Peter Williams is the Founding Director of ARCHIVE Global—an international non-profit that uses housing/environmental design to improve health among the most vulnerable. As an architect he has worked on 5 continents and taught at universities around the world. Peter holds Masters Degrees in African Studies and Architecture from the University of Oxford and Columbia University, respectively. His work has been featured on BBC, ABC, in the Wall Street Journal and leading design and health journals. He was named among the 40 leaders under 40 in International Development, is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health and lectures widely on architecture, public health and sustainability. Peter was recognized as an Utne Reader Visionary in 2009.  

Much of the coverage of the Haitian earthquake earlier this year has focused on the devastation it caused the country and its people, and rightly so. The plight of both should be continuously well-documented to try to figure out how to fix the current problems and avoid such dire results of future catastrophes.

Learning how to do those things, however, will not be possible without first gaining a clear and complete understanding of the historical factors that put places like Haiti in a position to be so completely devastated by these disasters, writes Anthony Oliver-Smith in NACLA Report on Americas.

In short, disasters are not accidents or acts of God. They are deeply rooted in the social, economic, and environmental history of the societies where they occur. Moreover, disasters are far more than catastrophic events; they are processes that unfold through time, and their causes are deeply embedded in societal history.… In effect, a disaster is made inevitable by the historically produced pattern of vulnerability, evidenced in the location, infrastructure, sociopolitical structure, production patterns, and ideology that characterizes a society.

Nowhere is this perspective more validated than in Haiti, which on January 12 in some respects experienced the culmination of its own more than 500-year earthquake.

Oliver-Smith goes on to explain how slavery, reparations, an embargo, and massive debt put Haiti in a vulnerable state from its earliest stages of existence. And while other Latin American countries, such as Chile, have instituted safeguards—like building codes—against natural disasters, Haiti has fallen short in terms of protecting itself, whether due to the lack of such safeguards or the government’s inability to respond properly to disaster.

As with most things, an understanding of what got us here is needed in order to craft an appropriate response.

Source: NACLA Report on Americas  (article not available online)

 Image by United Nations Development Programme , licensed under  Creative Commons. 

The chaos and destruction caused by Haiti’s earthquake are difficult for anyone to articulate, especially for a teenager. Global Voices points to two teenage bloggers who have provided eloquent first-person views of the earthquake and the emotional and physical devastation that it has caused. Before the disaster, a 16-year-old calling herself Krizkadiak wrote about singing and dancing alone on a Friday night. Afterwards, she wrote this:

I saw my school fall in front of me. 
I saw people running covered in dust, hearing that their houses fell… sometimes with people in them. 
I saw a refugee camp, as they are on tv… people praying, people alive but not really… 
I saw a baby half dead, covered in bandaids… 
I saw a friend at the cemetery burying his little cousin. 
I saw the oldest and prettiest houses of jacmel reduced to nothing. 
I saw pickup truck filled with corpses… 
I saw my teacher walking to the cemetery behind the car where his wife’s dead body was… 
I saw kids from my school, people i KNOW, at the refugee camp… 
And lots of stuff… i hear about dead people every second, tsunami alerts when i know i leave at the beach, stupid people trynna take profit, no gas, no water no food. 
But what I didn't see though… Is the haitian police and the Mayor. shame. 

Source: Global Voices 

Photo by the UN Photo/Marco Dormino, licensed under Creative Commons.

Both CBS and CNN sent about 50 staffers to Haiti in the wake of the recent earthquake. Fox sent 25. ABC, NPR, newspapers, websites, and other media outlets all sent their own reporters and photographers, too. Meanwhile, nurses and search-and-rescue teams were stranded in the United States—ready and waiting to help the Haitian relief effort—unable to get there because of transportation bottlenecks. Once in the country, reporters need to find places to stay, supplies for their reportage, and places to eat. Based on admittedly anecdotal evidence, Noam Scheiber writes in the New Republic that these media personalities inevitably raise the price of goods, occupy valuable places to stay, and take resources away from the Haitian relief effort.

And the journalism that has emerged from the army of media that has descended upon Haiti has been largely redundant. To curb the deluge of media personalities, Scheiber suggests the creation of a “disaster pool” of reporters, who would share their reportage with all the major networks. Just as with White House coverage, where a single interview is often used by many news outlets, smaller teams of reporters could be sent to disaster-stricken areas to cover the story for multiple networks. The news is still broadcast throughout the world, and more resources go where they’re really needed.  

Source: The New Republic 

Image by Nehrams2020, licensed under Creative Commons.

Photographer Jeff Antebi recently spent time in Haiti, shooting urban scenes in Port-au-Prince. Late last night he shared his thoughts as he reflected on the enormity of the earthquake’s devastation, and we in turn are sharing those thoughts—and some of his photos—with you. —The Editors

Haiti is on my mind and I am very sad tonight.

I was in Port-au-Prince twice in 2009.

When I arrived the first time, and walked around the streets, the people stared at me cold. It was, at first glance, an unwelcoming place.

My dear friend Jean-Marc de Matteis, who I hope is alive and well tonight, smirked a bit and said, “The thing with Haitian people is that they’ve been through a lot. It’s a hard life here and people wear it on their faces. But that’s not the true nature of Haitian people. Watch what happens if you make eye contact and simply say ‘bonjour’ to someone.”

I did. 100 percent of the time I got a smile. Sometimes a quick flash of a smile and back to a glare, but the glare became an easier glare. Sometimes they’d smile a massive smile and say “bonjour” back. I can’t stress enough the amazing feeling of getting a smile 100 times out of 100 attempts. The country, in its entirety, was a welcoming place.

I don’t exaggerate when I tell you I said “bonjour” to almost everyone I made eye contact with. I went out of my way to make eye contact. Compulsively so. And Port-au-Prince is a crowded place. That’s a lot of people to say “hello” to. My friend and interpreter Alain Charles, who tonight I cannot find and it’s taking me enormous restraint to not cry, took notice and would often laugh whenever I said “bonjour” with an almost exaggerated smile. To him, it seemed like I was kind of insane. Like I would if he tried it in Los Angeles or New York City. But I loved doing it.

Even then, before the earthquake, Port-au-Prince was an unbelievable mess. Practically no infrastructure worth talking about. In many (most?) parts of the city, there was no electricity. So as night began to fall, whole swaths of the capital became deserted for a lack of light and security. Bonfires the only way to move about without getting lost. Traveling as moths to flames.

One night, after a marketplace turned from lively to utterly apocalyptic, I decided to walk very far into the depths of the darkest, dangerous part of town rather than flee. Deeper than Alain was comfortable going, and he had lived in the city all his life. But I kept saying to him, “One more bonfire, that one in the distance, then we’ll head back.”

In retrospect, it was an almost suicidal mission. It’s hard to believe I made it in as far as I did and was able to return to a safer quarter. But it’s important to say that what kept me from being fearful was my continuing to make eye contact. No one wanted to say hello and I didn’t speak either. And even though I was conspicuous, carrying two cameras out in the open, no one bothered me. I would look at them, they would look at me. Over the course of the evening, this happened maybe a hundred times. They were ghosts to me, and I was an apparition to them. I passed through a nightmarish, spectral landscape alive and they allowed me to, unharmed.

I spent a lot of time in Cite Soleil, considered by most to be the worst slum in the Western Hemisphere. The Wikipedia entry for Cite Soleil states, “Armed gangs roam the streets. Murder, rape, kidnapping, looting, and shootings are common as every few blocks is controlled by one of more than 30 armed factions.”

The conditions in Cite Soleil are unimaginable, almost like a village built on top of a huge garbage heap. But one of the most striking features of this spot is the number of children. It was impossible to move without being surrounded by kids. Most didn’t have shoes, sharing the ground with pigs, waste, and excrement. But they were sort of a happy bunch, considering it all. Holding up half-melted robot toys or playing cards. Smiling and playing around with laughter and curiosity.

On the other hand, they were starving. Some looked at me and ran a finger across their throats. Hard to express the feeling you get when a child indicates he is going to die. Keep that image in your head. Which is why I can barely contain my sadness. These little ones had almost nothing going for them but for a sense of humor. Barely a chance for literacy, let alone any kind of education. An astoundingly high probability of falling ill and dying from bad water, and little chance of finding a job when they got older. More likely HIV/AIDS or human trafficking.

I can’t watch the news on television or listen to the radio. I can’t look at websites. I’ve been there, and now I picture it in my head after a 7-point earthquake.

Nothing going for them and now the earthquake. I am praying for the best for them. They deserve it.

See Jeff Antebi’s photos from Haiti on Flickr or on his website. Antebi urges people to donate to Oxfam or Doctors Without Borders. “It will make a huge impact,” he says. “Haiti is only a little more than an hour from Miami. It’s very easy to get help there.”

Images by Jeff Antebi, courtesy of the photographer.