Front Lines of PEPFAR: From Haiti

ONE member Graham Sowa writes in from Haiti.

Cazale, Haiti, where I am currently writing from is better off than almost all rural Haitian towns. There is a clinic that provides health care and medicine at little to no cost, with paid referalls to hospitals. There are several well-built churches, and there is a small but secure footbridge across the river. There is a pipe which brings fairly clean water down from a mountain source. Not bad.

However I only have to walk an hour, which I do almost daily (often several hours) furthur back into the mountains to find the rawest of miserable poverty that still allows human life to persist. Barely. The clinic I work (volunteer) with does its best to help out back here. Clinic vists are free for these people, and they are often assisted with food, school for the kids, and seed when the planting season starts….

At the TB clinic where we are to pick up the medicines I talk to the Haitian doctor and lab tech for about an hour as we run TB/HIV tests togeather. They are so happy to finally have electricity, via solar panels, a laptop, a country wide network of TB clinics to connect to, and the resources to diagnose and treat their patients, of which they see over 100 each day. This clinic specializes in TB only, and did not exist before PEPFAR. There is no alternative to this clinic. Elsewhere in this area TB medicines, even first line drugs, are prohibitively expensive even for “middle class” Haitians. In the TB clinic all consultation, educaton, tests, and treatment is free. Just as it is in allmost 300 clinics like it across the country.

After we run the tests from the sputum and blood we brought in that day we picked up the medicine and headed back to our rural mountain town. Tomorrow over 70 people will show up between 7am and 12pm to pick up their medicines, as they do every 15 days. Some will be just starting their regimes: 9 months of TB treatment. Some will be taking their final TB test after finishing the treatment. No one would be doing either without PEPFAR.

…It is easy for you and I to discuss the blockage of this legislation, we are used to political obstructionism. The patients however, who have watched each other die from these diseases for generations, this issue is much more tender. There is no proper way to break the news to them. The optimism they have developed, the optimism that is so impossible to cultivate in this country, is so very fragile. I cannot bring myself to do it. Therefore for me there is but one option: I will not let them block PEPFAR. Please sign the petition.

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Jubilee USA Launches Petition for Haiti

The global food crisis has Haiti in its grip.

The lack of affordable food has caused riots and political turmoil. While some Haitians are reportedly eating dirt to quell their hunger, their government is forced to pay almost $1 million each week in debt service to the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, both wealthy banks that were supposedly established to fight poverty.

The finance ministers of the G8 countries — the world’s richest nations — meet on June 13 and 14 in Japan to discuss the food crisis. By cancelling debts they could help alleviate the suffering of Haiti and other affected countries.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. will be attending the G8 meeting. Please sign Jubilee USA’s petition to U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. to urge him to support accelerated debt cancellation for Haiti and in the meantime an immediate moratorium on the country’s debt service payments at this meeting. Jubilee USA will deliver this petition before he leaves on Wednesday, June 11.

-Monet Cooper, Jubilee USA

Hunger Turns to Anger

A striking piece in the New York Times today about the hunger crisis in Haiti and across the globe:

“Haiti’s hunger, that burn in the belly that so many here feel, has become fiercer than ever in recent days as global food prices spiral out of reach, spiking as much as 45 percent since the end of 2006 and turning Haitian staples like beans, corn and rice into closely guarded treasures.

Saint Louis Meriska’s children ate two spoonfuls of rice apiece as their only meal recently and then went without any food the following day. His eyes downcast, his own stomach empty, the unemployed father said forlornly, “They look at me and say, ‘Papa, I’m hungry,’ and I have to look away. It’s humiliating and it makes you angry.”

That anger is palpable across the globe. The food crisis is not only being felt among the poor but is also eroding the gains of the working and middle classes, sowing volatile levels of discontent and putting new pressures on fragile governments.”

I’d quote the whole thing if I could. Read the full article here and take action against the hunger crisis here.

-Virginia Simmons

Haiti

Our Wednesday world food crisis email talked a bit about the situation in Haiti. More from a Reuters piece is below.

“PORT-AU-PRINCE, April 12 (Reuters) - Haiti’s Senate on Saturday voted to fire Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis, an ally of President Rene Preval, 10 days after violent protests over skyrocketing food prices hit the poor Caribbean nation.”

Read the full piece here.

And of right now, 59,189 ONE members have signed our petition to President Bush about the world hunger crisis. If you haven’t signed already, help us get 60k signers by adding your name today.

-Virginia Simmons

Jubilee on AIDS and Debt in Haiti

ONE Partner Jubilee USA sent us the below post about AIDS, debt, and poverty in Haiti from Global Justice Co-Director Evelyn Sallah.

Haiti: Struggling to Fight the Devastation of HIV/AIDS in the Face of Debt

So I can’t show you how, exactly, health care is a basic human right. But what I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Haiti is home to the highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Latin America, with reportedly the worst level of devastation in the Western Hemisphere.

Similar to many parts of the world, especially Southern Africa, HIV/AIDS in Haiti has created a population of hundreds of thousands of orphaned children. Meanwhile youth living in urban areas have three times the likelihood of contracting the disease than those living in rural areas.

Haiti’s crippling debt burden is a major factor in restraining government resources to adequately tackle this serious issue. The Jubilee Act, which would cancel the debt of 67 impoverished countries in the Global South, would free up resources for Haiti to fight the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Race is directly related to this poverty and is exemplified clearly with the disproportionate number of those affected by HIV/AIDS within the African Diaspora.

We can further see this reality when comparing the devastation HIV/AIDS has in Sub-Saharan Africa to Haiti, and recognize similar levels of devastation. As nurses in hospitals in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are fighting for space, and clean syringes, so are the nurses in Haiti’s hospitals.

In Haiti, all (more…)

Jubilee Member Blogs from Haiti

Michelle Karshan, a member of ONE Partner Jubilee USA and former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide foreign press liason, is fasting right now for Haiti. She blogs her perspective on how Haiti’s struggle with debt and economic recovery was ignored by the international press.

In May 2007, while in Haiti, friends told me of the rising cost of living. As I spent what seemed like a lot of money purchasing food to cook three meals a day, I wondered how folks were feeding their families even one meal a day at those exorbitant prices.

Michelet, a young man, considerably thinner since 2004, pointed out that he had personally seen a rise in TB in his own neighborhood. He explained that with the increase in the cost of living people could not nourish themselves enough to fend off disease.

Dr. Paul Farmer has so eloquently drawn this connection between infectious disease and poverty, yet the international financial institutions have yet to reprioritize their economic plans.

Former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide often referred to structural adjustment and the debt as “Economic Terrorism”, because globalization and the way it revolves around creating and keeping impoverished countries impoverished results in starvation, disease, illiteracy and death. And, in the end millions of dollars spent on poverty reduction cannot turn a country around without debt reduction and forgiveness.

Last week, while Haiti and each Haitian there still suffers from the backbreaking debt inherited from the Duvalier regime, former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier was heard on the airways apologizing for the atrocities and corruption during his administration.

Not coincidentally, his plea for forgiveness came immediately following Switzerland’s announcement that they would extend the Haitian government’s period of time to wage their legal battle to recover the millions of dollars in Duvalier’s Swiss bank accounts.

Haitian President Rene Preval rightly responded to Duvalier’s maneuvers, stating that while forgiveness is good, justice must prevail. Preval made it clear that his government would continue its pursuit of the monies, and that if Duvalier chooses to return to Haiti he will certainly be brought to justice.

It was extremely frustrating working as the Foreign Press Liaison to presidents Aristide, Preval and Aristide again. All the while, the international press ignored the debt that shackled any efforts towards recovery, ignored the U.S.-led embargo against Haiti’s government, and the economic “death plan” Aristide tried to resist. The U.S. Embassy waged a campaign denying that there was any financial embargo and they harassed press who dared to call the embargo an embargo!

The international press, distracting its readers from the real talking points, lay all blame at Aristide’s door, and characterized Haiti as: “spiraling downward;” “a basket case;” “a failed state;” and “a people unable to govern themselves.”

Yet inside the storm, at the eye of the storm, was globalization, the endless debt, the imposed impoverishment of a country up against a proud nation that believes that justice — economic justice — means accessible, universal health care, schools, literacy programs, and the right to work and farm.

It will not be hard for me to begin my fast today. What has been hard is to eat, knowing that more than 8 million people in Haiti cannot eat one meal a day.”