MyAyiti.Com Presents – “L’Union Fait la Force” Unity Makes Strength Vol. 1

Release Date – Oct. 01,2008

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The World Food Program (WFP) only has resources to help flood victims in Haiti through November and needs more money for the Caribbean country hit by four storms, the director of the UN agency said.

While the WFP has the knowledge to deal with the kind of disasters that have hit Haiti, inadequate funding prevents the program from getting the job done, Josette Sheeran said.

“WFP knows how to do this. We do it in tsunamis, floods, earthquakes all over the world, and that’s why the world created us,” Ms Sheeran said in an interview.

“Our mission is to come in and help with the emergency team, but right now we don’t have the funding to get the job done.”

The United States, Japan, the European Community, Switzerland and Canada have stepped up with $US11 million ($13.3) of $US54 million needed, according to the WFP.

Haiti was hit by four storms; Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike in just over a month.

The storms killed at least 800 people, including 520 in the hardest-hit city of Gonaives.

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Haiti has been devastated in recent weeks by Hurricanes Fay, Gustav and Ike, and tropical storm Hanna. Fay was the first to hit, on August 15, and Ike was the last, on September 7.

Partners in Health (Zanmi Lasante), a pioneering health services provider in Haiti, estimates as many as 1000 people may have perished, and more than 1 million people have been left homeless. Severe damage to food production has occurred throughout the country.

An eyewitness report from journalist Reed Lindsay on Canadian Broadcasting Commission Radio One’s The Current on September 15 said Gonaives, Haiti’s third-largest city, remained under water one week after Hanna struck.

Once again, Haiti has been devastated by natural phenomena whose human consequences are greatly magnified by the deterioration of the country’s forest cover, and the weakening and undermining of the national government by foreign powers.

Haiti’s government does not have the material resources nor the freedom of action to undertake the kind of massive hurricane preparation that saved all but a few lives in neighbouring Cuba, hit by the same storms. That’s because it has been the victim of constant interference and intervention from foreign powers that do not wish the country to prosper.

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Obama Holds His Own on Foreign Policy

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
postchat@aol.com
September began as John McCain’s month and ended as Barack Obama’s. McCain’s high-risk wagers aimed at shaking up the campaign turned into very bad investments. And Friday’s debate eliminated McCain’s best chance to deliver a knockout blow to an opponent whose most important asset may be his capacity for self-correction.

McCain is supposed to own the foreign policy issue — and he should have owned Friday’s debate. During their respective primary battles, McCain was a better debater than Obama, who could be hesitant, wordy and thrown off his stride.

But the Obama who showed up at Ole Miss was sharper and more concise than the man who frequently lost debates against his Democratic foes. He was also resolutely calm in standing his ground against McCain, whose condescension became a major talking point after the debate. If Al Gore suffered from his sighs during the 2000 debates, McCain will be remembered for his supercilious repetition of seven variations on “Senator Obama doesn’t understand.”

This gave special power to Obama’s peroration about McCain’s “wrong” judgments on going to war in Iraq. McCain’s dismissal of Obama brought back memories of how advocates of the war arrogantly dismissed those who insisted (rightly, as it turned out) that the conflict would be far more difficult and costly than its architects suggested.

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BY Jay Price

Local women replenishing the algae-producing compost for a fish pond.

FOND DE BOUDIN, HAITI – One reason the Caribbean’s frequent tropical storms damage Haiti worse and more often than other countries is that it has been stripped almost bare of trees.

With few sources of income and a huge market for cheap cooking fuel, the trees that once nearly covered the island have been cut for charcoal, leaving less than 2 percent of the nation forested by 2006. With nothing to hold the topsoil in place, it is washed downstream, leaving little to absorb rain. Downpours from storms wash quickly into rivers that then rage past their banks, destroying homes and crops and killing people and livestock.

Since the early 1990s, a group started by Jack Hanna, a former Westinghouse executive who lived in New Bern, has been fighting the problem with a reforestation program, now in three mountain watersheds in the southern part of the country. In the past two years alone, the Comprehensive Development Project has planted about 2 million trees in the once-barren mountains, said one of the program’s two field directors, Rick Land, who wore a Durham Bulls cap as he rode through the mountains on the back of a flatbed truck.

The program gets contributions from all over the United States, but mainly the Southeast. Churches in Cary, Durham, Wake Forest, Chapel Hill, Raleigh, New Bern, Tarboro, Winterville and Fayetteville are among those that have helped.

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