• Why The New York Times eliminated its social media editor position | Poynter.
  '“At the beginning there was some resistance among my colleagues about using these tools,” Preston said. “What did I hear at the very beginning? ‘Twitter is all about what people are having for lunch.’ Now, no one says that anymore.”'
  (tags: socialmedia gvsocmed)

• Nicholas Christakis on the networked nature of Twitter » Nieman Journalism Lab
  How do you look beyond standard (and, per Christakis’ anecdotal evidence, misleading) metrics like Twitter follower/Facebook friend counts and find more meaningful metrics of influence?
  (tags: socialmedia twitter influence gvsocmed)

Because not everything I’m interested in sharing feels CFR-worthy and because 140 characters sometimes just aren’t enough, I’ve started posting again over at Tumblr.

Start by leaving the country a few days before the event (not that you know it’s going to happen). About five days is good, say, around July 22, 1990. Make sure the place you’re going is far from any established West Indian community. Northern California is a workable option.

On the morning of the event (i.e. July 27, 1990), sit down in your friend Gillian Goddard’s cottage in Menlo Park, type up a television script on Gillian’s friend Dan’s Mac Plus, print it out and take it to a nearby copy shop, e.g. Kinko’s. From the shop, fax the script to your colleagues Walt and Danielle in Trinidad, who, later that day, will use it to shoot a segment of the television show you’re working on together. The act of faxing the script also inserts you—tenuously—into Walt and Danielle’s more heroic narrative related to the event, though of course you don’t know this at the time.

Take the train into San Francisco, trawl around the city like a tourist then in the afternoon meet up with Gillian in order to hitch a ride back to Menlo Park. While sitting in the car in rush-hour gridlock on US-101, fiddle with the dial on the radio and happen upon a National Public Radio (NPR) report about an attempted coup in your home country of Trinidad and Tobago!

Marvel at the coincidence of your landing, just at that moment, upon a news report about a nation that would otherwise receive scant coverage even on public radio, but exhibit incredulity. Await the jingle at the end of the report announcing that what you just heard was a comedy segment. When, instead of a jingle, you hear another report about something bad happening in some other part of the world, freeze for a few seconds. Then try to recall whether, five days before, there had been any sign or indication that something like this was going to happen. Decide that there hadn’t.

As it would be some years yet before either you or Gillian—or most of the world’s citizens—acquires a cell phone, sit patiently in traffic until you get back to Menlo Park, but once there, rush to the answering machine which is pulsating with voice messages. Be amused at Gillian’s Washington DC-based sister’s succinct “They had a coup! Call me!”. Wonder how all the Trinidadians on the west coast had managed to get hold of Gillian’s number. Return calls. Answer new calls that come in. Lament the fact that nobody has any real information.

Even though the phone lines to Trinidad are perpetually busy, keep trying to get through to family, but make sure you have a list of questions prepared, as long distance calls aren’t cheap and Skype hasn’t yet been invented, nor has the MagicJack. Lament the absence, in northern California, of a real West Indian community such as exists in New York or Washington D.C. or south Florida or even Atlanta, and discuss how this limits your access to the choicest rumours and to folks who know folks who had managed to get through to somebody in Trinidad who knows somebody who knows what’s going on. Experience feelings of profound isolation.

Keep the radio tuned to NPR. Make sure you tune in to an NPR report in which journalist Ira Mathur is interviewed from Port of Spain about the horrors to which your homeland is being subjected while sitting on the bonnet of the car in Stinson Beach, in the atmospheric Marin Headlands, looking out at the magnificent Pacific. Note it as one of the most bizarre juxatpositions of your lifetime.

Leave California for New York. Wait it out there for what seems like—or may well be, as you don’t yet record all your trips using as-yet-to-be-dreamed-of services like Dopplr and TripIt—weeks. Watch that single, worrying image on CNN of Port of Spain with a plume of smoke wafting up from the middle of the city over and over again; listen to the West Indian radio stations; talk to folks on the phone—but still feel you have no idea what’s going on in your homeland, except that the insurgents have surrendered and there’s now a curfew. Write letters (longhand, as you’re still five years from getting an e-mail account) to friends in various places announcing that you might end up staying in the US.

Be deeply envious of your friends Walt and Danielle, who were in fact shooting your script when news of the insurrection reached them, and who, with all other work brought to a standstill by the events, report that they’ve been venturing out with the camera to capture coup-related action.

Keep harassing the airline to put you on a flight back home. Settle eventually for one that connects in Miami, even though it means spending an awful night in Miami International Airport.

Return to Trinidad. Fail to remember, 20 years later, who collected you at the airport, what you saw from the car on the way home, what you felt when you finally walked through the doors of the home you weren’t sure you’d ever see again.

Wonder if 20 years is really that long or if there’s some other reason you’ve shoved those memories aside.

• Generation Y » Fish Eyes
  Fascinating post by Cuban über-blogger Yoani Sánchez about the security cameras scattered about Havana and the unwitting testimony they provide to certain of the activities of of the Cuban state.
  (tags: cuba)

In recent times, the photo below has appeared in two Trinidad and Tobago publications, UWI Today and Newsday.

In both cases the photo was used to advertise a public lecture by the photo’s subject, writer Thomas Glave—a lecture, I should add, that I’m glad to see taking place, as it presents a rare opportunity for a rational discussion about homosexuality in the Caribbean. The event also features my friend Colin Robinson. But all that’s beside the point, at least for the purposes of this blog post (listen to the podcast I recorded with Thomas and Nicholas Laughlin here). The point is that the image belongs to me, though there was nothing in either publication to indicate that this was the case. In Newsday’s case, the published version of the image even bears a Newsday watermark.

On learning of the Newsday instance, which, coming on the heels of UWI Today, was the straw that broke the camel’s back, I made like a 21st century person and went public about the incident on Twitter and Facebook. Within a few hours I’d received an e-mail from Vaneisa Baksh, the editor of UWI Today, apologising for the error. She said she had come across the photo (uncredited, of course) on a web site advertising a reading by Thomas, and thought it was a promotional image. (I suspect it may be this site, whose owners will be hearing from me very soon). UWI Today is now in possession of an invoice from me, which Vaneisa has promised to shepherd personally through the labyrinth of the UWI finance department, and I’m deeply grateful for her gracious handling of the matter.

I’m still awaiting a response from Newsday, whom I also sent a note and an invoice, though to be fair to them, it was sent only today.

As a number of my Facebook friends have expressed an interest in the details of the matter, I’ve decided to make public the text of the letters I sent to both publications.

The letter to UWI Today:

Dear Vaneisa -

Many thanks for your messages and for understanding my position. I was alerted to UWI Today's use of the photo when the edition was first published, and have been meaning to send you a note (plus invoice!) since then. But then came Newsday's more egregious use of the image, to which UWI Today's initial use became an unfortunate footnote.

The sad reality is that all it takes is a single uncredited use of an image and it's downhill from there, and I do acknowledge that UWI Today was not the original violator. I think the more important point is that photos don't take themselves: any published photo should be attributed either to its owner or to the person who granted permission for its use, unless it happens to be in the public domain. I deliberately release my images under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en), which allows anyone to use them for non-commercial purposes as long as I am properly credited. This eliminates the need for people who wish to use my photos for purposes covered by the licence to contact me (though most do so anyway), and is also in keeping with my conviction that rigid copyright regimes stifle creativity and innovation and that sharing creates goodwill.

I acknowledge that I should have contacted you simultaneously with my posting of the status message on Twitter/Facebook, and I do apologise for not having done so. I do think it is useful to be public and transparent in situations such as this and I have already posted a response stating that you have been in touch, and will post another stating that the situation has been amicably resolved.

Many thanks again for your gracious handling of this situation. I hope Newsday follows suit! The invoice is attached.

Best,
Georgia

And to Newsday:

Dear Ms Sheppard and Ms. Lum Wai -

Georgia Popplewell

• Filmmaker: I want to give the world a different view of Haiti – CNN.com
  Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck on Haiti after the earthquake.

Photo of 3canal by Jeffrey Chock

So perhaps I’m a little biased when it comes to 3canal. After all, they’ve been CFR’s official house band since 2005, and the bond is especially strong around where Carnival is concerned.

Caribbean Free Radio’s very first podcast was recorded in 3canal’s offices amidst the madness of Carnival Friday 2005, and last year 3canal and I teamed up to record the cut+clear carnival podcast, a six-part series examining various themes relating to the evolution of Trinidad and Tobago’s national festival.

We’d planned a reprise this year, but my work schedule and Haiti post-earthquake visit got in the way. So, as a substitute of sorts, 3canal passed me a recording they did for a local radio station previewing their 2010 Carnival show and releases. You can listen to it using the player below:

The 3canal Jam-It Show [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1624)

If you haven’t yet seen the 3canal Jam-It Show, I’d suggest you do so, and soon, as it runs only till Saturday (February 13). Since their move from the Little Carib Theatre to Queen’s Hall a few years ago, 3canal’s shows have been uniformly spectacular, especially in terms of the visual and musical production; but the 3canal Jam-It Show brings the theatrical aspects that made the Little Carib shows so delightful and special back to centre stage, making for a terrific—and terrifically funny—production.

Diehard PNM supporters should make an extra-special effort to attend!

• Zafen.org – Coming Soon!
  Haiti-specific Kiva.org and donation site rolled into one:

  "Zafen, Creole for "It's our business," soon will offer you the opportunity to lend or contribute to sustainable economic development projects in Haiti.

  "By providing support to micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, together we can bolster the Haitian economy, create new jobs, and improve the lives of those living in some of the poorest conditions in the world."

Having spent the last year doing a house renovation, and one that’s involved a fair amount of demolition, I’m naturally intrigued by the conversations around the rebuilding of Haiti post-earthquake. We hear yesterday that they’ve begun to tear down the damaged buildings in Port-au-Prince, even though an official demolition plan is yet to be announced. We’ve seen a fair amount of salvaging, do-it-yourself rubble-removal and a backhoe or two on our trips around town: those who can and those who can afford to, such as private enterprises like Sogebank, are forging ahead with the cleanup process.

Men salvage furniture from an earthquake-damaged house in Port-au-Prince

Jacqueline Charles writes in the Miami Herald that “government estimates that 25,000 government offices and businesses either toppled or need to be demolished. In addition, there are 225,000 residences that are no longer habitable. In all, some 2.1 billion cubic feet of concrete and rubble need to be hauled out of the city.” The article says that the United Nations Development Program has hired 12,000 people to clean up debris and hope to have 50,000 clearing roads by next week. I’m assuming this information has come via the daily briefings the UN has been holding for journalists at their headquarters. A development agency contact who’s been attending the briefings tells me he’s yet to see a Haitian journalist there. He also says he rarely sees non-Haitians at the briefings hosted by the Haitian government.

There’s been much discussion about the role played by building practices and standards, or lack thereof, in intensifying the impact of the disaster. Marc Herman, writing a few days ago over at Global Voices, reminds us that cultural practices are also part of the mix. “But Adolphe Saint-Louis, a 49 year-old quake survivor interviewed in Port au Prince by New American Media, describes something more complicated than iffy concrete,” Marc writes:

Her home was built as a series of additions, — and with rebar, she says — to keep extended family under one roof, and share building costs in the family. Making the building expandable served an important function, but proved catastrophic when the structure failed.

But even houses that don’t appear to be designed with expansion in mind appear to favour concrete as a roofing material. Travelling around Port-au-Prince, I’ve seen gables and hip roofs made of concrete.

Then there’s the critical matter of shelter for those who have lost their homes. Those who can manage it are already beginning to repair and rebuild for themselves. Those who can’t have been evacuated to the country side or are living in increasingly fetid improvised tent cities—or rather “sheet cities”, as I heard someone remark, as genuine tents are few and far between.

There’s talk of the setting up of official settlements with proper facilities, which one hopes won’t replicate the old mistakes. In the meantime, the crowds camped out in Place St. Pierre in Pétion-ville—likely one of the better serviced settlements—make do with a handful of portable toilets, and the daily information bulletins ask people to refrain from defecating in the streets. You keep your fingers crossed that this will all be sorted out in time for the rainy season, which begins in three months’ time.

Several of the 19th-century gingerbread houses in Port-au-Prince managed to weather the January 12 earthquake

Writing on the Corbett Haiti mailing list, Anne-Christine d’Adesky highlights another factor complicating the reconstruction process—the preservation of traditional architecture:

As the bulldozers work to clear the rubble, some Haitians who are very involved in Preservation of Haiti's rich cultural heritage are sounding the alarm about the need to PRESERVE and RESTORE Jacmel's unique architecture - including 100 year old houses. Ironically in P au P, Haiti's famed gingerbread houses are among the only ones standing (like my late grandmere's house in Bois Verna, an otherwise very hard-hit section with nearby Sacre Coeur church collapses. We need to learn from the survival of these well-built wooden houses...

• How to evaluate volunteer opportunities in Haiti
  Excellent post that everyone should read before considering volunteering in Haiti (or any other developing nation, for that matter). Makes the important point that "by working for free volunteers undercut the local labor market. For the cost of a round trip plane ticket a local construction worker could be paid months worth of work."
  (tags: haiti, volunteerism, disaster, relief, humanitarian)

Grand Rue in Port-au-Prince, Haiti is one of the city’s most disadvantaged neighbourhoods, but also home to a vibrant community of artists who create works of art out of the discarded materials they find in their environment. The area was host to the first Ghetto Biennale in December 2009.

This video highlights the impact of the January 12 earthquake on the artists’ surroundings and their way of life.

To offer direct support to the artists of Grand Rue, please donate to the Foundry Haiti Fund.

We went into downtown Port-au-Prince again yesterday. We’d via Twitter that food was being distributed near the National Palace, followed by reports, from Carel Pedre and Karl Jean-Jeune, of UN security “spraying gas” and “throwing tear gas”. Examining the footage posted to YouTube by Carel Pedre back at headquarters (ie his apartment in Barcelona), my Global Voices colleague Marc Herman concluded that the substance being sprayed looked more like pepper spray. The pepper spray story was corroborated by reports from the UK Times Online, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, though Al Jazeera English maintains the tear gas line.

Food distribution line in Port-au-Prince

Whether pepper spray or tear gas-related, the scuffle has died down by the time we arrive in town. The line is long, but people are waiting patiently. We ask a bystander what’s being distributed. He says he thinks it’s rice. I ask Roosevelt, our driver, to circle the Champs de Mars for a bit, so we can see what’s going on in the vast tent city that now occupies most of the city’s central square.

Unsurprisingly, the regular rhythm of Haitian life seems to have established itself in the maze of makeshift shelters clustered among plinths bearing statues of Toussaint, Pétion and company, the country’s founding fathers. Women are cooking, bathing babies and doing laundry in basins along the perimeter wall, bathing themselves at the roadside. Children are playing football, vendors have set up stalls on the periphery. Near the National Palace, people have gathered to watch a safe being lowered from a government building. Less formal salvage and scavenging operations are taking place in other parts of the city as well. We pass groups of men shoveling rubble, people picking among the ruins of buildings for things they can reuse. Among the detritus, Port-au-Prince is slowly coming back to life.

Around the tent city on the Champs the Mars, life resumes its normal rhythm

Last night a friend who’s come here to work with a Canadian NGO wondered how many of the “displaced” were people whose homes were intact but who were simply afraid of sleeping indoors. Yesterday the Haitian government, such as it is, issued a bulletin summarising the impact of the earthquake. On her blog, Anne-Christine D’Adesky posts translations of some of the highlights:

“Around 112,000 dead, 195,000 wounded, 1 million homeless, half the houses destroyed in Port-au-Prince, Jacmel and Leogane; at least 23 private hospitals collapsed.

“The government yesterday announced the creation of 2 camps for displaced persons in Port-au-Prince: one on the road to Tabarre, the other at Croix des Bouquets. Another site has been identified in the zone of Leogane.

“Only qualified engineers can determine if a damaged building is sound enough to be recoccupied. The rule to follow until an engineer has evaluated a property is: if the building doesn't look sound, it isn't.

“Today, we estimate the capacity of food distribution varies between 200,000 and 300,000 rations a day. This means that, in Port-au-Prince and its surroundings alone, over 800,000 people will not be reached. This is the major challenge.

“The government is opposed to precipitous adoptions and uncontrolled departures from Haiti of vulnerable or orphaned children and is concerned about the risk of trafficking.

“NGOs engaged in humanitarian or food aid are encouraged to work with the UN system that has been established.”

It’s hard to know what’s really happening on the ground. Port-au-Prince is a vast city and unfamiliar city, and my primary goal in being here is not to report on the situation. We’re staying in Petionville, away from the fray. As the tear gas story above demonstrates, it’s difficult to verify information. You try to get around as much as you can, but in the end you’ll see only a tiny fraction of the whole, and perhaps understand or read accurately only a fraction of that. But the overriding story is about the distribution of aid: how badly it’s going, how supplies are failing to get to those who need it, and also how difficult the whole exercise is. I’m pretty sure that one is true.

On the edge of the tent city near the National Palace I talk to a pair of middle-aged women from Bel Air. They say they’d haven’t received any food supplies. I ask them if they plan on leaving the city for the countryside. The older one says no. I ask why. She says it’s because her father is dead—she has no family left “en province“.

Earthquake damage in Carrefour

We drive out west to the bedroom district of Carrefour, where 40-50% of the buildings are said to have sustained damaged. Along the main roads at least, the impact of the quake doesn’t seem as dramatic as in central Port-au-Prince, as the buildings are lower and not as densely clustered. Tent cities have sprung up on the median strips and there are mounds of burning garbage along the roadside. But Carrefour didn’t need an earthquake to render conditions appalling. Yet, the community is going about its business, obviously accustomed to the general squalor and the grey slurry of macerated garbage underfoot. We pass three money transfer agencies with long lines in front, a sign that remittances, which by some estimates account of over half of the country’s national income, are flowing back into Haiti once more.

Tent city on the median strip on the Carrefour main road

Crowd gathered at a money transfer agency in Carrefour, awaiting remittances from abroad

We head back into central Port-au-Prince to engage with a different side of Haiti at the storied Hotel Oloffson in Bois Verna, where it seems like half of the Corbett Haiti mailing list is lunching. We chat briefly with hotel proprietor Richard Morse, who now has 12,065 followers on Twitter and appears on 638 Twitter lists, all as a result of the earthquake. Also there: Anne-Christine D’Adesky, who’s been blogging and posting to the Corbett list consistently since the earthquake hit and says that Haiti is the litmus test for whether the lessons learned in other recent humanitarian situations have really been learned; New Yorker Tequila Minsky, just in been taking photos in a nearby neighbourhood; writer Amy Wilentz, who’s blogging for TIME magazine; Haitian photographer Daniel Morel, who corrects my camera-holding techniques; and Leah Gordon, who offers to take us to Portail Leogane visit the sculptors of the Grand Rue.

But that’s the subject of another post. Over and out.

I noted in an earlier post that Haiti was among the countries that we at Global Voices have generally found it difficult to cover. Before the earthquake, citizen and social media activity inside Haiti was sporadic. Since January 12, however, we’ve published 24 fine articles focused directly on the citizen media activity taking place within Haitian borders, dozens of links to Haiti-related content and several more articles highlighting reactions to the earthquake from countries like Dominican Republic, Japan, Bangladesh, Brazil, Russia and Guatemala.

My role in the coverage has been quite minimal. After posting the first article, setting up a Twitter list of people posting from the ground in Haiti and a Google group to streamline the lively conversation that began almost instantly, the team grabbed the reins. I participated in the discussions and shared the occasional link, but it’s Janine, Nicholas, Marc and Fabienne who’ve really taken the Haiti story and run with it. Even as I sit here in Port-au-Prince trying to figure things out, I’m depending on my colleagues to help me make sense of the reams that have written about the country in the past two weeks. I’m very grateful to them, both for their outstanding work, and for making me—yet again—so proud of the work we do.

Only managed to sort out reliable Internet access yesterday evening, so lots to catch up on.

—

We arrived in Port-au-Prince on Saturday afternoon, after a long but uneventful drive from Santo Domingo. As we approached Jimani, on the Dominican border, we began seeing probable evidence of the situation on the other third of the island: makeshift roadside stalls selling gallon bottles of gasoline, heavy trucks carrying cargo, a motorcycle passenger with his leg bandaged to the thigh. The area near the border gate was swarming with vehicles and people, and we fully expected border formalities to take some time. But after a mysterious confab between our driver and the two associates who’d come along on the trip and a man in a purple cap, we drove through the border gates just like that, with nary a nod from the guards or a request to see a passport, through the few yards of tierra de nadie between the two borders, and into Haiti. Later I noticed that the man in the purple cap had joined us and was sitting in the tray of the pickup among our luggage—turns out he was our Haitian navigator.

—

It was some time before we saw any earthquake damage—the epicentre was south-west of the city of Port-au-Prince, and we were approaching from the east. Then, here and there, the odd ill-starred building with a collapsed balcony, in parking lots and clearings, clusters of makeshift tents. Then both sights became became more frequent: residences with collapsed upper storeys, framed pictures still hanging off the walls, crushed sofas; the clusters turned into tent cities. But still not anything like the images from the news.

—

I think that part of me has come to Haiti wanting to believe that the images I’d been seeing in the media were somehow exaggerated. In largely middle-class Delmas, where our journey from Santo Domingo ends on Saturday, a number of commercial buildings and residences along the Route de Delmas have collapsed, either entirely or partially, and walls everywhere show cracks and fissures. From one building, a large pane of glass leans precariously out over the sidewalk, and a pale yellow three-story residence has caved in on itself like a fallen cake, the ground floor flattened beneath the weight the floors above. The arbitrariness of the damage was striking—why this building and not that one? But the Canadian Embassy is perfectly intact, and a reporter is recording a stand-up on one of the parapets above the road. Businesses, including gas stations, are operating. People carrying five-gallon water bottles are lined up in orderly fashion in front of a water distribution shop. Traffic is flowing, and in spite of the damage it appears that things have returned almost to normal in Delmas.

Queueing for water in Delmas

The offices of the National Democratic Institute, which the Internews team has commandeered for its use while in Haiti, are buzzing with activity. A young Haitian hanging out in front of the building helps us take our luggage up the stairs. “Ça va [How’s it going?]?” he says. “Ça va bien,” I reply. The stock response, but it displeases him. “Ca va *pas* bien [It's *not* going well]“, he says. “J’ai perdu ma maison, mon beau-frère. Je suis sans-abri [I’ve lost my house, my brother-in-law is dead. I’m homeless].”

We’ve arrived just at the moment when the Internews team is rushing to get their daily information programme on air, so nobody pays us much heed. The place is crammed with suitcases, air mattresses, cases of water, laptops, emergency radios. Towels are slung over chair backs, and one shelf of a stationery cupboard is loaded with canned food. It doesn’t look like there’ll be room for us. We issue tweets saying we’re looking for accommodation and Alice gets on the phone and starts working her family contacts. Within 45 minutes Alice’s friends L and B have arrived to collect us, and we head back out on to the Route de Delmas, now in darkness except for the headlights of cars and the fires and flambeaux on street vendors’ stalls.

On our way up to L and B’s house in Laboule we pass through well-heeled Pétionville, which is reported to have been largely unaffected by the quake. Two of its gracious squares, Place Boyer and Place St. Pierre, have nevertheless been transformed into teeming tent cities, filled with the newly homeless from other parts of this divided city . The luckier people are settling down for the night under the canopies of camionettes parked at the side of the road. In spite of the people milling around in the darkness, it is quiet. Parked across from the Hotel Kinam on Place St. Pierre is a MINUSTAH truck.

Tent city at Place St. Pierre, Pétionville

—-

It’s odd to wake up the next morning in Laboule and look out upon a stunning mountain view. None of the houses in the area appears to have sustained much damage, though L and B have lost a retaining wall. The absence of running water and electricity probably have less to do with the earthquake than the fact that we’re in Haiti. At L and B’s house there are a few hairline cracks in the mortar that L, an engineer, has marked with black crayon, so he’ll know if they widen. L takes what he calls a scientific approach to the quake. He explains the math behind the Richter Scale and has decided it’s not worth worrying about aftershocks. In fact, L sleeps through the aftershock that occurs on Sunday afternoon.

The radio reports on Sunday indicate that people continue to be evacuated from the city. Over lunch, L tells us that some “méchants” (troublemakers) are spreading rumours that people who opt for evacuation won’t be allowed to return to the capital for five years. We also talk about L’s sister, a physician who has come from the States to volunteer her services and is now working in a centre at Croix des Bouquets. L’s sister reports that Haitian doctors are being sidelined in the relief efforts, and it’s only after she gives an interview to CNN that she starts getting some grudging respect from the big international agencies.

—-

We finally leave Laboule late on Sunday afternoon and descend into Port-au-Prince. There are fallen buildings all along the Route de Bourdon and a slum that covers the hillside across the distance like a skin looks chipped and battered. It gets worse at we get nearer to the city centre, but it’s still not the total wreckage from the photos. We arrive at the Champs de Mars, the massive square, which has been partly overtaken by a multi-section tent city. The sinking feeling sets in officially as we stop in front of the National Palace with its caved-roof. That one certainly matches the news photos, except that up close it’s more massive and more desolate. We drive around the Champs de Mars and pass in front of the Plaza Hotel, where a news cameraman is filming what looks like a heap of black rags in the street. The black rags are in fact two dead bodies, perhaps recently pulled from the wreckage, their limbs intertwined.

The area just east of the Champs de Mars is straight out of the news photos. A long corridor of rubble, not a building left standing. You’ve all seen it by now, so I don’t need to describe it further, or the scent of decay that hangs in the air, now several times less intense than it was a few days ago.

I’m adding these last few lines just so I can say I didn’t end on a note of despair. I apologise for adding to the heavy burden of bad news already borne by this country. And now to make a plan for what we’ll be doing while we’re here.

To supplement the tutoring I’m getting via the Byki iPhone app, I’ve been having Alice coach me in Haitian Creole, using some rather unconventional course materials. The only printed Creole resources I have on hand are copies of Kote ki pa gen doktè (the Creole version of the health education classic Where There Is No Doctor) and Kreyòl Ayisyen pou Swen Sante (Haitian Creole for Health Care). So if I need to ask anyone about “colonoscopy” (ekzamen gwo trip) or whether they’ve got an itch (Èske kò ou grate ou?), I’m all set.

The other learning tool is music. My collection of Haitian music is at home on my iPod, but we managed to find two of Beethova Obas‘ classic songs on iTunes. Last night the true beauty of “Si (Oh Oh)” and “Nou Pa Moun” was revealed to me as Alice walked me through the lyrics (which I already knew phonetically). I’m not sure I’ll ever need to say “under Lucifer’s flag” (anba drapo Lisifè) while I’m in Haiti, but hey—you never know.

At my hotel in Miami, catching up on email and the latest news over coffee, trying to prepare mentally for the days ahead. I didn’t sleep well last night: overtiredness, strange bed, anxiety that I wouldn’t hear the alarm and oversleep and miss my flight to Santo Domingo, dreams that. Matt Abud from Internews, with whom we’re hoping to travel to Haiti tomorrow, wrote to say he probably won’t leave for Haiti till tomorrow. Dye mon, gen mon. Beyond the mountains, more mountains.

January 21, 2010
6:00pm

I’m finally on my way. I won’t make it to the Dominican Republic tonight as planned, but American Airlines will put me up in Miami and I’ll catch a flight in the morning that should get me into Santo Domingo by early afternoon. After the frenzy of the last several days the setback feels almost welcome, though I am anxious to get to Haiti and begin work.

Prompted by this morning’s tweet about packing, a couple of people have expressed interest in what I’m taking with me to Haiti. The answer is everything. From the outside, my two rolling duffels resemble the luggage of any old traveler. The individual that opens both, however, would be hard pressed to decide whether they were dealing with a higgler or a low-rent James Bond.

Here’s what you’ll find in my luggage:

FOOD: One of my two bags is filled almost entirely with non-perishable foodstuff. At the end of the mission I’m probably not going to want to see nuts, dried fruit, protein bars, granola bars, bran crackers, peanut butter, soy milk, Chef Boyardee ravioli or those cheese wedges that don’t need refrigeration again for a very long time. But we need to be as self-sufficient as possible while we’re there, and I’m hoping I’ve packed enough to be able to leave some behind.

SHELTER ETC: Thank heaven for outdoorsy friends. Yesterday I raided Nikipedia’s stash of outdoor goods, and left with a sleeping bag, a lightweight hammock/mosquito net combination that folds up into a small drawstring bag, camping plate and cutlery set, travel French press, compass, emergency whistle, padlock, rain poncho, and compressible pillow. Other items in my kit include an LED flashlight, cigarette lighter, utility knives, masking tape, duct tape, cable ties, rubber bands, rubber gloves, fabric shopping bag, small daypack, candles, matches, ziploc bags, bedsheet, pillowcase, towel, water bottle, three-step filter bottle that claims to be able to render ditchwater potable, water purification drops.

FIRST AID AND MEDICATIONS: Various kinds of bandages, strapping tape, cotton wool, antiseptic spray, surgical gloves, surgical masks, throat lozenges, multivitamins, antidiarrheals, antibiotics, painkillers, etc.

TOILETRIES: The usual, plus extra hand sanitiser, baby wipes, hospital grade full-body wipes (read: “shower substitute”), toilet paper, paper towels.

CLOTHING: The only item worth mentioning are hiking boots, which normally wouldn’t make the cut for a Caribbean trip unless that trip included hiking. I figure they’ll come in handy on the rubble-strewn streets of Port-au-Prince.

MONEY: US cash. The teller at the bank raised her eyebrows when I asked for the quantity I needed in small bills.

GADGETS: I tend to travel with a fair number of gizmos anyway, but this time I’m carrying more than the usual complement, as I’ve brought along my audio recording equipment and deliberately over-catered in the cables department. Here’s the lineup:

Computers: MacBook, iPhone, bluetooth keyboard. Thanks to a third-party app called BTstack, I can now use the bluetooth keyboard as an external keyboard for my (jailbroken) iPhone, which turns the latter into the ultimate travel computer. I suspect I’ll be doing a good deal of my writing on this trip using the iPhone/keyboard combo, as the keyboard runs on AA batteries and I can juice up the iPhone with a solar charger (see the “And to keep these babies running in the event of a power outage” section below).

Photo, video, audio: DSLR camera, 18-250mm lens, 10-22mm lens, point-and-shoot camera, Flip camera, Aiptek HD video camera, minidisc recorder, microphone, headphones

Cables, adaptors etc: Mini USB, iPhone, Ethernet, chargers for all gadgets, power strip (special for this trip).

Also: Two Digicel mobile phones, USB sticks, Airport Express wireless router, and a voltage converter kit with plug adaptors for most countries. Haiti is 110v, but as the power we’ll be using may be generated by equipment brought into the country by international agencies I thought it best to be prepared.

And to keep these babies running in the event of a power outage: Camera batteries, AA and AAA batteries (rechargeable and disposable) and, thanks to Brian Kinzie, who dashed out to purchase it on the last day of a visit to wintry Montreal, a snazzy solar charger that will power all of the aforementioned gizmos with the exception of the still cameras and the MacBook.

Software: The only software acquired specially for this trip are FrontlineSMS (latest builds for Windows, Macintosh and Linux – thank you, Ken Banks and Josh Nesbit), Byki Haitian Creole iPhone app, First Aid iPhone app.

Analog: Small and medium Moleskine Cahiers, rolling ball pens, steel chalk.

Left behind: I normally travel with a selection of jewelry, but this time I’ve brought only the items I’m wearing: a wristwatch, earrings and a silver chain bracelet. I’ve misplaced a number of beloved rings on the road in recent times, in situations less uncertain than this, so decided to play it safe. I usually travel with an umbrella, but couldn’t fit one in. And I wanted to bring the USB headset I use for Skype calls, but they don’t exactly make those things compact, do they.

The best part of packing for this trip was remembering that I’ll be returning with only half the items I packed. I’m really, really hoping I’ve brought enough food to give some away.

11:04pm

During landing I struck up a conversation with two of the flight attendants sitting in the jump seats near to me. They said that American Airlines have been operating what sound like test flights into Haiti. So if all goes well, I may be returning to Trinidad from Port-au-Prince instead of via Santo Domingo.

And now to bed.

If everything goes as planned, I’ll be heading to Haiti at the end of this week. I fly into Santo Domingo on Thursday, and will make my way overland to Port-au-Prince in the company of a couple of colleagues. And yes, I am going there on behalf of Global Voices (GV).

I’ve read about Haiti, I’ve flown over its brown mountains en route to other places, I’ve seen it from shores of Lake Enriquillo on its border with the Dominican Republic. But I’ve never set foot in Haiti itself. I wish I were making my début at a different time. Of course. Anything I can say about Haiti is going to sound like a platitude, so I’ll spare you those having to do with human misery and direct another one at myself instead: I have no idea what to expect and am not sure my imagination can prepare me.

What do we hope to achieve with this trip? Primarily, to encourage and support the continuance of the burgeoning citizen media activity the earthquake has occasioned. Haiti has always been one of the countries we at Global Voices have found it most difficult to cover. In November 2005, shortly after I joined GV, I interviewed Alice Backer, a Haitian lawyer and blogger based in New York. One of the things we discussed was the dearth of Haitians blogging from inside Haiti.

GP: Haitian Mofo is one of the few bloggers who is/was actually based in Haiti, right? Do you know why he stopped blogging?

AB: I e-mailed him and even posted on the site for him to come back, especially when I noticed that he was still posting on the Haitian Politics list. He e-mailed back to say he had experienced some kind of burnout but was reading my blog and thought that he might restart in a bit. My impression of him is that he is a very bright guy who is also very busy

GP: Which brings us to some of the challenges that could be faced by a blogger attempting to do his/her thing out of Haiti? What are the obstacles, besides burnout?<

AB: Well, Georgia, Haitians are all over the web — every day I discover a new Haitian website. I think that the idea of the Haitian web site (with forum, entertainment news, free music and radio) is now seen in the community as a viable business model and it's spreading like wildfire. [There are many Haitian-targeted message boards] and a ridiculous number of konpa-oriented [konpa is a Haitian musical genre; also see Alice's post about konpa] web sites. So Haitians, like most people, seem to go to the web primarily for entertainment.

AB: I’d say anything can happen depending on people’s needs and when they have something to say.

To say that citizen media in Haiti would come into its own when it was needed and when people had something to say is not prescience—it’s common sense, borne out by examples such as Madagascar after the 2009 coup. But I had forgotten the substance of that conversation with Alice, who, incidentally, has since become a good friend and will be coming to Haiti to work along with me.

In the hours just after the earthquake, we got a sense of what was going on in Port-au-Prince thanks to tweets and blog posts from the likes of Richard Morse, Carel Pedre, Troy Livesay, The Haitian Blogger, Fredo Dupoux, Real Hope for Haiti, Pwoje Espwa. Réseau Citadelle relayed the news that Cap Haitien in the north of the island had not been badly affected, unlike Jacmel in the south, from where 16 year-old Yael Talleyrand, melindayiti and others were reporting casualties and serious damage, including to the road that connected the city to the capital, long before Jacmel became a story in the mainstream media. That evening Pierre Côté from Montreal was on Ustream interviewing Haitian residents over Skype.

“They were the lives lived in that location, they understood fully the impact and the horror of having a neighbourhood torn apart,” wrote UK journalist Jamillah Knowles on her blog a few days after the earthquake.

"They had heard the peaceful ambience before and could compare the disastrous clamour afterwards, their knowledge exceeded that of the media many times and their choices of stories to tell were revealing what was important to those communities. . . . I’m not at all against reporters summarising and creating our news reports. These are practised professional story tellers, they know what is vital to an audience, but at this time, my news was broken from the inside and it was more moving and vital than I had heard before.”

In the eight days since, the flow of “alternative” news and information out of Haiti has increased, as the Haitians and Haitian residents who’ve been reporting out have been joined by journalists, aid workers, member of the Haitian diaspora, other locally-based bloggers. At Global Voices, we’ve we’ve been doing our best to summarise and contextualise the activity on a special page devoted to the coverage.

They story of ordinary people armed with new media tools stepping into the breach in crisis situations is not a new one. It was told by journalists after the 2004 tsunami, and versions of it have been told in relation to Kenya in 2008, Iran in 2009, etc. Each time it shifts slightly, according to location, according to the world’s opinion and expectations of the affected population, according to the tools and technologies applied. I suspect that given the magnitude of the damage—and the magnitude of US involvement in the relief and reconstruction efforts—the Haiti earthquake isn’t going to disappear from the pages of the major media in the way that other stories have. But it’s going to be a different kind of coverage, and one that won’t necessarily highlight local stories.

Another of our key goals, therefore, is to highlight the need for local voices in the mix and increase the opportunities for communities affected by the earthquake to be heard and understood by those working and reporting on the recovery—a group that includes Haitian institutions and media as well as international agencies. We don’t expect it will be easy: Haiti is a complex place and the damage to the country has been severe.

But I’ll be on a plane tomorrow. I’ll be trying to report on the trip here and at Global Voices, and at the very least, tweeting at http://twitter.com/georgiap. Wish me luck.

From: Carol Fipp cfipp@bellsouth.net

UPDATE as of Sunday, Jan 17, 3:40 pm Eastern Time:

We received 5 patients via a single chopper about an hour ago. We received 4 patients yesterday. We have a total of 9 patients. We are ready and capable to handle *100* injured people.

We have a full-service hospital with two ORs, a trauma team and an orthopaedic team ready to serve. They can land helicopters in the soccer field. I can send anyone who needs the Google Earth coordiates and labeled arial photos for landing. The soccer field will be LIT WITH HEADLIGHTS from trucks tonight. We have an ambulance – we are ready – we do NOT need to be contacted in advance. PLEASE BRING THE PATIENTS TO US!

Carol Fipp
Hopital Sacre Coeur in Milot, Haiti
904-223-7233
904-451-0003
cfipp@bellsouth.net