistan also need to help, and surely are helping. Just as important, we non-Pakistani Americans and Canadians must help. We also must somehow self-raise our own awareness, given the paucity of decent media coverage. This is important both for obvious-enough political reasons, and simply because it’s the right thing to do.
I see troubling contrasts between the outpouring of generosity and attention that followed the earthquake in Haiti and the averting of eyes from the flooding in Pakistan. I see several reasons for this: Haiti is nearby; the earthquake killed 200,000 or more people all at once. In addition, though, there’s the fact that Haiti is not a Muslim country. The earthquake fit right in with the story we were already telling ourselves about Haiti, which is all about poverty and tragedy. Dr. Paul Farmer sums it up pithily in the title of his book The Uses of Haiti. The uses of Pakistan are different. We need to move beyond the uses of both countries and toward understanding them accurately and respectfully, in their own terms. Our awareness of Haiti should be more political and of Pakistan less so, or differently so.
Anyway, back to my friend’s question. The short answer is that, as always, grassroots groups are more nimble and effective, and your money will be put to better use if you give it to groups that are nearer the ground. This is why the nonprofit groups founded and run by Pakistani-Americans are crucially important. I’m including links to several of these below, and I recommend them all.
I was jolted the other day when another friend suggested that being asked to donate to the excellent Islamic Medical Association of North America “could possibly turn some people off.” He’s probably right, but we goras need to get over our knee-jerk aversion to the word “Islamic.” Your doctor might be a member of IMANA. As a Haitian woman told Paul Farmer years ago, “Tout moun se moun” – all people are people. We’re all in this together.
Please contribute to flood relief in Pakistan through one of these organizations (listed in alphabetical order):
ETHAN CASEY is the author of the travel books Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti for publication in spring 2011. He can be emailed at ethan@ethancasey.com and his books and articles are available online at www.ethancasey.com/books/ and www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans. Until further notice, he is donating 20% of profits from sales of his Pakistan books to flood relief in Pakistan, and from his Haiti book to the Colorado Haiti Project.
Pakistan and Haiti books update
Dear friends,
After a too-busy winter and spring, I’ve been enjoying the summer at home in Seattle. This message is a brief interim update on my books and related travel. I plan to send out one more update before I leave for Haiti on August 24.
If you’ve read my new book Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip, please do me a favor by posting a comment about it on this Web page:
http://www.ethancasey.com/2010/06/have-you-read-overtaken-by-events/
Word of mouth is important to selling books. You can help me do that with this simple step, and by posting about the book on Facebook and Twitter, telling your friends about it verbally and by email, etc.
If you haven’t yet bought Overtaken By Events but have been meaning to, please do, from one of these two pages:
http://www.ethancasey.com/books/
http://www.ethancasey.com/books/overtaken-by-events/
In addition to hopefully being entertaining and edifying to you, your purchases help me sustain my work, and I donate part of all proceeds to nonprofits doing important work in Pakistan and Haiti. Purchases made during August will help support relief to victims of the flooding in northwest Pakistan.
As many of you know, I’ve visited Haiti many times since 1982 and was there most recently briefly this March. The horrific January 12 earthquake has compelled me to spend this summer and fall writing a long-planned book on Haiti. I’m traveling to Haiti for three weeks starting August 24, and will be finalizing the book after that and publishing it next spring. The title will be Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti.
I’m publishing Bearing the Bruise the same way I published Overtaken By Events: independently. (If you want to know why, please read http://www.ethancasey.com/what-i-do-and-why/.) You can support that project by pre-purchasing a copy, which I’ll send to you with thanks as soon as it’s published. To cover publishing costs, I need to pre-sell several hundred copies. Please help me do that by pre-purchasing your copy from this page:
http://www.ethancasey.com/books/bearing-the-bruise/
Finally for now, I invite you to visit and browse my new website, www.ethancasey.com. I’ll continue to post comments and updates there on both Pakistan and Haiti, as well as short reviews of books and articles I read and recommend. My travel calendar is also there. I have a full speaking schedule around North America throughout the fall and am hoping to visit Pakistan to launch Overtaken By Events there in February.
Join my Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
and follow me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/ethancasey
More soon,
Ethan
Ahmed Rashid on the ISI’s failure to control the Taliban
I heard Ahmed Rashid speak a year or so ago at the wonderful venue Town Hall Seattle. Although I had previously met him several times and read his authoritative 2008 book Descent Into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia as well as many of his articles, I was mightily impressed anew by his command, in person in front of a live audience, of events past, present and future in the region he covers.
This is to say that, while he is fallible like any of us, I take – and we all should take – any assessment or prognostication by him quite seriously as part of the conversation on Pakistan and Afghanistan. Below is part of what he says now about the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, and what its involvement in Afghanistan might portend for the region. Especially damning is his claim about the ISI and the Taliban – i.e. not the well-attested truth that it was involved in nurturing the Taliban in the first place, but his subtler but equally disturbing point that the ISI has never, at any crucial moment, been able to control the Taliban.
The quote below comes from Ahmed Rashid’s July 14 post “Petraeus’s Baby” on the New York Review of Books blog:
“The ISI knows it is holding more cards than any of the other regional powers—Russia, China, India, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, and there is little they can do about its interference in Afghanistan for the moment. Still, most of these countries would not tolerate an ISI-Taliban dominated government in Kabul, and eventually they will gang up against Pakistan, creating still more turmoil in the region.
“Moreover it is highly unlikely that the ISI will ever be able to control the Taliban. It failed to control the outcome of the fall of Kabul in 1992 or the rise of the Taliban in 1994, and it lost all control of the Taliban just before September 11. …”
