US may be moving toward an access road to citizenship for Haitians under TPS
GRIND LOUIS AZER CHERY
White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly, gave an interview on "hot" political topics to an NPR (National Radio Public) correspondent.
During the interview, the cancellation of Temporary Protection Status (TPS) for Haiti and countries in Central America, was discussed.
Kelly explained that it would be possible to allow TPS holders to have access to citizenship. "I think that we should gather all beneficiaries of the TPS program who were here during a considerable period of time, and to find a way for them to be on their way to citizenship.” Kelly is referring to the 60,000 Haitians who are on the verge of losing their TPS.
During the conversation, John Kelly also made insensitive declarations regarding immigration, in particular regarding illegal immigrants. For example, he declared that "[…] Migrants are not criminals. But they are not people who easily integrate in the United States, in our modern society."
With regard to these "insensitive" comments, an American newspaper revealed that the democrat Michelle Lujan Grisham published a declaration qualifying Kelly's "sectarian comments" as an insult to the "generations of people who came from foreign countries to contribute to the wealth of our nation."
“It is sad,” she added, “to have to keep reminding the administration that immigrants participated in the construction of this country.”
Let us recall that that in November, 2017, the Department of Homeland confirmed that it was granting a period of 18 months, until July 22nd, 2019 to current TPS recipient from Haiti and El Salvador. This decision was made a few months after John Kelly had declared that "the conditions in Haiti had improved enough for the United States not to extend their temporary status".
Partial transcription of the interview on NPR
Why is Port-au-Prince the dirtiest city in the world?
Loop HAITI
In the 20th report of the annual investigation by Mercer on quality of life, published in March and surveying 231 countries, Port-au-Prince is number one out of 10 cities that are the least healthy in the world.
The spokesman for the city’s mayor Allwitch Joly, recognized that Haiti’s capital is dirty. He wished to highlight the challenges which city hall faces, in spite of its efforts to fight this situation.
“The management of garbage in the city is not a reflection of City Hall. It is the mission of the Metropolitan Service to Collect Garbage, and unfortunately it is failing,” he said. Although he recognized the lack of means which prohibit the specialized entity from doing its work.
Overpopulation
The massive exodus of the population from provincial towns towards big cities, is one of the big challenges which must be taken into account when speaking about waste management. The metropolitan zone was not designed to receive so many people, continued the mayor’s spokesman.
In addition, the Haitian State does not have a developed plan to receive and manage all of these inhabitants. Yet, "The more people are concentrated within one place, the more waste they will produce."
Educational Problem
The citizens don’t even hide even anymore to throw their trash cans in the streets, especially when it is raining. "Because they know that city hall will come by and collect it,” said Joly. But sometimes, because of the lack of equipment, the garbage stays out for a long time in public before being collected.
Prospective Solutions
In the municipality of Cite Soleil a popular district of Port-au-Prince, is Truitier. This space was used for a long time as place to discharge the Haitian capital’s garbage. But today, Truiter cannot sustain this anymore, said Allwitch Joly.
City Hall is aware of this problem and is willing to act accordingly. It is for that reason that it is working with organizations and other city halls on a project linking local authorities to create a discharge center and transformation of trash. An awareness campaign for young people in schools is also in progress. It aims at getting the youth to become concerned and responsible for their behavior towards their environment. On their end, municipal authorities planned to implement everything possible to strengthen the fleet of vehicles necessary for a timely collection of waste.
Port-au-Prince is not the only place where garbage is accumulating on a daily basis. In Cap-Haïtien for example, the country’s second city, people denounce the filthiness of certain streets.
U.N. criticized for failing on promise to help Haiti cholera victims
BOGOTA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Haitians battling cholera blamed on United Nations peacekeepers are getting little support with only two percent of promised funds materializing, according to campaigners accusing the global community of again failing the Caribbean nation.
Haiti was free of cholera until 2010 when peacekeepers helping after a devastating earthquake that killed more than 250,000 people accidentally dumped infected sewage into a river.
Since then about 9,750 Haitians have died of the waterborne disease that has infected more than 800,000 people, with the epidemic continuing to affect dozens of people every week.
The United Nations has not accepted legal responsibility for the outbreak but in late 2016 outgoing U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon apologized to Haiti for the organization’s role and announced a $400 million fund to help affected Haitians.
But to date - almost halfway through the fund’s expected three-year term - the U.N. Haiti Cholera Response Multi-Partner Trust Fund has only raised $8.7 million or 2.2 percent of the total - and less than half has been spent, U.N. figures show.
Sienna Merope-Synge, a human rights lawyer at the U.S.-based Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), said this showed “a failure by the U.N. system to honor that promise”.
“The U.N. promises, in particular to create a package of assistance that would provide redress to victims, (have) not been moved forward,” she said.
The IJDH previously filed a lawsuit against the U.N. on behalf of cholera victims, including a demand for financial compensation, but in 2016 a U.S. federal appeals court upheld the organization’s immunity from damages.
SLOW PROGRESS
The spotlight on the failure to eradicate cholera comes after the United Nations and aid organizations have faced criticism for slow reconstruction efforts in Haiti due to a lack of coordination and bypassing the government and businesses.
The behavior of aid workers in Haiti after the earthquake has also come under scrutiny with Oxfam rocked by allegations that staff, including a former Haiti country director, used prostitutes during the relief mission.
Eight years after the disaster Haiti remains the poorest nation in the western hemisphere. World Bank figures show only one in four rural Haitians has access to a toilet, and less than half to clean water.
Experts said improving the country’s water and sanitation systems is vital to overcome Haiti’s vulnerability to new cholera outbreaks, particularly after hurricanes.
In emailed comments, the U.N. Special Envoy for Haiti, Josette Sheeran, said nearly $700 million had been spent by the U.N. and global community on fighting cholera in Haiti since 2010 but funding for the Multi-Partner Trust Fund was lacking.
The office said Sheeran was working on “new innovative financing mechanisms” to raise funds but gave no details.
“There is still a big funding gap, and we urgently need $80 million to complete the next phase of cholera reduction, and community support,” Sheeran said by email.
Cholera is currently infecting about 74 more people each week although this is down from 18,500 at the outbreak’s peak.
Cholera expert Louise Ivers, executive director of the Centre for Global Health at the Massachusetts General Hospital said it was not enough to say things had improved since 2010.
“This has been one the biggest cholera epidemics in recent history and we are into the eighth year,” said Ivers, a doctor who led cholera response efforts during the outbreak in Haiti as head of mission for medical charity Partners In Health.
“Epidemics go down because people have had the disease, they have some natural immunity now.”
NO COMPENSATION
The U.N. fund envisions a two-track process.
The first track would focus on eradicating cholera and building infrastructure for sanitation an clean water.
The second is described as “a package of material assistance and support to those most affected by the disease” which Ban described as a “concrete expression of the regret of our organization for the suffering so many Haitians have endured”.
But Merope-Synge said so far no one has received any type of financial compensation, and projects to help rebuild affected communities - such as constructing markets and clinics - were virtually non-existent.
Ivers said working out which families could receive support is “daunting” because it is now hard to prove who died of what but that this should not account for the slow progress made.
“What’s happened over the last year is a real reluctance by the U.N. system, including the donor sites, to support direct payment to households,” Merope-Synge said.
“There’s a fear among the donors and within the U.N. system that it could set a precedent, that if the U.N. does something bad in the future it might have to compensate.”
In response to emails from the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the U.N. Office of the Special Envoy for Haiti did not confirm whether the U.N. had provided any direct financial assistance to individual cholera victims or families, or plans to do so.
The U.N. office also did not provide requested details about any development projects that are up and running.
It did say Sheeran and Haitian government officials met some cholera victims in February to discuss proposed pilot projects.
Following consultations with four communities in the central town of Mirebalais, the first set of projects had been chosen, and will start next week, with $1.1 million disbursed, the U.N. office said.
The United Nations did not provide details about what this would entail or look like on the ground but said it planned to carry out similar work in at about 140 more communities.
However Ivers said some Haitians feel they have been excluded from the U.N. consultation process which had led to street protests over the past year.
Merope-Synge said the cholera outbreak had left thousands of families struggling to rebuild their lives with little support.
“Families lost breadwinners that have plunged them further into poverty, people took on debt to buried loved ones. All these very real financial consequences,” she said.
RUN ACROSS HAITI IS IMPROVING LOCAL COMMUNITIES THROUGH RUNNING
23.04.18
WORDSVIVIEN LUK
PHOTOSDUY NGUYEN, PATRICK MOYNAHAN AND KEVIN KIM
I first stumbled on the Run Across Haiti while researching Esther Park, an inspiring American runner that we featured in this piece for International Women's Day.
When I learned that the 2018 edition of Run Across Haiti was only weeks away, I knew we had to cover it on Tempo for a number of reasons.
Luckily, organizer Vivien Luk and photographer Duy Nguyen were on board to share the stories from this amazing adventure.
Enjoy this fantastic piece from Viv and Duy, and be ready to be inspired.
We created the Run Across Haiti in 2015 to show that Haiti is not a place to be feared or to be pitied, and to raise funds to accompany families in Haiti out of poverty through good, dignified jobs. Our organization’s founder along with one of our early supporters ran the Sahara Race of the 4 Desert Series the previous year to raise money for our work. It's a 5-day self-supported 155-mile course. Both of them completed the race with about a toenail left each, and in the end, we raised $55,000 to support the families we serve in Haiti.
The set-up is simple. Runners run across the entire country of Haiti, north to south, coast to coast. Total mileage is about 200 miles (approx. 320km) over 7 days. We do about a marathon a day and a double marathon on the final day, one town to the next.
Each day begins at the hotel or guesthouse we stay at the previous night and ends at the next spot where our team rests. They line up at the starting line at 5am each morning, with the exception of the double marathon, which kicks off at midnight with a 12-hour turnaround from the previous marathon. It’s really an 80-mile finish in 36-hours, but splitting it up sounds slightly more manageable.
This is a run that’s fully supported by a crew of volunteers and staff members. It’s not a race, but an adventure run to gain perspective on a country that not very many people know much about.
We decided not to turn this into a race because we wanted to provide our runners time to take it all in, to let Haiti wash over them. When you see a country on foot, at 5-miles an hour, you gain a whole different perspective than sitting in a caged truck with bodyguards. You get to talk to people and make friends along the way. You see, smell, and hear things that you wouldn’t otherwise. You come up with a whole different set of questions to explore. You build more empathy by getting a little closer to the day to day struggles and milestones.
"You see the good, the ugly, and everything in between. It’s unfiltered.
Our runners get to tell their own stories, share their own versions of Haiti"
Having taken over 600 guests to Haiti, we’ve heard a myriad of questions and viewpoints. Most people know what they know about Haiti through the articles they’ve read. It’s the place that had the disaster. It’s really poor, right? Isn’t it next to the Dominican Republic? If so, why is it so much worse than its neighbour?
We get it. We’ve read these articles as well, but we’ve seen another side of Haiti that we’ve not read much about. It’s a side that involves people we now call friends and family, landscapes that we dream of returning to, miles and miles of glorious fields where people are working to make a living, beautiful mountains beyond mountains, a sunrise that would leave you breathless.
The media feeds us so much on a day to day basis, and this run offers an opportunity for individuals to build their own perspectives about the country we’ve come to love.
Runners have trained for months to get to this day. We’re up at breakfast by 4am, out on the coast by 5am to finally get started on the journey. It’s a rude awakening, a morning of dodging traffic and whatever that comes your way.
A little over 20 miles in you hit your first big mountain, with over 1,500 ft elevation within a few short miles. It’s hot, dusty, and brutal, but it offers some of the best views ever.
"Approximately mile 26-ish I saw many families and many kids. Some of the kids ran up to me and some ran side-by-side to me. All of them had smiles. I immediately felt pure freedom and joy from this as much they did too.
My mantra/fuel for this segment to Plaissance was ‘run freely and live simply’”
JOSEPH KIM
Plaisance is mountain filled with voodoo culture. You’ve hit a certain amount of elevation where it’s misty and foggy until day breaks. You start the day in the dark, running your first 7 miles on more switchbacks until you summit. As your joints and muscles get used to the climb, you get 7 miles of downhill that just feels like a hammer to nail on your entire body. You’re rewarded with a beautiful hotel in Ennery after camping out at a local high school the previous night.
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This day is mad hot as we move our way out of the mountains and into our first city center. Gonaives is the agricultural capital of the country. You’re greeted by markets big and small, and they’re packed. Large groups of people are seeing foreign runners speed by as they’re selling produce and meat. You’re squeezing between cars and people, some friendly, some not, and you’re also getting the worst of the fumes from cars and trucks. Most people, even seasoned runners, aren’t use to running more than 2 back to back days. Today, the fatigue and the doubts appear.
The Long Day.
Although the same amount of distance as the first day, because you’ve already traversed close to 70 miles, this day feels exceptionally long and impossible. It’s also incredibly flat and straight. The majority of the course is on the major single lane highway that offers little space for running, no shade from the sun, and ends with a 2-mile stretch across the entire town of Saint Marc at the busiest time of the day. It’s brutal.
The day before the holiday! Faces are long on this day. Everyone is hurting and they just want to make it to rest day. They’re focused but tired, and know how much they need to recover to make the final 80 mile run to the finish line. You’re running in parallel to the ocean. It teases you with the most faint sounds of waves as you make your way to it. Despite the location, there are no cool breezes, and those blisters don’t do so well on this day.
Ah, if you’ve made it this far, you do whatever it takes to get to that finish line. We make a trip to our communities, Menelas and Molea, to meet the families we’re running for and help our runners get some much needed inspiration.
Our Haitian crew members show off their homes and introduce their families to the whole team with so much pride, knowing how far they’ve come and how much each year’s run has contributed to their progress.
Runners also get a tour of the country’s largest open landfill, Molea, where 2,000 people live. There, we’ve formed what’s called the First Mile Coalition, an initiative to end undignified child labor. The team takes in the impact that has been made by previous Run Across Haiti teams and learn about the work they get to continue.
The nerves set in, not because there’s 27 miles ahead of everybody, but because there are only 12 hours to rest before the monster day to the finish line. It’s a simple math game. The faster you get to the finish line today, the more time you get to rest. The only thing standing between you and the recover is 27 miles of heat and cars speedy by inches away from you.
This is not a day our runners drop out, this is a victory day where runners are greeted by the families they met the previous day at the finish line and they know they’re so close to completing 200 miles.
The Monster Day. We start at midnight running in pods. It’s pitch black, and putrid smells fill the air as we run through Port-au-Prince. It’s that leftover raw fish in the fish market smell, the end of the day burned garbage smell, the dogs chasing you in the middle of the night, and the stomach being rumbled by nerves kind of run. It’s not fun. Runners drop out early on this night. You get through the first half marathon with your pod and off you go to the final finish line.
The first half of the run is flat. You run to the base of the mountain that takes you over and down to Jacmel. You run up the mountain, 4,500 feet up, 4,500 down. Somewhere along the up, you’re rewarded with the sunrise and songs from small churches. Some parts of the mountain are so steep, the only thing left to do is to slow down and hike. You keep thinking that there’s no way for the roads to go up, but up you go. You review your miles in your head and you can start to see the town of Jacmel, but still, up you go.
Hallucination sets in, you feel like you can no longer stand the pain, and with every muscle and joint aching, you start to run down the mountain. Finally, you made your way down, and there are about a million turns through the town to get to the finish line. A final test of character. You made it, not just with your feet, but with your heart, right into the southern coast of the country.
One of the most frequently asked questions is why would we run so damn far? If we want to just do a run, why not run a 5K, or a 10K, like civilized people do? Truth is, we know it’s crazy, but running a ridiculous amount of miles in a country that’s not known for running gives us a platform to talk about the things we want to talk about, and that’s ending abject poverty.
Doing 200 miles in one go is somewhat symbolic to the work that we do. There are no silver bullets to ending abject poverty. We roll up our sleeves and work together to find resources to solutions that our families spend their day to day thinking about. When we accompany a family, we stick with them until they no longer need us.
"As a runner, you spend a lot of time in your own head. Instead of thinking of the difficulty of running this last day, I found myself thinking of where I had been and what I had accomplished.
I feel very appreciative that I was given a chance to come to Haiti, to raise and donate money, and to be part of something that I think is going to reap a harvest for many people in Haiti"
CAM STAUFFER
Do you have what it takes to run across Haiti? Apply for the 2019 Run Across Haiti here.