Haiti schools reopen for first time since quake



Haiti appealed to the world's nations to donate $3.8 billion dollars to start rebuilding earthquake-ravaged Haiti. In the first minutes of a day-long conference, the U.S. and the E.U. pledged more than two-thirds that amount.



Elene attends a math class at the Bom Berger Baptist School, Cite Soleil slum, Port-au-Prince, Monday, April 5. Schools are opening across Haiti's capital for the first time since a devastating earthquake hit nearly three months ago.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — The official reopening of schools among the ruins of Haiti's capital brought unbridled joy Monday to students like 12-year-old Moris Rachelle.
After nearly three months on the streets with nothing to do but help her mother look after two younger brothers, Moris wore white ribbons in her hair as she ran, laughed and hugged friends she had not seen since the Jan. 12 catastrophic earthquake.

"All my friends are here," she gushed, smiling broadly. "I'm happy they are not under the rubble."

Registration for the academic year provided a major step toward normalcy for Haiti's children, and offered the first sense for how many of them have survived.

But Haiti's hard-hit education system is just beginning to recover.


The yard at Moris' public school in the western Carrefour-Feuilles district of Port-au-Prince remained covered with smashed concrete, glass, torn notebook paper. Parents did not want their children to enter a pair of concrete buildings still standing for fear they might give way from damage or an aftershock.

And there was no sign of the tents promised by the Education Ministry in sight, so the school eventually sent all the students home until next Monday.

Only a few hundred schools are expected to open this week in a country where the quake destroyed some 4,000 schools. Many are waiting for tents to teach under because nobody wants to put children back under concrete roofs.

Some community-led learning centers already opened in homeless camps, but there had been no formal education in the capital until Monday, said Edward Carwardine, a UNICEF spokesman in Port-au-Prince. He said it was impossible to say how many schools reopened Monday.

About 40% of schools in the hard-hit southern city of Jacmel have reopened.

At Moris Rachelle's school, as many as 100 of its roughly 1,000 students died in the quake, including some buried in the rubble of an unfinished, six-story hospital that collapsed onto the yard during afternoon classes.

The only way to know for sure who survived was to write down students' names as they filed in Monday. Student council member Chilet Louis, a volunteer registering a line of arrivals in blue school uniforms, said it was his first time back since he helped pull bodies from the rubble that afternoon.

"It's good to see life starting again, but I also knew a lot of the kids who died," said Louis, a 22-year-old high school junior at the public Jean Jacque Dessaline school.

Educators say the regular curriculum will wait while they address the trauma of the disaster.

Administrators took groups of older students aside to talk about the quake. Without any psychologists available, they used a form of group therapy.

One by one, the students stood up and described their experiences of Jan. 12. One girl said she was so startled by the bodies on the streets that she didn't eat, bathe or sleep for two days. Another said she survived only because she left her neighbor's house for an errand a moment before it collapsed, killing everyone inside.

The group applauded after each student spoke.

The magnitude-7 quake that killed a government-estimated 230,000 people left the education system to start from scratch. The Education Ministry and all its records were destroyed, and more than 700 teacher and staff were killed along with an estimated 4,000 students.

Schools are expected to open gradually across the quake zone, with the goal of having 700,000 children back in school by the middle of May, said Mohamed Fall, UNICEF's chief educational official in Haiti. The school year has been extended until August to make up for lost time.

Even before the quake, the system was in disarray. Only half of school-age children were enrolled and the government was unable to support more than a handful of schools, leaving a void filled by for-profit schools with fees that put them beyond the reach of many Haitians.

Many Haitian children leave school to work at a young age. Others are sent by their families to work as servants in more affluent households.

Fall said that as part of the quake recovery, the Haitian government and aid groups are developing strategies to extend education to children who had been excluded.

"We want to build back better," he said.

For now, he said, the immediate priorities are to clear rubble away to make room for classes, assure parents that students will not be kept anywhere near unstable buildings and ensure a minimum of sanitation for children who are often homeless.

Despite the joy of Moris and her classmates, it was a nerve-racking day for parents facing their first separation from their children since the quake.

Moris' mother, 29-year-old Jerline Ceuid, said Moris could have walked on her own from the campsite outside their collapsed home but she wanted to check on the school. She was startled to see only the two single-story concrete schoolhouses.

"If she went into those buildings, I think my heart would stop beating," said Ceuid, who added that she has taught her daughter to avoid unstable buildings in case of aftershocks. "There is still danger."

A bulldozer and frontloader parked outside had cleared a path from the street to the school, but the yard was still covered with rubble, including a pair of dusty children's shoes.

usatoday

Little boy from album covers now turning the cameras on U2


Photographer Peter Rowen who featured on the cover for U2 albums 'Boy', 'War' as a child, is set to turn the camera on the band when he tours with them this summer. Picture: Peter Rowen


Peter Rowen as he appeared on the cover of U2's 'War' album in 1998.


Katie Rowen, Peter's 10-year-old daughter, imitates her dad's famous pose.

By Ken Sweeney Entertainment Reporter


Monday March 29 2010

THIRTY years ago they photographed him for the cover of their debut album.

But this summer it will be U2 in the frame when the boy who starred on some of their best-known record sleeves turns the camera on them at a series of gigs around Europe.

Peter Rowen is known to millions of U2 fans around the globe as the boy on the cover of albums 'Boy', 'War' and their 1998 singles collection.

But in recent years the 35-year-old has been finding fame in his own right as an award-winning photographer.

Recently featured in 'The New York Times', his studies of people including artist Louis le Brocquy and his own daughter Katie have won him a string of awards.

This summer he will shoot U2 as their 360 Tour, featuring a massive four-legged claw, visits European capitals.

Rowen's involvement with U2 goes back to the band's birth in Dublin during the late 1970s, when his elder brother Guggi, now a bestselling artist, was a member of punk band The Virgin Prunes and friend of Bono.

"Bono was a neighbour of ours growing up. I don't know why U2 picked me exactly to be on a U2 sleeve? I guess maybe I was a cute-looking kid," he said.

Photographed for U2's first EP in 1979, a year later Rowen was posing for the cover of U2's first album, 'Boy' and then again for their third album 'War' in 1983.

He claims neither release encroached on his life.

"You have to remember that U2 were a very small band back then. I was six at the time and hanging around with other kids. We wouldn't have been into rock music so U2 meant nothing to me or my friends," he said.

But would he ever be on another U2 sleeve? "Only this week I got an email from the world's biggest U2 tribute band asking would I pose for their album cover? I had to tell them I was busy taking my own photographs," he said.

- Ken Sweeney Entertainment Reporter

Irish Independent

independent

Haiti to use quake rubble in capital's rebuilding


People stand in front of the rubble of collapsed buildings in Port-au-Prince, Saturday, April. 3, 2010. A large-scale cleanup is just beginning to tackle piles of rubble from the magnitude-7 quake, which generated 20 million to 25 million cubic yards of debris


By MIKE MELIA, Associated Press Writer Mike Melia, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 26 mins ago
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – The rubble from Haiti's shattered capital is rising in heaps at the port, dumped for sorting and recycling by a fleet of heavy, exhaust-belching trucks.

A tangle of twisted metal and broken blocks, it's an eyesore for now. But officials planning the reconstruction see only value in the debris: material to build roads, expand the waterfront and try to make Port-au-Prince better than before the Jan. 12 earthquake.

About 90 percent of the construction debris can be recycled. Already, the rubble has been used to expand a jetty at the port and build ramps for heavy equipment involved in the cleanup.

"Debris ends up having a number of lives. It's not just to be gotten rid of," said Mike Byrne, USAID's senior debris expert. "The recycling of the rubble, and the potential uses of it, could become economic agents for recovery."

A large-scale cleanup is just beginning to tackle piles of rubble from the magnitude-7 quake, which generated 20 million to 25 million cubic yards (15 million to 19 million cubic meters) — enough to fill the Louisiana Superdome five times.

Trucks brimming with smashed concrete are now inching their way through the hilly, congested streets of Port-au-Prince. While most roads have been cleared enough for cars to pass, drivers say the biggest problem now is the return of the capital's notorious traffic.

"I can only make three trips a day, two if traffic is really bad," said Lucner Jean-Philipe, who waited in the shade as a dozen men tossed the remnants of a collapsed university wall into the back of his Mack truck. The crew wore yellow Haitian government T-shirts saying "Let's Stand Up!" in Creole.

Jean-Philipe, a contractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development, then drove from the Turgeau neighborhood to the private port, passing French and Dominican trucks that other crews were filling with debris.

At the sorting facility, which receives roughly 80 trucks a day, workers separate rubble, rebar and wood by hand — occasionally finding human remains from the quake that killed a government-estimated 230,000 people.

Stanley Louis, a Haitian-American manager for the Miami-based PHS Group that is running the project on a USAID contract, said the Haitian government told him to bury the bones. He is keeping them in a tent in hopes of finding a better option.

Once sorted, the debris is expected to aid a government rebuilding plan that decentralizes the country and eases congestion in the overcrowded capital. One key use would be to fill in a waterfront promenade in Port-au-Prince, said Gerard-Emile "Aby" Brun, the chief government adviser on debris management.

"The loss by nature creates a window of opportunity to do things a better way," Brun said. "I am convinced it will be a better Port-au-Prince in the short term, within three to five years definitely."

With the rainy season approaching, Haiti's government and international donors are focusing on clearing drainage ditches, many of which had buildings collapse into them. Crews are also targeting rubble that endangers homeless people camped along riverbeds and other at-risk areas, Byrne said.

Some homeowners and private companies have cleared out their property, and American aid teams pledged to remove debris dumped by residents in the Turgeau neighborhood to help them return home. But Byrne said the demolition phase and neighborhood-by-neighborhood debris removal will not begin until after the rainy season.

Scavenging has been under way from the beginning, with people picking through the ruins for bits of rebar and any other materials of value.

At a sorting facility beside the Cite Soleil slum, the contractor has dug trenches and put up razor wire around its boundary to keep people away from the piles of sorted metal, wood and rubble. Guards shoo away people who approach anyway through the swamplands.

Compared with other disaster responses, Byrne said debris removal in Haiti is complicated by its island location and the sheer scale of destruction in a city that often used weak, nonreinforced concrete.

He said crews also try to talk to residents in areas where they're clearing rubble because of the emotions tied to the ruined buildings.

"These were people's homes, their churches, their schools, their hospitals," he said. "We have to be sensitive."

yahoo

Haiti declaration of independence found in UK archives

April 2, 2010 12:42 p.m. EDT

London, England (CNN) -- A Canadian graduate student has found the only known printed copy of Haiti's Declaration of Independence, tucked away in Britain's National Archives, researchers said.

Duke University student Julia Gaffield found the eight-page pamphlet, dated January 1, 1804, while researching Haiti's early independence, Duke said in a statement Thursday.

The discovery sheds light on the early history of Haiti and the relations it had with its Caribbean neighbors at the time, Gaffield and Duke Professor Deborah Jenson said.

Gaffield is researching early 19th-century Haiti for her doctoral dissertation in history, Duke said. She did research in France, Haiti and Jamaica, where she saw a handwritten copy of the declaration in the papers of Jamaica's governor at the time, George Nugent.

It indicated there was a printed version somewhere, but it wasn't enclosed.

In late January, Gaffield went to London for research at the National Archives, where she found the printed declaration.

"I wasn't specifically looking for it, but I had an eye out for it because I knew it was missing," Gaffield said. "We figured there was an original somewhere, but didn't know if it still existed."

The declaration had not been misplaced and had been in the archives for a long time, Gaffield said. The period had simply not been studied in detail, and Gaffield said she figures people who saw the document before probably didn't realize what they had.

Gaffield said she was thrilled by the discovery, but had to wait until the end of the day to notify her advisers at Duke, in North Carolina.

"The archives are not the place to make a big scene," she said.

Haiti's declaration is only the second of its kind in the world, the first being the U.S. Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson and others, Duke said.

The pamphlet, written in French, has three distinct parts, the National Archives said. The first two pages are titled "Liberte ou La Mort," which translates to "Freedom or Death," in which the generals of the Haitian army sign their names to an oath swearing to renounce forever the French yoke or die rather than live under its domination.

It's incredible that the long search for this important document should finally end at the National Archives
--Oliver Morley, acting chief executive, National Archives

Next, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the general-in-chief, addresses the citizens of Haiti in an impassioned defense of independence and the destiny of the nation.

On the final page, Haitian army generals proclaim Dessalines governor-general for life and swear to obey without question laws issued under his authority.

"To bring this document to light in Haiti's darkest hour may be seen as a symbol of renewal and rejuvenation, helping Haiti rebuild its national spirit following the recent earthquake," said Ian Wilson, president of the International Council on Archives. "Julia's achievement in recognizing the significance of this printed document deserves high recognition."

Oliver Morley, the acting chief executive of the National Archives, said they were pleased to play a role in the discovery.

"It's incredible that the long search for this important document should finally end at the National Archives," Morley said. "This declaration sent to the British government by Haiti's first independent leader is of great historical importance to both Haiti and the British people, and provides unique insight into the first successful slave rebellion of modern times."

Jenson, a professor of French studies at Duke who has researched the U.S. publication of Haiti's independence documents, said the discovery also shows Haiti had a fully functional printing apparatus at every moment of the new nation's independence.

Researchers had looked for the printed declaration before, without success, said Laurent Dubois, a Duke professor of French studies and history and one of Gaffield's advisers.

In 1952, Haiti asked intellectual Edmond Mangones to find an original or printed copy so it could be displayed for the nation's 150th anniversary, Dubois said. Mangones searched in many archives in Haiti and elsewhere before writing with exasperation that all his searching had been "in vain," Dubois said.

"It is really beyond belief," Mangones said at the time, "that not even a copy of the original printed version has been found in France, or in England, or in the United States."

Gaffield's discovery, Dubois said, "has finally changed that."

Documents from Haiti's early history have not been well preserved and are scattered in various places, said Dubois, who is working with other historians to rehabilitate Haiti's archives after the January 12 earthquake.

Dubois and Gaffield consulted Patrick Tardieu, a noted Haitian archivist at Brown University, to confirm the document's authenticity.

"I was so happy to find out it was true," Tardieu said. "It is an important document, and its discovery is important news for Haiti's scholarly community and more broadly for the people of Haiti."

Gaffield said she hopes the discovery will remind historians, Haitians and the world about the early history of the only country in the Western Hemisphere where slaves successfully revolted to gain national independence.

"The Haitian Revolution was of immense consequence to Jamaica and other colonies in the Caribbean, as well as to the United States," Gaffield said. "This find is further evidence that there was contact and negotiations going on between them. Haiti was not isolated after independence and it played a complicated role in a world based on colonialism and slavery."

cnn

Haiti recovery will take decades, Vero Beach doctor says
By Janet Begley
Posted April 2, 2010 at 6:33 p.m.

VERO BEACH — When Dermatologist Dr. Neil Heskel traveled to Haiti at the end of March, he knew the situation in this earthquake-ravaged nation would be bad.

But what Heskel found was even worse that he could have imagined.

“Haiti is in a terrible situation, said Heskel, who is the president of the Vero Beach-based Haiti Clinic. “The need is enormous and it will be that way for decades.”

Heskel and nine other medical colleagues, three doctors, three nurses, one emergency medical technician and two volunteers, carried 21 bags of medications and supplies to their clinic on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. But the need was so enormous they opened a satellite clinic in Soutane, an even poorer neighborhood, about a half-mile away.

The new clinic consisted on an army tent pitched on a vacant lot. It opened to standing-room-only crowds, with many patients seeing a doctor for the first time in their lives.

“Many children had the orange hair and distended abdomens from a protein deficiency,” Heskel said. “We treated many infections with the thousands of medications we were purchased through donations.”

Housing remains a major problem for people who lost their meager homes to the earthquake.

“The lucky ones have tents,” said Heskel. “But most people are just living in the streets. There are pigs wallowing and kids walking through raw sewage with no shoes. I don’t know how it could be any worse.”

Throughout the weekend, Heskel’s team treated 1,170 people, with illnesses ranging from ringworm to scabies to vaginitis.

“We saw the usual and the worse than usual,” said Heskel. “And we saw many people with infections that we were not able to treat like malaria, tuberculosis and undiagnosed AIDS.”

If there is a bright side to the situation, Heskel said the Haiti Clinic is functioning better than ever before.

“We have a Haitian doctor who sees patients regularly and is helping more people with chronic diseases,” said Heskel. “And we know what drugs to take with us. But while the operation is getting better, there’s really no end in sight.”

Heskel urged local medical personnel to consider making a Humanitarian trip to Haiti.

“You don’t have to be the best ER doctor to make a difference,” said Heskel. “You just need to know more than your patients. If you want to do it, you really can.”

Universally, most American volunteers with the Haiti Clinic are anxious to return, Heskel said. “The doctors and nurses just want to go back and help,” he said. “The people in Haiti are so brave; it’s a daily struggle just to find food for their family and make sure you don’t die from something.”

TO HELP:

In addition to cash donations, the Haiti Clinic is looking for laptop computers to computerize medical records for patients they see in at the Mission Ranch.

Donations of new reading glasses would be especially welcome, since many of the patients are unable to see clearly. To make a donation or for more information, log on to www.haiticlinic.org


tcpalm

U2 fan finds the 'Achtung Baby' car of his dreams on Ebay
By DARA KELLY, IrishCentral.com Staff Writer

Published Friday, April 2, 2010, 12:29 PM


The Trabant used in the U2 Achtung Baby tour

A U2 fan based in North Carolina has finally realized his dream. For almost two decades he had his heart set on buying a tiny East German car just like the one he saw in U2's legendary One video back in the 1990s and this week the keys are in his hands.

According to the U.S. fan site @U2, a member known to the U2 fan community as Chris S. finally got his hands on a Trabant, one of the mass produced East German cars that was a favored mode of transport by U2 back in its Achtung Baby era.

In fact, the devoted U2 fan actually secured one of the Uno models, the exact make that U2 had hand painted by late New York artist Keith Haring.

A poster on the @U2 website writes: "Chris made arrangements to have it shipped over from Germany to Baltimore, picked it up there, and hauled it home to North Carolina. From what he can tell, Chris says he’s the car’s third owner since the video shoot and he thinks there have been some minor touch-ups on the exterior paint (mainly around the face and hands)."

"Overall," continued the fellow fan, "the car’s not in great shape, the rear window on the driver’s side is missing and the window on the driver’s door is stuck and won’t roll up, so years of rain and snow have damaged the interior."

During the Zoo TV Tour back in 1992, U2 featured a small fleet of brightly painted Trabants on stage. The four cars recently hung in the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland as part of a special U2 exhibit.

The Trabant was once the most commonly driven car in Eastern Germany, but nowadays it's either a hated symbol of Soviet oppression or a worthless heap of junk that's actually smaller in size than a mini. For a precious few like Chris S., it's an enduring link to the Irish supergroup and a dream come true at last

irishcentral

A witness to disaster

Bruce French talks about helping Haiti
By REILLY CAPPS
Writer

Published: Sunday, March 28, 2010 8:11 AM CDT

It doesn’t end, the suffering — not in Haiti, where the suffering is both so big that it’s uncountable — 200,000 to 270,000 dead — and also so small that it rolls by unnoticed … except by people like Bruce French, a local who’s spent more than a month there helping. Last week he watched a legless man sit in a shiny new wheelchair. But the man hadn’t yet learned to control it. And, on a traffic-filled, rubble-strewn road, the wheelchair gathered speed, and the man bounced off vehicles and crashed into a curb, and a guy who’d already lost both legs in the quake lost some teeth, too.

“Every day, thousands of volunteers from around the world come and go from Mais Gate Airport,” French wrote in an e-mail. “NO ONE leaves here untouched.”

French sees more than most. He’s an average guy who has become a witness to disaster. The bigger the disaster, the faster and farther French goes, on his own, and the longer he stays to try and do his small part to pick up and patch together the mutilated world.

Right after the horrific Asian tsunami of 2004, he rushed to Sri Lanka and spent five months there, then returned time and again to help.

And so French has become an expert on the ways the Earth can kill.

“In my perspective, this has been worse,” he said by phone from his refugee camp near Port au Prince. “A lot of the debris from the tsunami was either shoved kilometers into the jungle or pulled into the ocean as the waves retreated.”

In Haiti, everything fell straight down.

“In every direction there’s something destroyed,” French said. “Everywhere you look, human mass amongst collapsed concrete, tangled rebar and crushed vehicles. Millions of tons of rubble. … The destruction is more ‘Mad Max’ apocalyptic compared to, say, Hiroshima.”

There’s so much debris in Haiti that it literally lines the streets, he wrote. And people are afraid to clear out the debris of their homes because their relatives are buried beneath. They’re afraid to sleep indoors, so tens of thousands sleep in the street.

He hadn’t intended to get involved in another disaster. He happened to be in Panama when the earthquake hit Jan. 12, and didn’t even hear about it for a while. But when he got to a computer he found notes from friends from the Sri Lankan disaster effort telling him he ought to get to Haiti.

Bruce French normally works for rock stars, as a private chef for Pearl Jam and U2, and will probably leave Haiti in May so he can go be the private chef on tour for U2 or Rush. But in Sri Lanka, he became a kind of film star himself, as one of the subjects of a documentary called “The Third Wave.” Sean Penn got involved with the movie and entered it at Cannes.

And since Penn, an actor who rushes in to disasters, had already showed up to Haiti, French headed to where Penn had set up a relief operation.

Now he’s living in a camp in Pétionville, on what was once a golf course, on the outskirts of Port au Prince, he wrote, “lending my chi and post tsunami experience to coordination/camp management efforts” with Penn’s non-profit, “providing relief services.”

“My/our presence has brought some semblance of order, even tranquility to some challenging and deadly moments,” he wrote.

He sleeps in a tent under a tarp, on top of a hill that overlooks 50,000 displaced people, along with doctors and staff and a “gaggle of orphans, dissembled families and a stray kitten.”

French knows the good aid workers can do. He has returned to Sri Lanka — twice last year alone — and seen it come back from the dead. Some of the projects that he helped set up are still going: a couple bakeries, a coconut oil mill, a couple machine shops that make cement bricks. “Little things to get people back on their feet and some semblance of normality,” French said.

To him, amid all the disaster in Haiti, he finds vibrancy, a thriving culture, and hope. In the refugee camp there’s a thriving marketplace selling rice, charcoal, chicken, beans, soda and beer.

He’s amazed by that. Beer. In the middle of all the death.

French has given up so much. “I surely didn’t get my money’s worth out of my ski pass,” he said. “My personal bank account is in shambles,” he wrote. But he doesn’t much care. He’s more than willing to give.

It’s easy to get hyperbolic and hagiographic about him, and paint French as some kind of hero instead of a servant, but, well, you know. There are ethicists who say that men should be judged by what they do for the least of their brothers and sisters, and French finds the very least brothers and sisters on Earth, and he does very much.

Of course, there’s only so much anybody can do. The rains are coming, and when they come life will be even harder than it is now, for that market in the camp, the one that sells beer and gives him so much hope, sits in the path of the coming floods.

telluridenews