With the rains already beginning, over 300,000 are without any shelter and the tarps that the lucky ones have are barely holding up.

The international community must do a better job of delivering aid more quickly and effectively to Haitians living in camps in and around Port-au-Prince

Haiti IDP Camps video 2 from Adam Stofsky on Vimeo.

Please sign the petition that the IJDH has organized to persuade the international organizations to start delivering aid faster and more efficiently to the thousands of Haitian people that desperately need it.

Source: Haiti: Relief and Reconstruction Watch, Partners in Health

PermaCorps International Haiti Update

Marisha Auerbach is a PermaCorps for Haiti advisory board member who worked in northern Haiti in an area near Limbe on a permaculture relief project focused on local food security and ecological regeneration. Marisha and her close friend and fellow NW permaculture educator Kelda Miller joined Rosedanie Cadet of Helping Hands Noramise and traveled to the outskirts of Limbe, Haiti along with other US volunteers. This team worked with Haitians in the surrounding community on building the foundations of a no-till permaculture food forest that will aid in the restoration of the local soil quality, food diversity, and overall ecology of the area. In all regions of Haiti food security is a critical issue as it has been difficult for families in the countryside taking care of internally displaced relatives to meet their basic needs while also planting crops for the future.

Currently, the torrential rains make this a even more challenging as precious limited topsoil is often washed down stream due to extreme deforestation. The Limbe team helped plant breadfruit, guava, papaya, mango, cacao, coffee, citrus, pumpkins (joumou), spinach (zepina), okra (gumbo), melon (melon), tomatoes (tomat), onions (zonjion), carrots (karot), etc, as well as, set up swales to harvest water and stop sheet flow from washing away vital soil nutrients .

Source: PermaCorps International

Solidarity as Economic System for Dealing with Social Crisis

By Beverly Bell, posted Mar 26, 2010

“If it weren’t for solidarity, Haiti wouldn’t be alive today,” is an expression commonly heard here since the earthquake of January 12.

Haiti’s history is based on sharing and cooperation—expressed with gifts and solidarity toward those surviving on the margins. These displays usually go unnamed and unnoticed.

Some are formalized systems. One is called konbit—collective work groups in which members of the community labor without any expectation of compensation or even return. Konbit is the equivalent of a barn-raising, an option for those without enough hands to accomplish the task by themselves or enough money to hire labor. The cooperation of konbit has allowed farmers to harvest their fields and engage in other major work projects from time immemorial.
In sòl—revolving loan funds—a group of women puts a certain amount of money into a common pot each week or each month; the total is given to a different member each time.

That way, each woman can, at some point, have enough capital to allow her to make a significant expense: hospital care for a sick mother, a carton of soap bars that she can buy on discount and sell for profit, a new cooking pot for a fried dough business on a street corner. She doesn’t return the allotment and there is no interest to pay; no one profits off of anyone else. The exchanges are based on trust and human relationships.

Sabotaj, practiced among market women, is like sòl but occurs each day. The term implies sabotaging poverty.
Mèn ansanm, hands together, is another system of community-generated financial assistance. Unlike sòl and sabotaj, which occur among individuals, mèn ansanm occurs through organizations. Here, everyone contributes money to a common pot on a schedule that they determine, and then lends it to one member. That person keeps it for a period to bolster his or her income-generating activities. He or she then returns the principal, but keeps the profit. Again, no one makes a profit from another member.

Trok is another common form of exchange which does not involve currency. It happens informally, with a woman giving milk from her cow for another woman’s baby while the other gives back beans from her garden.

Some organizations say that solidarity should be recognized as an explicit part of an alternative economy, and that the mutual aid—without expectation of return—creates a model of what domestic and international economic policy could look like. Ricot Jean-Pierre of the Platform to Advocate Alternative Development in Haiti (PAPDA) says, “Our work is to show that we can enter into another development logic that’s not just via the market but that is through the community, especially with a solidarity economy.”

During the ten weeks since the earthquake, solidarity has formed a critical part of the international rescue, recovery, aid, and support operations. Community organizations, peasant farmers, churches, and townspeople are housing and feeding hundreds of thousands of homeless and displaced people. They are relying on their own resources, contributing their own slim reserves of food, income, and time, since very little outside help has come to underwrite the initiatives.
Judith Simeon, an organizer of women’s and peasants’ groups, shared this analysis: “People are in solidarity in their misery. They are also in solidarity with their capital.”

One example of gifting and solidarity systems at work is emerging in the earthquake-damaged town of Jacmel and surrounding villages. In one of those villages, Cap-rouge, the peasant organization Long Live Hope for Development of Cap-rouge (VEDEK) sent out a call to others to help survivors and brought it to Jacmel’s general hospital to buy basic medicines and water for the wounded.

Meanwhile, more than 2,000 displaced Haitians were pouring into Cap-rouge from Port-au-Prince and Jacmel. In response, peasants brought roots and fruits from their gardens to feed the survivors.

Source: Solidarity Economy