New hotels arise amid ruins in Haitian capital

By TRENTON DANIEL Associated Press

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Glimmers of hope are coming to this devastated capital and its surrounding cities, as the concrete Royal Oasis hotel rises over a metropolitan area still filled with displaced-persons camps housing hundreds of thousands. Signs of Haiti's comeback can also be seen in the 105-room Best Western hotel being built within blocks of shanty-covered hillsides.

At least seven hotels are under construction or are in the planning stage in Port-au-Prince and its surrounding areas, raising hopes that thousands of investors will soon fill their air-conditioned rooms looking to build factories and tourist infrastructure that will help Haiti bounce back from a 2010 earthquake that officials say claimed 300,000 lives. Some damaged hotels are undergoing renovations.  Continue reading...

Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/2012/04/29/2315541/new-hotels-arise-amid-ruins-in.html#storylink=cpy

Hamilton pair enlisting Haitians in T-shirt firm

The Green Egg is the first contract partner of the Haiti Projects, a fair-trade, nonprofit sewing and knitting cooperative located in Fond des Blancs, Haiti. Situated in a poor mountainous area 75 miles southwest of Port au Prince, it was founded in 1995 and has US offices in Beverly, with the goal of empowering women in Haiti to lift themselves out of poverty, become self-sufficient, and strengthen their community. “It feels good to me that these little shirts can actually make a difference in their lives,’’ said Davidow, who runs the company with her husband, Steve. “It’s got a very powerful meaning for me. It’s amazing that these little shirts can do so much for somebody.’’

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Cadets Commit to Improving Conditions in Haiti

LEXINGTON, Va., April 16, 2012 -- “Anpil, anpil.”

These words, in Haitian Creole, expressed the intensity of one man’s joy at the arrival of VMI cadets to lay the groundwork for a new clinic to serve his village.

Ten cadets in VMI’s Engineers Without Borders chapter, led by Maj. Tim Moore ’97, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, worked toward establishing the clinic in Zoranger, Haiti, during spring furlough, March 10-17. The cadets were supporting the operations of Foundation Manmo, an organization formed by Haitian Rosemona Gedeon to serve the children living in Zoranger.

Continue reading...

Sean Penn says he's in Haiti for the long haul

By BEN FOX and TRENTON DANIEL; AP

Posted: Sunday, Apr. 22, 2012

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/04/22/3190504/sean-penn-says-hes-in-haiti-for.html#storylink=cpy

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti Sean Penn no longer lives in a tent, surrounded by some 40,000 desperate people camped on a muddy golf course. And he no longer rushes about the capital with a Glock pistol tucked in his waistband, hefting bags of donated rice and warning darkly of a worsening humanitarian crisis.

But the actor who stormed onto the scene of one of the worst natural disasters in history has certainly not lost interest. Defying skeptics, he has put down roots in Haiti, a country he hadn't even visited before the January 2010 earthquake, and has become a major figure in the effort to rebuild.
"At the beginning, we thought he was going to be like one of the celebrities who don't spend the night," said Maryse Kedar, president of an education foundation who has worked alongside Penn. "I can tell you that Sean surprised a lot of people here. Haiti became his second home."

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Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/04/22/3190504/sean-penn-says-hes-in-haiti-for.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/04/22/3190504/sean-penn-says-hes-in-haiti-for.html#storylink=cpy

A Poem by Kenneth Koch

  A Schoolroom in Haiti

In Haiti, Port-au-Prince, a man walked up and down the school hallways
      carrying a bull whip.
Oh, he never uses it, the school administrator said. Its purpose is only to
      instill good discipline in the students.
They were from fourteen to seventeen years old,
Boys in white shirts and white short pants. They stood up
And wouldn't sit down till the Minister of Education
Beckoned to them to do so.
They concentrated very hard on the ideas they were being given for
      writing poems.
After the officials left, they started writing their poems in Creole.
After four or five days they were asking to come forward and sing to the
      rest of the class these Creole poems. They did so.
This experiment was never repeated. The government became even more
      repressive.
One poem begins "B is for black, Bettina, a negress whom I dote on."
The assignment was a poem about the colors of the vowels or the
      consonants in the manner of Rimbaud.
What has happened to those poems? What has become of those students?
I have the poems in New York. In Haiti I had asked to teach ten-year-olds
      but I had been told
They won't be able to write well enough. The reason was they didn't
      know French,
Not well enough to be able to write poetry. Their native language was
      Creole,
The language they spoke at home, but at the Lycée Toussaint L'Ouverture
And every other school, the instruction was in French.
They were stuck behind the French language. It loomed over them a wall
Blocking out everything:
Blocked mathematics, blocked science, blocked history, blocked literature
While Creole stayed back with them, cooking up poetry
But that was all. For the most part, except for a few rich boys
Who could afford to study French in the afternoons
They were left fatally behind. 

______________________________

 
Kenneth Koch (1925-2002) was a legendary teacher of poetry, whose presence is still felt among the many young poets who passed through his classroom. He liked to teach elementary-school children as well as the usual graduate students; today’s poem, which appeared in his final collection, A Possible World, came out of a trip he took to Haiti in 1975, invited by the American ambassador to teach poetry in a Port-au-Prince lycée. As Koch later wrote about his poetry experiments in other countries, with their distinct literary traditions and contexts for poetry, "I did the foreign teaching, I think, mostly out of curiosity: to see if the teaching would work, and to see what kinds of poems the children would write. I didn’t think that the ease, excitement, and spontaneity, the quick and poetic responsiveness of my students at P.S. 61 in New York were exclusively American phenomena." As it turned out, despite the pupils' lack of familiarity with his teaching method and the atmosphere described below, Koch did break through to the Haitian children, using Blake's "Tyger" and Rimbaud’s "Vowels" as examples for them to follow.

NatCom introduces Haiti to Fiber Optics

(Picture credit Ilio Durandis)

Posted by Francy Innocent on March 31, 2011

Leogane, Haiti--On April 29^th, 2010, the Vietnamese Telecom (Viettel) officially became the majority owner of the Haitian national telecommunication company (TELECO). Viettel is a state-owned company. The transaction took place in Port-au-prince under the leadership of Viettel representatives and the governor of the National Bank (BRH) Charles Castel; other dignitaries present were General Director of the council for modernization of public enterprises (CMEP) Yves Bastien and Michel Presume former director of TELECO.   Continue reading...

Haiti: President diagnosed with pulmonary embolism

Apr 17, 10:04 PM EDT

By TRENTON DANIEL
Associated Press

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) -- Haiti's President Michel Martelly was being treated for a blood clot in his lung caused by an earlier surgery, a presidential adviser said Tuesday.   Continue reading...

McKenna Technical Institute

The Technical Center

To be called the Sant Teknik McKenna [McKenna Technical Center], this project has as its goal teaching boys and girls from Maison Fortuné, but also from the town, skills in such areas as the building trades, tailoring/sewing, auto mechanics, and agriculture. The Sant Teknik’s products and services will eventually provide income to make it a sustainable operation.  It will, in addition, become an incubator for small businesses in the area.  Continue reading...

 

Site Plan

US, Haiti kick off vaccination campaigns!

Apr 17, 12:38 AM EDT

 By TRENTON DANIEL Associated Press

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) -- Haiti, the United States and international partners are launching a nationwide vaccination campaign in the Caribbean country that seeks to curb or prevent infectious diseases, health officials said Monday.   
Continue reading...

Ms. Kathleen Sebelius U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary is in Haiti

April 16th.

Ms. Kathleen Sebelius U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary is in Haiti for a 2-day visit to strengthen the ongoing partnership between the U.S. and the Haitian Government and strengthen health services in the country, particularly regarding the prevention of infectious diseases.

Continue reading...

6 a.m. Mass in Hinche

Angels in the Dark

I’m sleeping on a simple cot in the Rectory.
Hinche, Haiti. 
Suddenly the night sounds of constantly barking dogs are overwhelmed by a hand rung bell in the steeple  of the Sacre Coeur church only a stone's throw away.
It is 5 a.m. 
More dogs bark. 
Roosters dotting the landscape begin their daily ritual. 
Hinche awakens in its darkness. 
And as not to have one forget,
allowing me to fall back into sleep,
the bell sounds again its call to morning.
It is 5:30 a.m.
To follow in what seems a timeless sense of space,
gentle voices of children can be heard,
singing hymns.
I listen mesmerized in a dreamlike state.
Voices from heaven I wonder?
It is 6 a.m.
Daily Mass begins in Sacre Coeur.
Darkness is giving way to lightness.
As I pray,
uniformed children of Carissade begin their walks to school.

- Steve Applegate 



- Video by Ed Gerardo

Pax Christi Haiti

We will be screening the video, Cite Soleil,  that has been selected for the New York Peace film festival.

Speakers Amy Watts and Manuel Padilla from Pax Christi USA will share the background of Cite Soleil, where Pax Christi’s work is being done. They will discuss how history, economy, stigma and violence often work together to create seemingly impossible situations of conflict and oppression.

They will share the work of PC Haiti and PC USA in addressing these root causes of violence and how conflict resolution and working with the youth are acting to transform lives and the community.

Together we can identify parallels to the challenges we face in our own metro community and draw on each other for inspiration and hope.

Sunday, April 29, 2012
3:00 pm – 6:00 pm
St. Edward Catholic Church

Bring a covered dish for a Pot Luck immediately following the presentation

For more information contact:
Patrice Schwermer
(757)575-­7002
or pschwermer@comcast.net