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Haiti

Society

Thumbs Out For Higher Education? Why Haitian Students Have To Hitchhike To Class

For some Haitian students, navigating dangerous, dilapidated roads or catching a rider with a stranger is the only way to get to class.

CAP-HAÏTIEN — Sherlyne Ligène spent five years studying to achieve her dream of becoming a fashion designer, but completing her studies wasn’t the biggest challenge she faced.

To access her classes — at the Université Publique du Nord au Cap-Haïtien, a public university, and at SOS Children’s Villages, a vocational school just over half a mile away — she had to navigate a long, dusty dirt road with no public transport options other than motorbike taxis. It’s the only route available to students traveling from the north of Haiti’s second-largest city to both colleges. For those who cannot regularly fund motorbike taxis, hitchhiking is their only option.

Ligène, who graduated in 2021 and now runs her own business selling her clothing and accessory creations, says the 30-minute journey by motorbike taxi to get to school via the neighborhood of Haut-du-Cap cost 150 Haitian gourdes (approximately 1 United States dollar); with no money coming in, she couldn’t fund this mode of transport, so she hitchhiked each day.

“There were drivers who sometimes pretended to give us a ride,” Ligène says. “We see them slow down but as soon as we start walking toward them, they drive off. This is very humiliating, especially when other people are watching.”

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Kenya Is Coming To Help Haiti — And Where Are Our Neighbors From The Americas?

A lack of action by countries in the Western Hemisphere could increase the risk of Haiti truly turning into a failed state.

-Analysis-

The kidnapping and subsequent release of U.S. nurse Alix Dorsainvil and her young daughter in Haiti in early August drew brief international attention to crime in the impoverished Caribbean nation.

But the truth is that such kidnappings are commonplace for Haitians, and they rarely receive attention from outside the country itself. Indeed, Haiti has become a forgotten crisis to many international bodies and foreign governments. News that Kenya has offered to lead an international effort to bring order to the country only underscores the lack of action by other nations closer to Haiti.

As someone who has written a book, “Fixing Haiti,” on the last concerted outside intervention – the United Nations’ stabilizing mission (MINUSTAH) – I fear the lack of action by countries in the Americas could increase the risk of Haiti transitioning from a fragile state to a failed one.

MINUSTAH was the first U.N. mission formed by a majority of Latin American troops, with Chile and Brazil taking the lead. The prospect of outsourcing that role now to Kenya may have sparked concerns from human rights groups, but it might also lead to soul-searching questions in capitals from Washington to Brasília, as well as at United Nations headquarters in New York.

Haiti has been falling into chaos for the last two years, ever since the murder of President Jovenel Moïseoïse in July 2021. A subsequent earthquake that struck the southern part of the country only further worsened the plight of Haitians.

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Perpetual Floods, Rivers Of Trash: Climate Change Hits Extra Hard In Haiti

The lack of government services in Port-de-Paix, Haiti, has spawned an ongoing crisis in the coastal city, where residents struggle to maintain their homes amid constant floods.

PORT-DE-PAIX, HAITIAnélie Ulysse’s home in Nan Palan, a small coastal neighborhood near the Port-de-Paix River, holds many memories. She lived there with her late husband and five children for over two decades.

But these days, her once busy home is largely silent; she lives alone in her corrugated iron-roofed home. Persistent flooding has left two of her five rooms too muddy to access.

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How Natural Disasters Threaten The "Madan Sara," The Women Driving Haiti's Economy

The Madan Sara provide a vital service by collecting farmers’ produce and selling it in urban communities. But natural disasters and growing insecurity have threatened their way of life.

MANICHE — For more than 20 years, single mother Cedeniese Lexima has supported herself and her four children by buying produce from local farmers to sell in the southwestern town of Les Cayes. She is one of hundreds of Haitian women known as Madan Sara, who provide an essential link in the country’s food supply chain.

The Madan Sara, named after a migratory bird adept at foraging food, work together and rely on public transport to move local produce between communities.

“I am not part of any Madan Sara group or any state-owned organization,” Lexima explains. “We are the ‘left behinds,’ but we do our best to help each other out and always travel in groups, never on our own.” Lexima says the mayor’s office does not give them the same support, such as health insurance, that it affords to other workers.

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This Happened

This Happened—January 12: Earthquake In Haiti

An earthquake in Haiti that killed 220,000 people happened on this date in 2010.

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In The News
Chloé Touchard, Lisa Berdet, Lila Paulou and Anne-Sophie Goninet

Nord Stream Leaks, Abe Funeral, High-Speed Space Crash

👋 Ha’u!*

Welcome to Tuesday, where Japan honors former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in a controversial state funeral, unexplained gas leaks are reported on Nord Stream pipelines and NASA’s Dart mission succeeds, at high speed. Meanwhile, German daily Die Welt looks at how European countries are dealing with the prospect of a winter energy crisis and the potential repercussions on their support for Ukraine.

[*Hopi, Arizona, U.S.]

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Society
Anne Myriam Bolivar and Megan Spada

The Haitian Entrepreneurs Happy To Stay Home

Given the opportunity to flee an economic and political crisis in Haiti, some business owners opt to stay.

PORT-AU-PRINCE — Mathilde Ménélas recalls the moment her parents sold a piece of their land and handed her the cash, telling her to leave the only country she’d ever known. The 26-year-old refused. Instead, she set up a beauty salon in Haiti’s busy capital of Port-au-Prince.

The trained esthetician understood her parents’ fear for her to remain in a country marred by the threat of kidnap, natural disasters, an unstable economy and rising unemployment. Ménélas says leaving her country was all she could think about.

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Society
Anne Myriam Bolivar

In Haiti, Where Vodou Steps In For Lack Of Mental Health Care

With the country's mental health care severely lacking, Haitians seek the assistance of Vodou priests.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI — At exactly 12 p.m., the time when treatment rituals are performed, Moléus Jean enters the peristyle and begins bowing and tossing water from a white cup. He sits in a large chair and lights a candle. A Vodou priest for the past 20 years, he is dressed in a red robe symbolizing Erzulie Dantor — one of the main Vodou spirits, a mother protector for those who suffer oppression and abuse. A red handkerchief is tied around his left arm.

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In The News
Anne-Sophie Goninet, Jane Herbelin and Bertrand Hauger

COVID & Fertility, Airplanes 5G Warning, R2D2 Moon

👋 ഹലോ!*

Welcome to Thursday, where Kim Jong-un offers to reopen hotline with Seoul, a 96-year-old Nazi war crime suspect flees and a Turkish man gets so drunk he joins a search party for himself. From France, we also take a look, and listen, to the surprisingly loud noises of the countryside.

[*halēā - Malayalam, India & Malaysia]

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In The News
Jane Herbelin, Anne-Sophie Goninet and Bertrand Hauger

Russia Space Blast Endangers Astronauts, Belarus Border Clashes, Leo’s Beach

👋 ሰላም!*

Welcome to Tuesday, where Russia is under fire for blowing up a satellite in space, clashes erupt at the Poland-Belarus border and Leo's Beach opens again. Courtesy of German daily Die Welt, we also look at the reasons behind the major discrepancies in COVID-19 vaccination rates across Europe.

[*Selam, Amharic - Ethiopia]

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Geopolitics
Yanick Lahens*

Hard Truths, And A Glimmer Of Hope In Haiti

In the wake of the July 7 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, Haitian writer Yanick Lahens revisits the history of the island, addressing its fractures, but also seeing a reason for cautious optimism.

-Analysis-

Not wanting to respond in the heat of the moment to the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, I declined requests to speak with journalists. Typically, a real-time reaction forsakes nuance, resulting in an answer that severs the event from the deeper factors that caused it. The inevitable shortcuts taken to summarize an event for "front-page news' tend to compound the reservoir of cliches and prejudices that exist around it, despite any attempts otherwise. And when an event worthy of the front page takes place in Haiti, the temptation is even greater to dive into such an abyss.

There's a reason for that. Haiti, more than any other place, has the capacity to boggle the minds of those unable or unwilling to stretch outside of their intellectual comfort zone. This emblematic island nation challenges and disturbs all at once. And yet, those who have not grasped the place Haiti holds in modern history — in its very birth and subsequent transatlantic influence — will only see the fire, poverty and bloodshed. They will only see another coup d"état, and they will only see black skin.

What happens in Haiti must always be placed in conversation with its inescapable history, summarized quickly around its unthinkable independence in 1804, when the country thwarted slavery, colonialism and nascent capitalism, and at a time when the Western powers were preparing to consolidate their world empire. Independence made Haiti the first country of the South, and subsequently the mold and template — I cannot stress this enough — of North-South relations.

Haiti understood before everyone else. Placed in quarantine (today we would call it embargo) by the colonialist powers of the time, the country was forced, as a condition to ending its political and economic isolation, to pay reparations for profits lost to the former French colonizers of Santo Domingo. This would place a heavy burden on Haiti from the beginning, dragged down by a steep mortgage that would send the country spiraling into a debt it wouldn't be able to pay off until the middle of the 20th century. And yet, during its difficult period of isolation, Haiti still helped Simon Bolivar liberate five Latin American countries and even inspired Greece to gain its independence.

Independence made Haiti the first country of the South.

Writer Laurent Dubois, in Les Vengeurs du Nouveau Monde (Les Perséides, 2006), noted that in 1801, U.S. President Thomas Jefferson was already thinking about what would happen should Santo Domingo achieve independence, which he feared would set a bad example for the other slave-holding countries in the region. In a conversation with delegates from France and England, he laid out conditions of engagement: "Not allowing blacks to own ships will be enough." In essence, Jefferson ceded Haiti the right to exist as a large village of maroons, but there was no possibility of accepting it into the concert of nations.

You may shrug and tell me that this happened long ago. But since then? Alas, the spirit and even the very words of this statement have persisted and infiltrated the policies that the great powers enforced on Haiti throughout the 19th century and up to the present day.

U.S. President Bill Clinton, a Democrat and in keeping with Jefferson's vision, did not bat an eye when referring to Haiti as the "backyard," implying a location where garbage is dumped. Donald Trump, the latest Republican president, stooped lower, remorselessly referring to the country as a "shit hole." The former eliminated Haitian rice production in the 2000s by forcing the Haitian market to accept subsidized, and therefore much cheaper, American rice. The latter, seeking the Haitian vote against Venezuela, promised unconditional support for the authoritarian regime of the late president.

But how was all this possible, you may ask? Well, it was made possible due to the complicity of the political and economic sectors that have ruled Haiti since independence.

The departure of the colonizers brought about a double shift that resulted in two different approaches to government and societal organization. The majority of the Bossales, the men and women who had just arrived from Africa, radically rejected the plantation system and liberal economic logic. Throughout the 19th century, they built an original culture that incorporated a common language and religion, prioritized the lakou (the common dwelling) as a basic community space, emphasized the cultivation of gardens and shared everything down to the last piece. It was a culture that would be protected from the beginnings of the neo-colonial project. The rural environment is referred to in everyday language as "the country outside."

Artists performing during a ceremony in honor of slain Haitian President Jovenel Moise — Photo: Orlando Barria/EFE/ZUMA

The other group was made up of the Creoles, many of whom were revolutionary leaders and others who accepted and adopted colonial traditions after independence, namely, the French language, the Catholic religion and Western legal foundations. With the two cultures constantly at odds, the chaos truly began with the failure to integrate the state model of the Creoles, across the country, and, as the sociologist Jean Casimir specifies, with the international community's negative view of the Bossale. Now, the country must find a way to build a community out of a centuries-old conflict.

Many of Haiti's struggles since the 19th century originate in this specific disconnect. Back-to-back international and internal crises throughout the 20th century progressively weakened the country's institutions, leading to long-standing distrust in government and placing a large swatch of the population into poverty without any structures intended to offer support, all of which was reinforced in 2010. Global and local crime syndicates have taken advantage of and co-opted these weak institutions. The licit and the illicit ended up merging, establishing corruption as a mode of governance, a process that eventually led to the shocking assassination of President Moïse.

Some may be quick to highlight the international aid Haiti has received over the years. But this aid perverts those who give as well as those who receive. When the aid does not simply feed corruption on both sides, a substantial portion of it goes back to the donor, leaving the recipient dangerously dependent, even if a few organizations, thank God, escape this model. The aid given after the 2010 earthquake is a perfect manifestation of this dysfunction.

As rapid urbanization unfolded and the centrality of the Creole language spread through various media and social networks, a youth has risen up, eager to stake their claim as the "country within" by showing the world their desire to fully exercise their citizenship, and build community and institutions. It is this young and new "country within a country" that has, with their bare hands, fought back against the unconstitutional referendum project supported by the international community. And they have managed to do this, as the young philosopher Edelyn Dorismond points out, despite the serious assaults on symbolic architecture; despite the massacres orchestrated by gangs, instruments of the powerful; and despite widespread imprisonment and the general exhaustion of so many.

We Haitians must save ourselves from reductive narratives.

It was these young people who were preparing to do the same, to fight against the widely contested elections that were supported by the international community. In the face of such obstacles, building community and democracy will take persistence and time. A lot of time. It will demand the construction of a new political order and fresh representation. There is no speedy solution or quick answer.

We Haitians must save ourselves from reductive narratives whose harmfulness lies in their ability to trap us in sad emotions, as Gilles Deleuze says. It is natural, and we will feel sadness, fear, hopelessness. But let us also remember, using the guiding light of history, how to make room for clear-mindedness and strength and draw from familiar joy. Let us not be defeated twice.

Contrary to what is conveyed in international or even national media, there is hope in the projects that are at work. One is the ecological community project in the lower northwest region, which is building a multifunctional park in a working-class neighborhood of Port-au-Prince. Others are artistic endeavors, agricultural activities, building an efficient university, creating innovative models for schooling. All these initiatives share one key point in common: They have been able to integrate the people in their approach. In contrast to our collective misfortunes, they are unfolding far away from the "front-page" sound and fury.

In the Failles, the novel which I wrote in 2010 in the aftermath of the earthquake, I repeatedly asked myself how to write without "exoticizing" misfortune and tragedy. Let's refuse to deny our suffering, but let us not indulge in self-flagellation or use our misfortune as a means of profit. Because if there is misfortune, it is not only Haiti's, it is the misfortune of the first world, the second world, the third world and the fourth world. It is the misfortune of our dominant world-model. It is not exotic; it is the misfortune of all.

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BBC

The Latest: Haiti President Assassinated, Iran’s Uranium Plans, Fish On Meth

Welcome to Wednesday, where we're following the breaking news of the assassination of Haiti's president. Also Iran acknowledges it is enriching uranium and the ship that blocked the Suez canal is finally free to sail away. In other news, we look at the rock'n'roll statue controversy that pits Paris greens vs. Harley-Davidson.

• Haitian President assassinated: Haitian President Jovonel Moïse, 53, was killed in his private residence at 1 a.m. local time by armed assailants, amid political instability in the impoverished Caribbean nation. First Lady Martine Moïse was injured in the gunfire. Moïse had been ruling by decree for more than two years after the country failed to hold elections and parliament was dissolved.

• Iran begins enriched uranium production: Iran says it plans on starting the process of enriching uranium metal, a move that could help the country create a nuclear weapon, reports International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. atomic watchdog. The United States and European powers warned that these steps could muddle attempts to restore the 2015 nuclear deal.

Taliban enter key western Afghan city: As American troops and NATO allies withdraw from Afghanistan, the Taliban has rapidly advanced through the country, seizing dozens of government controlled districts. Most recently, the group has entered the city of Qala-e-Naw, the capital of Afghanistan's Badghis province, liberating a local prison and continuing to battle government troops as they advance on the center of the city.

• Eric Adams wins NYC Mayoral Primary: Eric Adams, a former police captain, has been declared the winner of the New York City Democratic Primary, beating opponent Kathryn Garcia by a single percentage point. As Adams did not originally receive over 50% of the vote in the city's new ranked-choice voting system, results took longer than usual to count. If elected, Adams will be the city's second Black mayor.

• First indigenous woman appointed Canadian governor-general: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has appointed Mary Simon to be the country's first indigenous governor-general. The move comes amid a national reckoning over the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves of indigenous children and the intergenerational harm caused to indigenous communities through the residential school system.

• Ever Given ship finally leaves Suez Canal: After blocking the Suez Canal for six days and severely disrupting international trade routes in March, the Ever Given ship has been released from the waterway. The ship had been held at Great Bitter Lake while the Suez Canal Authority sought compensation for salvaging efforts and losses incurred.

• Meth in water may turn fish into addicts: A new study has shown that Brown trout can become addicted to methamphetamine when it accumulates in freshwater rivers. The research demonstrates that when trout are placed in waters containing trace levels of methamphetamine, the fish develop withdrawal when moved to a clean tank.

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