16043: Karshan: Live from Haiti (San Francisco Bay View) (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: MKarshan@aol.com

Live from Haiti


by JR

Saturday, June 21 – The dopest thing that I experienced was the fact that I
flew into Toussaint Louverture International Airport, an airport named in honor
of the Black revolutionary freedom fighter who helped to free Haiti. I met a
lot of people and had a lot of intense political discussions with people in
Ifa Resturant, the neighborhood bar, and at the boys’ orphanage in which we are
staying.

One misconception that has been bothering me is that they know very little
about Black people in the United Snakes. They get all of their info from rap
music and movies. One of the Haitian homies, Amos, who is 29 years old, thought
that the word nigger was a term of endearment because he said that he hears
Black people from the states using it.

We need to create some form of interaction so that they could know in depth
about Malcolm, the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army and the BGF, among
others. The blockade for damn sure blocks any positive info about our
fighting spirit in the states. Many believe that we are in bed with the white man AND
ARE NOT AT ALL RESISTING OPPRESSION, but we have to be the ones to change
that.

Other than that, I have just been walking around Delmas, Port au Prince,
watching the many vendors. It reminds me of the Ashby flea market, but with many
more people selling way different things, from toothbrushes to ice. I got a
gang of pictures to show ya’ll, and until later, I’m out.

Sunday, June 22 – Today I went to a Catholic mass at St. Clair Church in Port
au Prince where we hooked up with Father Jerry, who is a revolutionary
liberation theology priest. The mass was hard for me to contend with, one because
I’m not Catholic and into going to church, two because the mass was in Creole
and I couldn’t understand anything that was being said for the whole
two-hour-plus service. So after a while I had to get up from my seat to go outside, get
some air and walk around, because I found myself dosing off and getting
restless.

One thing that stood out was the beautiful music during the service. It
reminded me of South African music that I have heard on tv and in movies. It had me
hooked.

After the mass, we went with Father Jerry to peep out his work in the
community. Every Sunday and Wednesday, he finds the finances to feed hundreds of
children in the first round, then teenagers and adults in the second. You could
feel the level of respect that the people have for this man, just being around
him while he was puttin’ in work. He fed hundreds of people, and there was not
one person who got out of hand and acted out at no time - and I am talking
about hundreds of hungry youngsters, ages probably five and up.

Before the food was ready, they had like a talent show where he let the
youngstas who wanted to, perform songs. One little boy who was no older than 8
years old sang about six or seven verses of a French song that everybody knew.
When the crowd started clapping to the beat and the live band started backing him
up, Father Jerry eventually had to let him know that he was finished, ‘cause
he wasn’t going to stop anytime soon.

After we helped to serve food and ate, we left with the priest to a spot
where he talked to us about liberation theology and Haitian and world politics. He
also told us about how after the coup that ousted Aristide, the government
was trying to kill him. Instead of fleeing to the United Snakes, where he lived
for over 30 years, he risked his life to aid the people and the revolution.

After hooking up with Father Jerry, we went to a restaurant that is at night
transformed into a voodoo temple. The food was banging. Then we came back to
the boys’ orphanage where they threw a dance theater show, acting out different
scenes from Haitian culture, depicting in dance everything from slave revolts
to the life of a shoeshine boy, to that of a fisherman and many more.

The boys, ages 8-18, were some of the dopest dancers that I have ever seen,
and I like to hang out at places like the Alice and watch dance. I told them
that they should stick with it, because as young as they are and at the level of
dance that they are at, they could easily be world renowned.

Later that night I went to a ballroom dance club called Tempo, where young
Black professional Haitian dancers gather on Sundays to practice and party at
the same time. It was off the hook seeing Black people around my age doing the
tango, rompa, salsa and a gang of other dances that I didn’t know the name of.
I still have like eight days, and I feel like a baby experiencing all this for
the first time.

Monday, June 23 – Today we started the day off going to a Haitian school that
serves 165 students k-12. We sat with some of the administrators who founded
the school, teachers, parents, students and a local member of the Lavalas
Party, the party of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the Haitian president. The school is
located in the former house of Tije, a death squad assassin for the Duvalier
regimes. When he died, the government expropriated the house and gave it to the
administrators of the school.

Under the swimming pool used to be a torture chamber that is now covered up.
During the regimes of Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier, the swimming pool was
used to muffle the screams of the victims. We sat down and had a real deep
discussion about how the school works, the curriculum and the outreach to the
community. One disturbing fact that I learned is that most of the youngstas in the
neighborhood have never gotten any kind of education in their lives and that
this is their one chance at living a better life from the day to day struggle
to attain food that their parents and a majority of Haiti’s people are coping
with currently.

Just to explain what I mean, I have never seen such poverty in my life, and I
have been to ghettos all across the country and in Cuba. The average Haitian
only makes about $300 dollars a year, which they are supposed to feed, clothe
and house a family on. One administrator told me that each class has only one
textbook that 40 students are supposed to learn from, and when the students
come home, they are expected to do their homework from candlelight, since most
Haitians don’t have electricity.

One beautiful thing about the school that a father who is illiterate told me
was that he couldn’t afford the school’s $5 a month tuition, so he kept his
child at home. After a few days of the child not showing up at school, the
school sent somebody to the child’s house to see what was wrong. When they found
out that it was a financial matter, they let the child come to school for free
because they said that it is their policy to never turn anyone down because of
a lack of funds, even though the school is super financially strapped. The
teachers haven’t been paid in six months, but they still come every day to
teach.

The spirit of these Haitian people to advance against all odds is amazing and
inspiring. While we in Amerikkka get caught up on such petty things, they
literally create something out of nothing - and are forced to do it every day.

The people have a deep respect and love for Aristide. This school is an
example of him putting his money where his mouth is, although the country is under
a U.S. embargo. What’s a trip also was that although some of the people at the
school that we were meeting with were illiterate, they were some of the most
articulate, passionate people that I have ever met.

Another thing that caught my eye was that at the school we were witnessing
capitalism in its most refined state. Next door to the school is a rich
landowner who owns a huge mansion with a huge steel gate and 24-hour armed guards in
front of it. It reminded me of the mansions in the movie “Scarface,” yet the
school next door that serves 165 local youth has walls missing, and they are
having problems paying their teachers $13 a month. Now that’s crazy.

After we left there, we met with an organization of women that works with
women who were victimized after Aristide was overthrown in ‘91. One of the
horrific stories was of a woman in the organization who was forced at gunpoint by
the terror squads of the regime that took power to have sex with her sons. She
got pregnant, and they killed her sons on the spot. She had the baby, and as
the baby grew up and started to ask questions, she had to tell the child that
she was the baby’s grandmother, mother and father at the same time because of
the atrocity she suffered at the hands of a regime whose top officials were/are
on the CIA’s payroll. Another example of your tax dollars hard at work.

At the same spot we met with another women’s organization that does work on
general women’s issues, and we got to understand more about how sexism plays
out in Haitian society. She said that one of the ways in which her organization
is working to eliminate it is by giving Haitian women marketable vocational
skills to compete in the economy.

After a while, a member of another organization that deals with victims of
the coup in general came through, and one of his questions to me was why doesn’t
the mainstream media cover things that go down in Haiti that are important,
even when they up the media to the fact before hand. My answer was that the
mainstream media might as well be the fourth arm of the oppressive Amerikkklan
government, with all of the cheerleading that they do in support of the status
quo, and we don’t own it. We should support independent media in Amerikka, like
the Bay View, cuz we for damn sure will run pieces by and stories of Haiti’s
poor Black population.

Later on the mayor came through to the orphanage and sat down to have a
political discussion with us. It trips me out how accessible the government is in
Haiti. I have never seen Jerry Brown come to East or West Oakland, let alone a
group home in the hood. Now you tell me who looks more like a dictator.

This mayor answered some hard questions very well. Considering that everybody
at the table was not on the same political page that I am on, they were
trying to hit him with some hard questions, but at the end of the discussion I
think that he did well in shaking the haters off.

One question that was asked was what went down with the elections in ‘94 [the
author is referring to the 2001 elections] when the Lavalas-led government
was accused of electoral fraud by the Snakes and the Organization of American
States after they won a majority of congressional seats. The day after the
election, Amerikkka and the OAS announced that they thought that these were some of
the fairest elections in Haitian history. Then when the results came back two
weeks later showing that Lavalas won a majority of the seats in the
Parliament, Amerikkka and the OAS said then they thought that the whole election was
corrupt. It just goes to show that Amerikkka is a problem for the majority of
the people in the world, because all countries not in Europe have had the U.S.
government at one time or another tinker inside their domestic politics.

The whole day was fun and I learned a lot. Learning things like this just
reinforces my position that traveling is an important part of educating people
about the world around us, considering that traveling gives us the ability to
judge things about a people for ourselves, absent government press releases that
always seem to make it into the mainstream media, pushing views that are
truly against our self-interest.