Today I work your field, tomorrow you work mine. Cooperation is the friendship of the poor [Masters of the Dew]

and Jean Bertrand Aristide

That [this] is the force of solidarity at work, a recognition that we are all striving towards the same goal, and that goal is to go forward, to advance, to bring into this world another way of being…………  I live in Haiti [In the Parish of the Poor]

There is no clinic in the whole of Canaan, a IDP camp of somewhere between 60,000 and 200,000 so for this group of women, members of Aide Humanitarian, Sunday was a special day.  The first tasks was registration and then on to receiving patients and handing out medication.

7 nurses attended 48 children 90% who had infections, flu and malnutrition. Of the 40  women who came, the majority had  vaginal infections and many also had eye infections from the dust plus 4 women were pregnant.  It was really an amazing day.  None of the women or children would otherwise have received treatment and even if they could have afforded to pay it would have taken them hours to reach the nearest clinic.

Over 300 women came on Sunday to attend the clinic and due to the nature of the illnesses, Rea and the other volunteers will try to return next weekend with another clinic.

Sorting out the medication in Solidarity House

Enough for the next few mobile clinics

Women in Canaan 1 waiting to receive treatment

Volunteer nurses

Nurses and patients

The plan is to try to hold the mobile clinic at least once a month but though it will be a huge challenge to find ways to purchase medicines and vitamins and to sustain the clinic, I have no doubt a way will be found.  If  anyone is interested in working in solidarity with this project and wish to know, more please email me at sokari AT blacklooks DOT org.

May Ayim

From Afro-Europe, a documentary “Hope in my Heart“, on the late Afro-German poet, May Ayim [in German and English] in which she speaks of her life, her poetry and racism in Germany.  May Ayim’s father was Ghanian at the time studying medicine and her mother German.   She was initially placed in a children’s home and later adopted by a German family.  In her poem “afro-german I” she gives us an insight into her childhood experience of racism within her adoptive family and German society:

afro-german I

you’re Afro German?

…Oh I see: African and German

An interesting mixture, hug?

You know: there are people that still think

Mulattos won’t get

as far in life

as whites

I don’t believe that.

I mean: given the same type of education…

You’re pretty lucky you grew up here.

With German parents even. Think of that!

D’you want to go back some day, hm?

What? You’ve never been in your Dad’s home

country?

That’s so sad….Listen if you ask me:

A person’s origin, see, really leaves quite a

Mark.

Take me, Im from Westphalia,

and I feel

that’s where I belong….

Oh boy! All the misery in the world!

Be glad

You didn’t stay in the bush.

You wouldn’t be where you are today!

I mean you’re really an intelligent girl, you

Know

If you work hard at your studies,

you can help your people in Africa, see: ….

 

There is a deeper story of May Ayim in that she suffered from depression and had multiple medical problems.  After at least one  previous suicide attempt she finally killed herself by jumping on August 9th, 1996.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

REVIEWS

A richness of voices, a multiplicity of discourses, a quiverful of arguments. African queers writing for each other, theorizing ourselves, making our movements visible. This is a book we have hungered for. – - Shailja Patel award-winning Kenyan poet and activist, author of Migritude

All too often we read about African queers as monolithically victimized or as passive recipients of modernity from the West. What a great antidote The Queer African Reader provides to that narrative, with its diversity of styles, stories, memoirs, scholarly theory, art, photography, and deliciously combative polemics and petitions as rich as the diversity of Africans themselves! Listen to the poetry, feel the passion – love, rage, sadness, pride – admire the beauty, grow from the insights of Africans speaking directly to us about their struggles to be true to themselves, to their families, their lovers, their nations. This brave volume should be essential reading for all human rights activists far and wide in Africa and the Diaspora. Professor Marc Epprecht, Department of Global Development Studies at Queen’s University

The Queer African Reader serves as an amazing anthology documenting the struggles faced by African LGBTI people both in Africa and in the diaspora.  From personal narratives written by individuals like the late human rights defender, David Kato, to in depth academic and feminist analysis of the discourse concerning sexual orientation and gender identity in traditional African contexts, this publication contains a wealth of knowledge that can act as a starting point for various discussions concerning queer Africans around the world.  Hopefully this book will allow others from all walks of life to share their unique African LGBTI experiences. – “Victor Mukasa, Ugandan human rights defender and long term LGBTI activist”

QAR is a revelatory, path-breaking collection of writings drawn from across the continent and its diaspora. Ekine and Abbas have achieved  a huge task in compiling and editing 38 contributors who courageously share what it means to inhabit the precarious space that opens up between the patriarchal heteronormative regimes of the past and the radical possibilities heralded by so many personal-political struggles for sexual freedom.  QAR offers timely testimonies, a bold and defiant cacophony of voices that variously subvert the sexual-political despotism that relies on normative fear and hatred to resist radical nonconforming ways of being and enjoying sexuality and desire. The first of its kind, QAR offers a rich festival of material includes analytic and expressive prose, theoretical discussions, erotic fiction, journals, documents and representations from visual and performance artists, that work to share the disquieting realities of LGBTQI experiences, contradictions and political perspectives to life. QAR is a rich resource – a milestone in the self-narration of Africa by people who will be silent no more. Essential reading for the twenty first century!  Amina Mama, Professor & Director, Women and Gender Studies, University of California, Davis

Long awaited and overdue, written amidst burnout and premature death, in the front lines of Empire and gender violence, this first collection by queer Africans is no quick or easy read. The Queer African Reader demonstrates that urgency was never an excuse to leave anyone behind: unlike the depressingly streamlined movements of the global/izing north, they have ample space for impossible subjects that complicate the single story and expand who belongs in the movement and what it demands, from transgender to disability to healing. Written by and for Africans, this assembly of leading and emerging activists, artists and academics from the continent and its diasporas takes a leadership in sustainable, accountable community building that non-Africans, too, should learn from – while hearing the signal that queer and trans African have always been able to represent themselves. Jin Haritaworn  PhD, trans/queer of colour activist, York University (Toronto), author ofThe Biopolitics of Mixing and co-editor ofQueer Necropolitics.

Various launches will take place in the UK, South Africa, Kenya and the US and we will announce these as they happen.

Last Wednesday residents of Camp Bristou in Peguy Ville were forcefully evicted by agents of the state and local police.  Bristou is overlooked by Mojub school which is part of SOPUDEP community and many of the women, men and children who attend the school and literacy classes lived in the camp and the surrounding area.

In nearby Delmas, the residents at Camp Acra & Adoquin continue to live in fear of another fire or worse a complete eviction.  In addition to Esther Pierre and Elie Jean-Louis, another Chanjem Leson member, Augustin Dieudonne who lived close to the murdered man,  has also begun to receive threatening phone calls sometimes 3/4 in a day.     Last Thursday 7 plain clothes agents entered the camp at 11.45 pm asking for his whereabouts. Fortunately he was warned and was able to leave.  His family have now left for their own safely.  He is fearful as he believes the police have fixated on the three activists and will not stop until they are dead.   People in the camp are afraid and many of them are hungry and sick.

Bristou camp is the third forced eviction in Petion-Ville this year.  Along with the destruction of the camps is the daily harassment of street vendors and market women.  The attacks are vicious as police and other security bulldoze, ransack and sometimes burn down the public spaces.  Every few days agents of the mayor, young men wearing yellow  or green t-shirts and armed with sticks drive up in trucks and proceed to destroy stalls, scatter food and chase the vendors up and down the streets.   Many of the women from the FASA micro-credit which provides small loans to street vendors working in Petion-Ville, have lost their goods and much of their trade as they now have to hide on side streets with small baskets in case they need to run.  On Saturday I learned that all vendors and kiosks selling on the only Jalouzi street would have to leave as the government planned to rebuild the steep hillside road.   No one is arguing against the building of the road  even though most Jalouzi residents do not have cars and the road is way to narrow for tap taps.  But this development should not be at the expense of poor women who have no other way to earn a living other than to sell on the streets or kiosks.

Flaurantine Enise who has a small kiosk selling non-prescription drugs is one of the women who will loose her trade.  As I sat with her,  her faced taught with the strain at this latest act of violence she explained how the kiosk supports the whole family, 4 adults, 2 teenagers and her granddaughter.  Her two sons cannot go to college because they can hardly afford to feed themselves let alone pay school fees. Occasionally they find work for 50/100 gdes [$1/2]    Her youngest daughter has a heart condition and much of the family’s income goes on her medical expenses.   And people ARE hungry.  Many people who do not eat from one day to the next. People who get sick from burning in their stomachs because they have no food to eat.   A  man who knows my host, walked across the city to our house to ask if he could take some breadfruit for himself and his family.  He said they had not eaten properly for days.   Another young man sent me a text saying he was ill with a fever.  I went to meet him and he could hardly stand.  He eventually admitted he had not eaten for days.  People are hungry everywhere and for many children, death is a real possibility.  This report from  Belle Anse in southern Haiti states two out of three people have insufficient and irregular food.

6.7 million, or a staggering 67 percent of the population that goes without food some days, can’t afford a balanced diet or has limited access to food, according to surveys by the government’s National Coordination of Food Security. As many as 1.5 million of those face malnutrition and other hunger-related problems.

I don’t doubt these figures but the report completely ignores UN and US complicity Haiti’s present situation.  For example it makes no mention of  the devastation caused by cholera.  It  fails to adequately explain the US’s role in destroying Haitian rice and the livelihood of many farmers.   It mentions the low wages but fails to make the connection with corporate exploitation being pushed by the US and Haitian elite to use Haiti as a factory outpost of cheap labour.   For example many of the people who sold their land to accommodate the Caracol Industrial park have spent the money but now have no land to farm and therefore feed themselves.   Others in the city want to return home to the country where at least they can grow their own food but they are stuck in a cycle of debt and very often the need  for healthcare access,  however limited this may be in the capital, it is far more than in rural areas.

Hunger is not unique to Haiti but  set against the billions of dollars to fund an ever increasing militarization – the  UN / US occupation, a newly formed para-military presence on the streets,  private armed security and macoute like state thugs who terrorize market vendors and people on the streets.  Everywhere there are men with pistols,  automatic rifles, batons, sticks and AK 47s patrolling the streets of the central city parameters, in full combat gear, weapons at the ready.   In the US surveillance is carried out through the back door collecting data on everything we do.   In Haiti, surveillance of the popular masses is carried out in the open through guns and government thugs.   The UN continue to deny  criminal negligence in introducing cholera and NGOs, though heavily reduced in numbers, continue to plough the streets with little apparent benefit to anyone but themselves.    But worst of all Haiti’s poor have been swept to the margins, their livelihoods  often dependent on an assortment of religious missionaries, evangelicals and charities leaving them with very little agency or a sustainable future.

After months of promising myself, I finally started reading Jacques Roumain’s “Masters of the Dew“. I am still on the introduction which is quite long, where I came across this paragraph.   Before coming to a depressing conclusion it should be noted that ‘Masters of the Dew’ could also translate into ‘master of ones destiny – of imposing one’s will on the world’ in which case being fed up with poverty may well lead to taking action to end it – personally and or politically.

They were fed up with poverty.  They were worn out. The most reasonable among them were loosing their senses.   The strongest were wavering.  As for the weak, they had given up.  ”Whats the use?” they said. One could see them stretched out, sad and silent, on pallets before their huts, thinking about their hard luck, stripped of all their will power.   Others were spending their last pennies on clarin at Florentine’s the wife of the rural policeman, or else they were buying it on credit, which would sooner or later catch up with them.

Fonds Rouge [the village setting] was falling  away into debris  and the debris consisted of these good peasants, these earnest hardworking Negroes of the land. Wasn’t it a pity, after all? [P.104]

Recently Place Boye,  which up till a year ago housed a large IDP camp in Petion-Ville was opened as a new park including a basketball court.  [Back story was each family was given $500 to leave, just enough for one room rent for a year.  Now the year is over many are facing a second eviction from the rentals. ]     On the day of the opening by President Martelly a group of women from Le Phare in Jalouzi came down and demanded they be given the job of taking care of the park.   This was agreed and now there are 10 women and two youths with the responsibility of keeping the park clean and tidy.    They insisted I came to see them and everyone was smiling with double kisses.  A wonderful victory  as a group of women decided to seize the opportunity and took action to end their misery.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Recently I passed through the high security zones of Petion-Ville and Delmas on my way to Cite Soleil where policing is limited to the neighbourhood parameters. It’s very possible I was missing something and the police were hiding at the ready as the tap tap driver complained that he did not like coming to CS because there were bad people here.  Unfortunately with my limited Kreyol I could not understand the reason for his nervousness.   I had gone to visit with Dr Carroll at the  pediatric clinic at the ‘House of the Sisters’ * where he has worked for many years.  The clinic is set in a large tranquil compound with a school, a sewing training center for women and a nutrition center for underweight babies to attend with their mothers.  There are two security guards at the entrance but thankfully they are not armed.   As usual the shaded courtyard was filled with mothers, babies and toddlers. Many more  waited patiently inside in the large airy waiting room.

Lunch at the nutrition center for babies

It was already 11am and  Doktor John’s morning clinic had been running for a few hours.  I opened the door hesitantly and entered. He immediately greeted me and began to tell me about 11 month old baby Willgesta Pierre who needs hole in the heart surgery.  A previous patient, baby  Elie Joseph who at the time was living in the one of the worst camps in PAP, Aviation City  [a shameful reminder of the assault on human dignity and the failures of post earthquake humanitarianism]. Baby Elie needed similar treatment but died after his mother failed to get her passport to the Dominican Republic for the operation.   Dr Carroll described Elie’s death as a series of failures including his own

Big mistakes plus little mistakes plus big negligence plus little negligence all adds together and equals death. Just because his parents don’t know how it all works, doesn’t mean people aren’t at fault.

And we are all failing the hundreds of thousands of innocents living in the tents now. There is no urgency for the poor. There never has been.

I imagine Elie’s death was foremost in Carroll’s eyes and the need to ensure that baby Willgesta did not die through a similar set of failures.  Repairing a hole in the heart [ventricular septal defect] is just a 15 minute operation but it requires sophisticated medical technology to keep the blood pumping whilst the heart is being repaired, high medical expertise in a specialist pediatric heart surgeon, and reliable electricity, a combination not present in Haiti at this time.    Willgesta was admitted to hospital in April but needs her surgery quickly.  Already the pressure is building up around her lungs and if this continues she will need both lung and heart replacement which is not going to happen.  So now he has to sell the surgery to his local hospital in the US, find a surgeon willing to operate for free [this is the easiest of his tasks] and get visas for baby and mother all in the next few weeks.    In his words

There is absolutely no excuse for this baby to die – ZERO!

One of the biggest problem in providing appropriate and timely treatment is clinic hopping  Patients go from one clinic to the next  often without a clear knowledge of the diagnosis and or forgetting the treatment they received.   The lack of documentation is time wasting and patients are retreated for the same problems whereas with documentation the doctor would be able to see a particular patient has repeated problem and look for an underlying problem.   Willgesta is an example of this.  She has been to five clinics and all she she has to show is a bag full of payment receipts but nothing has been done for her daughter.  Now she is critical with fever and sweats and worse, possibly TB which is rampant throughout Haiti.  How does one begin to understand any of this when the struggle to pay for doctors is pitted against the struggle to eat. Three, four hours spent traveling from clinic to clinic, each time waiting in hope that someone will care enough to do something.

Earlier I mentioned the root cause of illness amongst Cite Soleil residents is structural violence – those social conditions which determine   ‘who will suffer abuse and who will be shielded from harm‘ and their discriminatory affects. [Paul Farmer**]. Lets take as one example the  cost of maintaining the 2012-13 UN occupiers which is  $648,394,000.   In contrast the World Bank just announced $70 million for maternal and child health in Haiti. We are told that 1.8 million  women, children and vulnerable families will benefit though we are not told the quality and quantity of that benefit and more importantly how much of that money will go towards operational and staff costs?    But its deeper than that as whilst any improvement in the access and use of health services is of course  a positive step, the real cause of illness in Cite Soleil and elsewhere, is due in large to living conditions and since  the World Bank money will not be used to improve these in any way,  then the programme ends up as a bandaid used to cover a bullet wound.

* The Rosalie Rendu Pediatric Clinic in Cite Soleil is run by the Daughters of Charity. The Daughters are Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul which

The Nigerian SSMB 2013 was passed by the house of representatives on the 30th May.  It is now in the hands of President Goodluck Jonathan who must decide whether or not to sign it into law. The US and UK have both stated that passage of the Bill would compromise some aspects of aid, possibly HIV/AIDS funding but I doubt threats from either are substantial enough to persuade him. It boils down to which pressure he feels the most – from his own government and lawmakers or from the foreign donors remembering that countries such as China are no doubt ready to fill in any financial gaps arising from loss of US/UK aid.     How much will there is for the passage of the Bill is not clear considering it has taken nearly two years between the 2011 Senate vote and last Thursdays lower house vote.    The original Bill dates back to 2006 and there are some differences in the wording but of most concern is the “Offences and Penalties” section which was originally 5 years and has now been upped to 14 years for civil union or marriage and 10 years for registering a ‘gay’ organisation or shows affection in public plus 10 years for witness too or aid and abet.  The Bill is also  far more precise in its interpretation of marriage which includes civil unions as follows….

means any arrangement between persons of the same sex to live together as sex partners, and shall include such descriptions as adult independent relationships, caring partnerships, civil solidarity pacts, domestic partnerships, reciprocal beneficiary relationships, registered partnership, significant relationship, stable unions etc

Whether it was the intention or not, the wording of the Bill reflects an admission that same sex relationships are ‘caring’ ‘significant’ ‘stable’ partnerships and their decision to extend criminalisation of such relationships is cruel and and assault on the dignity of all people irrespective of their sexual orientation to decide how they conduct their intimate life in public and in the domestic sphere.  It now remains for Nigerian and African civil society and human rights orgnasations to add their voice in support of GLBTIQ rights in Nigeria and across the continent.

The 2011 Bill can be downloaded here 

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.