A small reminder

From a previous post:

Henri Christophe became President of Haiti in 1807. He writes of the French:

Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks,
crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they
not forced them to eat shit? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they
not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to
stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown them into
boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels
studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they
not consigned these miserable blacks to man eating-dogs until the latter, sated
by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and
poniard?

Let Them Eat Dirt

Poor Haitians Resort to Eating Dirt
By JONATHAN M. KATZ – 2 days ago
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — It was lunchtime in one of Haiti's worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti's poorest can't afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country's central plateau.
The mud has long been prized by pregnant women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium. But in places like Cite Soleil, the oceanside slum where Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings and two unemployed parents, cookies made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal.
"When my mother does not cook anything, I have to eat them three times a day," Charlene said. Her baby, named Woodson, lay still across her lap, looking even thinner than the slim 6 pounds 3 ounces he weighed at birth.
Though she likes their buttery, salty taste, Charlene said the cookies also give her stomach pains. "When I nurse, the baby sometimes seems colicky too," she said.
Food prices around the world have spiked because of higher oil prices, needed for fertilizer, irrigation and transportation. Prices for basic ingredients such as corn and wheat are also up sharply, and the increasing global demand for biofuels is pressuring food markets as well.
The problem is particularly dire in the Caribbean, where island nations depend on imports and food prices are up 40 percent in places.
The global price hikes, together with floods and crop damage from the 2007 hurricane season, prompted the U.N. Food and Agriculture Agency to declare states of emergency in Haiti and several other Caribbean countries. Caribbean leaders held an emergency summit in December to discuss cutting food taxes and creating large regional farms to reduce dependence on imports.
At the market in the La Saline slum, two cups of rice now sell for 60 cents, up 10 cents from December and 50 percent from a year ago. Beans, condensed milk and fruit have gone up at a similar rate, and even the price of the edible clay has risen over the past year by almost $1.50. Dirt to make 100 cookies now costs $5, the cookie makers say.
Still, at about 5 cents apiece, the cookies are a bargain compared to food staples. About 80 percent of people in Haiti live on less than $2 a day and a tiny elite controls the economy.
Merchants truck the dirt from the central town of Hinche to the La Saline market, a maze of tables of vegetables and meat swarming with flies. Women buy the dirt, then process it into mud cookies in places such as Fort Dimanche, a nearby shanty town.
Carrying buckets of dirt and water up ladders to the roof of the former prison for which the slum is named, they strain out rocks and clumps on a sheet, and stir in shortening and salt. Then they pat the mixture into mud cookies and leave them to dry under the scorching sun.
The finished cookies are carried in buckets to markets or sold on the streets.
A reporter sampling a cookie found that it had a smooth consistency and sucked all the moisture out of the mouth as soon as it touched the tongue. For hours, an unpleasant taste of dirt lingered.
Assessments of the health effects are mixed. Dirt can contain deadly parasites or toxins, but can also strengthen the immunity of fetuses in the womb to certain diseases, said Gerald N. Callahan, an immunology professor at Colorado State University who has studied geophagy, the scientific name for dirt-eating.
Haitian doctors say depending on the cookies for sustenance risks malnutrition.
"Trust me, if I see someone eating those cookies, I will discourage it," said Dr. Gabriel Thimothee, executive director of Haiti's health ministry.
Marie Noel, 40, sells the cookies in a market to provide for her seven children. Her family also eats them.
"I'm hoping one day I'll have enough food to eat, so I can stop eating these," she said. "I know it's not good for me."

Disturb the comfortable, Comfort the disturbed

On Saturday, I went with a group from the Collectiva des Mujeres to Monte Plata - a region to the north east of the Capital -who were delivering aid: chlorine for water purification, milk, toilet paper, saltines, and vaccinations against typhoid, whooping cough, and diptheria. This region was not particularly hard hit but the Collectiva has an outreach clinic there and there was one community of 500 people who had been completely cut off.

I wish I could describe the scene to you but the truck that I was in got lost and spent two hours driving in a seemingly endless circle amidst a stunningly beautiful African palm tree plantation whose fruit is used to make palm oil. We did arrive in time to greet the 40 other workers, mostly women, almost 25 of them volunteers, who had spent the day in the little pueblo. Ah well, I was there in solidarity, at least!

Among them were two Norwegian volunteers who were overcome by the experience, never having seen this level of poverty. Indeed, most people in the "developed" world have never seen this level of poverty - except when it finally reaches the TV screens at the level of Darfur. I doubt that there is any poverty in Norway that could compete even with the poverty in the United States. Nor does the poverty there compare with the poverty here. Nor can here compare with Haiti.

My first exposure to the sight and smell of poverty came when I was 17 and set out to help the North Student Movement, operating safely on the outskirts of Harlem from Morningside Heights, which was helping organize rent strikes. At our Quaker school the most competitive thing that we did was raise money for the annual school charity drive. Juniors were allowed to chose a non-profit and present their work to the student body which then voted to select the one the funds would go to. Mine lost to the American Friends Service Committee which then "imported" a bright Black student from Florida -- "why not from Harlem, I cried?" -- he later went on to become a major general in the Army. His two years with the Quakers had not been enough not catch the Quaker peace testimony. Yet by our actions we students integrated the heretofore all -white school.

The second day in the North Student Movement office, I was taken across town to Harlem by one of the staff to see some of the apartments. I was the only white face walking down the street, feeling self conscious and awkward and out of place for the first time in my life. The doors of the first five apartments that my guide knocked on slammed quickly shut as soon as they saw the color of my skin. Ah Ha -- so this is what it feels like.......

I held back my tears. "But it wasn't me" I wanted to cry out. "I want to help" "Please let me in." But I remained silent.

By the sixth apartment, my guide had learned a new approach: "She is young. She wants to help. She needs to be educated. Please let her in. She needs to see this."

So I was allowed inside the little two room apartment, with the peeling paint, with three holes that the rats had made in the walls of the bathroom, with the three children, hiding close behind their mother's skirt, looking up at me in fear.

I close my eyes and I am there once again.

I know how those young women from Norway felt yesterday.

Everyone should be required to have this experience.