You Got Me Blogging

Note from Paul Clammer, a friend & writer of Lonely Planet Haiti (& Dominican Rep)

Hallo all,

As many of you know, I’m the author of Lonely Planet’s Haiti coverage. Like everyone, I’ve spent the last few days trying to get to grips with the news from that poor country, and in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, every day the news seems to get worse before it will get better. But having experience of the country, having friends there, knowing the names of streets of Port-au-Prince as actual places rather than random names from a newsreader has made the news particular bitter for me.

It took two days to get in direct contact with friends in Port-au-Prince. The phone network collapsed, but is gradually recovering. My good friend and fixer, Jacqui, came through OK but has lost her best friend, who was in the UN headquarters when it collapsed. Another friend of hers lost both his daughters, her driver lost his house and his wife was seriously injured. The place I like to stay at in Port-au-Prince, St Joseph’s Home for Boys, a truly inspirational vocational home for ex-street kids that also runs as a guesthouse, was totally destroyed, although mercifully the kids were OK. An artist I know survived, but his entire neighbourhood – he lives in what can only described as a shanty – is now rubble. The list goes on.

Every major government building is either damaged or destroyed. Several major hospitals, flattened. Two cathedrals, including the Saint Trinité with its wonderful murals that were a showcase of 20th century Haitian art, destroyed. The southern port of Jacmel – a truly lovely place with beautiful Victorian buildings and one of the best carnivals in the Caribbean – is also reportedly heavily damaged, and the road over the mountains connecting it to Port-au-Prince remains impassable due to landslides. It is beyond shocking and frankly speaking, it breaks my heart every time I turn on the news.

I’m not one normally given to forwarding email pleas for help, but as someone who really fell in love with Haiti, I can’t ignore events. I urge you to please give something if you can. In the UK, the Disasters Emergency Committee is the umbrella body of NGOs running the main appeal; in the USA, a list of organisations can be found on the White House website. Both the BBC and CNN websites also have good lists of those working on the ground in Haiti.

That said, I’d like to mention three excellent smaller organisations in Haiti worthy of your support – these are the sort of smaller players who inevitably get overlooked in the media scrum, but often have more focused and effective programmes working among local communities – essential characteristics once the immediate heavy lifting of disaster relief is over, and the media and world inevitably turn their attention to the next story:

Partners in Health – A medical charity that has been working in Haiti for a long time, building local medical capacity. Run by MD Paul Farmer, a noted writer on Haiti, it has a large network of Haitian doctors and nurses well-placed to offer immediate and long-term medical assistance.

The Lambi Fund – A smaller but highly regarded development charity. It offers assistance to communities outside Port-au-Prince (areas also hit by the effects of the quake) to help arrest the decline of the agricultural sector which has driven hundreds of thousands of young people from the countryside to search for a livelihood in the capital’s now-stricken shanty-towns.

Yele – A development NGO working mainly in education and community projects, but with extensive experience in food distribution and emergency relief. Yele was set up by the musician Wyclef Jean, who is also a Goodwill Ambassador for Haiti. It’s close ties to communities in some of the poorest and worst affected areas will be invaluable in the coming weeks and months.

Please feel free to post these links on Facebook, Twitter or your social media of choice.

Parts of the media haven’t been slow to point out that Haiti seems like a country from which only bad news ever seems to come, but the last few years really had seen the country begin to turn a corner. Security has largely no longer been an issue (the US State Department finally dropped its hysterical travel advisory last year), peaceful elections have been held, and some major foreign investors have started to return to the country. The tourism sector, once Haiti’s major hard currency earner, was also starting to pick up. It’s not all a bed of roses certainly, but the outlook was positive. But the legacy of long periods of political instability has seen Haiti’s infrastructure in tatters even before the earthquake. This is a country in need of serious and prolonged help.

Finally, a last word from the indomitable Richard Morse, who runs the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince (the model for Graham Greene’s Haiti novel The Comedians) and who is providing updates from the ground on Twitter:

“I’m trying to find a positive point of view and all i can come up with is: a lot of people didn’t die.”

Thanks for reading.

Paul