They had been on hiatus, but maybe I helped?
"Newton woman brings hope to orphans in Haiti; Filis Casey had never seen need like she found in the country" by Brian MacQuarrie | Globe Staff, June 24, 2012
KENSCOFF, Haiti — From her home in Newton, Mass., Filis Casey has traveled the world, lifting children out of the shadows and suffering and into adoptive homes. But she has never seen anything like the problems that plague Haiti, where the overwhelming misery can easily make an orphan’s plight invisible....
In the calculus of post-earthquake Haiti, these children would ordinarily be marked for lives of destitution. Some lost parents or siblings in the 2010 earthquake, others were abandoned on the side of the road, and some were brought here by sobbing mothers who said they could not afford to support another child.
“I feel that Haiti is much more needy than any place I have ever been,” Casey says....
But here, buoyed by money from the Needham-based foundation, a new orphanage is rising a few hundred yards from the children’s squalid home. The shell of a medical clinic and crafts workshop takes shape nearby. And a vocational school, where Kenscoff youth would learn a trade, is the hoped-for capstone to the vision developed by Casey, her American partners, and Kenscoff community leaders.
“Every single day will be a better day than they’ve had before. They will have a future, and that’s what it’s all about,” Casey says.
For the orphans of Kenscoff, a farming town nestled 4,300 feet above sea level amid mist-shrouded mountains, the world is an unforgiving place where children learn from their peers instead of adults.
On one recent afternoon, dozens of young children ran unsupervised around the concrete-and-dirt home where they have lived for 18 months, trundling up and down an uneven outdoor stairway without railings, lying on tables in a dusty classroom, and leaning out an unfinished window 15 feet above the ground.
Next to the entrance to a claustrophobic kitchen, a large poster cautions against cholera, which has infected some half-million Haitians and killed more than 7,000 since late 2010.
Related: Sunday Globe Special: World's Worst Cholera Crisis
And yet we read so little about it in the newspapers.
The only adult at the home this day, the wife of its owner, sits in a ground-level courtyard making beads, absorbed in her work as the children race around her.
“We can’t wait to get these kids out of here. It’s not healthy,” says Bob Casey, Filis’s husband, who accompanied her to Kenscoff.
There is little prospect that many of these children will find adoptive homes, Filis Casey says, because their age, 3 to 13, makes them unattractive to prospective parents. They will probably remain in Kenscoff, living with others like them, until they set off on their own as adolescents.
Without help, their prospects are grim in a country that held 380,000 orphans before the earthquake, according to a UNICEF estimate. Now, that number is believed to be considerably higher, and the need exponentially greater, for children who appear thinner, frailer, and years younger than their peers in the United States.
Alex, an 11-year-old boy from the pine forests of southwest Haiti, wears a Cookie Monster T-shirt this day, avoids eye contact, and speaks in a barely audible voice. The horrors of the quake, more than two years later, still terrify him.
“I get sad. I have flashbacks,” Alex says. “When that happens, I don’t want to play with the other kids.”
Alex lost a brother in the earthquake, but he does not know his name. He also does not know what became of his parents, and he has no desire to return to them.
“I don’t miss home at all,” he says, his speech trailing to a melancholy whisper....
The Caseys know that their efforts, and the work of thousands of foreign aid workers who have flocked to Haiti, can address only a tiny portion of this impoverished country’s needs. But they feel compelled to act....
That's fine, thank you.
In Kenscoff, however, life gains a sense of purpose....
Sigh.
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More Haitians looking for homes:
"Haitians protest government plan to raze shanties" June 26, 2012
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — More than 1,000 Haitians marched through the Caribbean nation’s capital Monday to protest a reported plan to destroy their hillside shanties for a flood-control project before they have found more permanent dwellings in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake.
Police fired tear gas in an attempt to control the protesters, some of whom threw rocks.
The demonstrators went through the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area chanting threats to burn down the relatively affluent district if the authorities flatten their homes....
The protesters said President Michel Martelly fell short on his promise to build homes destroyed in the 2010 earthquake.
The disaster destroyed tens of thousands houses in the capital and other cities in the south and officials said 314,000 people died.
The march began peacefully but some protesters threw rocks at a towering hotel financed in part by the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, a nonprofit set up after the earthquake by two former US presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
Oh, so THAT is what the REBUILDING MONEY went for!
Un-f***ing-believable!
Who put them in charge of that, anyway?
The demonstrators were angry to see the opulent hotel under construction amid fears that they will lose their homes.
Was that money well spent like they promised?
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Just two days of construction, Globe?
