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.

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.

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

I could not live without lists. I make and keep them for all sorts of purposes: to-do lists, lists of items to take along on my travels (I keep three, separated by category), lists of talking points for presentations, fun lists, the occasional top [insert number] list.

Umberto Eco, himself an inveterate list-maker, recently described lists as “a way of escaping thoughts about death”. Practitioners of GTD, even half-baked ones like myself, know that list-making is also a way of escaping thought. Or, more accurately, having to think—having to hold the contents of the list in your head, a receptacle not optimised, in most cases, for holding lists of items (unless the list in question is a mental list, which is another matter altogether).

Lists are a key ingredient in any kind of planning, of course, and I was struck by two lists I came across today relating to the Haiti earthquake relief efforts.

The first comes off Bob Corbett’s Haiti mailing list, an e-mail list for Haiti-watchers I’ve been lurking on for years, and which has proven an invaluable source of information over the past couple of days. It was posted by Alan Woolwich, a community planner in Florida:

On acting locally in country. Get word to all local mayors and community leaders/orgs that you know, via internet, cell phone, twitter, AM/FM/TV (Satellite TV) radio stations in country and those powerful enough to broadcast in, ask them, the mayors and local leaders to get a few key people together, focus and start making specific written lists of what their damages are, rescue and medical needs, equipment and additional communication/equipment needs. This will help the mayors/leaders stay focused when they are contacted directly in person or by radio/phone by responders. They need to be collected and ready. There needs to be a central, controlled and accurate response from each small community who may not get outside help for awhile. Also have them list what resources they may have, no matter how small, available to help others outside their immediate community if and when possible.

The second is a list on a far more ambitious scale, the needs assessment posted by Partners In Health at their new Stand With Haiti web site. The first thee items on it are:

1. Reopen the airport
2. Repair cell phone communication systems
3. Clear main roads from debris

Big, hard-to-do things. But still a list, and a place to start.

Have spent most of today following the aftermath of yesterday’s 7.0 earthquake in Haiti. A few observations and links:

- Many people there, concerned about the continuing aftershocks, will be sleeping outdoors tonight, some in public areas like the Place Jeremie. “We’ll sleep in the driveway,” tweeted Richard Morse, the hotelier and musician (he’s the front man of the band RAM). And I’m assuming that by “we” he also means the guests at the Hotel Oloffson. It rained briefly in Port-au-Prince earlier this evening. Keeping my fingers crossed it doesn’t rain again tonight.

- Richard Morse’s Twitter coverage of the aftermath remains outstanding. The series of tweets he posted in the hours after the earthquake make for some heartbreaking reading, but the simple fact that he’s stayed on top of the situation, devoting his time and energy to describing the situation as he sees and hears it from his vantage point at the Oloffson, fielding requests for help and information, has been inspiring. And Morse’s tweets have flavour. Compare Morse’s “I saw a collapsed building today..it may have been 8 or 9 stories.it looked like 8 or 9 pieces of bread one on top of the other..survivors?”, with CNN reporter Ivan CNN’s “the scenes I saw today were absolutely heartbreaking. These people are desperate”, and tell me who’s doing a better job. Follow others tweeting from on the ground in Haiti via http://twitter.com/georgiap/live-from-haiti.

- Not having learned Creole is a long-standing regret that resurfaced today in listening to HaitiPal, whose video stream has been online all day, broadcasting from Haiti in Creole and French.

- A reminder (in French) of the toll catastrophes often take on a nation’s culture, in this case, its music.

- My friend Marvin Chéry in Miami has set up http://www.koneksyon.com/ to help people locate friends and family in Haiti.

- Natural disasters don’t just paralyse geographic locales, they can paralyse donors as well. Who to donate to? Are the funds going to reach the people it’s intended to help? Etc, etc. My friends at MEP Publishers have published a list of agencies raising funds both internationally and locally in Trinidad. MEP Publishers would do well to add Partners In Health, which was recommended by Nikipedia, who also passed on the link to the Foundry Haiti Fund.

- Last but not least, Global Voices, my employer and second family. The community really rallied to the cause today, and we’ve set up a special coverage page for Haiti with links to Global Voices posts and resources like the Haiti Ushahidi map.

Filmed this down and dirty little video yesterday at the National Museum in Accra, Ghana. In it I ask three Africans–two Ghanaians and an Ethiopian–what they think about Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize win.

As many of you know, I work for Global Voices, so I have a vested interest in following the instructions that Solana posted here. But I also believe passionately in the work being done by Global Voices Advocacy (GVA), the section of our organisation that seeks to defend free speech online.

While Trinidad and Tobago’s press freedom record pales in comparison with that of many of the countries which feature regularly in GVA’s pages, recent events in this country suggest that we shouldn’t be taking this freedom for granted. In November of last year, the Hon. Patrick Manning, prime minister of this nation, paid a visit to a radio station that resulted in the suspension of two commentators who had said things on air he didn’t like. And yesterday the news broke that Kevin Baldeosingh, a columnist at the Newsday, one of the country’s three dailies, was dismissed from his job at the paper, allegedly on account of a letter, published in the Trinidad Express on May 7, in which he exposed a Catholic priest as a plagiarist. A Catholic priest, moreover, who had just been appointed by the President to lead the Trinidad and Tobago’s Integrity Commission.

That the priest in question admitted his sins and stepped down (recalling, in the process, that the church’s Canon Law would have prohibited him from accepting the position anyway) thereby validating Baldeosingh’s claims, appears to be immaterial to the powers (Newsday alone? Newsday egged on by other parties? Who?) who are now attempting to silence him. The more important point, however, is that Baldeosingh was dismissed from his job for doing—regardless of where he happened to be doing it—what journalists are supposed to do, i.e. investigate a matter of public interest and present the information to the public. I imagine that Baldeosingh would have preferred to publish the information in his own paper and earn money in the process, rather than in a rival publication’s Letters to the Editor section; I also imagine that there must be a good reason he did not do so.

There are numerous writings on freedom of expressions from which I could insert an excerpt here, but I’ll quote from the one I happen to be engaged with at the moment—Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word, portions of which I’ve been receiving in installments from the ingenious DailyLit, yet another one of my daily obstacles to personal productivity that nevertheless enrich my life. This is from the essay by Toni Morrison, who is also the book’s editor, though the emphasis is mine:

We all know nations that can be identified by the flight of writers from their shores. These are regimes whose fear of unmonitored writing is justified because truth is trouble. It is trouble for the warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justice system, and for a comatose public. Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources. The alarm, the disquiet, writers raise is instructive because it is open and vulnerable, because if unpoliced it is threatening. Therefore the historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow.

And now for the obligatory line, as per Solana’s post: I vote for Global Voices Advocacy, because freedom of expression, online and elsewhere, is a right that we often value insufficiently until it’s taken away from us.

Write your own post supporting Global Voices Advocacy (or your charity of choice) by following the instructions at http://www.zemanta.com/bloggingforacause/.

This blog post is part of Zemanta’s “Blogging For a Cause” (http://www.zemanta.com/bloggingforacause/) campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about. 
 

“So long as we can call (sic) get fired, Radio will never be free.”

So went the anonymous e-mail message I received last night. Did the sender of this message so desperately need to vent his/her feelings about Prime Minister Patrick Manning’s visit to radio station 94.1 FM that any Trinidad and Tobago-identified entity with the word “radio” in its name sufficed as a target? Or could it be that he/she thinks CFR is a radio station? Or perhaps a warning that I should expect a visit from the PM some time soon?

I’m also wondering what, apart from temporary stress-relief, this person expected to achieve by sending me the message, and, moreover, in a manner (ie via anonymous remailer) that did not permit me to respond, or, even better, enter into dialogue with him/her. Unless he knew I would write this blog post, which, given my recent record, would be way against the odds.

But I agree that the day a Prime Minister pays a visit to a media company that results–either directly or indirectly–in two people being suspended from their jobs, is a sombre day indeed for those who work in what has come to be known as the mainstream media. And when that same Prime Minister declares, in a post-Cabinet news conference, that he was well within his rights to visit the radio station, denies any connection between his visit to the station and the suspension of the employees, announces his intention to sue the TNT Mirror for their report on the incident, asserts his right to “sue any media house whose reporting aggrieves him” and to “visit any offending media house ‘as the spirit moves [him]‘”, who can blame the citizens of the country for feeling that freedom of expression–indeed, democracy–in Trinidad and Tobago is under serious threat?

For those unfamiliar with the details of the radio station visit, here’s the version of the story circulated by the Media Association of Trinidad and Tobago (MATT):

MATT received reports of an incident involving Prime Minister Patrick Manning at the Abercromby Street, Port of Spain, offices of Power 102 and 94.1 FM.

The association contacted the station’s Vice-President of Operations O’Brien Haynes, who confirmed the Prime Minister had visited the station on October 25 to express his displeasure at the contents of the station’s 12:25 pm newscast. He described the Prime Minister’s demeanour as calm and cool.

Mr Haynes said the Prime Minister expressed concerns about crosstalk during the newscast on statements he made at Thick Village with regard to the increase in the price of premium gas and drivers converting from diesel to CNG.

The Vice-President said after an internal investigation it was agreed by management at the station that a newscaster and presenter were in breach of programming protocol. Mr Haynes added the employees were suspended.

Perhaps even more offensive than his threats are Mr. Manning’s efforts to shroud the clearly personal reasons for his beef with the media in the sheep’s clothing of officialdom. “Too many of the commentators either in the newspapers or on the radio do not respect our institutions,” he is reported as saying. “It is a question of being disrespectful to institutions and authority and pursuing a course of action that can cause the image of these institutions and individuals to be tarnished in the minds of those in whose interest they are set up to serve. And therefore they can become completely ineffective.”

Which I take to mean that our “institutions” are so feeble as to be rendered ineffective by the fact that the public thinks they’re not doing their job. And of course the reason the public thinks this they’re not doing their job is solely because the media tells them so, not because members of the public have dealings with these institutions and draw conclusions themselves. In addition to the impending suspension of our right to freedom of expression, should I also be bracing myself for the announcement that thoughtcrime has been added to the list of criminal offenses? Now there’s something that would aggrieve me.

People finding themselves in Mr. Manning’s situation are also fond of falling back on the old line about rights not being absolute. “They exist,” he said yesterday, “to the extent that they don’t encroach upon the rights of others, and if my rights are trampled in that process then I too have redress under the law.” Today MATT issued the following press release in response to the comments made by the Prime Minister in yesterday’s post-cabinet meeting, reminding us what those rights are:

Freedom of speech is enshrined in Section 4 of the Constitution of Trinidad and Tobago. The Media Association takes this opportunity to remind its members and all members of the population that we have a responsibility and right to comment on the actions of public officials and issues of national importance.

While we agree Mr. Patrick Manning has the same rights as any other citizen, a prime minister has greater power, which should be exercised in the public interest, with due care and responsibility.

MATT notes it is not the first time, nor will it be the last time, a prime minister has taken issue with a media house. Mr. Manning has every right to consult his lawyers whenever he feels aggrieved.

The association notes that in the Privy Council’s 1936 ruling in the Ambard case, Lord Atkin said, “The path of criticism is an open way: the wrongheaded are permitted to err therein.”

With regard to the Prime Minister’s statement that “expecting redress from the media is asking too much,” MATT begs to differ. Individual media houses have mechanisms for dealing with such matters and members of the public are also free to ask the Media Complaints Council to intervene if they are not satisfied.

MATT maintains its position that the Prime Minister’s visit to 94.1fm was inappropriate and unnecessary.

Well done, MATT. But let us keep talking about this. Let us not take this sitting down. Let the media also harness its power to help the citizens of this 46 year-old quasi-democracy internalise the idea that the right to free speech is as precious as the right to wine, and that it is in fact a “gateway” right to other critical rights.

Mr. Manning is also free to visit Caribbean Free Radio at any time the spirit moves him.

The suspension from Parliament yesterday of Basdeo Panday, Trinidad and Tobago’s leader of the Opposition, for unauthorised laptop use, has left me feeling me terribly confused. Please help me resolve some of the issues surrounding the matter by taking this poll:

*in June 2006, US Senator Stevens famously referred to the internet as “a series of tubes“

UPDATE: The Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society blog has a listing of news articles about the incident.

A historic building in Trinidad is in danger of demolition. Please visit the web site and sign the petition.

Technorati Tags: trinidad and tobago, architecture, victorian, conservation, history, port of spain, boissiere house

The first thing I thought to do as I felt my desk and chair start shaking, albeit gently, about 40 minutes ago, was to post to Twitter: “Earthquake here in Trinidad!” Within two minutes I had a response from the intrepid iange, asking: “what’s the value of the quake, don’t see any seismic senors which have picked on it yet.”

I told iange I’d check the UWI Seimsic Research Centre’s web site but then got sidetracked by e-mail. Within another few minutes, however, iange was back with the info: “appears to be a quake measuring 5.4 Magnitude according to GEOFON’s sensors” and “GEOFON has revised reading to 5.2 Magnitude , off the coast of Venezuela“, plus links to the sites shown in the images above and below.

This is one of the many reasons we use Twitter.

Update (6:07 PM): The UWI Seismic Research Centre has posted a report.

Technorati Tags: earthquake, twitter, social media

People displaced by the post-election violence in Kenya line up to receive supplies in Jamhuri Park, Nairobi. Photo by Afromusing

I’ve been taking a particular interest in the post-elections situation in Kenya, as I’ve got friends there. Today one of those friends, Juliana Rotich, who’s been blogging extensively about the goings-on in various parts of the country and posting striking photos, announces that the Kenyan remittances service MamaMikes has set up a page through which you can donate money to the Kenya Red Cross’s relief efforts. MamaMikes has also been posting updates on their own blog, which I find totally cool.

I’ve just donated some money, so I can vouch for the fact that the service works, and offers several options for payment, including credit cards and PayPal. And what’s even nicer is that a band of Kenyan bloggers will be directly involved in the purchase and distribution of the supplies. According to Juliana, “on Thursday the 17th of January the bloggers in Nairobi will meet at the mamamikes office, assist in purchasing all the items and delivering them to the Red Cross.”

Go donate now.

From an allAfrica.com article challenging the “tribe-centric” analysis of the current situation in Kenya (link via Ethan):

". . . many analysts have long argued that "tribe" is particularly pernicious in diverting attention from the structural and immediate causes of violence by attributing it to supposedly immutable and irrational divisions."

Just as the term “gang-related” seems to be doing in discussions about crime in Trinidad?

Technorati Tags: trinidad, caribbean, crime

So the new cabinet has been announced (congrats to Campaign41 for getting the information online in record time, ie yesterday afternoon). A few of the appointments make me downright queasy and I have to admit that I’m tired of men like Manning boasting about how many appointments he’s given to women, as though this is some kind of magnanimous act (and especially when one of the women is his wife).

Finding myself agreeing with the activist quoted this morning in the Express, who said that, with the exception of Attorney General Bridget Annisette George (whom I cannot say I know much about), “none of them have shown any sympathy, empathy, indication or understanding of what is required or expected of women in those positions. . . . The fact that the Prime Minister chose them is a strike against them.”

I’m willing to wait and see whether some of the appointees — female and otherwise — of whom I have such low expectations surprise me and learn the meaning of the term “gender policy” and why such might be necessary in a country where issues like reproductive rights remain at the bottom of the agenda. But I ain’t holding my breath.

Technorati Tags: trinidadandtobago, trinidad, caribbean, politics, government

A person I know called a while ago to enquire about the mood in the neighbourhood following the results of yesterday’s election. I told him it was hard to tell, as this isn’t the kind of area where you necessarily know what’s going on behind closed doors. We went on to discuss why Prime Minister Manning is choosing to break with tradition and hold the swearing-in session in Woodford Square instead of the President’s House.

Apart from rather obvious desire to co-opt the Square’s historic allure, even if the President’s House remains unfit for ceremonial purposes, we wondered, why not hold the event in the new Diplomatic Centre, where the National Awards were held back in August? Could there be something in the Diplomatic Centre the Honourable Prime Minister doesn’t wish us to see? “You mean like a throne?” said my acquaintance.

It’s people like this who have this country in such a state.

It turns out that 12pm was the perfect time to go and cast one’s vote at polling station 0136 (known as the Diego Martin Junior Secondary School when it’s not election day). A parking spot awaited me in the schoolyard, in the shade of a mango tree, and apart from a handful of voters and a number of my COP activist neighbours roving the dingy corridors and walkways in between shifts as polling agents, the place was deserted. After visiting a main classroom where an Elections and Boundaries Commission officer checked to make sure my name was on the list, I was directed to the room for voters with surnames beginning with L-Z, where where voters with and without ID cards were separated into lines demarcated by strips of red and green paper stuck on the floor.

A certified “without” (I deliberately misplaced my ID card some years ago, largely on account of the horrifying photo), I took the red line. Once there, I proffered my passport and the polling card I’d received in the mail. The officer consulted the electoral list and drew a red line through my name, then rifled through a massive ledger and found a blue card with my registration info and a copy of the dreadful photo (now thankfully faded) from my lost ID card stuck to it. (I hope a copy of information in this ledger is stored on a computer somewhere.) Then the officer made me swear that I wasn’t lying about being unable to produce an ID card and that I hadn’t sold it, after which I had to sign a note confirming same. Then my name and consecutive number (198, for the record) were announced, mainly for the benefit of the two polling agents present (one of whom was probably COP and the other PNM–the UNC Alliance probably not bothering to waste further resources in this constituency), whose task is to try and figure out who I’m likely to be voting for.

Then I moved on to the voting officer, who signed and handed me my ballot paper and showed me how to fold it and to use the “X” stamp. Then I went behind a screen propped up on a school desk, considered briefly whether to inaugurate Jeremy’s proposed plan for proportional representation by putting a percentage instead of put an “X” next to the name of my candidate of choice, but decided on the “X” instead. Then I inserted my ballot through a slot into a padlocked metal box, dipped my finger into a pot of red ink, wiped off the excess, and left the room. So I’ve exercised my constitutional right, as the people like to say.

All morning the words to Bally’s “Party Time“, one of the undisputed hits of the 1986 election season, have been ringing in my head; belatedly, I know, as yesterday marked the end of the mindless and particularly Trinidadian brand of campaigning that Bally parodies in his calypso and which seems to have been taken to unprecedented heights this year. And of course I’m remembering 1986, the first and only time I ever felt deeply involved in an election campaign, not to mention hopeful about the outcome. That year my neighbourhood threw their support, predictably, behind the NAR, and I, not long back from university abroad, joined in. I spent most of that election day either at the polling station (I was a polling agent) or at the house up the street which had been designated NAR activist headquarters, getting high on the buzz.

The NAR won 33 out of 36 seats, of course, and swept into power on a tremendous tide of goodwill. Who knew then that, a mere three and a half years later, I’d be sitting in traffic on a highway in northern California (having left Trinidad only five days earlier) and hear an announcement over National Public Radio about a coup in Trinidad and Tobago. A journalist friend of mine says that when she hears the calypso “Vote Dem Out”, the campaign song that rocked the worlds of NAR supporters in 1986, chills still run up her spine–though not for quite the same reasons they did in 1986.

I envy my COP activist neighbours, some of whom were key figures in the NAR frenzy of 21 years ago, their commitment and passion and the sense of hope they’ve clearly been able to muster about the outcome of this year’s election. But try as I might, I can’t share in it.

Tonight I’ll be getting together with a few friends here at home to watch the election results. We’ll order some food, and Jonty is poised to grab a few bottles of wine once the polls close and the prohibition against the sale of alcohol during polling time is lifted. Nikipedia says he may blog, but we (or rather I) have warned him that relatively sociability is one of the requirements for being a part of this lime. We probably won’t make it a very late night. J9 has to be up early for a shoot tomorrow, and in any case we’ll probably all drink more than we should. Then wake up tomorrow and face the music.

To follow up on my previous post, and also the piece I wrote on Global Voices about the role of the internet in the Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago elections, here’s an excerpt from a comment left by Liz Henry on a Global Voices post about the build-up to the general election in Guatemala (which takes place today):

People sometimes bring up the digital divide, or low literacy rates, as a reason not to care about putting political information online. But we’ve got to support good, clear, thorough information about elections and candidates — and history and law — online. Then it can spread, through whoever does have the means to read it, print it, distribute it, and do what it takes to get the information out into the world.

All of this is enough to make me think that the population is really politically savvy and educated despite the lack of structured civics education in our school system. What I worry about is whether the online community, with ready access to computers and the Internet, are an accurate representation of the general population. What about the political opinions of those on the other side of the digital divide? And it may be that the Internet is just the latest forum for Trinis to do what they do best, talk. How much this translates into action is another question. Like a friend of mine, wary of all the online talk that has been taking place, recently wrote: “While we, 'the future', sit and occupy our time amusing ourselves with all these…discussions, the true leaders in the real world are doing as they please.”

Blogger Shivonne du Barry, expressing some healthy skepticism about the “alternative spins” on Trinidad and Tobago politics being provided by blogs and social networking sites. And now it’s my turn to play devil’s advocate, and a highly optimistic one at that!

Juxtapose the 12% internet penetration rate and Danah Boyd’s infamous findings about Facebook and class (assuming they apply to Trinidad and Tobago) and you conclude that Shivonne’s concerns are well taken, as of course they are – they’re the concerns perennially expressed in discussions about the role/value of the the internet in “developing” societies. But they also assume that, in the absence of Facebook and its equivalents, the political dialogue/activity taking place among this select group would have taken a different (and possibly superior) form (as well it might). Or taken place at all.

They also assume (more than likely correctly) that there’s not some innovative parallel activity taking place “on the other side of the digital divide” using cell phones and SMS. They also assume that all online political activity will necessarily be partisan. Might we not see some serious citizen reporting this upcoming election season? Might some ordinary person not happen to capture some priceless image or bit of footage on a cell phone camera that the jaded media practitioners have missed?

Colours of Notting Hill: Over at Global Voices, Nikipedia has posted a selection of photos from this year’s Notting Hill Carnival celebrations in London.

The Manning blog: The Prime Minister of Trinidad & Tobago is blogging! Would love to know who’s behind this, but on the other hand, maybe I wouldn’t — knowing who it is might just spoil the fun. Hazel “Breakfusses” Manning chimes in from time to time.

Barbados apartment tragedy: Barbados Free Press posted three lengthy reports (one, two, three) on the collapse of an apartment containing five people into a cave in Brittons Hill, Barbados. According to BFP’s last post, it is “highly unlikely there are survivors”. The latest post had attracted 79 comments when I last checked. Barbados Underground and Pull! Push filed reports as well. YouTube user izellajaouda has posted a video of an eyewitness’s account of the collapse recorded from the local television news, and another video from the Voice of Barbados radio station shows a car being rescued from the site.