US Catholic Bishops Disagree with Catholic Hosptal Association

OSF-SFMC in Peoria created a policy in the mid-1990's that allowed OSF physicians to write for oral oontraceptives. They still have the blessing of the Catholic Diocese of Peoria in this practice which is obviously against the teachings of the Catholic Church.

Simply, Bishop Jenky does not have the courage to take on the very rich OSF in Peoria. He fears their power in the Peoria business community.

However, just recently the United States Council of Catholic Bishops disagreed with the President Obama overhall of national health care specifically because of abortion funding.

Not surprisingly the Catholic Hospital Association disagreed with the Catholic Bishops. Catholic hospitals want to make money even if it needs sacrificing Catholic teaching. Just like OSF in Peoria.

Below are the last couple of paragraphs in this weeks New England Journa of Medicine regarding this schism in the Church over abortion.



There is no politics like abortion politics, and there are political winners and losers in the abortion-funding sideshow. President Obama is the big winner: he got a bill passed when passage seemed impossible, and he remained constant in his pledge that under his plan, “no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions.” Stupak’s political future will be decided in this fall’s election,3 but in the eyes of many, including me, he has gained stature by agreeing to support health care reform without his amendment. Political losers include Pitts and the fundamentalist Christian political leadership group known as the Family or the Fellowship, as well as the Catholic bishops, all of whom insisted that health care reform should not be passed without the inclusion of the Stupak–Pitts amendment.

Perhaps the most conspicuous winners are the Catholic Health Association of the United States and the Catholic women’s religious orders, whose members deliver health care in 1200 facilities and organizations nationwide.4 In mid-March, shortly before the final vote, both groups came out very strongly in favor of the Senate bill without the Stupak–Pitts amendment; the nuns noted that the bill “will not provide taxpayer funding for elective abortions. It will uphold longstanding conscience protections, and it will make historic new investments . . . in support of pregnant women. This is the REAL pro-life stance, and we as Catholics are all for it.”5 Amen.

How the US can Help Haiti

How the US can help Haiti

Thousands of Haitians lost everything in the earthquake. The US should open its borders and start granting humanitarian parole.

Holly Cooper guardian.co.uk, Sunday 28 March 2010

Arriving back home in the US after spending a week in Haiti, my five-year-old son came up to me and squealed, "Mommy is back from Hades!"

"Haiti, not Hades," I corrected him. The last thing I wanted was for Haiti to be equated with the underworld in my child's mind, even though it was an innocent phonetic error. For to me Haiti was Persephone, an irrepressible spirit, abducted by unexplained forces into a dark world.

On 11 March 2010, I arrived in Port Au Prince, Haiti with a human rights delegation intent on finding individuals for whom we could request humanitarian parole into the US. Under immigration laws, the secretary of homeland security can exercise her discretion to parole individuals into the US for urgent humanitarian reasons. This can include cases where the individual has a serious medical condition; is pregnant; is a juvenile; or parole is in the public interest. The executives have invoked humanitarian parole throughout US history to persons fleeing persecution and tragedy. In 1956, Eisenhower paroled in thousands of Hungarians fleeing communism; the US employed it again in the 1960s and 1970s for Cuban, Vietnamese and Haitian refugees. A policy for Haitian orphans was announced after the earthquake, but it is very limited in scope. Immigration lawyers and advocates in the US are campaigning for a more expansive use of humanitarian parole.

Our delegation comprised four doctors from Stanford University, myself from UC Davis, a lawyer from Reed Smith, a Haitian medical student from UCSF, and a photographer, operating with support from the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti and Bureau des Avocats Internationaux. We set out, naively perhaps, to find the most egregious cases, those which could compel our government to magnanimously open its borders, to offer sanctuary, medical care, food, and perhaps dignity to the Haitian people. We then met with more than 100 individuals, listening to each person's personal tragedy.

One that haunts me was that of Mr P, a carpenter, who was dug out of his home and remained unconscious for three days. He awoke to learn his leg had to be amputated, that he would have to use a catheter for the rest of his life and could never know intimacy with his wife again. He also learned his home was completely destroyed. The earthquake took all this from him in a single moment. He, his wife and children, like hundreds of thousands of Haitians, were homeless, living without a tent in the streets of Port Au Prince. He had no hope of finding a prosthetic leg to salvage his career or his mobility. He had to teach himself how to get around on crutches, and how to recover from the tragedy, all while hungry, thirsty, and homeless.

I told him about our mission and about the possibility of coming to the US. Would parole into the United States be something that would interest him?

He smiled radiantly at the thought of it. His wife laughed and clapped her hands together. This was the first time they had smiled since the earthquake. The opium of hope had momentarily taken him and his wife out of Haiti and into an imaginary world in the United States. Out of the sweltering heat, the stifling sauna-like humidity, out of the tent camp, the mosquitoes, away from the long lines for food and water, away from his amputated leg and into a world of hope. He laughed: "Schools again for our children! Food in abundance, a home, maybe a new leg – I hear in the USA they have plastic legs, I could work again." His wife joined in: "And I could have a kitchen. I would cook you a big Creole meal, Ms Holly." We all laughed and smiled at each other.

Then the fantasy stopped as Mr P began to cry. Then the Creole interpreter, who had until then tried to remain invisible, began to cry. We were all quiet for several minutes – respectfully waiting for Mr P to look up from his hands again. The quiet tears were undefined, unexplained. Perhaps Mr P and the interpreter knew this was all a fairytale – the prosthetic leg, the kitchen, being lifted out of this misery.

We then took Mr P's photograph for his parole application. Being photographed in misery is humiliating. He stood there proud as the photographer took the shot; I looked away so as not to aggravate the knock to his pride. He then turned on his crutches to walk away. He turned and said: "Thank you. For the first time since 12 January, I feel alive. This hope you give me of coming to the USA is the only thing giving me the will to live. Thank you for giving hope."

I walked off, not able to look him in the face. I wept. I wept because I had no guarantees. Just the guarantee that I would try to make our government show compassion, that I would carry his story to you.

Like Persephone, the people of Haiti simply request an exit from their land, to have a spring again, to pick flowers again in Nysa, for a reprieve from their eternal winter.

We as a nation should be humbled that the Haitian people, a people who rose above slavery, a people of great resilience and survival, wish to become part of our community. They want only the basics: education, food and shelter. In return they offer their cultural riches – their resilience, their art, their music, their beloved food and their beautiful laughter. The United States government should grant humanitarian parole to the Haitians in need and we should not forsake Mr P nor his people whose lives are irreversibly impacted by the earthquake of 12 January 2010.

Look Who Took Money

For years Advanced Medical Transport (AMT) of Peoria paid OSF's Dr. George Hevesy a salary.

Dr. Hevesy was Project Medical Director of all of the ambulance companies in central Illinois, including AMT.

Until last summer AMT was the only provider of advanced life support in Peoria. The Peoria Fire Department now has one station that is allowed to provide advanced life support when they arrive at a 911 medical emergency.

And for years the AMT corporate board of directors has said that there was no conflict of interest regarding the fact that Dr. Hevesy was paid by AMT. And for years the AMT board of directors is composed of Peoria hospital administrators and other strong business people in the area who wanted AMT to be the only provider of advanced life support in the city of Peoria.

See Leonard Pitts article below describing the US congressman being paid by Toyota as they "investigate" the world's largest car maker.

This sounds like the way we do things in Peoria.
----------------------

Leonard Pitts:

"This week's congressional hearings only heighten the concern. Lawmakers are investigating the recent recalls over safety defects that have besmirched the reputation of the Toyota company. We are indebted to The Washington Post for publishing an analysis of legislators' financial ties to the automaker. It turns out, according to The Post, that of the 125 members of Congress on the committees investigating Toyota, over 40 percent have accepted campaign donations totaling $135,673 from the company in the last 10 years.

"That's on top of a million dollars funneled to lawmakers by Toyota through state parties and PACs. Which is, in turn, on top of yet another million, just since 2008, donated by Toyota to nonprofit groups with, as The Post put it, ``strong ties'' to members of Congress."

What I've Learned

The past decade has been the best learning experience of my life.

It had to happen and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

In the words of the philosopher Edmund Burke, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

Haunted Doctors

While working in Haiti during the last three decades I have been haunted.

With almost every patient that I have examined, I feel like I didn't do enough or that I did too much. But in order to work in Haiti, I think health care professionals need to reconcile that we are limited and weak human beings and the conditions in which we work are inhuman and disorienting.

And most Haitians forgive us when we walk away. Or when we shake our head and give them the the third best treatment because treatments one and two are not options in Haiti.

In Haiti I sometimes stare at the next patient and don't see him because I am thinking of the last patient who is shuffling out of my "office". I am asking myself, "Was that the best you could do?"

All I can say in those circumstances, is "forgive me God".

Everyone working in Haiti needs to be gentle on themselves. But we need to do our best to speak and act for Haitians whom the world will soon begine to ignore again. Most importantly we need to try and help Haitians build a society which will never allow this travesty to happen again.

Below is an article from the New York Times that chronicles some of the "guilt trips" that foreign doctors are on right now after their recent medical experiences in Haiti.



February 13, 2010
Doctors Haunted by Haitians They Couldn’t Help
By DEBORAH SONTAG

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The foreign doctors who performed the first amputations after the earthquake used hacksaws. They relied on vodka for sterilization, substituted local numbing for general anesthesia, jury-rigged tourniquets from rubber gloves. Working around the clock in improvised operating rooms, they sacrificed limbs and lost patients to injuries that are no longer supposed to be disabling or deadly.

Now back in their antiseptic, high-tech offices in the United States and elsewhere, the medical professionals who initially flew to Haiti’s rescue are haunted by their experiences, “overwhelmed by conflicting feelings of accomplishment and guilt,” as Dr. Louisdon Pierre described it.

They witnessed what Dr. Laurence J. Ronan of Massachusetts General Hospital described as a “mass casualty horror show.” They practiced what Dr. Dean G. Lorich of the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan called “Civil War medicine.” They saved lives, probably by the thousands. But their accomplishments were limited by the circumstances, and then they left, uneasily, before conditions for doctors and patients alike started improving.

Most of the doctors interviewed said they were committed to returning to Haiti and to marshaling the medical community’s resources to deal with the thousands of Haitians who sustained permanently disabling injuries. The needs are staggering: from basic wound care to skin grafts, revision surgery, physical and occupational rehabilitation, prostheses and trauma therapy.

“Everything that everyone did during those first two heartbreaking weeks will have been for nothing if these patients don’t get continuing care,” said Dr. Elizabeth Bellino, a pediatrician based at Tulane University who worked in Haiti right after the earthquake.

In Uganda now on a project, Dr. Bellino, 34, said she closed her eyes and saw the beaming face of a 12-year-old Haitian boy named Mystil Jean Wesmer who ended up comforting her when she dissolved into tears. As she recounts it, Mystil smiled gently and, sensing that she was overwhelmed by the need around her at a field hospital run by Americans, said: “ ‘Go take care of the sicker kids. I’ll be O.K.’ ”

He himself was waiting to have his leg amputated.

“All he wanted to know was how he was going to walk to school and church,” Dr. Bellino said. “I said, ‘Well, we’ll figure that out.’ But now I’m so worried about him, about all the kids.”

Dr. Pierre, a Haitian-American who is the director of pediatric intensive care at the Brooklyn Hospital Center, said he thought constantly about the patients he left behind, too. Even as he plans his next trip — he and Dr. Stephen Carryl, the chairman of surgery at his hospital, will be returning with a prosthetics maker — a few memories plague him.

Back in Brooklyn, he still hears the loud, shrill cry of a mother at the moment her small son died of a raging infection on the lawn of a hospital in the Carrefour neighborhood. The mother and father, one child already lost to the earthquake, had implored Dr. Pierre to help their 4-year-old, who had been eviscerated by a concrete block and hurriedly stitched back together by a local doctor.

But the boy, lying in a crib under a tree, his heart rate racing, his breathing way too fast, was clearly suffering septic shock, and Dr. Pierre, equipped only with his stethoscope, could do nothing.

“I felt so helpless,” he said, and not long afterward, while he was deeply sedating another patient for surgery, he heard the wail that told of the boy’s death.

Later, amid the patients strewn across the hospital’s grounds, Dr. Pierre spotted a wrapped bundle in what appeared to be an abandoned incubator. The bundle, mewling, was a premature infant whose mother had died in childbirth. Dr. Pierre and a pediatric nurse from Brooklyn, Sharon Pickering, frantically tried to find a way to hydrate the baby.

“This is something we know how to do,” he said they told each other. Finally, they managed to insert a needle in a bone cavity and get the baby some fluids. But the next morning, Dr. Pierre found the incubator empty.

Such losses were shattering but it was hard to react at the time, the doctors said. There was too much to do, and the circumstances were disorienting. Dr. Lorich, an orthopedic trauma surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery, said it was hard to adjust to the grim reality of mass amputations. “I am in the habit of saving legs,” he said.

When his 13-member team from New York arrived at the Haitian Community Hospital, thousands of terribly injured Haitians lay on stretchers, boards, mattresses and the floor, among them tiny children with crushed legs, all by themselves.

The hospital had two functioning operating rooms, Dr. Lorich said, but the anesthesia machine did not work, the oxygen tanks were empty, there was no blood supply and the labs were not functioning. Still, the New York team plunged in, performing 40 amputations, 60 limb-saving operations and, to conclude three sleepless days, one Caesarean section — “a nice pink baby,” Dr. Lorich said.

The departure, however, was unsettling. Dr. Lorich’s team was exhausted, as were their supplies, but a flight that was supposed to be arriving with a fresh team of surgeons and nurses to replace them had been canceled. Outside the hospital, crowds seeking help pushed against barricaded doors, and they did not want the foreign doctors to abandon them. The doctors needed a military escort to leave.

In Uganda, three weeks away from her return to Haiti, Dr. Bellino said she could not stop wondering how the 12-year-old Mystil had fared after his amputation.

Through an uncle, the boy was found at the World Harvest Missions/New Life orphanage, where American volunteers are looking after wounded children who have been discharged from field hospitals.

Mystil was lying on a mattress on the concrete floor of a church with a roof damaged in the quake. On his plaid shirt he wore a SpongeBob sticker, which a volunteer said he had earned by doing several laps around a mango tree on his new crutches. Sarah Wimmer, a paramedic from Arizona, said that Mystil’s wound was healing well, and that he was receiving some physical and emotional therapy. When his stitches are removed, he will be sent home to his parents, who are living outside their cracked house, but he will be considered an outpatient, Ms. Wimmer said.

Reached in Africa, Dr. Bellino sighed. “I can breathe now,” she said after learning that Mystil was all right.

Lying on the mattress, with tired, sad eyes, Mystil had said he missed “Dr. Elizabeth.” Asked if he wanted the doctor to bring him anything when she returned to Haiti, Mystil said: “Toys, I guess. I know — a bicycle!”

Then, looking down at his bandaged stump, the boy slapped his forehead and buried his face in a pillow. “I forgot,” he said.

Haiti's Common Good

National Catholic Reporter Editorial
Febrary 4, 2010

It is a bitter and awful irony that it took an earthquake of horrifying dimension to bring a stop to it all and to rivet the globe’s attention and compassion. A redemptive quality mixes even now with the stench of death that hangs over Port-au-Prince. The questions arising from the rubble are enormous. Reconstruction will occur, but it must be done in a way that does no further damage to the integrity of Haiti and that advances the broadest benefit for the greatest number of people.

The common good is not a well-established concept in Haiti, and Port-au-Prince before the earthquake provided the best evidence of the degradation that occurs when the perks of commerce and political power accrue to only a few while the rest remain in poverty.

Post-earthquake possibilities include the opportunity to manage the enormous outpouring of the world’s compassion and resources to develop Haiti beyond the borders of Port-au-Prince, to establish the infrastructure and services so desperately needed to revive agriculture and other industries in Haiti’s rural provinces.

Haiti has paid a historic price to the slave trade and to those in the hemisphere with the power to manipulate. It now deserves a fighting chance to reestablish itself as a player on equal footing with the rest of the world.

The Rest of the Story is Ours

Haiti: The rest of the story is ours

By Joan Chittister

Created Jan 25, 2010

I went to Haiti years ago. There was an earthquake going on then, too, but that earthquake was of another making. That earthquake rumbled up from the underground of a people who had been exploited, abandoned, abused and forgotten by their own government and brought to the point of total resistance.

In the midst of the fissure stood a young Salesian priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, shouting like John the Baptist in the desert, for peace and justice for the poor in the face of Haiti's sinful impoverishment by the Western world. From 1845 to 1947, Haiti had been forced to pay France reparations in gold for its 1803 war of independence. This required the country to borrow huge sums of money at egregious rates of interest from American, French and German banks. Furthermore, Western corporations, our own among them, were using Haitians at slave-labor wages and paying not a cent in taxes for the privilege of doing so.

Aristide was being hunted by day and by night by minions of a corrupt regime intent on quieting the fearsome voice. Aristide's great earth-shaking crime lay in running a home for street children and speaking a lonely truth in the face of the national family secret that the country was being prostituted by its own government for its own indecent desires. The dictators François Duvalier, or "Papa Doc," and his son Jean-Claude, "Baby Doc," were draining millions out of the country's coffers for personal use.

During that trip to Haiti, in 1989, I made a 20 minute film about the situation called "Voices of Promise; Voices of Hope," which I smuggled out of the country right through the hands of the government security team. The film was to help to raise consciousness in the United States about the deplorable conditions of the place, but nothing much happened to change things there. The infrastructure remained decrepit, the people remained underpaid, the country remained destitute.

The film, nevertheless, talked about more than corruption. It talked just as much about beauty. The country was desperately deprived but ruggedly beautiful at the same time. The people were pathetically poor but fiercely beautiful in their calm and kindness at the same time. The private civilian and religious aid agencies that sustained the poorest of the poor in the country were pathetically undeveloped and totally beautiful in their commitment to this hopeless place. The future was frighteningly dangerous but spiritually beautiful. Haitians were full of faith in God and full of faith in their own unprepared selves.

I had never seen such suffering, such beauty in my life. But now, since the worst earthquake the Western Hemisphere has ever experienced struck Haiti, I am seeing it again. The only question now is how much beauty will it bring and for how long?

For the first time in years, the lead news story in the United States isn't about war. The banner headlines aren't about suicide bombings. The pictures aren't of maimed soldiers. The sidebar articles aren't about suspicion and body scans. They aren't about the oppression of one person by another. But that doesn't mean that the news isn't about pain and suffering, about frustration and powerlessness, about God-awful deprivation and aching hearts.

Instead, Haiti is a story of 111,000 corpses being tilted from dump trucks into open graves in a public trash heap. It is the story of a small country that had 380,000 orphans before the earthquake and is now calculating that there may well be a million more children, homeless, alone, wandering through life in a place where life does not exist. It is the story of a country of at least 200,000 dead and two million homeless that is totally destroyed and totally demoralized at the same time.

But that is not the end of the story. The rest of the story is ours.

You see, Haiti is also a story of millions of dollars being poured into relief programs for Haiti by simple people everywhere. It is the story of the mobilization of planes, ships, troops, rescue crews and relief agencies from around the entire world. It is the story of reporters gone to record the event having put down their microphones to become part of the rescue scene themselves. It is about celebrities, politicians, presidents and U.N. officials everywhere stopping their own lives and agendas to take up the cause of a people whose cause has almost never been recognized before. It is the story of a world in tears for a people who are surviving their desolation by singing on hillsides together, singing about death as they are pulled from the rubble alive, singing alleluias in their ruined churches as they pray to be delivered from fates worse than death.

This scene, too, has a stunning kind of beauty and deep commitment. This time it is the beauty of the human community dedicated to shining a light through the blackest parts of the human situation rather than aiming predator drones or suicide bombs at other innocents around the world.

For the first time in history, financial aid is pouring into Haiti from every part of the globe. For the first time in history, the ugly face of human abandonment is being exposed to the caring face of human bondedness. For the first time, the human race, ironically, looks totally human everywhere.

There is another test of humanity, however, that Haiti will surely essay and which is a clear and measurable one: How long will the human community stay in Haiti, not just to rescue the few survivors or hand out emergency rations or bury the nameless, unwashed, unblessed dead but how long will we stay there to rebuild it?

After all, U.S. gratitude to Haiti is long overdue. Haiti, the first and only nation to arise out of a slave revolt not only defeated Napoleon in his attempt to retake that island nation but, in the process, foiled Napoleon's plan to then use that country as a launching pad for the invasion and conquest of the land known now as The Louisiana Territory. In other words, Haiti saved the Western United States from French rule. Saved the United States.

So how long will we ourselves, the United States, a country that occupied Haiti for our own interests from 1915 to 1934 and then put half a century into wars around the world and billions of dollars and millions of weapons into death -- stay in Haiti to save it, to repay the debts that the abandonment of an entire people incurs. How much time, how much money, will we and the rest of the global community put into becoming as much a part of Haiti's resurrection as we have been part of its burial?

From where I stand the situation is a clear one: Haiti in its devastation stands not only for the rebuilding of its own country but for the possible rebuilding of the soul and humanity of the entire human community itself.

If we see this one through, Haiti may well save us again, this time not from the loss of our land but from the loss of our humanity.

From Where I Stand
Copyright © The National Catholic Reporter Publishing Company

Addicted to Haiti

(Photo by John Carroll, pre-earthquake Port-au-Prince)

February 7, 2010
Op-Ed Contributor/New York Times
Addicted to Haiti
By BEN FOUNTAIN
Dallas

IN 1999 I made a day trip from the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, up to the wanly charming town of Kenscoff, a couple of hours drive into the mountains. I’d done this journey before, but not in several years, and as the road wound upward I couldn’t help being astonished by the sprawling mansions that had taken over the hillsides.

Where this road had once offered peaceful views of terraced fields, patches of forest, clusters of modest farmhouses, there now hulked villa after mind-boggling villa, as if the McMansions from Dallas’s flat-as-a-pancake suburbs had been transplanted to the mountains overlooking Port-au-Prince. Had oil been discovered in Haiti? As every turn revealed new vistas of architectural bombast, my Haitian friend in the passenger seat was shaking his head, muttering the same word over and over:

Drogue. Drugs.

Since Haiti’s devastating earthquake, much attention has been focused, rightly so, on the convergence of economic, political and cultural forces that rendered the country so vulnerable to this catastrophe. Many have looked to the past for guidance, and recent weeks have given us earnest and often perceptive analyses of Haitian history, reaching back to its brutal colonial origins, its proud, improbable and staggeringly violent war of independence, and continuing on through the next 200 years of mostly miserable governance, that depressing catalog of revolts, coups, betrayals and interventions — usually aided, if not procured outright, by foreign powers — that drained Haiti of so much of its wealth and promise.

But if Haiti is to be rebuilt, or not merely rebuilt but transformed, then drug trafficking needs to be recognized for what it is, a primary force — arguably, the dominant force — in Haitian political life for the past 25 years.

A 1993 memo, written by John Kerry as the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, asserted that “there is a partnership made in hell, in cocaine, and in dollars between the Colombian cartels and the Haitian military.” At the time, Haiti was well on its way to becoming the Caribbean’s leading transshipment point for cocaine entering the United States from South America, and while the individual actors may have changed in the years since then, the partnership has continued to thrive. Today, drug trafficking is a billion-dollar-a-year enterprise in Haiti, generating tremendous profits in a country where most people survive on a few dollars a day.

In any country, this kind of wealth would provide ample incentive and means for acquiring power, but in Haiti the drug trade exerts an influence out of all proportion to other sectors of society. The narrative of Haitian politics since the fall of the Duvalier regime in 1986 closely tracks the rise of drug trafficking. As Haiti struggled to hold elections in the years immediately after President Jean-Claude Duvalier’s ouster, compelling evidence pointed to the involvement in cocaine trafficking of Col. Jean-Claude Paul and other high-ranking officers, a faction of the Haitian military that was, perhaps not coincidentally, especially pitiless in its suppression of the democratic movement.

The military continued to be closely linked to the drug trade during Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s brief first turn as president, cut short by the coup of Sept. 30, 1991, and little changed after his ouster. Indeed, Port-au-Prince’s chief of police, Lt. Col. Joseph Michel François, emerged as the next key man in Haitian drug trafficking, presiding over a notorious network of soldiers and paramilitary attachés that, in addition to expanding the country’s drug trade, carried out a ruthless program of political terrorism in which thousands of Haitians were murdered.

Those years of intense repression coincided with Haiti’s rise as the region’s major transshipment point for cocaine, a distinction it maintained even after civilian rule was restored in 1994. By 2000, an estimated 75 tons, or 15 percent of the cocaine consumed annually in the United States, was being channeled through Haiti. Drug-related corruption and violence became endemic during Mr. Aristide’s second term as president, with many in his inner circle — including the National Palace security chief, the director of the Haitian National Police, the head of an investigations unit of the National Police, and the president of the Haitian Senate — eventually serving time in American prisons for violations of American narcotics and money-laundering laws.

At virtually every turn over the past two and a half decades, Haiti’s attempts to establish the institutions and standards of civil society have been subverted or crushed, often with the hand of the drug trade clearly evident. President René Préval’s administration made greater strides than any previous government toward true reform, yet progress even before Jan. 12 was tenuous. The National Police remained a weak and uncertain force; the judiciary was dysfunctional; government ministries were highly politicized and rife with corruption; concepts of transparency, human rights and the rule of law were fragile at best.

At present, there is no lack of debate on how best to go about remaking Haiti. Plan better. Build better. Push for institutional reform. Pour in many billions of dollars in international aid, with stronger oversight, firmer resolve, greater involvement of the Haitian public and private sectors. An opposing school of thought says that aid should be cut off completely, forcing Haitians to take ownership of their country’s fate; only shock therapy can break the enduring cycle of dependence, dysfunction and self-inflicted poverty.

Whichever way you lean, chances are that the power and profits of drug trafficking will doom your prescription to irrelevance. Yes, Americans have shown tremendous generosity toward Haiti since Jan. 12 — more than $20 million in text donations to the Red Cross, $57 million and counting raised by the Hope for Haiti Now telethon, the private planes stacked up at airports in southern Florida, waiting for a landing slot in Port-au-Prince. That’s the part of the story that makes us feel good.

Then there’s the other part. The United States leads the world in cocaine consumption, which means there is a line that goes straight from our stupendous drug habit back to the conditions in Haiti, all those years of toxic governance that set the stage for so much destruction, so much death and injury.

So it’s come to this: the richest country in the hemisphere and the poorest, the first republic and the second, trapped together in the New World’s most glaring modern failure, the war on drugs. It would be naïve to hope that Americans will quit their cocaine any time soon for Haiti’s sake. But it would be equally naïve not to recognize this huge obstacle standing in Haiti’s way, and the role we’ve played in creating it. Our aspirations for Haiti lead straight through our addictions.

Ben Fountain is the author of the short-story collection “Brief Encounters with Che Guevara.”

Bishop Jenky, Haitian Children, and the Earthquake

Dear Bishop Jenky,

The Catholic laity in the Catholic Diocese of Peoria recently raised tens of thousands of dollars for Catholic Relief Services (CRS) for the Haitian earthquake victims.

Several days ago a letter was written by Catholic Relief Services, Catholic Charities, and the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops.

I am sure you would have seen this letter that attempted to ensure that vulnerable Haitian children and orphans are protected and taken care of in an expeditious and ethical fashion.

A significant bullet point in the letter states:

"Ensure that children in need of urgent medical care are able to access life saving
services as soon as possible, whether in Haiti or in another country. Whenever
possible, these children should be accompanied by a parent or guardian if one is
available."

Bishop Jenky, as you know, Haitian Hearts in Peoria has been doing this for over 15 years.

In fact right now we have children in Haiti that have survived the earthquake and need heart surgery that they cannot obtain in Haiti.

Will you help us find a medical center(s) in the United States to accept these children?

Also, Haitian Hearts has two young adult patients, Jenny and Henri, that were operated at OSF-SFMC in Peoria ten years ago. Both are homeless in the streets of Port-au-Prince now and both need repeat heart surgery. Unfortunately, both have been rejected by OSF-SFMC and Jenny and Henri have not been allowed to return to OSF-SFMC.

Will you intercede at OSF-SFMC on their behalf? Other medical centers do not want to accept them for a variety of reasons. And OSF-SFMC really needs your guidance now so they can follow their mission philosophy and never turn any one away. (Haitian Hearts will obtain their passports, visas, and pay for their travel to and from the United States. We will bring them to the United States and they will stay with the same host families in Peoria that they lived with ten years ago. We will also provide their medication post operatively in Haiti for the rest of their lives.)

Bishop Jenky, please do what is right for the Haitian children and for Jenny and Henri. I am sure that Catholic Relief Services would support you in this humanitarian effort.

Thank you.

John Carroll, M.D.

(Jenny is pictured above.)

Haitian Hearts Summary of the Last Two Weeks

Dear Haitian Hearts Friends,

Haitian Hearts thanks you for the tremendous financial support you have given the Haitian people following the earthquake that destroyed Port-au-Prince two weeks ago.

We have made or received hundreds of phone calls and e mails to and from Haitian Hearts patients, their families, and their friends during the last 14 days.

We have heard from Katia, Caleb, Suze, Henri, Mirterlande, Frandy, Jenny, Katina, Marie, Rodolphe, and Nadia. Most of them lost their homes, relatives, and friends, and almost all of their possessions, including their heart medications. But none of them were physically hurt by the quake.

It is very sad and sobering to listen to their desperate voices from the streets of Port-au-Prince. Most are living on the streets. They describe lack of clean water and food. There is no infrastructure that is working well. There is no sewage system in Port-au-Prince.

Katina's father and family fled to the countryside in southern Haiti to live with relatives who have a garden. Katina's father explained to me that he escaped the earthquake "with only his head".

Mirterland's sister Carminne called today and she is living in Liancourt, a village in Haiti's central plateau.

Jenny, a thirty year old girl who needs repeat heart surgery, is living in a car body parked in her yard near her damaged home.

Suze, Henri, Frandy, Marie, and their families are living on the streets of Port-au-Prince.

Maria has been able to wire money via Western Union from Haitian Hearts to almost all of the people mentioned above. Western Union is not charging any fee for our Haitian friends to obtain their money in Haiti.

Haitian Hearts supporters have allowed us to do this and the people and their families mentioned above who lost almost everything are benefiting right now.

Unfortunately, we have lost some Haitian Hearts patients.

We were working on getting Valerie, a six year old girl, accepted to a medical center in the United States for repair of a hole in her heart (atrial septal defect). Valerie, her twin sister, and her mother were all killed in the earthquake. Her recent video echocardiogram sits on the floor of our living room. It is hard to look at it.

Dieula was an eight year old girl that I examined for the first time in 2006. She had a ventricular septal defect and active tuberculosis. We treated the tuberculosis in Haiti and another group was successful getting her accepted into a large pediatric medical center for heart surgery. Dieula had the surgery in 2007 and returned to Haiti.

When the earthquake struck Port-au-Prince, Dieula was killed. Her seven siblings and mother survived.

Several days ago a six year old Haitian Hearts patient that I first examined five years ago was formally accepted for surgery in California. Her name is Widnerlande. She has a ventricular septal defect also. She and her mother Magalene live about three hours by car north of Port-au-Prince. We have been unable to contact Magalene since the earthquake, but we will continue to look for them until we get an answer.

Medjina is the last Haitian Hearts patient that we brought for heart surgery. Medjina arrived in the States in December and is scheduled for mitral valve replacement this spring. Medjina's mother gave the ok for surgery two days before the earthquake and has not been heard from since. If we do find out Medjina's mother status, we will let you know on this site.

As you are following in the news, the majority of search and rescue teams are done with their work. Now Haiti has entered another stage of disaster medicine in Haiti.

This stage will be just as horrific if not more so than the first stage. Infections due to trauma, surgery, and dirty water will be rampant. Haitian mothers will not be able to get their kids medical help quickly due to the Haiti's deficient infrastructure which even became more impossible two weeks ago. Lack of good shelter and sewage systems will cause more morbidity and mortality.

People suffering diseases of tuberculosis and AIDS will go without treatment which will hurt them and possibly others around them.

Many more orphans in Haiti need help right now. And BEFORE the earthquake there was an estimated 300,000 orphans in Haiti.

And what about the psychological help that hundreds of thousands of Haitians need that have survived this disaster? And there will be significant burn out and severe stress for the relief teams that enter Haiti to help out.

Unfortunately both national and international corruption will slow down the aid to the people that need it most. Fuel prices have already been elevated.

The funds that are donated to Haiti need to filter up and not down. There are hundreds of thousands of young men and women that can and would rebuild their country if they were paid fairly and could provide basics for their families. During the last 29 years I have seen Haitians do unbelievable physical labor, and I have no doubt they could rebuild Haiti with their bare hands. The work force is in Haiti right now. Why not use them?


Poor Haitians have had problems for centuries. True justice for the majority of people in Haiti, to enable a basic standard of living, simply does not exist.

Haiti will not be fixed quickly. It will take decades of intense work at every level. But it can improve significantly if the national and international will is there.

Haitian Hearts will do the same work this year that we have been doing for the last 15 years. We will continue to work in hospitals and clinics with Haitian doctors and nurses seeing whoever comes in.

When a young heart patient comes along, we will do our best to examine, diagnose, treat, and determine if the patient is a surgical candidate. And if the patient is operable, we will attempt to find medical centers in the United States or other countries, to accept the child and perform the surgery.

Jenny, Henri, and Rodolphe all had heart surgery about 10 years ago and all three need heart surgery again. We have their exams and echocardiograms done. They sit on our living room floor too, reminding us to work hard. We will continue to search for medical centers to accept them.

In summary, Haitian Hearts work will be challenging in 2010.

The world has now seen the courage of the Haitian people. And from our personal experience we know our Haitian Hearts patients will not give up. And they won't let us give up either.


Sincerely,

John and Maria

www.livefromhaiti.blogspot.com
www.dyinginhaiti.blogspot.com

New Civilization Discovered

(Photo by John Carroll)
The Onion reports new civilization discovered.

After reading their report the people in Haiti DO seem human.

I wonder if OSF-SFMC in Peoria is aware of this breaking news?

Madame Mellon of Hoptial Albert Schweitzer

The young girl pictured to the right is Mirterlande. I took this picture in 2006.

Haitian Hearts first examined her during the fall of 2006. She clearly had a damaged mitral valve due to rheumatic fever and was in congestive heart failure.

We were able to bring her to the United States at the end of 2008 where she underwent mitral valve replacement by and excellent surgeon at an excellent medical center. Mirterlande is doing very well today.

Mirterlande is from Haiti's central plateau. She told us that she had been hospitalized as a child at Hopital Albert Schweitzer (HAS) for heart problems.

HAS was founded in the mid 1950's by Dr. Larry Mellon and his wife Gwen Mellon. They built the hospital for approximately 1.5 million dollars with their own money.

I had the opportunity to transport a patient to HAS in 1981. My patient was a little 5 year old boy that had fallen off a donkey, struck his head, and was leaking cerebrospinal fluid from his fractured skull.

HAS accepted the little boy and the pediatrician placed him on antibiotics. I begged this physician to send me follow up. Several months later I received a letter from this Haitian pediatrician who told me that the little boy survived, did well, and was discharged.

In 1987 I was able to work at HAS from July until November. It was the best medical experience of my life. Dr. and Mrs. Mellon were elderly at that time but still lived close to the hospital and were very involved in the daily operation of the hospital.

My friend David Volk and his wife Dr. Lauze Volk worked at HAS ten years ago. David sent me the following post written by Ian Rawson. Mr. Rawson is the son of Gwen Mellon. The lady he refers to in the post is his mother.

Please see article below.



Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Each day I try to go through the hospital several times in the early morning, during the day and in the evening. I try to encourage the people who are waiting for surgery and their families, and then to check on the progress of those who are recovering from their procedures. I have become quite close to several of these strong people, and our visits buoy the spirits of both of us.

We have never asked people about their experiences in the earth quake, but some now want to be able to express themselves about the disaster. One of my special friends is an elderly lady who has required two surgical procedures, with her leg in traction between them. She has endured pain and discomfort with strong perseverance (that's the word she used). She has a beautiful smile, which she usually shares with me each time I visit. If not, I know that she is suffering.

Once, when I went to see her, the bed was gone, but her son, who has not left her side, indicated that he wanted to talk, so we went out the ward door to a breezeway, and sat on a concrete bench. His mother comes from a small community on the north side of the Artibonite River. She had come in to Port Au Prince with her family to prepare for the daughter's wedding. When the quake hit his mother was buried in the rubble of a 3-story apartment building.

Miraculously, her sons found her and carried her to a nearby house. One of the sons drove to three hospitals to seek help for her broken leg, but he only found bodies of people which had been carried there by distraught families. The son returned to report to his mother, who was coming out of the initial shock of the quake. She told her children to take her home. Why? They asked, and she told them about the hospital across the river where she had gone when they were young, to have an operation.

The sons drove around buying gasoline, for which the price had doubled, and started on the road to Deschapelles and Hôpital Albert Schweitzer. On the way, she told them about the hospital and the American woman who visited her every day.

I met her the day after she arrived, when she stopped me to ask me when she would have her operation. We talked a while, and she asked if the American lady was still there and I explained that she was not, but as the American lady was my mother, she had taught me how to care for our patients. That earned me the first of her beatific smiles.

She said that she will be my Mami, and I am honored with the relationship.

Later today, she will have her second operation and will be on her way to recuperation, and I am certain to be graced with another of her smiles.

Ian Rawson

Humility

(Photo of Dr. Jennifer Carroll examining baby with congenital heart disease in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.)
Hard lessons, humility for big-city doctors in Haiti

By Elizabeth Cohen, CNN Senior Medical Correspondent

Doctors arriving in Haiti learn there is no technology, no basic equipment
Doctors created operating room with no surgical lights, oxygen, blood or ventilators
After witnessing death of children, surgeons quicker to give permission to amputate


Port-au-Prince, Haiti (CNN) -- Dr. Roberto Feliz and Dr. Hiba Georges were quickly jolted from the most modern of medical care in Boston, Massachusetts, to the most rudimentary of care when they flew to Haiti last week to work at a hospital housed in two tents run by the University of Miami.

The doctors, who worked at the Boston Medical Center, quickly learned that when you have no technology -- not even the simplest blood test -- you have to make medical decisions in an entirely different way.

The first death they witnessed taught them a valuable lesson.

The patient was a boy who needed his leg amputated or else he would die of either an infection or rhabdomyolysis, a kidney disease that follows injuries where muscles are crushed.

Find loved ones in Haiti | Share your story

Feliz, Georges and the other doctors had nowhere to take the boy. Their own hospital had yet to open its operating room, so they spent hours trying to find a hospital that could do surgeries. Their search was in vain.

Finally, the doctors decided to do the surgery themselves that night by the moonlight under a mango tree.

"We just sawed his foot off. We didn't have to use anesthesia because he was already unconscious and wasn't feeling a thing," Feliz says.

But they'd waited too long. The boy took his last breath during the surgery.

"Some of the doctors cried," Feliz says. "I told them, 'There is no crying in medicine.'"

As a direct result of the boy's death, a few hours later, at 3 in the morning, the surgeons at the University of Miami hospital decided to build their own operating room. They had no surgical lights, no oxygen, no blood, no ventilators and no monitors. For a tourniquet they used one of the doctor's belts.

"We'd been waiting to build the operating room until we received better equipment, but after that boy's death we became more aggressive. We said let's do it, because they're going to die anyway," Feliz says.

The doctors continued to learn lessons about what one had called "civil war medicine" after the operating room went up.

At one point, a 16-year-old boy needed an amputation, but the surgeons asked Feliz and Georges to make sure the boy's kidneys were working before they put him through surgery. Without any blood tests to assess kidney function, the only thing they could look for was urine as a sign that his kidneys were working.

"We tried to see if we could get some urine going, but there was not a drop. We filled him with fluids and gave him Lasix, a diuretic, to get him to pee, but nothing," Feliz says.

The boy died as the doctors were treating him.

"I saw a lot of deaths there, but this one hit me the hardest," he says. "I texted my wife back at home, 'I've had a bad day.'"

After that boy's death, surgeons were quicker to give permission to amputate, Feliz says.

Feliz says if there's any silver lining to practicing such rudimentary medicine, it's that it made him a more humble doctor.

"Back in Boston, I'm a hot shot. The nurses have to respect me," Feliz says. "Here, I'm just a worker bee. I cleaned the OR floor after surgery. I carried dead bodies down the street. I was in traffic carrying dead bodies. That makes you human. I came here a very fancy doctor, and I'm leaving here as a humble man."

Shameful Medical State

The young lady pictured to the right is Mona. She lives in southern Haiti and has the most common cyanotic congenital heart disease called Tetralogy de Fallot. Most people with heart defect do not make it out of their teenage years. Mona, being Haitian of course, survived. She needs surgery and I am looking for a medical center in the States to accept her.
Please help if you know of a good medical center that would operate adults with congenital heart disease.

Below is a commentary written from the heart by a team of doctors that found the medical situation in Haiti worse than they could imagine.


Doctors: Haiti Medical Situation Shameful

By Drs. Dean Lorich, Soumitra Eachempati and David L. Helfet, Special to CNN

Doctors gathered sophisticated team and equipment for Haiti on private plane.
They found nobody in charge, chaos, hospitals had nothing, not even elementary equipment. Plane sent with equipment; supplies hijacked; resupply plane not allowed in. They say the "lack of support for our operation by the United States is shocking."

Editor's note: Dr. Dean G. Lorich is the associate director of the Orthopaedic Trauma Service at the Hospital for Special Surgery and New York Presbyterian Hospital and teaches orthopedic surgery at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University. Dr. Soumitra Eachempati is a medical researcher with a clinical surgical practice and teaches at Weill Cornell Medical College. Dr. David L. Helfet is professor of orthopedic surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College and director of the Orthopaedic Trauma Service at the Hospital for Special Surgery and New York-Presbyterian Hospital.


New York City (CNN) -- Four years ago, the devastating Hurricane Katrina affected millions in the United States. The initial medical response was ill-equipped, understaffed, poorly coordinated and delayed. Criticism was fierce.

The response to Haiti has been the same. The point no one seems to remember is this: Medical response to these situations cannot be delayed. Immediate access to emergency equipment is also crucial.

Within 24 hours of the earthquake, Dr. David Helfet put together a 13-member team of surgeons, anesthesiologists and operating room nurses, with a massive amount of orthopedic operating room equipment, ready to be flown directly to Port-au-Prince on a private plane.

We also had a plan to replace physicians and equipment -- within 24 hours, we could bring in whatever was necessary on a private jet. We believe we had a reasonably comprehensive orthopedic trauma service; as trauma surgeons, we planned to provide acute care in the midst of an orthopedic disaster.

We expected many amputations. But we thought we could save limbs that were salvageable, particularly those of children. We recognized that in an underdeveloped country, a limb amputation may be a death sentence. It does not have to be so.

We thought our plan was a good one, but we soon learned we were incredibly naive. Disaster management in Haiti was nonexistent.

The difficulties in getting in -- despite the intelligence we had from people on the ground and Dr. Helfet's connections with Partners in Health and Bill and Hillary Clinton -- only hinted at the difficulties we would have once we arrived.

We started out Friday morning and got a slot to get into Port-au-Prince on Friday. That was canceled when we were on the runway and was rescheduled for the next day. We were diverted to the Dominican Republic and planned on arriving in Port-au-Prince on Saturday.

That Saturday morning slot also was canceled and postponed until the afternoon. The airport had one runway and hundreds of planes trying to land. But nobody was prioritizing the flights.

Once we finally landed, we were taken to the General Hospital in Port-au-Prince with our medical supplies. We had been told that this hospital was up and running with two functioning operating rooms.

Once we arrived, we saw a severely damaged hospital with no running water and only limited electrical power, supplied by a generator. Surgeries were being performed in the equivalent of a large storage closet, where amputations were performed with hacksaws.

This facility could not nearly accommodate our equipment nor our expertise to treat the volume of injuries we saw.

We quickly took our second option: Community Hospital of Haiti, about two miles away. There, we found about 750 patients lying on the floor. But the facility had running water, electricity and two functional operating rooms.

We found scores of patients with pus dripping out of open extremity fractures and crush injuries. Some wounds were already ridden with maggots.

About a third of these victims were children. The entire hospital smelled of infected, rotting limbs and death. Later on, we would judge our surgical progress by the diminishment of the stench.

In our naïveté, we didn't expect that the two anesthesia machines would not work; that there would be only one cautery available in the entire hospital to stop bleeding; that an operating room sterilizer fit only instruments the size of a cigar box; that there would be no sterile saline, no functioning fluoroscopy machine, no blood for transfusions, no ability to do lab work; and the only local staff was a ragtag group of voluntary health providers who, like us, had made it there on their own.

As we got up and running and organized the patients for surgery, we told our contacts in the United States what we needed. More supplies were loaded for a second trip. Those included a battery-operated pulse lavage, a huge supply of sterile saline and the soft goods we needed desperately in the operating room.

The plane landed as planned Sunday night, and the new equipment was loaded onto a truck. Then that truck, loaded with life-saving equipment, was hijacked somewhere between the airport and the hospital.

We had planned to run a marathon round-the-clock operation and leave at 11 p.m. Tuesday. We worked for 60-plus hours without stopping. The plane that would take us home would bring with it not only a new medical staff, but also equipment that was nonexistent in the hospital, or even the country.

These pieces of equipment, two of each, were urgently needed: portable anesthesiology machines; electrocautery machines to stop bleeding after amputations; portable monitors for the recovery room; autoclaves to sterilize equipment; and a lot of orthopedic equipment, which we were quickly using up. The other items were those that were on the previous flight and had been hijacked.

Officials at the Port-au-Prince airport canceled that plane's 6 a.m. Tuesday slot, and the plane never made it to us on time.

We had started to see daylight Monday night, having performed about 100 surgeries, which were mainly amputations, fixing broken limbs and soft tissue debridements. Many of the patients were children and babies.

But on Tuesday morning, a huge number of new patients arrived. The Haitians had heard we were trying to save limbs, and families were bringing their injured loved ones to us.

The hospital was forced to lock down, closing its gates to the angry and frustrated crowd outside. On Tuesday morning, we saw that many of the patients we had operated on were becoming septic and would require additional surgeries.

We finished operating at noon Tuesday, our last surgery assisting an obstetrician on a Caesarean section and helping to resuscitate a newborn who was not breathing.

We decided the situation was untenable. Our supplies were running out, our team was past exhaustion, safety was rapidly becoming a concern, and we had no firm plan to leave or resupply.

A hospital benefactor helped us get to the airport. First, Jamaican soldiers with M-16s escorted us out of the building as the crowd outside saw us abandoning the hospital. We made it to the airport on the back of a pickup, got onto the tarmac, hailed a commercial plane that had carried cargo to Haiti and was returning to Montreal, Canada, and had a private jet pick us up from there.

We were unprepared for what we saw in Haiti -- the vast amount of human devastation, the complete lack of medical infrastructure, the lack of support from the Haitian medical community, the lack of organization on the ground.

No one was in charge. We had the first hospital in the Port-au-Prince area with functioning operating rooms, yet no one came to the hospital to assess how we did it or offer help.

The fact that the military could not or would not protect the critical resupply medical equipment on Sunday, or allow the Tuesday flight to come in, is devastating and merits intense investigation.

There was no security at the hospital. We needed a much higher level of security with strong and clear support of the military from the very beginning.

The lack of support for our operation by the United States is shocking and embarrassing and shows how woefully unprepared we are for the realities of disasters. We came to understand that our isolated operation may work in a mission, but not in a disaster.

We first thought we would support those at the helm but soon realized we were almost the only early responders with the critical expertise and equipment to treat an orthopedic disaster such as this.

Still, nobody with a clear plan is in charge, and care is chaotic at best. Doctors are coming into the country with no plan of what they are going to do, and nobody directing them how to do it.

Surgeons who expect to show up and operate will be mistaken. Without a complement of support staff and supplies, they are of limited to no value.

We left feeling as if we abandoned these patients, the country and its people, and we feel terrible.

Our role back in New York is to expose the inadequacies of the system in the hopes of effecting change immediately. Patients who are alive and still have their arms and legs remain in jeopardy unless an urgent response is implemented.

The quickest and most efficient way to really help now and support the medical staff on the ground is to assess needs, provide equipment and personnel in necessary quantities, and bring them safely and expeditiously into the country and to the hospital units caring for patients.

Upon our departure, we witnessed pallets of Cheerios and dry goods sitting on the tarmac helping nobody. Yet our flight of critical medical equipment and personnel had been canceled, and the equipment that did get through was hijacked.

We implore an official organization to step up and take charge of the massive ongoing medical effort that will be necessary to care for the people of Haiti and their children. And to do it now.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Drs. Dean Lorich, Soumitra Eachempati and David L. Helfet.

Healing Haiti

(Photo by John Carroll)
January 22, 2010

Op-Ed Contributor
To Heal Haiti, Look to History, Not Nature
By MARK DANNER

HAITI is everybody’s cherished tragedy. Long before the great earthquake struck the country like a vengeful god, the outside world, and Americans especially, described, defined, marked Haiti most of all by its suffering. Epithets of misery clatter after its name like a ball and chain: Poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. One of the poorest on earth. For decades Haiti’s formidable immiseration has made it among outsiders an object of fascination, wonder and awe. Sometimes the pity that is attached to the land — and we see this increasingly in the news coverage this past week — attains a tone almost sacred, as if Haiti has taken its place as a kind of sacrificial victim among nations, nailed in its bloody suffering to the cross of unending destitution.

And yet there is nothing mystical in Haiti’s pain, no inescapable curse that haunts the land. From independence and before, Haiti’s harms have been caused by men, not demons. Act of nature that it was, the earthquake last week was able to kill so many because of the corruption and weakness of the Haitian state, a state built for predation and plunder. Recovery can come only with vital, even heroic, outside help; but such help, no matter how inspiring the generosity it embodies, will do little to restore Haiti unless it addresses, as countless prior interventions built on transports of sympathy have not, the man-made causes that lie beneath the Haitian malady.

In 1804 the free Republic of Haiti was declared in almost unimaginable triumph: hard to exaggerate the glory of that birth. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans had labored to make Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was then known, the richest colony on earth, a vastly productive slave-powered factory producing tons upon tons of sugar cane, the 18th-century’s great cash crop. For pre-Revolutionary France, Haiti was an inexhaustible cash cow, floating much of its economy. Generation after generation, the second sons of the great French families took ship for Saint-Domingue to preside over the sugar plantations, enjoy the favors of enslaved African women and make their fortunes.

Even by the standards of the day, conditions in Saint-Domingue’s cane fields were grisly and brutal; slaves died young, and in droves; they had few children. As exports of sugar and coffee boomed, imports of fresh Africans boomed with them. So by the time the slaves launched their great revolt in 1791, most of those half-million blacks had been born in Africa, spoke African languages, worshipped African gods.

In an immensely complex decade-long conflict, these African slave-soldiers, commanded by legendary leaders like Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, defeated three Western armies, including the unstoppable superpower of the day, Napoleonic France. In an increasingly savage war — “Burn houses! Cut off heads!” was the slogan of Dessalines — the slaves murdered their white masters, or drove them from the land.

On Jan. 1, 1804, when Dessalines created the Haitian flag by tearing the white middle from the French tricolor, he achieved what even Spartacus could not: he had led to triumph the only successful slave revolt in history. Haiti became the world’s first independent black republic and the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere.

Alas, the first such republic, the United States, despite its revolutionary creed that “all men are created equal,” looked upon these self-freed men with shock, contempt and fear. Indeed, to all the great Western trading powers of the day — much of whose wealth was built on the labor of enslaved Africans — Haiti stood as a frightful example of freedom carried too far. American slaveholders desperately feared that Haiti’s fires of revolt would overleap those few hundred miles of sea and inflame their own human chattel.

For this reason, the United States refused for nearly six decades even to recognize Haiti. (Abraham Lincoln finally did so in 1862.) Along with the great colonial powers, America instead rewarded Haiti’s triumphant slaves with a suffocating trade embargo — and a demand that in exchange for peace the fledgling country pay enormous reparations to its former colonial overseer. Having won their freedom by force of arms, Haiti’s former slaves would be made to purchase it with treasure.

The new nation, its fields burned, its plantation manors pillaged, its towns devastated by apocalyptic war, was crushed by the burden of these astronomical reparations, payments that, in one form or another, strangled its economy for more than a century. It was in this dark aftermath of war, in the shadow of isolation and contempt, that Haiti’s peculiar political system took shape, mirroring in distorted form, like a wax model placed too close to the fire, the slave society of colonial times.

At its apex, the white colonists were supplanted by a new ruling class, made up largely of black and mulatto officers. Though these groups soon became bitter political rivals, they were as one in their determination to maintain in independent Haiti the cardinal principle of governance inherited from Saint-Domingue: the brutal predatory extraction of the country’s wealth by a chosen powerful few.

The whites on their plantations had done this directly, exploiting the land they owned with the forced labor of their slaves. But the slaves had become soldiers in a victorious revolution, and those who survived demanded as their reward a part of the rich land on which they had labored and suffered. Soon after independence most of the great plantations were broken up, given over to the former slaves, establishing Haiti as a nation of small landowners, one whose isolated countryside remained, in language, religion and culture, largely African.

Unable to replace the whites in their plantation manors, Haiti’s new elite moved from owning the land to fighting to control the one institution that could tax its products: the government. While the freed slaves worked their small fields, the powerful drew off the fruits of their labor through taxes. In this disfigured form the colonial philosophy endured: ruling had to do not with building or developing the country but with extracting its wealth. “Pluck the chicken,” proclaimed Dessalines — now Emperor Jacques I — “but don’t make it scream.”

In 1806, two years after independence, the emperor was bayoneted by a mostly mulatto cabal of officers. Haitian history became the immensely complex tale of factional struggles to control the state, with factions often defined by an intricate politics of skin color. There was no method of succession ultimately recognized as legitimate, no tradition of loyal opposition. Politics was murderous, operatic, improvisational. Instability alternated with autocracy. The state was battled over and won; Haiti’s wealth, once seized, purchased allegiance — but only for a time. Fragility of rule and uncertainty of tenure multiplied the imperative to plunder. Unseated rulers were sometimes killed, more often exiled, but always their wealth — that part of it not sent out of the country — was pillaged in its turn.

In 1915 the whites returned: the United States Marines disembarked to enforce continued repayment of the original debt and to put an end to an especially violent struggle for power that, in the shadow of World War I and German machinations in the Caribbean, suddenly seemed to threaten American interests. During their nearly two decades of rule, the Americans built roads and bridges, centralized the Haitian state — setting the stage for the vast conurbation of greater Port-au-Prince that we see today in all its devastation — and sent Haitians abroad to be educated as agronomists and doctors in the hope of building a more stable middle class.

Still, by the time they finally left, little in the original system had fundamentally changed. Haitian nationalism, piqued by the reappearance of white masters who had forced Haitians to work in road gangs, produced the noiriste movement that finally brought to power in 1957 François Duvalier, the most brilliant and bloody of Haiti’s dictators, who murdered tens of thousands while playing adroitly on cold-war America’s fear of communism to win American acceptance.

Duvalier’s epoch, which ended with the overthrow of his son Jean-Claude in 1986, ushered in Haiti’s latest era of instability, which has seen, in barely a quarter-century, several coups and revolutions, a handful of elections (aborted, rigged and, occasionally, fair), a second American occupation (whose accomplishments were even more ephemeral than the first) and, all told, a dozen Haitian rulers. Less and less money now comes from the land, for Haiti’s topsoil has grown enfeebled from overproduction and lack of investment. Aid from foreigners, nations or private organizations, has largely supplanted it: under the Duvaliers Haiti became the great petri dish of foreign aid. A handful of projects have done lasting good; many have been self-serving and even counterproductive. All have helped make it possible, by lifting basic burdens of governance from Haiti’s powerful, for the predatory state to endure.

The struggle for power has not ended. Nor has Haiti’s historic proclivity for drama and disaster. Undertaken in their wake, the world’s interventions — military and civilian, and accompanied as often as not by a grand missionary determination to “rebuild Haiti” — have had as their single unitary principle their failure to alter what is most basic in the country, the reality of a corrupt state and the role, inadvertent or not, of outsiders in collaborating with it.

The sound of Haiti’s suffering is deafening now but behind it one can hear already a familiar music begin to play. Haiti must be made new. This kind of suffering so close to American shores cannot be countenanced. The other evening I watched a television correspondent shake his head over what he movingly described as a “stupid death” — a death that, but for the right medical care, could have been prevented. “It doesn’t have to happen,” he told viewers. “People died today who did not need to die.” He did not say what any Haitian could have told him: that the day before, and the day before that, Haiti had seen hundreds of such “stupid deaths,” and, over the centuries, thousands more. What has changed, once again, and only for a time, is the light shone on them, and the volume of the voices demanding that a “new Haiti” must now be built so they never happen again.

Whether they can read or not, Haiti’s people walk in history, and live in politics. They are independent, proud, fiercely aware of their own singularity. What distinguishes them is a tradition of heroism and a conviction that they are and will remain something distinct, apart — something you can hear in the Creole spoken in the countryside, or the voodoo practiced there, traces of the Africa that the first generation of revolutionaries brought with them on the middle passage.

Haitians have grown up in a certain kind of struggle for individuality and for power, and the country has proved itself able to absorb the ardent attentions of outsiders who, as often as not, remain blissfully unaware of their own contributions to what Haiti is. Like the ruined bridges strewn across the countryside — one of the few traces of the Marines and their occupation nearly a century ago — these attentions tend to begin in evangelical zeal and to leave little lasting behind.

What might, then? America could start by throwing open its markets to Haitian agricultural produce and manufactured goods, broadening and making permanent the provisions of a promising trade bill negotiated in 2008. Such a step would not be glamorous; it would not “remake Haiti.” But it would require a lasting commitment by American farmers and manufacturers and, as the country heals, it would actually bring permanent jobs, investment and income to Haiti.

Second, the United States and other donors could make a formal undertaking to ensure that the vast amounts that will soon pour into the country for reconstruction go not to foreigners but to Haitians — and not only to Haitian contractors and builders but to Haitian workers, at reasonable wages. This would put real money in the hands of many Haitians, not just a few, and begin to shift power away from both the rapacious government and the well-meaning and too often ineffectual charities that seek to circumvent it. The world’s greatest gift would be to make it possible, and necessary, for Haitians — all Haitians — to rebuild Haiti.

Putting money in people’s hands will not make Haiti’s predatory state disappear. But in time, with rising incomes and a concomitant decentralization of power, it might evolve. In coming days much grander ambitions are sure to be declared, just as more scenes of disaster and disorder will transfix us, more stunning and colorful images of irresistible calamity. We will see if the present catastrophe, on a scale that dwarfs all that have come before, can do anything truly to alter the reality of Haiti.

Mark Danner is the author, most recently, of “Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War,” which chronicles political conflict in Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq and the United States.

Better to Light One Candle...

See Elaine Hopkins post regarding local support of Haiti.

Pictured to the right is a small Haitian Hearts patient with her mom.


Also, see Pam Adams article below.

Let's not fail poor Haiti again

Pam Adams

Journal Star
Posted Jan 20, 2010 @ 10:30 PM
Haiti is never far from central Illinois.

No further than right around the corner or just down the block, there's a neighbor who cared for, maybe adopted, a Haitian child brought here for heart surgery through the Haitian Hearts program.

Or a cousin who travels there often on medical mission trips with Friends of the Children of Haiti.

Or a co-worker who's involved with Haiti Mission Connection, another Peoria-based group that organizes medical mission trips to Haiti.

There's a friend who was a foster mom to teenage refugees fleeing Haiti in the 1980s, or a member of one of many area churches that do the trips, raise the money to help feed, house and school Haiti's poorest.

Even before the earthquake, Haiti and its problems had been growing closer to central Illinois. One friend, one church, one co-worker, one cousin, one neighbor is connected to 10, and 10 are connected to hundreds who give time, money or compassion to the island nation best known as one of the poorest countries in the world, the absolute poorest in the western hemisphere.

Poor Haiti. Already doomed to dependence on the kindness of strangers, and now a major earthquake has crushed the country to the bone, leaving much of the capital, Port-au-Prince, in ruin, displacing some 3 million people and who-knows-how-many tens of thousands dead.

To go to Haiti 30 years ago was to return to central Illinois with a sublime appreciation for the marvel of running water and traffic stoplights. To go to Haiti today is to confront wreckage that leads a coordinator of Doctors Without Borders to tell the Associated Press, "We were forced to buy a saw in the market to continue the amputations."

Poor Haiti. With each passing day, the death toll climbs as deaths due to natural disaster give way to deaths due to the man-made disasters that hinder aid to the injured, avoidable deaths brought on by the economic and political poverty that leaves Haiti's social infrastructure virtually paralyzed in the aftermath of a massive earthquake.

Central Illinois and Haiti are close. Haiti and the United States are linked.

The barren land known as Haiti was once a fertile colony of France. It was France's richest colony, producing at various times in its very early history three-fourths of the world's sugar, coffee, rum and cotton.

If the United States was the first independent nation in the Americas, Haiti was the second. Both countries share a history of revolution to overthrow colonial masters. After that, the histories diverge. An independent U.S. feared an independent neighbor where slaves had overthrown slave masters. The U.S. went on to become the richest country in the hemisphere, Haiti the poorest.

As one partial explanation of Haiti's persistent poverty goes, in Haiti, slaves overthrew their masters and Haitians have been paying for it ever since - beginning with billions paid, essentially in reparations to the French, to gain diplomatic recognition from the rest of the world.

Haiti's own legacy of corrupt regimes combined with our own often disastrous political, economic and immigration policies toward Haiti have continued almost to this day.

"For some of us Haiti is a neighbor and, for others of us, it is a place of historic and cultural ties," former President Bill Clinton told the Washington Post. "But for all of us it is now a test of resolve and commitment."

Current President Barack Obama has promised the U.S. will not fail the test.

U.S. policies toward Haiti have not always been as benevolent as the efforts of the friend, the church, the co-worker, the cousin, the neighbor in central Illinois. But if there was ever opportunity in disaster, it's time for this nation's long-term policies toward Haiti to get closer to what Haiti needs rather than what the U.S. wants.

Pam Adams is a columnist with the Journal Star. Her e-mail address is padams@pjstar.com.

Copyright 2010 pjstar.com. Some rights reserved

Haitian Hearts Patients Still Hungry and Thirsty

We have had contact with many Haitian Hearts patients in the last week who are victims of the Haitian earthquake.

Pictured above is Katia and below is Suze. Both had valve replacements several years ago at Provena St. Joseph's Medical Center in Joliet, Illinois. Both are homeless in Port-au-Prince and without any medication to prevent them from clotting off their artificial valves.

Our patients are contacting us via cell phones, cybercafes, and through friends and relatives in the United States.

Most have lost everything and are living on the streets with their families and neighbors. Our patients are pleading with us for water and food. They repeatedly tell us that international aid has not reached them.

Haitian Hearts has received significant donations from many generous people. These funds will go to our Haitian Hearts patients and families who are homeless and also to the Daughters of Charity Pediatric Clinic in Cite Soleil.
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When one leaves Port-au-Prince and travels south and west, there is a huge amount of destruction. Roads and bridges are bad and villages have been leveled.

See Michael Diebert's article below.

One Week in, Haitians Are Still Hungry

By Michael Deibert

Posted Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2010, at 11:34 AM ET

http://www.slate.com/id/2241930/entry/2241931/

LEOGANE, Haiti—When Elvis Cineus rushed to his home in the town of Leogane, 18 miles west of Port-au-Prince, in the aftermath of Haiti's devastating earthquake, he was not prepared for what awaited him.

Under the remains of his home, smashed flat as if pummeled by a giant fist, lay the bodies of his wife, his nephew, his cousin, and a friend, all dead. His 1-year-old son was dangling from the building's jagged facade, injured but alive.

"It was a miracle," he says of the infant's survival. "But I think there are still survivors in the fallen schools, because we still hear them screaming."
This coastal town, once one of the most pleasant in Haiti, was largely decimated by the quake. The International Federation of Red Cross estimates that as much as 90 percent of the town has been destroyed.

Along Leogane's Grand Rue, once-stately concrete buildings lie in rubble, with only a few structures built in Haiti's distinctive wooden gingerbread style remaining. The putrid smell of death wafts through the lanes, helped along by an ocean breeze.
At a ruined dental clinic, a woman cries when she tells how a neighbor died after her leg was severed by falling debris and how the neighbor's child, a little girl, took off screaming down the street.

"It's beyond chaos, beyond catastrophe," says Michael Moscoso, a local businessman. "The losses cannot be numbered."

One week after the earthquake flattened large swaths of central Port-au-Prince, people beyond the capital and closer to the epicenter have grown ever more desperate as much-promised aid has been slow to trickle in or has failed to materialize altogether.

In the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in the capital's southern Carrefour neighborhood, several hundred people lay on makeshift surgical tables, on benches, or sprawled on the floor. Half a dozen people groaned with severe suppurating burn wounds caused when a gas cylinder exploded during the great tremor. Nine-year-old Michel St. Franc lay with blood caking his face, his leg in a primitive cast and tears in his eyes.

"This is the worst situation I've ever seen," says Julien Mattar, project coordinator for the hospital. "We have huge needs in terms of human resources, medical supplies, and materials."

Mattar tells me that a supply plane that was unable to land in Port-au-Prince was instead rerouted to the Dominican Republic. From there, the supplies made the seven-hour overland journey to Haiti.

The injured who were able to reach the hospital were the lucky ones. Farther down the road, both the living and the dead waited for respite in the form of assistance from the international community or from the government of Haitian President René Préval, who has faced withering criticism at home for his perceived lax and disorganized response to the disaster.

Along the Route des Rails, almost every home seemed to have been destroyed, and, again, the intense smell of decay intensified under a glaring Caribbean sun. Residents say they feel abandoned.

"No one has ever been here," Vilaire Elise, a 38-year-old Protestant minister, said as he led a visitor and fellow residents to survey homes where his neighbors had died. "We have no water to drink, nor food to eat. We are suffering here."

Though nearly 105,000 food rations and 20,000 tents had been distributed by humanitarian groups on Monday, the effort seemed unable to come to grips with the scale of the disaster. The U.N. World Food Program has said it will need 100 million prepared meals over the next 30 days.

The growing foreign military presence in Haiti, which has played host to a U.N. peacekeeping mission since 2004 and will now house at least 2,000 U.S. troops, also seemed overwhelmed.

Late on Monday, with the sun setting outside Leogane, in a scene reminiscent of others played out in severely war-torn countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, at least 1,500 townsfolk rendered homeless by the quake took over a flat patch of grassy land and constructed fragile shelters from logs, twigs, bed sheets, and leaves.

"Since the disaster, everyone here has had nothing," said Innocent Wilson, a 31-year-old who acts as one of the impromptu camp's spokesmen. "No one is here to help us, so we are organizing ourselves."

Michael Deibert is the author of Notes From the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti.

Sound of a Wooden Bell...Can you Hear us Now?

A Haitian proverb says:

"No one hears the cry of the poor or the sound of a wooden bell."

Haitian Hearts protested when OSF-SFMC was slow to do the heart surgery on a sick Haitian baby boy. After he arrested at home, we asked OSF, why? And when we went to the Catholic Diocese of Peoria to report this incident, we were told by the Vicar General to "let me know if this ever happens again."

Can you hear us now?

Haitian Hearts protested and notified the OSF Pediatric Resource Center when a young Haitian Heart's patient's pre operative work up was cancelled. She was put on the schedule immediately after we notified them of medical abandonment by Children's Hospital of Illinois.

Can you hear us now?

OSF-SFMC told the Journal Star that Haitian Hearts would not change at the end of 2001. We knew better. OSF cut all funding of Haitian Hearts six months later.

Can you hear us now?

Haitian Hearts picketed OSF when the Executive Director of Children's Hospital of Illinois called the American Consulate in PAP and asked the Consulate to deny any visas for children coming to OSF for heart surgery. The Consulate official in Haiti became tearful as she told me this story in Haiti. She knew that this would cost Haitian kids their lives. And it has.

Can you hear us now?

Haitian Hearts picketed OSF when Willie Fortune was denied any care at OSF when full charges were offered to OSF to pay for a new pacemaker after his old pacemaker failed. OSF's CEO Keith Steffen stood behind 88 year old Sr. Canisia while both looked out her administration office window at us. Mr. Steffen smiled as Willie and I stood on the sidewalk. Sister Canisia did not see Mr. Steffen's antics behind her, but Willie did.

Can you hear us now?

Keith Steffen told me that fear amongst empoloyees at OSF is a good thing.

Can you hear us now?

Jackson Jean-Baptiste and Maxime Petion both became ill in Haiti. Both were OSF patients and Haitian Hearts patients. Both needed repeat heart surgery to stay alive. OSF refused to care for either of them and they both died extremely painful deaths. Both are buried outside of Peoria.

Can you hear us now?

Heurese was denied repeat surgery at OSF too. She had heart surgery elsewhere and was denied a post operative outpatient echocardiogram at OSF. And last year OSF's attorney contacted the non immigrant visa section of American Consulate in Port-au-Prince requesting private information on Heurese. For what reason?

Can you hear us now?

And Jenny e mailed me from Haiti last night. She had heart surgery at OSF in 1999. She was on the fourth floor of a building in Port-au-Prince during the earthquake. She escaped with no physical injury. However, she states that she is not good and has lost all of her medication that Haitian Hearts provides her. She needs repeat heart surgery but OSF is denying her any care. Is this not insane?

Can you hear us now?

And Bishop Jenky assumed control of the Haitian Hearts program to cover for OSF's public relations nightmare. However, Bishop Jenky's fear of OSF's money was obvious when he told me that OSF was a "1.6 billion dollar industry" and refused a Catholic Tribunal Court against OSF stating, "I won't rule against OSF."

OSF and The Catholic Diocese of Peoria, can you hear the Haitian people now?

(Maxime Petion photo above, one month before his death.)