But now he faces his latest challenge:  the aid industry – and how it’s killing the demand for locally-produced buckets.

As the General Manager of a plastics company, Plastech Solutions, Radia has had to lay off more than 20 of his 150 staff because his company cannot compete with the free materials coming in from the US and other countries.

“Manufacturing has shifted to the US and benefits the US producer,” Radia says, adding that the US military has been shipping donated goods to Haiti free of charge.

“On top of that, the US gives tax advantages [to donors,] so it’s a write-off. So how do you expect me match that?”

Most heavily hit was the demand for 5 gallon buckets – used in a post-disaster situation for myriad tasks, including water purification, construction and as containers for carrying emergency household goods distributed by aid groups.

Prior to the January 12, 2010 earthquake, Radia could sell a single bucket for $4. Now, with donated buckets glutting the market, he has to push to keep the price above $2.50.

That earthquake is estimated to have killed more than 220 thousand people and left more than a million homeless.

I went to Haiti earlier this month on a trip sponsored by The Peace Dividend Trust, an organization that encourages international organizations to spend their money locally, rather than sourcing aid material from overseas. (Full disclosure: the head of The Peace Dividend Trust, Scott Gilmore, is a friend of mine. I shot a promotional video for PDT in Haiti.)

“Buying local” is a simple concept – but one that has been too often ignored by the aid-industry.  In theory, after the earthquake, Plastech Solutions should have had more demand for 5 gallon  buckets, and Radia should be hiring more Haitian staff, rather than laying them off.

But according to PDT, as little as 5 percent of aid money spent during a humanitarian crisis is spent in the local economy.  Much of the funding goes toward foreign goods and ex-patriate salaries for aid-workers.  (PDT’s “Haiti First” project is intended to link aid-groups with Haitian suppliers that meet international standards for goods and services.)

Now consider that the United Nations is sponsoring a donor conference on Haiti today. The Haitian government has asked for $11.5 billion to rebuild the country over the next several years.  Five percent of that is a trifle over half a billion dollars to stay in Haiti. A relative pittance.

And that’s if donors agree to Haitian officials’ full request for funding.  (It seems clear that a $3.9 billion short-term plan will likely win approval.)

I’m not suggesting that the international community ignore on-going humanitarian problems associated with disasters or war. Haiti still needs help.

But the Haiti situation represents the classic conundrum of balancing humanitarian largesse and the dangers of associated with the creation of a welfare state  – versus the need to stimulate local economic growth.

(Some members of Radia’s Haitian staff have walked out of their homes, he says  – even though they were left standing by the earthquake. They’ve moved into “tent city” refugee camps, where they get free food everyday. Because hey – why not?)

Radia says he hopes his business has stabilized and he won’t be forced into any more lay-offs.  But he remains concerned.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) is donating 500 tons of cooking oil to Haiti in April. Radia fears that will decimate demand for locally packaged cooking oil  – and the demand on Plastech Solutions for plastic cooking oil bottles.

In an email, USAID spokeswoman Moira Whelan told me, “Ensuring that our work furthers the Haitian economy is a top priority to USAID. We work hand-in-hand with local business owners and have deployed market experts to make sure that the investments we make are sound and can become self-sustaining.”

It will probably take more than that to convince Radia – who says he has yet to be contacted by USAID or any other international agencies. (A letter he wrote to the Clinton Foundation, expressing concern about the effect international aid has on Haitian business, he says, has gone unacknowledged.)

Still, even Radia admits it’s  difficult to know, after a disaster, just where to draw the line.

“How do you stop feeding everybody?” Radia asks. “How much is economic and not disaster-related? Somewhere along the line, people need to be told [the aid] needs to end.”

Screen Shot 1 (Folha de São Paulo)

Did Zynga, dominant maker of social games like FarmVille for Facebook, make important errors in the design of its innovative Haiti earthquake relief campaign?

That’s the contention of one of South America’s most prestigious newspapers, Folha de São Paulo, which has posted several pointed criticisms of Zynga on its website.

Folha alleges that the design of Zynga’s January campaign on FarmVille was confusing and poorly communicated. So much so, that the newspaper is asking whether or not some users might have felt that what they thought was a charitable donation ended up being locked in the game.

Zynga has responded with a long letter (also sent in reply to my last post, and appended to it), which Folha has also translated and posted in Portuguese.

Zynga says it merely provided gamers with a way to help Haiti while playing the game, and that the few steps required to help Haiti were clear and easy to follow. But the paper is insisting in its criticisms.

As I said, I posted on this issue Tuesday, but felt compelled to give both sides a chance to explain their positions to me and follow up with more detail since I was made responsible for introducing this story to the U.S media-sphere.

Context first: the World Food Programme in Rome has confirmed that Zynga gave it $1.5 million for its post-earthquake Haiti programs. This is money raised during the five day campaign via FarmVille and a few of the company’s other ultra-popular games.

So Zynga clearly helped Haiti out, and they deserve credit for that. Also, as websites raced to roll out Haiti relief campaigns in the days after the Jan. 16 earthquake, it was certain that kinks in digital campaigns would exist. It was inevitable that such campaigns cobbled together in a few days would be imperfect.

Finally, it’s also important to keep in mind that in Brazil, Internet companies, particularly foreign ones, are subject to tremendous scrutiny from Brazilian media and government.

The back-and-forth between Zynga and Folha needs to be understood through that lens.

However, Folha does raise interesting questions about the way the campaign was designed and whether more transparency and explanation was needed. And the paper is perfectly justified in asking questions about a charity campaign. Natural disasters are becoming more and more deadly and costly in our urbanized, hyper-populated and interconnected world. Digital and social media will continue to play a major role in global response efforts.

Zynga’s generous pioneering is commendable, but the company shouldn’t earn some sort of immunity from media scrutiny solely on the basis of its unimpeachable goals. Social and digital media needs to understand that as a player in politics and aid efforts, it will be held to the same standards as a Red Cross or foreign government.

In other words, this is an early test case for the manner in which social media charity campaigns should be constructed and communicated to users, who inevitably will be spread out around the world, and have varying sensitivities.

Now for the outlines of the story. After the Haiti earthquake, Zynga, maker of FarmVille and other popular social games, launched a campaign to help victims of Haiti’s earthquake.

FarmVille, a kind of farming simulation popular with tens of millions of Facebook users, was one of the platforms used for this charity campaign (and, as Zynga’s most popular game, it was the one that raised the most money).

The novelty of this charity effort, and past ones deployed by Zynga in its games, is that FarmVille virtual currency was used as the means to “donate,” through users’ purchase of a virtual product.

In other words, users had to buy FarmVille currency first, not just access their credit cards or Paypal accounts, in order to donate.

What’s more, they had to buy what Zynga calls a “social product” in order to make their donation effective. In the case of the Haiti earthquake campaign, which Zynga says lasted five days in January, they had to buy “white corn” to plant in their FarmVille plots.

This is where Folha de São Paulo’s reporting begins to run into friction with Zygna’s stance.

Ricardo Feltrin, editorial head of Folha Online who was one of the Zynga investigation’s co-writers, says he considered it at least confusing for FarmVille users to be invited to participate in a Haiti relief campaign, and then have to buy virtual currency within the game to join. And not only that, but have to buy “white corn,” within the game, to make their donation effective.

Shernaz Daver, a spokeswoman for Zynga, confirmed that players had to buy white corn for money to go to Haiti. She said this made the donation process easy to understand and allowed “people who use the game to work within the mechanics of the game.” Daver suggested that Folha misunderstood how the campaign was supposed to work and mistook the game’s own rules for lack of clarity.

Feltrin defends his reporting, and disagrees that the “white corn” mechanism was well explained.

Feltrin says he is familiar with Farmville, and that he, his family, and friends play it often. “I do think it’s an ingenious game.”

But he also thinks that when dealing with a Haiti charity campaign, FarmVille should have been clearer in communicating to users how it worked and more sensitive to any semblance of murkiness.

Folha’s follow-up article yesterday in response to Zynga’s letter, with screen shots included and reprinted here, shows that users were asked to “donate,” but if they bought FarmVille currency for this purpose (say 40$ worth), they were sent to another screen where it became apparent that another step was needed.

They had a “license” to buy white corn, but they still had to buy the white corn– worth 10 FarmVille currency units according to the screen shot– within the game in order for part of their purchase to go to Haiti.

Since so many steps were needed to actually donate, it’s not a leap to think that some of the FarmVille currency bought through a Haiti relief-branded screen, might have stayed locked in the game (where users can buy tractors, trees and other crops with it) instead of going to Haiti, according to Feltrin.

For example, a user may have purchased 240 units of FarmVille currency, then, realizing she had to buy and plant white corn again and again to help Haiti, might have done so only a few times, meaning only a small percentage of that money actually went to Haiti.

“Whatever the reason, it has to be better explained,” he says.

Screen Shot 2 (Folha)

In fact, because of the mechanics of how white corn had to be purchased (its price and growing time), Feltrin says, it would have been difficult if not impossible for Zynga users who bought a large amount of currency (e.g. 40$ worth) for Haiti relief purposes to spend all of it on white corn for Haiti. Feltrin said he and many of his friends ran into this problem and were frustrated by it.

“Here in Brazil people are really up in arms,” he adds.

However, so far, neither Zynga nor Folha has offered proof, via screen-shots or other data, that this was or was not a problem (that 40$ worth of FarmVille currency would have been difficult or impossible to convert into “white corn,” and thus a Haiti donation, in the time-frame of the campaign).

Zynga was well-positioned to carry out its Haiti earthquake campaign. In a previous charity drive for Haiti last year, Zynga urged FarmVille users to buy sweet potato seeds for Haitian charities: a tech-oriented NGO and a micro-finance organization. It donated 50 percent of the proceeds to these charities.

Folha also criticized Zynga for this previous campaign, but as Zynga rightly points out, it announced the 50% number through its website. And that’s far more generous a percentage than other corporations set aside when linking sales of a product to a charity cause.

And other knowledgeable users have reported on their experience buying white corn for earthquake relief without seeing any problems with the campaign’s design. On GamesBeat, Dean Takahashi wrote with praise about his experiences on FarmVille after the earthquake:

Now, whenever I plant white corn seeds on my farm, I’ll remember the Haiti relief fund. Hopefully, this kind of donation will be popular not only in a time of disaster, but during relative calm as well. It’s a blessing for Haiti that it has become so much easier to make donations online.

However, the Folha story, and the ensuing anger in Brazil, on its own is evidence that the campaign was at the very least confusing in other parts of the world where people are perhaps more suspicious about the fusion of for-profit game products and charity.

Zynga’s ability to tap into gamers to raise money for worthwhile causes through virtual social products is a brilliant use of entertainment for a good purpose. Zynga has been rightly praised for its innovative fund-raising.

But as cutting-edge as it may be, the company seems so far to have shown limitations in its capacity to respond to the doubts and worries of its considerable Brazilian fan base, and has so far has not allayed all the concerns aired by the Folha newspaper.

In any case, readers of this blog can look at the screen shots in this post and go to these links to inform themselves:

Zynga releases:

1, 2, 3

Zynga.org

Folha coverage:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Other relevant coverage:

1, 2, 3

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Haitian sensation Andre Berto, a world champion at welterweight and one of the best fighters in the sport was scheduled to meet the legendary Shane Mosley on January 30th this year. It was a fight that Berto, who lives in Florida, had been dreaming of for years, and had by all accounts prepared meticulously for. However, the massive earthquake that hit his native country threw a wrench into his preparations, and he was forced to pull out. Berto lost many family members in the devastating earthquake and jumped on the first plane he could get to help his fellow country men. I’d definitely recommend reading the article he submitted to the Huffington Post detailing his traumatic, tragic but ultimately uplifting experience in the nation he calls home. Here’s an excerpt:

Back at the Medishare hospital, I see a truck pull up with a father and his daughter. His daughter has passed out. I pick her up and carry her into the hospital. When I lay her down, she opens her eyes and I tell her it’s going to be okay. I didn’t think anything was wrong with her. There were no cuts and no bruises. But not even five minutes later, she falls into cardiac arrest. Doctors rip her shirt open and start CPR. The father starts to yell and cry. I grab him and tell him to relax and he tells me she is all that he has because everybody else died in the quake. The doctors brought her back and revived her three times but the last time she didn’t come back. Her father grips my shirt in pain and sorrow and falls to his knees. Wow. It’s hard to imagine a parent losing their child and actually witnessing her death. Some other workers and I pick the young girl up and place her in a body bag.

Another day and another life lost, but many were saved as well. It felt good to see doctors and volunteers from all around the world helping with Haiti’s efforts. Within all the pain and hurt I’ve seen so much strength.

Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife

MIAMI—Throughout the history of foreign assistance, charitable organizations and government agencies have built schools and water treatment plants and created farm projects only to discover that their good works did not really fit in with the local scene. Or that one project contradicted another. Schools and water treatment plants fell apart and experimental farms withered.

Before the earthquake in Haiti, international aid groups had begun working on a comprehensive plan to convert the country’s treeless, dirt hills and mountains and its over-farmed valleys into verdant, productive land. The key features of the plan would be linked together in mutual support. It would be the opposite of piecemeal.

That was before more than 200,000 Haitians died as homes, hotels, hospitals, stores, schools and small factories collapsed. Now the aid groups, including the United Nations Environment Program and Columbia University’s Earth Institute, are urging that restoration of the Haiti’s countryside be incorporated as a key element in rebuilding the country.

The task of restoring Haiti’s countryside is almost too much to imagine and could turn out to be impossible. Very few trees are left in Haiti because the tradition –as in many developing countries – has been to chop trees into charcoal for cooking fires. In an impoverished country, people do not buy fertilizer. After a few decades the soil in their small plots becomes exhausted. In Haiti, farmland produces five times less corn than just across the border in the Dominican Republic. Farmland in Haiti is 10 times less productive on average than in the United States.

Some of the key points of an environmental restoration project would likely include:

* Planting tens of thousands of trees, including fruit varieties that would set down long roots to help prevent erosion and also provide food.
* Providing fertilizer to increase the growth of corn and wheat and other crops. Just adding fertilizer to fields in Africa has doubled yields.
* Persuading Haitians to rely less heavily on wood and charcoal for cooking fires. Some ideas: providing inexpensive stoves that use less charcoal, hiring some woodcutters and charcoal makers to work in a security force to protect the trees, planting fast growing varieties of trees that could be used for charcoal and showing Haitians how these trees can produce the ingredients for charcoal for years if they are pruned instead of killed.
* Dredging rivers and canals and, in some cases, erecting walls along the banks to reduce flooding.

A healthy countryside would provide more food for Haiti. Flooding would be less severe. The restoration work would provide jobs. Little by little, the land would support more farmers with better crop yields.

As envisioned by the experts at Columbia, the restoration would involve a series of coordinated projects within a small section of the country. Not overly ambitious, not staggeringly expensive. If the work succeeded, it would start anew in another section. It would move section by section until the entire country had been covered. It would take a long time, maybe 20 years at a minimum. Over the long run, the work could cost hundreds of millions of dollars. But it would give Haiti a strong agricultural and environmental base for the first time in many, many years.

To start with, the Columbia plan calls for a study of the landscape and conversations with people in the area to find out how things have gone over the years and what might help. Then a set of complementary projects would be devised.

“An idea is always going to fail if you just kind of pick a village here on a hillside and try to do some good thing,” said Marc Levy, the director of Columbia University’s contribution to the Haiti project. The problems in an area, Mr. Levy said, “are all interconnected.” So the plan is to make sure all the work meshes with “all the ecological and social dynamics.” #

Image via Wikipedia

The soon-to-be released remake of “We Are the World,” a mega-collaboration of artists to benefit Haiti, will feature one hip-hop star who has been out of the limelight as of late; and another who is on his way out.

Kanye West, who I noted was conspicuously left out of the lineup to perform at the Grammys despite having a prominent role in the song “Forever,” took part in the charity single. Lil Wayne did also – perhaps the last time the rapper will be in a recording studio before he begins a stint in prison.

The hip-hop community was well-represented on the performer list for “We Are the World,” which was once again organized by Lionel Richie, Quincy Jones, and other industry veterans who helped spearhead the effort the first time around. Hip-hop veteran LL Cook J helped craft a good chunk of the rap lyrics, at the request of Quincy Jones. Among the hip-hop stars contributing were: will.i.am, Wyclef Jean, LL Cool J, Akon, Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes, Kid Cudi and Bizzy Bone. They joined performers from various other genres, including Barbra Streisand, Josh Groban, Celine Dion and Pink.

I know what you’re thinking – it’s about time Snoop Dogg and Barbra Streisand finally got around to working together.

Jones told the media in a statement:

“Twenty five years ago, the entertainment industry showed the power of community to help our fellow man when we recorded ‘We Are The World’ to bring relief to those suffering from famine in Ethiopia. And while the need to assistant Africa continues, today the country of Haiti is suffering immeasurably from the destruction due to the recent earthquake and is in immediate need of relief that will last long after the television cameras have left. As artists, we have joined together on this 25th anniversary and in the spirit of ‘We Are The World’ to help meet that need.”

The remake will premiere this Friday, during the opening ceremony for the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games

When Rudyard Kipling wrote the poem, “The White Man’s Burden” in 1899 it was in response to the American colonial invasion of the Phillippines after the Spanish American War.

Take up the White Man’s burden…Send forth the best ye breed…Your new-caught, sullen peoples,Half-devil and half-child…To veil the threat of terror  Take up the White Man’s burden- The savage wars of peace–Fill full the mouth of Famine And bid the sickness cease; silent, sullen peoples…Shall weigh your gods and you.

Kipling seems to have truly believed in the White Man’s burden, as do the members of the Idaho group who came to save the children from their “half devil, half child” ways.  Of course, the Imperialism of America and England has always been layered with the Imperialism of a militant and nationalist Christian Evangelical movement.

The leaders of the American group, New Life Children’s Refuge, 
Laura Silsby and 
Charisa Coulter, are members of Central Valley Baptist church in Idaho.  Atlhough New Life Children’s Refuge never quite got their website up and running, the Central Valley Baptist church website as well as other Christian websites give some insight into what the hell these white people were doing taking children out Haiti and lying to their parents about the fact that they were going to be adopted to American “Christian” families.

New Life Children’s Refuge is a non‐profit Christian ministry dedicated to rescuing, loving and
caring for orphaned, abandoned and impoverished Haitian and Dominican children,
demonstrating God’s love and helping each child find healing, hope, joy and new life in Christ.
We will strive to also equip each child with a solid education and vocational skills as well as
opportunities for adoption into a loving Christian family.

Note that it says “impoverished” children as well as orphaned and abandoned children.  Already the plot thickens.  Apparently poverty in and of itself is reason to “save” these children by placing them into a “Christian family.”

From the Church website, we learn that it is a Christian obligation to go forth in the world and convert others to their Evangelical beliefs.

It is the duty and privilege of every follower of Christ and of every church of the Lord Jesus Christ to endeavor to make disciples of all nations.  The Lord Jesus Christ has commanded the preaching of the gospel to all nations. It is the duty of every child of God to seek constantly to win the lost to Christ by verbal witness undergirded by a Christian lifestyle, and by other methods in harmony with the gospel of Christ.

I’m not sure whether kidnapping is in harmony with the gospel of Christ, but according to the church’s website, a family is clearly defined as the marriage between one man and one woman with children (adoptive or biological) and a wife who willingly submits to her husband as leader, protector, and teacher.

Ah, the white man’s burden, being carried out by white men and women in Haiti.  Over a century after the birth of the American Empire, as Kipling warned, the burden of whiteness continues to weigh on us all.

Image by treesftf via Flickr

MIAMI—It was long, long ago that the hills and steep, craggy mountains of Haiti were covered in rich, green forests. One by one the trees had been turned into firewood by a poor people on the way to becoming poorer. The hills and mountains became dirt slopes, spillways for rushing flood waters when it rained. The soil had worn so thin that it produced one of the most meager crop yields of any place on earth.

“I warned her, I said as soon as you get there without the proper documents, you are going to get into trouble, because they are going to accuse you, because you have the intent to pass the border without the proper papers and they are going to accuse you with kids trafficking,” Carlos Castillo said he told the group’s leader, Laura Silsby, during a meeting Friday.

Four hours later, Silsby and nine other Americans were turned back from the border. They were arrested and taken to a jail in Port-au-Prince.

“This woman knew what she was trying to do was not legal,” Castillo said.

A CNN reporter attempted to get reaction to Castillo’s comment from the jailed Americans, but they would not discuss the matter, responding to questions by singing “Amazing Grace” and praying.

And it gets worse; even though the leader of the Baptists claims she did not know that many of the children had living parents, interpreters used by the group contradict her denial.

Told earlier that many of the children had living parents, Silsby said, “I did not know that.” She added, “In our hearts, our intention was to help children that had been orphaned or abandoned by their parents.”

But the interpreters the group had used said the conversations between Silsby and the parents in the Haitian town of Calebasse made clear to them that Silsby must have been aware of the children’s status.

SOS Children’s Villages, an Austrian charity, said that it has determined that at least two-thirds of the children are not orphans.

(Hat tip: Marjorie.)

When I first heard that Wyclef Jean and a few of his musical friends were getting together to re-record “We Are the World” for Haitian earthquake relief, I was slightly skeptical. From a social standpoint, it’s a commendable gesture, but from a musical one, why mess with a classic?

Even rapper Lil Wayne wasn’t so sure. His reaction when they asked him to do Bob Dylan’s verse from the original: “You guys are real good comedians.”

Yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking.

But Wyclef’s head was in as good a place as his heart. First, he got original “We Are the World” producer Quincy Jones and Lionel Richie, who cowrote the 1985 single with Michael Jackson and already had been planning a 25th anniversary re-recording with Jones, involved as his co-executive producers. Instant credibility and two major links from past to present.

Ah, yes, the present. Of course there are the usual 2010 suspects, many of them rappers (hip hop was barely a blip on the pop music canvas a quarter of a century ago) and many of them whippersnappers who weren’t even born when the original was released: Miley Cyrus, Jonas Brothers, Justin Bieber, Drake and, naturally, Lady Gaga.

Then someone — something tells me it was Quincy — got the bright idea to call in the big guns, durable stars who would bring real gravitas and increased credibility to the proceedings: Celine Dion, Tony Bennett, Natalie Cole, Janet Jackson, Gladys Knight, Harry Connick Jr., Jeff Bridges and Barbra Streisand.

When Streisand sings people listen.

And just in case they don’t, there will be some decidedly 21st-century touches to encourage them to. When the video, directed by Paul Haggis (Crash) makes its world premiere on NBC during the opening ceremony of the Vancouver Winter Olympics on February 12, it will be viewable in 3D. There’ll also be an online version where regular folks can place themselves in the “We Are the World: 25 for Haiti” line up.

So even if you aren’t Josh Groban, who will be singing the line that Kenny Rogers sang in the original, or Justin Bieber, who’s tackling Lionel Richie’s opening couplet, you can still be a part of history in the remaking.

And one of the pastors involved has denounced “the accusations of Satan.”

Ten American Baptists sit in a Haitian jail on Monday, accused of child trafficking for what they say was a hastily conceived attempt to rescue orphans by quickly removing them from Haiti — before getting official permission or even checking to determine that the children really were orphans. In Haiti and on the Web, the arrests have led to fresh accusations that some religious groups may be guilty of a kind of spiritual trafficking, by mixing the help they offer to victims of last month’s earthquake with proselytizing.

The Baptists were open about the fact that they felt driven by their Christian faith. Speaking to reporters after the group’s arrest, Laura Silsby, who led the Baptist team to Haiti, described the children as “deeply in need most of all of God’s love and his compassion.” In a description of the mission posted online, the group wrote, “God has laid upon our hearts the need to go now.”

Meanwhile in Idaho, where several of the Baptists are from, Rev. Clint Henry, a pastor involved in the effort, denounced what he called “the accusations of Satan,” made against “our team,” The Associated Press reported.

A representative of an Austrian charity that is now looking after the 33 children the Baptist team tried to remove from the country told CNN that an initial investigation showed that at least 10 of them are not orphans.

More details from CBS News:

“In this chaos the government is in right now, we were just trying to do the right thing,” Silsby, told the AP at Haiti’s judicial police headquarters, where she and others were taken after their arrest Friday night trying to cross the border into the Dominican Republic in a bus.

Silsby, 40, admitted she had not obtained the proper Haitian documents for the children, whose names were written on pink tape on their shirts.

The children, ages 2 months to 12 years old, were taken to an orphanage run by Austrian-based SOS Children’s Villages, where spokesman George Willeit said they arrived “very hungry, very thirsty.”

A 2- to 3-month old baby was dehydrated and had to be hospitalized, he said. An orphanage worker held and caressed another, older baby, who was feverish and looked disoriented.

“One (8-year-old) girl was crying, and saying, ‘I am not an orphan. I still have my parents.’ And she thought she was going on a summer camp or a boarding school or something like that,” Willet said. …

In Idaho, the Rev. Clint Henry denied that his Central Valley Baptist Church had anything to do with child trafficking and said he didn’t believe such reports. He urged his tearful congregation to pray to God to “help them as they seek to resist the accusations of Satan and the lies that he would want them to believe and the fears that he would want to plant into their heart.”

Image by The U.S. Army via Flickr

MIAMI—Long before the earthquake, Haiti was mired in a crisis that only a few experts noticed – a severe lack of clean drinking water.

Image by United Nations Development Programme via Flickr

A former student, one of the brightest I’ve taught, put a six-word post on Facebook the other day.  It read: (His name) “is tired of Haiti.”

Now this young man is no Rush Limbaugh fan. When I suggested that a week seemed awfully fast to “tire” of a story involving the death of 2 percent of a country’s population – the equivalent of 6 million people in the United States – he elaborated.

“My antipathy is not towards the Haitian people, for what they’ve suffered is certainly unimaginable,” he wrote. “What exhausts me is the world of celebrity that’s created around a cause like this, the whirlwind spring to action by those looking to be absolved for some other sin, by donating money, attending telethons. I don’t like the industry that springs up around cataclysms, and I see and hear more of that than I do actual news about Haiti.”

Yes, but ….

I’d rather be besieged by telethons than watch people shrug and mutter, “Whatever.” Because when it comes to news of any kind – even a catastrophe of such unfathomable scope as Haiti’s — Americans seem to have the attention span of a kid in a penny candy store. They’d rather move on to another bin.  Too often, they’d also rather score personal political points than try to address the central issue, whether that’s Haiti, health care or the halting economy.

In a county in which the Supreme Court just legalized bribery by lifting limits on corporate contributions to campaigns, both tendencies worry me.  In a country whose public considers Fox News the most “trustworthy” network, they’re an even bigger concern.

No question. We live in a complex world.  But the complexities are made insurmountable in part by the steady flow of political and media spin passed off as something else.  If Americans are to have any hope of sorting through the myriad challenges on the country’s plate, we need to develop attention spans that last longer than that of — say –  goldfish.  It’s the best way of guarding against the frenzied, near fanaticism that money + propaganda + ignorance breed.

But instead of being engaged as a nation, the only thing we seem to be any good at these days is being pissed off.

In an article in today’s Washington Post, Joel Achenbach notes that the American people, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, have little confidence that the president is capable of making “the right decisions” and even less confidence that either political party does.  After a year of health care debate, those polled said they’d like to see the bill scrapped and want Congress to begin all over again. Though the stimulus package contained hundreds of billions of dollars in broad-based tax breaks, they don’t like that either. Some 56 percent oppose it.

Achenbach ends his piece by writing about the American “Againstness Epidemic.”  He notes:

“It has been years in the making. Individual strains of opposition have been cultivated in the petri dishes of special interest groups, religious fundamentalists, blogs, cable TV shows, talk radio, fringe subcultures (birthers, truthers, tea partiers). They feed into, and are fed by, entrenched industries of disagreeableness (fossil fuel companies, labor unions, the Chamber of Commerce, Rush Limbaugh). We live in a country in which being contrarian now means advocating a mainstream initiative.”

To put it more simply, we have so many fractures and fissures, so much suspicion, so much venom, that as a political entity, the United States is just plain broken.  So broken, it seems, that instead of focusing on responding to one of the most horrific natural disasters of a lifetime just miles from America’s shores, we have to mock and chew up efforts, however flawed, to provide help.

Is there nothing we can agree on? I’m curious. If a plane had flown into the World Trade Centers in 2010 instead of 2001, would we have spent the days  that immediately followed arguing about which political party bore responsibility instead of treating the injured, caring for the displaced, digging through the rubble for possible survivors?

There is a picture on the front page of today’s New York Times that shows a crush of Haitian people seeking food. An older, gray-haired woman in the middle has her eyes closed, an elbow in her jaw and a mass of human pressure around her. The caption reads, “thousands of Haitians mass for food distributed on Tuesday at a police office. Some left empty-handed.”

I wonder if she was one. I wonder if she survived just this minor ordeal. The accompanying story talks of the plight of Haiti’s children, and leads off with the story of a 14-year-old who found the body of her mother.  She is now orphaned.

Tired of Haiti?  Then get out of the way. If we are to retain our humanity, sometimes the political animal in us needs to slink into a cage, to stop barking. Maybe engaging as a nation in a single common humanitarian concern can carry over into a broader sense of common good?

Maybe.  I’m not optimistic.

In our public schools, a similar course of events has played out. We fail to address children’s weak literacy skills (see my recent column for GOOD for more on this) and overall lack of school readiness (if you’re wondering what constitutes school readiness, check out this 2005 report from the School Readiness Indicators Initiative), both of which are due in large part to a lack of attention to and funding for early childhood education programs, which include but are not limited to preschool programs. Yet we seem to have no qualms about spending on what results from our lack of attention to those problems: among other things, billions on summer school and remedial programs for struggling middle- and high-schoolers, and $60 billion annually for local, state, and federal corrections facilities, where the most common characteristic of inmates is a low level of literacy.

We have known for some time that we get more “bang for our buck” spending money early in a child’s life than at any other period (see Nobel Prize winning economist James Heckman’s website for a great 2-minute video explaining this). And according to the Detroit Free Press, a report released this week by a Minnesota research group showed that the state of Michigan’s “preschool programs over the past 25 years are saving the state $1 billion this year in crime and education costs, with increased productivity.” The story breaks down the savings as follows:

A $220-million savings to public schools because fewer students repeat grades and there is less need for special education instruction.

$584 million less for programs for juvenile corrections, child abuse, welfare and unemployment, and more work productivity when the children enter the workforce.

$347 million less in social costs as a result of less crime and substance abuse, and more income for their parents.”

The research report found that “another 35,000 children could qualify if funding was available.” Unfortunately, voters, politicians, and policymakers in Michigan and across the country have ignored the data and been unwilling to expand early childhood education opportunities to all children who need them. For some reason, our society seems content to deal with the high-cost/low-impact programs that attempt to address the dropout rate, crime, or other problems emanating from a lack of early childhood education, instead of putting money into programs that prevent these problems from occurring in the first place.

The parallels between the situation in Haiti and our nation’s public school system are striking, and sad. In both cases, we knew a problem existed but continually failed to put forth the money to address it. When a crisis hit and the dire consequences of those problems were thrust in our faces, though, we decided it was a good time to round up funding and do something. But that money didn’t solve the problem at the root of the crisis; it simply ameliorated the crisis. So after spending tons of money at the wrong point in time, we returned to square one, where we patiently wait until the next crisis hits.

It would be a shame for us not to reflect on the tragedy in Haiti and use it to improve the lives of others in some way. Advocating for increased funding for preschool programs is one way that we can do so. Early childhood education programs improve our children’s well being, strengthen our communities, and help our economy. If you’d like to e-mail or call your elected officials about this issue, visit Congress.org and type in your zip code. You’ll then be presented with a list of all of your representatives and ways to contact them. Governors and state representatives typically provide the bulk of the funding for early childhood programs, so they are the best people to contact.

(In case you’re interested, my September 30 post includes a more in-depth look at literacy, brain development, and money spent on corrections, and has lots of links to primary sources.)

Image via Wikipedia

When did Justin Timberlake become a contender for greatness? I was never a fan of *NSYNC, and for the most part, I’ve found his solo work only intermittently interesting. But on Friday night, for the first time ever, JT kind of blew me away. On the “Hope for Haiti” telethon, his version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” on which he was accompanied by Matt Morris (his fellow former Mickey Mouse Club member and son of ’80s country star Gary Morris), did a little goosebump number on me.

I adore Leonard Cohen, and I know that I’m not supposed to say this, but I’ve never been a big fan of the song. Not when Cohen sang it. Not when Jeff Buckley covered it. And certainly not when 2008 X Factor champ Alexandra Burke turned it into a 2008 Christmas No. 1 in the UK.

But seated at a piano, tinkling the keys and wistfully crooning those cryptic words (I don’t really get how the sexually-charged lyrics relate to the situation in Haiti, but whatever), JT did the unthinkable: He made me go “Hallelujah!” after listening to “Hallelujah.” Hallelujah!

Buy the shirt, see below.

Jonah Goldberg surprises me every time. I always think he’s finally going to have the good sense to not write about things that are over his head, but he charges right in there like a former Heritage Foundation intern going to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. He evens writes about things that he literally lacks the moral authority to say anything about because of earlier aggravated mental assaults he’s committed against people in dire situations.

Take Hurricane Katrina. Back in August 2005, when conservative governance literally reached its high water mark in the destruction of New Orleans and communities all along the Gulf Goast, Jonah found the time to make jokes about how the terrified people in New Orleans’s Superdome were in a Waterworld-like situation.

That is to say that when it comes to analyzing the root causes of a disaster, I trust Jonah’s thoughts on the earthquake in Haiti as much as I’d trust Phil Gramm’s analysis of why our economy went sour last year. He’s too much of a churl to have any moral authority on the subject.

But here he is writing about Haiti. And as usual, even when he isn’t intending to engage in brainless mean-spiritedness like the prior example, he absolutely misses the point:

While the scope of the tragedy in Haiti is nearly impossible to exaggerate, it’s important to remember that last week’s earthquake was so deadly because Haiti is Haiti.

If a similarly powerful earthquake were to hit much more densely populated San Francisco or Los Angeles, the death toll would be much lower. That’s an amazing thing when you consider that American cities are crammed with skyscrapers while Port-au-Prince’s skyline was, for the most part, one story high. Indeed, as others have noted, when a 7.1 earthquake hit the Bay Area two decades ago, 67 people were killed. Meanwhile, the Haitian death toll is almost unknowable, but almost certainly over 100,000 and climbing.

Haiti getting hit by an earthquake isn’t analogous to LA or San Francisco getting shaken up. Look at the list of earthquakes that have struck California in recorded history. The list runs into the dozens.

Now try and find a comparable list of large quakes shaking up Port-au-Prince. You won’t. It’s been 250 years since a major quake shook up Haiti. A large quake wasn’t just off Haiti’s radar screen – there was little to no thought about quakes in Haiti on the part of the US Geological Service.

In contrast, states like California have a large number of regulations on the engineering of structures to make them less likely to be damaged by quakes. Californians get earthquake safety brainwashed into them from the time they are tykes. Haiti has none of these things, because THERE HAVE BEEN NO BIG EARTHQUAKES IN HAITI. The country has been so ripped up by the quake not simply because it’s got a ‘culture of poverty’ or is a victim of racism. It’s been leveled by an earthquake in the way that you’d expect Milwaukee, WI to be brought down if there was an earthquake because cheeseheads don’t know squat about earthquakes.

But Jonah digs himself in deeper, comparing Haiti to Japan and Switzerland:

It’s true that Haiti has few natural resources, but neither does Japan or Switzerland. What those countries do have are what Kling and Schulz call valuable “intangible assets” — the skills, rules, laws, education, knowledge, customs, expectations, etc. that drive a prosperous society to generate prosperity. That is where the real wealth of nations is to be found — not in factories, oil deposits, and gold mines, but in our heads and in the habits of our hearts. Indeed, a recent World Bank study found that 82 percent of America’s wealth could be found in our intangible assets.

Yes, well, Switzerland has had a continuous, stable form of government for centuries and managed to sit out all of Europe’s major wars with its policy of neutrality.

But it’s even more asinine for Jonah to bring up Japan. Japan was never colonized and stole mountains of wealth from other countries over the roughly 50-year period in which it was a brutal dictatorship that colonized other Asian countries. To boot, America rebuilt Japan from scratch, and then propped it up with massively preferential trading terms because a stable Japan was in our Cold War interests. And Japan worries a lot more about the state of its ‘intangible capital’ than Jonah lets on. But even worse, he doesn’t even address the 1923 quake in Japan that killed around 140,000 people at a time when the country was in its upward climb. Apparently even a country where ‘hard work’ is valued can lose

Jonah doesn’t even address the foreign debt burden that our Allison Kilkenny discussed here.

Jonah can try to settle for “Hey, I have Haitian friends,” to prove that he’s not being a dick, but in blaming Haitian culture for the impact of the country’s quake, he’s not only ignoring the facts of the situation, he’s really just disparaging a lot of hard working people in a poor country who try their best to get along but have suffered from many institutional and external constraints from getting wealthier.

Of course, when American exceptionalism is your religion, as it must be for anyone who wants to enter the National Review secret society, disparaging poor people around the world (and, as I noted above, occasionally at home) is an expected part of your routine.

But hey, to make up for it Jonah, I’ll forgive you if you buy one of these sweet Threadless tees and post of photo of yourself in it on The Corner. All proceeds go to the Red Cross.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The celebrity-addled Haiti telethon is set to air this evening, with performances expected from moral arbiters like Coldplay, Madonna, and Justin Timberlake. It’s a worthy cause, and I wish it well.

Yet, this telethon, and many before it, reveal a certain moral blind spot that afflicts celebrities and their charity events. For while Hollywood celebrities are often visible raising funds and all-important “awareness” (after all, in the words of our President, “bearing witness” is just enough) in the wake of natural disasters, the victims of man-made disasters are all too often forgotten.

With the exception of (the truly exceptional) 9/11 attacks, almost all star-studded fundraisers are devoted to aiding victims of nature’s fury. The last telethon of Haiti-style magnitude occurred in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami of late 2004. The great Jerry Lewis famously puts on an annual telethon to benefit those suffering from Muscular Dystrophy. And perhaps the first major celebrity fundraising event was the 1971 response to cyclones in Bangladesh put on by George Harrison.

(In fairness, this trend is not confined to the rich and famous: cities across the country often stage walks and runs to combat a number of natural ills, such as breast cancer, AIDS, and leukemia.)

People who are victims of other people, however, go all but ignored in the celebrity imagination.

In the last fifteen years, 3 to 4 million North Koreans have starved to death as a result of deliberate policies put in place by the Kim Jong Il regime. Horrifically, this continues today. Meanwhile, those North Koreans lucky enough to escape into China desperately need money for resettlement in South Korea, the US, or elsewhere. Where is their telethon?

Experts estimate that some 300,000 have died in Darfur as a result of tribal wars and genocide. Survivors in refugee camps are deprived of basic needs, such as food, water, and medicine. Where is their telethon?

Many thousands more have died in Afghanistan as a result of the coalition’s war on that impoverished country. Regardless of one’s opinion on the justness of that war – and the President’s surge – it is undeniable that a humanitarian crisis of grave proportions is afoot. Where is the telethon?

It’s not altogether difficult to deduce why staging fundraisers for victims of nature is attractive to celebrities. After all, helping victims of natural disasters requires no moral stance: who could be “in favor” of a tsunami or an earthquake? What’s more, aiding victims of climate or geology does not require one to confront evil – or even call “evil” by its proper name.

Let’s call this trend by its proper name, though: inconsistent at best, cowardly and morally bankrupt at its worse.

Photo by Logan Abassi/UN

At The New Republic, Noam Schieber argues the blanket media coverage of the Haitian earthquake aftermath is just too much. It’s redundant, it’s interfering with aid operations, it’s a waste of resources. His solution: pool coverage. Just as the president is followed around by a rotating pool of reporters, maybe Haiti and other natural disasters should be too:

Just like they do for White House coverage, the major (and some not so major) news organizations could draw up an agreement to send a contingent of print, radio, and television reporters to wherever the next global disaster strikes. The participating news organizations could then use the raw material transmitted back to them to fashion their own reports. The pool correspondents could even be available to conduct on-air interviews with different television organizations, depending on their editorial needs. The arrangement would obviously be less than ideal for the outlets with the biggest budgets. But, collectively, the media would have the peace of mind of knowing it’s not exacerbating the same problems it’s trying to alleviate.

I yield to no one in my contempt for the crass, sensationalistic conventions of TV news (which, given technical demands and the quest for ratings, has by far the biggest footprint of any media). And the coverage of natural disasters employs most of those conventions, notably the faintly ridiculous notion of journalist-as-globetrotting-hero.

But do we really need less coverage of Haiti? Natural disasters are not garden-variety breaking news, discrete events analogous to a presidential meeting. To be clinical, they are complex events in which the built and natural environments change instantly and radically, and with them entire societies, economies, and political arrangements. Millions of lives are upended in minutes. Some are – for their nations, regions, and at times the world – historical pivot-points.

It seems self-evident that when something like this happens, the more eyes that are on it, the better. It’s one of the few times that our collective media wattage is actually focused on something consequential. Sometimes journalists will all cover the same story. But sometimes they’ll stumble on stuff that nobody would have otherwise. Moreover, the more journalists become intimately familiar with Haiti, the better it will be for future coverage of the disaster’s aftermath – something that has proved helpful to New Orleans in its long, slow recovery.

Aside from annoyance at Anderson Cooper and his ilk, Scheiber’s principal argument seems be that the mass influx of journalists must somehow be hurting the Haiti rescue and aid operations. But he offers nothing more than a few guesses about this. I expect the actual footprint of journalistic operations, compared with aid efforts, is very small and getting smaller. Tina Sussman of the Los Angeles Times, just returned from Haiti, offers some additional thoughts on this.

The 21st is likely to be the century of the mega-disaster. The more raw information we get about them, the better.

[I]t’s time to promote locally led paternalism. In this country, we first tried to tackle poverty by throwing money at it, just as we did abroad. Then we tried microcommunity efforts, just as we did abroad. But the programs that really work involve intrusive paternalism.

David Brooks’ Sunday Haiti column has by now been thoroughly deconstructed, but few have compared his paternalistic policy prescriptions to the ones the U.S. government and state and local leaders have already egregiously applied to American Indian tribes and citizens.

Stephen Gasteyer, a sociology professor at Michigan State University, touched briefly on the issue in a letter to the Times:

David Brooks should be congratulated for stating that greater attention to poverty reduction is needed. He is also correct that systemic poverty reduction will result neither through small, nongovernmental efforts alone nor neoliberal macroeconomic policies. There is a growing body of development research now focusing on the importance of cultural change.

But I take issue with his call for more paternalism. United States foreign policy in Haiti has been nothing if not paternalistic. Over the last 20 years the United States has ousted, reinstated, then ousted again Haiti’s leadership. We have consistently worked with international financial institutions to impose neoliberal governance — leaving the Haitian government impotent before the earthquake, and largely invisible since.

Paternalist cultural development policy has led to some of our most shameful legacies (like Indian boarding schools). Cultural change must be locally led to have positive effects — not based on self-righteous proclamations.

Gasteyer’s point on Indian boarding school policy is a big one. Even in light of many Native American families and children saying throughout the 1800s and 1900s that these schools were just not working for them, the federal government and non-Indian “friends” forged on with their mission–often to disastrous effects (broken spirits, rape, abuse, and death were rampant at some of the institutions). At just one such institution, the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, hundreds of Indian kids died during its operation from 1879 – 1918. Ironically, Carlisle was held up at the time as a model of the assimilation era.

History isn’t the only area where American paternalism toward Indians has led to complications. When the No Child Left Behind Act was enacted in the early 2000s, there were no provisions focused on the importance of cultural and language learning in measuring a Native student’s progress. No shock, many Native kids initially failed. In time, Indian educators successfully pointed out that this was a flaw of NCLB, and slow steps have been taken to correct it.

It’s now a disaster zone in Haiti, so points on paternalistic policy may seem much too esoteric at the moment. But the issue will not go away, even when the earthquake becomes part of the distant past. Just ask the thousands of tribal citizens in the U.S. today who continue the fight to break free from the aftereffects of the chains of paternalism, while living in extreme poverty (which brings up another flaw in Brooks’ argument: shouldn’t there be very little poverty in Indian populations, given the exceptionally high historical rates of paternalism toward them?).

Contrary to what some have suggested, a charter city in Haiti is simply not an option at this time. A charter city can only be created through voluntary agreement. Under the current conditions, the government and people of Haiti do not have the freedom of choice required for any agreement reached now to be voluntary.

In 2004, most knowledgeable observers concluded that the crisis in Haiti met the stringent criteria required for a humanitarian military intervention. A UN dispatched a force of 7000 soldiers and 2000 police officers. It made real progress, particularly after 2006. It reduced kidnappings and established a police presence in areas where criminal gangs had been so strong that Haitian police could not enter. The UN also paid for the expansion and training of the Haitian police force.

On top of its enormous human and economic cost, the earthquake has setback these efforts at strengthening the Haitian government. The case for a foreign military presence is now much stronger. The number of foreign troops is increasing rapidly. They are likely to stay much longer.

In the current circumstances, any attempt at creating a new city in Haiti under foreign control would turn a humanitarian military intervention into a humanitarian military occupation. This approach is fraught with risks that the concept of a charter city is designed to avoid.

As sensible as I think charter cities are for the third world – essentially little reproductions of Hong Kong in developing countries – this analysis makes sense to me.  Just like democracy can’t be produced at the barrel of a gun, neither can foreign powers force charter cities on developing countries.  Of course, Hong Kong itself was pretty much forced on the Chinese, but that was a different time.  Far from a freely chosen effort to bring investment and economic liberalism to Haiti, it would come across as paternalism of the worst sort, and would only succeed at this point with an accompanying military occupation.

In a sincere tribute in the Globe and Mail, John Ralston Saul, the president of International PEN, said Anglade “was a formidable opponent equipped with a torrent of rich, terrifying language, a true model of the engaged writer.” Mr. Anglade’s essays and fiction utilized a literary style known as lodyans, a condensed and often humorous composition recited orally and sometimes written for special occasions. His most recent book, Haitian Laughter came out in 2006 and was published in French by Educa Vision Inc. In 1974, Mr. Anglade was imprisoned and he was twice exiled. He spent much of his time between Canada and Haiti, thus strengthening the bond between the two countries. He served on the board of PEN-Quebec.

Two years ago he founded the PEN Centre in Haiti in the hopes of linking exiled Haitian writers with their counterparts still in Haiti. The network  sought to strengthen the bond between Haitian writers across the globe who wrote about the experience of being Haitian, and it ventured to make their voices louder, more unified. There was safety in numbers, he believed.

via International PEN Mourns the Loss of Georges Anglade.

via Requiem for a Haitian Writer.