Thursday, January 12, 2012

a couple of Haiti links for you

http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2012/01/12/144968943/if-you-teach-a-man-to-photograph-haiti-as-seen-by-haitians
You will be interested in these photos, I think. They aren't the ones you find in the paper.

Haiti as seen by Haitian through a camera lens
NPR article front - link above


http://www.npr.org/2012/01/12/145104854/ordinary-life-resurrected-slowly-in-haiti
Here is another NPR article about life going on two years later.  An excerpt:

In Port-au-Prince, a radio blares from speakers in front of a guy selling pirated CDs on Delmas, a main street in the Haitian capital. Women sitting along the side of the road hawk everything from vegetables to cigarettes to pharmaceuticals. Overloaded tap-taps, the pickup trucks that serve as the main form of public transportation here, chug up the hill.

The scene is one that's remarkable for being unremarkable: Though it occurred this week, it could just as easily have been Port-au-Prince two years ago, before a massive earthquake destroyed much of the capital.

The 7.0-magnitude quake struck on Jan. 12, 2010, and killed, by some estimates, 300,000 people and left more than 2 million homeless.

Two years later, although hundreds of thousands of Haitians are still living in makeshift camps, the country has come a long way.

When people complain that Haiti isn't rebuilt, I like to point out that the World Trade Center is not rebuilt after ten years, and New Orleans still isn't cleaned up after seven.  Personally, I'd prefer to point out all the progress I see. Things really are happening here! There's a long road ahead, but that is to be expected.  There is so much more to Haiti than one event, as central as that is right now.  Let's remember that, too.

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