It's weird, almost as if they are congratulating their globalist selves for..... failure?
"Out of Haiti, bearing stories of hope and loss; Tragedy speeds adoption of little Valencia" by Stephanie Ebbert and Beth Daley, Globe Staff | January 23, 2010
The devastating Jan. 12 earthquake in her homeland had not further complicated but rather expedited her arrival....
She was one of the lucky children whose adoptions were well underway when the earthquake struck. She was lucky, too, that her orphanage, Crèche De L’Enfant Jesus, was safely outside of Port-au-Prince, and only had minor damage....
It's the front-page feature.
Valencia nestled into her new mother’s arms as she took in the scene. The Laytons had visited her in her orphanage and gotten to know her a bit. But right now, they can barely communicate; Valencia speaks only Creole. “We made it through today with ‘potty’ and ‘food.’ And I think we’ll both learn,’’ Layton said. “My wife and I always felt that adoption was the right thing for our family. When we looked into domestic and international adoption, we just fell in love with Haiti and knew there were kids there that needed homes,’’ he said, his eyes brimming with tears. “And that was something we could provide.’’
Five friends from their church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Lynnfield, surprised them at the airport with signs and gifts.
Can you believe it? They are MORMONS!!!
Terry Gilbert brought a Brooks Brothers bag filled with comforts for the new extended family - a videotape of national news footage Thursday night that captured the Laytons and Valencia in the airport in Fort Lauderdale, as well as a dinner of homemade chicken nuggets, rosemary potatoes and carrots, clementines, and heart-shaped cookies....
Oh, what a bounty that must seem to a starving Haitian!
Btw, if the U.N. is so interested in helping maybe they could have the Haitians over for lunch?
Yeah, the U.N. is there to help, right.
Even before the earthquake, adopting from Haiti meant putting up with long waits - sometimes more than the three years the Laytons endured - to bring children to the United States. The United Nations, in 2008, put the number of children in Haitian orphanages at roughly 380,000 after a string of natural disasters there, but cautioned many of those youngsters may not be orphans. Poverty-stricken parents often drop children off at the facilities to be fed or to receive medical attention, only to come back for them the following week or month.
I'm grateful for the attention now, but where has it been all this time?
Knowing that Haiti is receiving the coverage for more nefarious reasons and ulterior motives isn't helping my attitude, either.
In addition, the Haitian adoption system is plagued by lost paperwork and unclear procedures, according to parents waiting for children and adoption agencies familiar with the process.
Since the earthquake, US government officials have been working to get the estimated 900 Haitian children in the US adoption pipeline out of Haiti.
Government can really move when it wants to, huh?
Of course, anyone else coming and we are shipping you back.
On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced she would waive visa requirements, and by yesterday, joyous stories like the Laytons’ were becoming more frequent, although there is no estimate how many children have made it out of the country.
I mean, Globe, c'mon!
A State Department spokeswoman said last night that 400 humanitarian visas for children to enter the country had been given out since the earthquake, including 93 Thursday. Spokeswoman Megan Mattson said US officials were being “vigilant not to separate children from relatives’’ and were concerned about child trafficking.
What, and ruin the agenda-pushing party?
Yesterday, US Senators John F. Kerry and Paul Kirk wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, urging her to expedite the adoption process. “Dozens of families in Massachusetts are in agony waiting to be united with their adopted children while these kids are at risk without basic human services,’’ said Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.
All this action, I mean, the Indonesians and Filipinos must feel cheated after their fall of earthquakes, floods, and landslides. They didn't receive near as much attention or calls for aid. I guess they already rebuilt everything, huh?
Still for those heartbroken by the devastation in Haiti who would like to adopt children, it may be a long wait - even though the earthquake probably created thousands of new orphans.
Hey, we are ALL HEARTBROKEN about this!!!
And that last phrase really leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth, as if this is somehow a ray of silver in this storm.
That’s because it will take months or longer to investigate each child’s story to ensure they are orphaned and that adoption is the best option for them....
--more--"Of course, there are GOOD BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES(?) to be HAD, cui bono?
"Mass. native’s group lends a hand; Organization in Haiti focuses on rebuilding" by James F. Smith, Globe Staff | January 22, 2010
A Massachusetts man who runs a nonprofit organization in Haiti’s second-largest city says it is not too soon to start thinking about how Haitians should rebuild once they get through the initial earthquake disaster.
Peter Haas, executive director of Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group, said the immediate focus should be how to build affordable, environmentally sound, earthquake-resistant housing, to provide safer shelter and put people to work.
Haas, who grew up in Weston, and his Haitian-American wife, Catherine Lainé, have helped Haitians employ simple, environmentally sensitive technology to improve the quality of life in their communities around Cap Haitien, the port city on the northern coast of the island, since 2007. Their organization also works in Guatemala. They live in Providence, RI.
From clean communal latrines to biogas cooking stoves, the group has worked to foster the creation of small businesses in Haiti that use such appropriate technology. The group offers local entrepreneurs grants and loans, along with help with business plans.
Bill Clinton, in his role as United Nations envoy to Haiti, included Haas in a group of nonprofit leaders whom he acknowledged in November at an event sponsored by the Clinton Global Initiative. Others on the stage included Dr. Paul Farmer of Partners in Health, now Clinton’s deputy envoy to Haiti.
You know, it really makes you wonder why Haiti is such a hell hole if Clinton loved it so much, and how much of a cut of the drug profits he is getting to protect and watch over the place. He may not be president anymore, but service to the masters continues.
Since the earthquake, Haas has helped manage the flow of displaced Haitians arriving each day in Cap Haitien from Port-au-Prince, the capital and quake epicenter. Haas has also helped identify and deploy structural engineers to hard-hit areas. He is working with several stove makers to get efficient stoves to the hardest-hit areas. In a telephone interview, Haas warned that victims of the earthquake are fanning out from the capital to smaller centers across the country, raising the potential for problems beyond Port-au-Prince. To avoid a long-term refugee crisis, he said, the central government and its international supporters must help not only victims in the capital but those who have fled elsewhere.
Yeah, THAT is what is DEVELOPING on the ground after a WEEK of WAITING for HELP!!!
Haas estimated that several thousand people a day are arriving in Cap Haitien from the capital and are largely left to fend for themselves....
As the Haitians always have been.
“I think we have an opportunity here to help start new companies that can address these housing stock problems,’’ he said. “Haiti is a market that innately stifles entrepreneurship with government bureaucracy and high costs of incorporation, and the venture capital market and small business loan market do not exist.’’
Sigh.
Banks, banks, banks, always about the banks and debt slavery.
Hasn't Haiti had enough of that?
Haas, 34, graduated from Yale in 1998 and launched AIDG in 2005 in Guatemala with $800. Since then it has won funding from donors including the Echoing Green organization, which supports emerging social entrepreneurs....
Another globalist foundation funding his work, no doubt!
Where the "opportunities" are:
"Haiti slows search for survivors; Relief effort intensifies as crisis grinds on" by Mary Beth Sheridan and Manuel Roig-Franzia, Washington Post | January 22, 2010
An elderly Haitian woman was caught in the crush of people struggling for food and water distributed by a relief agency yesterday in Petion Ville, Haiti. At least two small aftershocks rattled the country, compounding the distress of millions. (Bill Greene/Globe Staff)
Does SHE look HAPPY to YOU, readers?
Related: Aid Aftershocks
Haiti Was a HAARP
And U.S. ships are crawling all over the area now.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - The hunt for survivors of Haiti’s earthquake slowed yesterday, but a humanitarian operation intensified, with relief workers sending food to imperiled orphans and truckloads of water and generators snarling traffic in the capital.
Still, with the death toll at 75,000, according to Haiti’s government, the crisis continued to dwarf aid efforts. The International Organization for Migration said it had tents for 2,000 families but needed 200,000 more. Medical groups scrambled to find space for patients’ beds.
Amazing how the military can operate in a war zone though, huh?
Figure this would be a bit easier with no war, but....
At the Notre Dame de la Nativite orphanage in southern Port-au-Prince, director Evelyn Louis-Jacques waited anxiously yesterday for a delivery from the World Food Program - the first major aid she was scheduled to receive since the 7.0-magnitude quake struck nine days ago.
Sorry, you failed, global government -- if you ever really intended to succeed.
“It has been really, really difficult to find milk for the children,’’ she said, standing outside a walled complex of crushed buildings where 56 of the 136 orphans in her charge had died.
But the front-page lead is a feel-good adoption story.
Some of the tiny survivors lay outside on the sidewalk, dozing on thin mattresses, while others shrieked and played in a garden area cordoned off from the rubble. More than 120 people have been pulled alive from the rubble since the quake....
While I am grateful for that, WTF is with the continuous focus on the small successes in light of this major catastrophe?
Haiti has approved plans for more than a dozen sprawling tent cities in and around Port-au-Prince, the first step in an epic relocation effort that could reshape the country as up to 1 million people displaced by the earthquake find new places to live. Officials with the Haitian government and the United Nations said yesterday that they were moving as quickly as possible to establish organized camps, with water, food, and health care, before the rainy season starts to peak in May.
But they will still be living in those tent cities when the floods start!
In the face of the crisis, Haitians are struggling to put their lives back together. Women set up crude roadside stands offering a handful of carrots, eggplant, or grapefruit. Some hawked clothes or soap....
Yeah, things are sort of returning to normal, right? And when can we get outta here, right, reporters?
At least two small aftershocks rattled the country yesterday, compounding the distress of millions of traumatized Haitians.
In a hospital courtyard in the southern city of Jacmel, people jumped as the ground trembled shortly before noon. “My God, my God,’’ a woman with gauze wrapped around her head murmured, “when will it end?’’
When the U.S. stops testing, or is it our of their hands now?
Relief organizations continued to struggle to distribute the aid pouring into the country. Christian Fortier, a logistics specialist with the World Food Program, said the group was finally getting a steady supply of gasoline from the Dominican Republic and was finding more Haitian drivers now that cellphones were working.
But with its warehouse damaged, the organization had to scout for new facilities. Meanwhile, traffic was snarling as relief convoys snaked through streets clogged with rubble and partially blocked off for sleeping....
Welcome to hell, Haitian-style.
Some are not staying:
"Survivors flee Haiti capital; buried still saved" by Mike Melia and Ben Fox, Associated Press Writers | January 22, 2010
A group of men wielding sticks storm a food distribution center, run by Eagle Wings Foundation of West Palm Beach, Florida, at the Carrefour neighborhood, in the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, Thursday, Jan. 21, 2010. A melee erupted at the charity's food distribution point as people broke into the storehouse, ran off with food and fought each other over the bags. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)
Looters.
Or people just trying to survive being presented as such.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti --By boat or by bus, by bicycle and on foot along clogged and broken roads, earthquake survivors streamed away from this city and its landscape of desolation Friday and into Haiti's hinterlands and the unknown.
The government and international agencies urgently searched for sites to build tent cities on Port-au-Prince's outskirts to shelter hundreds of thousands of the homeless staying behind before springtime's onslaught of floods and hurricanes.... 1 million, sprawled over some 600 settlements around the rubble-strewn capital and in the quake zone beyond.
And not much time at all.
Into this bleak picture Friday came stunning word of rescues from beneath the ruins, 10 days after the killer quake.
Every article it is the SAME DAMN THING, and this is even more galling.
An Israeli search team pulled a 21-year-old man from a crevasse in the rubble of what had been a two-story home.
Did they search the Gazan rubble for the kids they killed?
Yeah, that's what I thought!
Emmannuel Buso, a student and tailor, was so ghostly pale that rescuers said his mother thought he was a corpse. He said he survived the ordeal in part by drinking his own urine....
I didn't need to know that added update.
Earlier Friday, an 84-year-old woman was said by relatives to have been pulled from the wreckage of her home, according to doctors administering oxygen and intravenous fluids to her at the General Hospital. They said they had little hope the woman, in bad condition, would live. The rescues came two days after many international search teams began packing up their gear.
Gee, that kind of dulls the feel-goods, 'eh?
The 7.0-magnitude quake struck Jan. 12 and killed an estimated 200,000 people, according to Haitian government figures cited by the European Commission. Countless dead remained buried in thousands of collapsed and toppled buildings in Port-au-Prince, a city of slums that drew migrants from an even more destitute countryside. Now that movement has abruptly reversed, as quake victims, with meager belongings, jam small buses and battered automobiles, take to bicycles or just walk to outlying towns and rural areas, to relatives or whatever shelter they can find....
The end of the road didn't always offer relief, however. At least 100,000 people may have fled farther north, to Gonaives, a city of 280,000 devastated by back-to-back hurricanes in 2008. "We are working with authorities to discourage people from going to Gonaives," said Myrta Kaulard, country director of the U.N. World Food Program. "It is a very dangerous town and it is still partially destroyed from the hurricanes."
What, and the world didn't rush right in to help?
It's almost as if the globalists have a guilty conscience on this one, no?
Brazilian U.N. peacekeepers and work crews have begun clearing a site at Croix-des-Bouquets, just northeast of Port-au-Prince, for what may become a tent city for 30,000 people, the International Organization for Migration said.
Which won't hold up under hurricane, will it?
Six other sites have also been identified, but it will probably take weeks before the first camps accept Port-au-Prince's homeless....
And that is where the newspaper ended it, cutting this:
Aftershocks this week damaged a U.N. warehouse in the city, causing a loss of some 200 tons of food, USAID reported. Those same tremors forced medical staff and patients to abandon two hospitals in Port-au-Prince and one in Leogane because they were no longer safe, the aid group Doctors Without Borders said.
And the U.S. was blocking them at the airport to begin with!
In just one day, however, the U.S. Navy hospital ship Comfort had made a difference. The giant white ship, which dropped anchor on Wednesday, had treated 932 patients and performed 32 surgeries by midday Thursday, USAID reported.
Think they could roll that on up into Boston Harbor for all the folks without health care here when they are done? Could even bring along some Haitian kids, right?
The world's nations have pledged almost $1 billion in relief aid, and more was on the way: Top-name international celebrities from film, music, sports and politics, from Beyonce to Leonardo DiCaprio, headlined a two-hour telethon Friday night to raise funds for Haiti....
On Saturday, the great grief of this devoutly religious nation will focus on one of its tens of thousands of dead, in an 8 a.m. funeral for Msgr. Joseph Serge Miot, archbishop of Port-au-Prince, near the ruins of his cathedral.
--more--"Of course, the Globe puts up a substitute on the web:
"Challenge may be most complex; Many obstacles hamper efforts to provide relief" by Ray Rivera, New York Times | January 23, 2010
A Haitian man held his wife and child as they left their destroyed neighborhood in Port-au-Prince yesterday. (Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)
I think the little girl's expression says it all.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - The relief effort in Haiti could end up being the most difficult, faith-testing recovery from a modern disaster, perhaps even exceeding that of the 2004 Asian tsunami, according to UN officials and aid groups with experience in large-scale catastrophes.
Haiti, already the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, was barely showing signs of recovery from the 2008 hurricane season when the earthquake flattened its capital, Port-au-Prince, crippling the country’s already weakened transportation and service delivery network....
The difficulties have confounded aid workers, even those who have dealt with some of world’s worst disasters in recent years. At a first-aid tent where hundreds of people are now living in Jacmel, a coastal city that was among the worst hit, a French doctor threw his hands in the air.
I understand the gesture because I do it a lot, but not over what he saw!
“I am very, very surprised,’’ the doctor, Francois Sarda, a volunteer with Aides Actions Internationales Pompiers, said of the three days it took the aid group to get in and the chaos he found when he finally arrived....
To help manage the chaos, the United Nations and the United States signed a two-page memorandum of understanding yesterday to formalize their roles and end the tensions that flared earlier in the week.
And FORMALLY DIVVYING UP the ROLES of OCCUPATION.
The United Nations had complained about the US military’s handling of flights at the airport here, saying critical deliveries of food from the World Food Program were being unnecessarily delayed.
Under the memorandum, Haiti maintains overall control of the aid and rescue efforts, though the United Nations is in charge of coordinating the work. But the memorandum does not put American soldiers or other personnel under UN command. The Americans remain focused on delivering aid, while the United Nations handles peacekeeping.
Still, the United States is known for throwing its considerable weight around in international aid efforts, so it is unclear whether the agreement will solve the problems.
Doctors Without Borders has complained about the US military’s running of the airport. The group has landed some planes, but has had others diverted, forcing it to truck in supplies from the Dominican Republic, according to Marie-Noelle Rodrigue, deputy director for operations for Doctors Without Borders in Paris. Jason Cone, a spokesman, said much of the confusion involved who was coordinating matters. He said airport access had improved in recent days through direct contact with the Pentagon and the US Agency for International Development.
Major Nathan Miller, with the Air Force’s 23d Special Tactics Squadron, said that the military was not playing favorites, and that military planes arrived during off-peak night hours to make more room for international aid flights.
--more--"
Here is one family that will never be happy remembering Haiti:
As the family of a college student from Rutland missing in Haiti marked her 20th birthday yesterday, school officials say they want a guarantee from the US State Department that all missing students and faculty will be returned home, even if they are found dead.
Britney Gengel, a sophomore at Lynn University in Florida, traveled to Haiti with 11 classmates and two professors last week to feed the poor with the service group Journey for Hope-Haiti. Her family traveled to Florida last week for an anticipated reunion when a contractor working for Lynn told the school that Gengel and three classmates had been found alive. The school later retracted the report, citing bad intelligence from the contractor. It remains unclear how the contractor made the error, school officials said yesterday. Four of the Lynn students and both of the professors are still missing in Haiti....
Related: Code Red24 For Haiti
Sunday Globe Censorship: Guilfoil's Girl
Missing Girl Buried in Haitian Hotel
I hate to even think it, but sometimes I wonder if these people are not being disappeared to take new identities as a CIA agent.
I know, that's just crazy talk. Not like the CIA ever runs non-official cover anywhere or infiltrates anything.
Lynn spokesman Jason Hughes said two private contractors working for the school were denied access to the site yesterday by the United Nations, which is coordinating rescue efforts at the hotel. He said as many as four rescue teams were searching the area yesterday. Asked why the two contractors were denied access, Hughes cited “different priorities’’ on the site but did not elaborate....
What other "priority" could there be other than digging out the people?
Finding CLASSIFIED RECORDS and DOCUMENTS like what were in WTC 7?
--more--"
Heading home now, readers:
The parents of Britney Gengel, the college student from Rutland still missing after the Jan. 12 eathquake in Haiti, returned home yesterday from a nine-day vigil at her Florida campus after hearing from the US State Department that the mission has shifted from rescue to recovery, leaving slim chances of finding any survivors.
“They will start pulling the building apart layer by layer,’’ Leonard Gengel read from a statement yesterday at Logan International Airport, referring to the hotel where his 20-year-old daughter had been staying when the 7.0 earthquake hit. His voice breaking, he said, “We are asking our government to guarantee that every American dead or alive [in the hotel rubble] be accounted for and brought home in a dignified way.’’
The State Department did not immediately return a call yesterday. A spokesman said on Thursday that department personnel would facilitate the return of all American citizens, regardless of their condition. Gengel said the State Department informed him yesterday that 40 American citizens remained trapped in the rubble of Hotel Montana in Port-Au-Prince, where his daughter was staying with 11 classmates and two professors from Lynn University in Florida. They had traveled to Haiti to feed the poor with the program Journey for Hope-Haiti.
Eight of those students have been rescued. Britney Gengel, three classmates, and the two professors are still missing. Leonard Gengel made an emotional appeal to President Obama last week, urging him to do more to aid the rescue effort. Gengel told reporters yesterday that he never imagined he would be begging the federal government to bring his daughter home, dead or alive. “It’s just unimaginable and unthinkable,’’ he said.
Agreed.
The Gengels flew to Florida last week for an anticipated reunion, after a rescue contractor working on behalf of Lynn University reported that she had been found alive. The school later retracted the report, citing bad intelligence, and devastating the family. It remains unclear how the error was made, school officials have said.
It also remains unclear why the Globe is vague about the company.
Why are they protecting Code24?
Leonard Gengel alluded to the ordeal yesterday. “Not only have we lost our daughter once, but we have lost her twice in 48 hours,’’ he said, visibly moved. Cherylann Gengel also addressed reporters, thanking all rescue teams, the Lynn University staff, the news media, and the efforts of Senator John F. Kerry and US Representative James P. McGovern, as well as friends and relatives who kept vigil online. Britney Gengel’s brother Bernie, 17, was also at Logan but did not address reporters. Leonard Gengel ended his remarks by saying that despite the agony of the last 10 days, “we have hope, we have faith, and we have love,’’ which will help the family persevere.
He lit two candles for his daughter at a Lynn University chapel Thursday to mark her 20th birthday, school president Kevin M. Ross said during a conference call. The Gengels did not take questions after reading their statements yesterday. They retrieved their luggage and were escorted out of the terminal by airport security personnel. Leonard Gengel told a Globe reporter outside the airport that the family would rely on Lynn University staff members for all updates on the mission in Haiti.
Better than relying on the newspaper.
--more--"
