Amauta

Josette Pérard is director of Fon Lanbi Haiti, the Haitian counterpart of the Lambi Fund. Fon Lanbi trains, builds capacity of, and gets grants to women’s and small farmer organizations in rural areas. Josette’s perspectives on community development follow.
The idea of development is to provide everyone with the means to work, to meet their needs, [...]

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When people ask me, as they do all the time, “Is there any cause for hope in Haiti?” I answer yes.
It’s more tempting to think that the situation is so hopeless that it can’t any worse, especially right now. Last week, Hurricane Tomas brought three days of heavy storms, causing flash floods which washed away [...]

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I am infested with memories. They hang from my face like an oily unwashed beard. They refuse to speak. Instead, they dance to the muffled sounds of creaky tables overloaded with the weight of dying dreams.
Trying to arrange my recollections into neatly marked cubbyholes has never worked. There are no childhood memories that can be [...]

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Haiti is a reminder of a lesson we in New Orleans got after Hurricane Katrina and the broken levees: the capacity of humanity to survive, sustain culture, and create joy – no matter the external circumstances – is without limit. That capacity is unsinkable, like trying to keep a cork underwater.
Ronal Toussaint, who sometimes takes [...]

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“If it gets any worse,” said Wilda, a homeless Haitian mother, “we’re not going to survive.”   Mothers and grandmothers surrounding her nodded solemnly.
We are in a broiling “tent” with a group of women trying to raise their families in a public park.  Around the back of the Haitian National Palace, the park hosts a regal [...]

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In just a few short years, it has become increasingly apparent that humankind is fast approaching a technological tipping point. Particularly in the West – the First World , the Developed Nations, or whatever self-consciously superlative designation you prefer – a thoroughgoing dependence on “high technology” for life-sustaining essentials is evident in all spheres of modern society. The hardware of our lives, from food and energy to transportation and shelter, is entirely bound up with the workings of a highly mechanized and digitized global economy. And no less so, the software of our existence – communications, community, entertainment, education, media, politics, and the like – is equally entwined within that same technocratic system. This is not a lamentation, just an observation. To describe this state of affairs as a fait accompli or to conspiratorially suggest an orchestrated inevitability misses the larger point that it merely constitutes what is at this point in history.

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I would like to tell the leaders the way things should be done. Everyone needs to participate. But the government doesn’t pay any attention to the peasants. They’re thinking about the well-off, not the bad-off. They’re just watching their own backs. But the poor class is dying of hunger, we need people thinking of us. The [earthquake] victims are getting a few grains, but what about the rest of us?

Here’s what Jonas Deronzil has to say to the U.S. government: your policies are bad. Help us produce, don’t give us food. We’re not lazy. We have water. We have land, especially in the Artibonite. Give us seeds, give us material. Don’t give us rice, we don’t need it. Our country can produce rice. If we’re short, we’ll let them know. There’s a lot of things I’d like to tell the American government but I don’t know where to find them. But if I could find the Americans, I’d tell them that.

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Americans are facing a troubling reality. The economic recovery they were promised has not materialized. There’s growing talk about a “new normal” — a new way of life to take us through a long period of failed recoveries.

There are, indeed, good reasons to believe we won’t go back to the old ways. But this new normal doesn’t have to be a time of chaos and decline. Instead, many Americans are building stronger families and communities, rejecting the waste and greed that made our economy implode, and turning instead to self-reliance and the sort of neighborliness that embraces diversities of all sorts.

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Entre los muchos problemas actuales, los más desafiantes son estos tres: la grave crisis social mundial, el cambio climático y la insostenibilidad del sistema-Tierra. La crisis social mundial deriva directamente del modo de producción que impera todavía en todo el mundo, el capitalista. Su dinámica lleva a una acumulación exacerbada de riqueza en pocas manos a costa de un espantoso pillaje de la naturaleza y del empobrecimiento de las grandes mayorías de los pueblos. Es creciente y los gritos agudos de los hambrientos y considerados «aceite quemado» no pueden ser silenciados. Este sistema debe ser denunciado como inhumano, cruel, sin piedad y hostil a la vida.

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“How to improve the lives of peasantry? We are always battling for decentralization, the principal problem to be resolved. Most of those who were killed in the earthquake were peasants who went to Port-au-Prince to search for bread and work and a better life. Because the government doesn’t give anything to the country, we have to go to Port-au-Prince for a better life. That’s the work of Tèt Kole. Our idea is to reinforce our strength and capacity to mobilize by bringing together all progressive forces, Haitian and foreign, to make Haiti into another nation, another state, where people can live in security, with food, with education.”

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