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...

Yesterday we focused on online censorship and freedom of speech, and we’re paying attention today to the work of the wider Global Voices community.

Follow the proceedings via our liveblog, our Twitter feed, our videostream, Flickr and the global blogosphere.

Back to work.

UPDATE: Follow the Twitter commentary on GV Summit via Summize (Thanks to @hectorpal for the tip!)

Kidding, of course.

3Canal can talk with whoever they wish, as long as they don’t stop talking to me. Which, incidentally, they should be doing tomorrow. Stay tuned for CFR podcast #48, coming some time over this weekend!

Technorati Tags: 3canal, caribbean, podcast, trinidad, rapso, PRI’s The World

Nikipedia travelled to Kingston this week for the interview, which took place today. The results were announced during a luncheon (after the dessert course, apparently) at Red Bones restaurant. Nikipedia, as many of you know, is editor of the Caribbean Review of Books and the chief blogger at Antilles.

Many thanks to Festival producer Frances-Ann Solomon (plus apologies for not having blogged about this earlier!) for inviting me, and to the Film Company of Trinidad & Tobago, who’s footing the bill for most of this trip.

A plagiarism in plaid

- Farewell, Ousmane Sembene!

- Hello, Grandpa Sydney!

- Daily Telegraph, if you’re going to steal information from bloggers (and commenters), the least you can do is give a credit in return. And come up with less lame defenses than this.

Technorati Tags: daily telegraph, geoffrey philp, ousmane sembene

Now I know how Tobago residents feel when they read about all the exciting happenings in the sister metropolis (ie Trinidad).

As part of the lead up to World Environment Day on June 5, Red Earth, a non-profit founded by “a group of environmentally motivated artists and professionals, to raise eco-consciousness through the arts” is hosting the Red Earth Eco-Arts Festival in Tucker Valley, Chaguaramas.

The festivities started yesterday, and since the Red Earth flyer describes it better than I ever can, I’ll simply cut and paste:

This year, in belated commemoration of the occasion and of my grandparents’ mixed marriage, I offer this photo of my grandparents, Morton Dean and Petronella (née Quarless) Gangar, which hangs on the wall of my uncle’s house here in Tobago.

Farewell: Brian Lara flanked by pals Dwight Yorke (left) and Russell Latapy (right) at Lee Studios, Manchester, England in April 2006

It’s difficult. . . to recall a time when Brian Lara was not the man of the moment. Since April 1994, when he scored 375 runs in the fourth Test against England in Antigua, breaking Sir Garry Sobers’s 36-year-old record for the greatest number of runs scored in a single innings in Test cricket, he’s carried the future of West Indies cricket on his shoulders. (Less than two months later he scored 501 for Warwickshire, his English county team, the highest score in a single innings in the history of first-class cricket.)

The burden has only become heavier with time. Having entered the senior team just as West Indies cricket was beginning its long descent from the heights of greatness, he spent his early days witnessing the departure of the old guard. By the time Courtney Walsh and Curtly Ambrose (the last remaining members of the West Indies’ legendary pace bowling attack) departed, Lara found himself the sole repository of the people’s hopes of victory. When the batting line-up collapsed, when the bowling was being flayed to all corners of the pitch, Lara was the man expected to come up with a swift century and save the day. >> more

That excerpt is from a piece I wrote at the end of 2004, a few months before Brian Lara wrested his world record back from Matthew Hayden. Lara’s certainly the man of the moment today, as he plays what he says is his last ever international cricket match, against England in Barbados.

Lara’s delighted and maddened and dazzled and puzzled and frustrated and entertained us greatly these past 17 years (he’s a West Indian man, and that’s what they do). We wish him all the best.

Technorati Tags: brian lara, west indies, cricket, trinidad, caribbean, cricket world cup

One rather obvious candidate for such a playlist would be Stevie Wonder’s “You Haven’t Done Nothin’“, from 1974′s Fulfillingness’ First Finale, (arguably) Stevie’s greatest album. Which skepticism-inducing dystopian ditties would you add to the anti-election campaign playlist?

This profile of Michael Holding, which appeared in Caribbean Beat in January 2000, is one of the first pieces I ever wrote on cricket, and it remains one of my favourites out of all the things I’ve published. I recall transcribing the long interview I did with Michael in Jamaica and feeling about for a structure that would permit me to use more of his distinctive voice than would normally be acceptable in a profile. I eventually found that structure in a 1999 Rolling Stone profile of another former athletic star — Bill Bradley, who was making a bid for the US presidency that year.

Holding happens one of my favourite people in cricket, and not for just the reasons he’s one of many women’s favourite people in cricket. You’ll want to bear in mind, however, that this piece was written at the end of 1999 and that many aspects of the subject’s life, and of the cricketing establishment, have changed since then.

(Caribbean Beat doesn’t seem to have got around to making material from their 2000 archives available as yet, but those who insist on seeing the piece in its original form can download the cruddy-looking pdf I cobbled together from bad page scans via this link).

1. Go to Wikipedia and type in your birthday, month and day only
2. List 3 events that occurred on that da
3. List 2 important birthdays
4. List one notable transition
5. List a holiday or observance (if any)
6. Tag five of your friends

And here’s how I fared:

1. My birthday

December 14

2. Three events (would love to have posted some Caribbean ones, but Wikipedia didn’t list any)

1903 – The Wright Brothers make their first attempt to fly with the Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. It crashes, and 3 days later, after repairs, they get it to fly.

1911 – Roald Amundsen‘s team, comprising himself, Olav Bjaaland, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel, and Oscar Wisting, becomes the first to reach the South Pole.

1959 – The Motown record label is founded in Detroit, Michigan by Berry Gordy.

3. Two birthdays

1503 – Nostradamus, French astrologer (d. 1566)

1546 – Tycho Brahe, Danish astronomer (d. 1601)

4. One notable transition

1989 – Andrei D. Sakharov, Russian physicist, Nobel laureate (b. 1921)

5. Holidays

R.C. Saints – Memorial of Saint John of the Cross

6. Tag five friends

Jeremy, Amira, Veronica, Oso, Jonathan and any other memeaholic who cares to try.

I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that Keith Smith outdid himself today.

Technorati Tags: lloyd best, keith smith, trinidad, caribbean

From Nikipedia’s brief but extremely moving tribute to Lloyd Best, “one of the truly great men of the Caribbean,” who passed away yesterday afternoon.

And will somebody please start working on Lloyd Best’s Wikipedia entry.

UPDATE (March 25, 2007): There’s now a Wikipedia entry.

"Why, you're Tony Cozier," said the rental car man.

Cozier, you see, had spoken. Until he opened his mouth, he had simply been another middle-aged customer sent over by the Heathrow airport desk. But then he asked whether we could possibly exchange our Hyundai Sonata for a Volkswagen Passat, and Cozier metamorphosed before the elderly gentleman's eyes into an icon. Here, demanding an audacious upgrade (though let me say, for the record, that our argument was trunk space), was the voice of West Indies cricket. The talk then switched from cars to the inevitable: Brian Lara, whom Warwickshire had fined again that week; the Test series (England vs South Africa) in full swing up at Edgbaston; and what in heaven had happened to West Indies cricket? In the end, we did drive away in the Passat. Read on >>

The scores are coming through load and clear, of course, for what is turning out to be the lamest match of the lot: West Indies v. India, taking place now in Trelwany on Jamaica’s north coast. The West Indies are 85/9 after only 25 overs (for those of you who don’t know cricket, this means we might as well say congratulations to the Indians and head back to the team hotel). “They should give the people they money back!” says a man listening to the broadcast on his cell phone. “Imagine,” says another, “the host team, collapsing like that in the last match before the tournament start.” They steups* in unison.

But the scene here in Trinidad is generally festive. Apart from the Asian couple in the row behind us, whom I suspect are Indian nationals (he’s wearing an India replica shirt, and the tentative manner in which they picked their way to their seats a couple hours earlier suggested they weren’t locals), nobody here probably cares too much about the outcome of the match. Like me, they’re probably just happy to be out here on a Friday afternoon, on the kind of breezy, slightly hazy day that Relator probably had in mind when he wrote the lines “A lovely day for cricket/Blue skies and gentle breeze. . . .” But that calypso, of course (whose title is “Gavaskar“) commemorates another of the West Indies misadventures against India on Caribbean soil (in 1971, to be exact), so maybe we don’t want to think about it.

The Sir Frank Worrell Memorial ground is a neat little facility on the edge of the University of the West Indies campus in Trinidad. It’s clearly a work in progress. The area beyond the cricket pitch is still bare earth, but at least they’ve done us the courtesy of covering it with black flannel to keep down the dust. The covers on the bleachers are party tents bound together with duct tape, which is not to say, either, that they don’t do the job. The media centre — almost empty today — looks bright and well-appointed. One of the Sir Frank Worrell Memorial’s ground best features isn’t on the ground at all: the backdrop of the northern range, grayish-green today in the light haze.

As we arrived this morning, there were scores of megaphone-toting volunteers directing the parking and announcing the infamous regulations (no plastic bottles etc) in cheery tones. And then again at the gates, directing women with bags to one line, men without bags to another, and offering plastic baskets for us to put our cell phones and keys and loose change. The security check was cursory, but then, this is a tame, non-partisan crowd comprising mainly locals, arriving at a ground that holds 3,000. I wonder how smoothly things will run at Kensington (30,000), Sabina Park (27,000) the Oval (25,000).

The team is on lunch now, and so are we. The air around me is filled with the aroma of KFC and beer. The deejay in the area I now realise is the party stand is jamming this year’s road march, though the only people who seem to be hearing the music are two exhibitionists wearing fancy Indian headdresses jumping around near the boundary fence.

But the umpires are walking back on to the pitch, followed by the South Africans, who look like they mean business, and the Pakistani batsmen Nazir and Hafeez (Cricinfo live scorecard’s finally working)**, bobbing and prancing and trying to convince us that they’re only limbering up, not trying to chase away the heebie-jeebies that any opening batsman in his right mind should be feeling at the prospect of facing the gigantic André Nel.

*“the act of sucking air past one’s teeth, creating a sound of disapproval (also: steupse, chups, cheeups”)

**[UPDATE: Actually the scorecard wasn't yet fully working when I first posted this, which is why I wrote earlier that the opening batsmen were Gul and Sami, who happen to be bowlers and probably wouldn't be allowed to open even for the West Indies. Apologies -- though it's really all Cricinfo's fault. Here's the final scorecard, by the way - congrats, Pakistan!]

Technorati Tags: cricket, cricket world cup, trinidad. caribbean, south africa. pakistan

Salman Rushdie on having his papers housed at the Manuscript, Archive and Rare Book library at my alma mater.

Nikipedia just e-mails me announcing the arrival of Caribbean Writing Today: The online literary magazine of the Caribbean, edited by Wayne Brown.

There’s a sample issue available free of charge, with work by, among others, Edward Baugh, Mervyn Morris, Olive Senior, Pamela Mordecai, Ramabai Espinet, Anu Lakhan, James Christopher Aboud, B.C. Pires, & Ian McDonald.