DePaul University is collaborating on a microfinance program designed to increase investment in the country’s economy, DePaul Magazine writer Ruhan Memishi reports. Working with Vincentian organizations worldwide, DePaul hopes to lay the foundation to “give Haitians seed money to create and develop small businesses that will make a big difference.”

The program, called Zafen, is set to launch in April. Zafen means “our business” in Haitian Creole.

Vincentians are members of a Roman Catholic community inspired by the life and work of St. Vincent DePaul, a 17th century French priest who spent his life working among the poorest of the poor. Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere and the seventh poorest in the world.

“DePaul, the Haitian Diaspora (Haitians and Haitian descendants who live outside Haiti) and Fonkoze, Haiti’s alternative bank for those who are not served well by traditional banks, all are playing key roles in the effort,” Memishi reports.

Fonkoze is the most successful microfinance institution in Haiti and is closely aligned with the values of St. Vincent, according to Laura Hartman, Vincent de Paul Professor of Business Ethics, who is spearheading DePaul’s role in the initiative.

The project is designed to increase investment in the Haitian economy and create jobs by building an Internet pathway between the international Vincentian family and the Haitian Diaspora. Hartman says businesses and projects that hold the best promise for bolstering Haiti’s economy will receive funds generated through donations.

The Internet pathway is a Web site that offers online tools for people to contribute money to specific sustainable projects, Hartman explains. The site also will provide Haitian entrepreneurs online access to funding, allowing them to overcome challenges posed by illiteracy, language barriers and access to technology. All projects, no matter their size, will be reviewed by a steering committee before being posted on the Web site.

A team from DePaul’s College of Computing and Digital Media designed and built the site. Dean David Miller and Associate Dean Martin Kalin wrote the code that built the site from scratch, and CDM faculty and students are testing it.

The site will be fully functioning in April. In the meantime, those interested in contributing to the program can find out how to do so now at zafen.org.

Yakini Ajanaku-Coffy and Jean-Paul Coffy are teachers and musicians. They’re also both Haitian and Chicagoan. They own and operate a music-based pre-school called La Grande Famille in the city’s Kenwood area.
Like many Haitians in the U.S., they have loved ones affected by the Jan. 12 earthquake. Not knowing the fate of his parents and brothers and sisters amid the destruction and rubble, Jean-Paul went to Haiti to see for himself. Here’s been there since Jan. 22, negotiating for health care services and basic necessities for his mom and dad, who have no one else to depend on. He’s torn between family in Haiti and family in Chicago.
We interviewed Yakini, a wonderful singer, and she told us their Haiti heartache story. For more on this family’s saga, view and listen to the video above.
You can also read e-mails exchanged between Yakini and Jean-Paul and get updates on their family through their blog, Help Coffy.

The National Association of Black Journalists-Chicago will host a panel discussion on news coverage of the earthquake in Haiti at its monthly meeting Thursday, Feb. 18. The meeting also will raise money for earthquake victims.

The discussion will begin between 6-6:15 p.m. following the Association’s business meeting at Red Kiva, 1108 W. Randolph, Chicago.

Stephanie Shonekan, a Columbia College professor, will moderate the discussion of current and past media coverage of the Haiti earthquake. The panelists are:

• State Sen. Kwame Raoul
• Evanston Ald. Lionel Jean-Baptiste of the Haitian Congress to Fortify Haiti
• Patrick Brutus, co-founder of Haitian-American Professionals Network
• Mary Mitchell, Chicago Sun-Times columnist
• Marielle Sainvilus, Illinois State Department spokesperson

Proceeds from the event will go to the Haiti relief effort. Members attend free, but are encouraged to make a donation to help the victims in Haiti. Non-NABJ-Chicago members are asked to donate $5 (and any additional amount) to Haiti relief.



Love this song. It’s timeless. Loved seeing Michael Jackson spliced in. Thanks to all the artists who participated.
Video is available for download on iTunes for $1.99.

“The people of Haiti understand what these folks were trying to do—-steal babies. Whether it was to peddle their flesh or to bring to “the Lord” in Idaho these babies were stolen plain and simple and I am very glad that they are being charged and pursued.”–E.R. Brown, commenting on nytimes.com

Haitian officials on Thursday filed child abduction and criminal conspiracy charges against 10 Americans who tried to take 33 Haitian children out of the country last week. The Americans, most of them members of a Baptist congregation from Idaho, had not gotten the Haitian government’s consent to transport the children across the border into the Dominican Republic.
The group, led by Laura Silsby, a businesswoman and self-described missionary, claimed they were rescuing Haitian children left parentless after the Jan. 12 earthquake. The Americans, after being questioned, admitted they did not seek approval to remove the children from Haiti. Officials confirmed that several of the children have at least one living parent.
The Idaho Statesman reported that Silsby “had a history of failing to pay debts, failing to pay her employees and failing even to follow Idaho laws.” (That doesn’t sound much like Christian behavior to us.)
The Statesman went on to report: “Silsby has been the subject of eight civil lawsuits and 14 unpaid wage claims. The $358,000 Meridian house at which she founded her nonprofit New Life Children’s Refuge in November was foreclosed upon in December. A check of Silsby’s driving record revealed at least nine traffic citations since 1997, including four for failing to provide insurance or register annually.”
The mother of three, Silsby, 40, was CEO of an Internet business, personalshopper.com, and was named eWomenNetwork’s international businesswoman of the year in 2006.
Now, Silsby waits in a Haitian jail facing a potentially extended legal proceeding. If convicted, she faces three to nine years in prison.
Judging from comments posted on several Web sites we checked, Silsby and her group aren’t getting much sympathy for their rescue mission. And rightly so, we think. From the first reports, everything about the Baptists’ story seemed suspect to us. Claiming that they didn’t know they needed permission to remove the children was the first strike against them. They never said which orphanage in the Dominican Republic they were supposedly taking the children to yet they supposedly had gotten permission by the Dominican government.
And, now with revelations about Silsby’s personal troubles, her concern for Haitian children seems even less sincere and well-meaning. Child trafficking and not child rescue come to mind. Silsby and her group weren’t helping Haiti, they were helping themselves. And that’s not Christian charity by any means.

Public sentiment is not on her side if one scans the hundreds of comments posted on The New York Times. Here are a few:

“As an adoptive parent, these right wing evangelicals make me furious and disgusted. Now that the facts are coming out – thanks CNN – it’s quite obvious that the ringleader was only using a trip to Haiti to “rescue” children as a ploy to make money. As reported on CNN tonight, her home was foreclosed Dec. 24th, her business is in shambles, she has many lawsuits against her, and the “brochure” they were handing out in Haiti to desperate parents and caregivers is full of lies. She was only looking for a way to pay her bills via donations and to be seen as a compassionate Christian. Shame on her! I hope she rots in jail. These unscrupulous “christians” have now done irreperable damage to hundreds of thousands of parentless children around the world who wait for permanent families.”

“Somebody’s likely said it by now, but you gotta wonder how these same religious zealots and their crackpot defenders would have reacted if a few Haitians had taken a busload or two of New Orleans children to Haiti in the wake of Katrina.”

Tell us what you think of the Baptists’. Send your comments to: editor@sendhelp2haiti.com.

Last night, we attended a fundraiser for Haiti’s artists at the Nicole Gallery in Chicago. Haitian-born Nicole Smith founded the gallery in 1986. She began her career in 1971 as curator at the Le Centre D’Art de Port-au-Prince. Until the center was decimated by the Jan. 12 earthquake, it was Haiti’s sole arts center. American-born watercolorist DeWitt Peters founded the center in 1944, and over the years, it has featured works by some of Haiti’s best-known artists, including Hector Hyppolite, Philmoné Obin,Rigaud Benoit and Montas Antoine.
“Artists for Haiti/Chicago”is curated by Chicago artist Candace Hunter, who has also donated a work to the cause.
The fundraiser continues through the weekend, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Jan. 30 and 2 to 5 p.m. Jan. 31. For more information about the benefit, call Nicole Gallery at 312-787-7716. Nicole Gallery is located in Chicago’s River North gallery district at 230 W. Huron.

Sarthe Neighborhood Clinic staff

This post includes an audio interview. See link at the end.

The Haitian Development Fund serves the medical needs of residents in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood called Sarthe. For almost a decade, HDF has provided critical care to the mothers and children who visit the Sarthe Neighborhood Medical Clinic, which is “smaller than a Chicago bungalow,” says board member Greg Richmond.

Though the clinic isn’t spacious or high-tech, the Haitian medical staff that runs it has treated more than 67,000 patients, Richmond told SendHelp2Haiti in a phone interview. The clinic’s annual budget of $35,000 goes a long way in Haiti, where many people live with no plumbing and electricity and get by on only a few dollars a day.

Richmond, a Chicagoan, first visited the clinic in 2001 with a friend, Dr. Brent DeLand, who had been going to Haiti on medical missions for about 10 years. After the trip, the two men decided they wanted to do more to support the clinic and went about raising money to pay the salary of its doctor and other medical staff.

Richmond and DeLand, who lives in Springfield, Ill., make personal contributions to support the clinic and raise funds from other individuals, small family foundations and religious charities. An order in Italy recently sent an $8,000 grant.  Money raised helps buy medical supplies such as bandages and aspirin and equipment such as examination tables, Richmond says.

The Sarthe neighborhood is bleak and its residents live in squalid conditions, says Richmond, describing a place marked by drainage ditches filled with garbage and sewage and people sitting outside their cinder-blocks houses selling whatever they can to get by.

Patients in line outside clinic

“On one level, what we do is relieve suffering,” Richmond says about HDF’s work in Haiti. “But beyond that, what a lot of people don’t appreciate unless you live there is Haiti is a tropical country. And if you have an infection in Haiti—and you don’t have antibiotics, you don’t have ointments—in that heat and humidity, [the infection] doesn’t heal unless it’s treated. Those types of infections stay infected and can spread and lead to amputations or death. One of the things that struck me in the time that I was there was how rare it was to see someone who wasn’t maimed.

“What our clinic has been doing is providing that kind of medical care.”

Since the Jan. 12 earthquake, HDF has stepped up its fundraising efforts to meet the critical need for additional medicines and supplies to treat the many who were injured. “Everyday there’s a line of people waiting to be treated,” Richmond says, noting the clinic did run out of supplies after the earthquake. But the clinic is “functioning, treating people [and] we are getting medicine and supplies to the neighborhood.

“We are very glad the clinic was there… For years to come, the need is going to be overwhelming.”

For more information about the Haitian Development Fund, visit hdfund.org.

Click here to listen to our interview with Greg Richmond of the Haitian Development Fund.

brick stone dust and bones
an island in ruins, floating on
sea of memory

This haiku is dedicated to all Haitians and people everywhere who have responded to their need.

Earth rumbled below

Many hands of mercy

-Cassandra

A young girl carries a bucket of water during water distribution in Port-au- Prince on Jan. 16, 2010. REUTERS/Carlos Barria, courtesy www.alertnet.org.

As tens of thousands of Haitians struggle to recover from the horrific physical injuries they sustained in the Jan. 12 earthquake, their economy is suffering massive wounds of its own. Haiti’s “crippled” government expects the country’s economic output to plunge 25 percent this year, bloomberg.com reports.

The 7.0 temblor that rocked the island caused tremendous damage to Haiti’s $7 billion economy as a third of the buildings in the capital and surrounding towns were damaged or destroyed, leaving more than 2 million people homeless, the European Commission reported in its latest fact sheet on Haiti. More than a quarter of a million people are in need of urgent care. In all, an estimated 3.5 million–almost a third of Haiti’s 9.6 million population–have been affected by the disaster.

Before the earthquake, almost 80 percent of Haitians lived on less than $2 per day.

Describing the magnitude of the earthquake’s toll on her country, Yolette Etienne, Oxfam’s country director in Haiti,  said in an interview published on the international relief and development agency’s Web site: “It’s the worst I have seen. The first time we have experienced this type of disaster. The worst thing is the huge number of people affected. We don’t know how many are affected. It’s like the end of the world. Our entire world has changed.

“We are not just talking about the disaster affecting the country’s institutions…it affects the government, civil society and the international community.”