New God Blog

more news brought to your by our blog, thanks for visiting

From Smithsonian Magazine:"We had 12,000 to 15,000 paintings here," says Georges Nader Jr., with a Paul Tanis work at the remains of his family’s house and museum near Port-au-Prince.Alison WrightWithin weeks of January’s devastating earthquake, Haiti’s surviving painters and sculptors were taking solace from their workBy Bill BrubakerPhotographs by Alison WrightSmithsonian magazine, September 2010Video GallerySaving Haiti’s Priceless ArtworkAfter the devastating earthquake, Smithsonian conservationists are working to preserve Haiti’s cultural heritageSix weeks had passed since a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, killing 230,000 people and leaving more than 1.5 million others homeless. But the ground was still shaking in the nation’s rubble-strewn capital, Port-au-Prince, and 87-year-old Préfète Duffaut wasn’t taking any chances. One of the most prominent Haitian artists of the past 50 years was sleeping in a crude tent made of plastic sheeting and salvaged wood, fearful his earthquake-damaged house would collapse at any moment.“Did you feel the tremors last night?” Duffaut asked. Yes, I had felt the ground shake in my hotel room around 4:30 that morning. It was the second straight night of tremors, and I was feeling a bit stressed. But standing next to Duffaut, whose fantastical naive paintings I have admired for three decades, I resolved to put my anxieties on hold.It was Duffaut, after all, who had lived through one of the most horrific natural disasters of modern times. Not only was he homeless in the poorest nation of the Western Hemisphere, his niece and nephew had died in the earthquake. Gone, too, were his next-door neighbors in Port-au-Prince. “Their house just completely collapsed,” Duffaut said. “Nine people were inside.”The diabolical 15- to 20-second earthquake on January 12 also stole a sizable chunk of Duffaut’s—and Haiti’s—artistic legacy. At least three artists, two gallery owners and an arts foundation director died. Thousands of paintings and sculptures—valued in the tens of millions of dollars—were destroyed or badly damaged in museums, galleries, collectors’ homes, government ministries and the National Palace. The celebrated biblical murals that Duffaut and other Haitian artists painted at Holy Trinity Cathedral in the early 1950s were now mostly rubble. The Haitian Art Museum at College St. Pierre, run by the Episcopal Church, was badly cracked. And the beloved Centre d’Art, the 66-year-old gallery and school that jump-started Haiti’s primitive art movement—making collectors out of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Bill and Hillary Clinton, the filmmaker Jonathan Demme and thousands of others—had crumbled. “The Centre d’Art is where I sold my first piece of art in the 1940s,” Duffaut said quietly, tugging on the white beard he had grown since the earthquake. Duffaut disappeared from his tent and returned a few moments later with a painting that displayed one of his trademark imaginary villages, a rural landscape dominated by winding, gravity-defying mountain roads filled with tiny people, houses and churches. Then he retrieved another painting. And another. Suddenly, I was surrounded by six Duffauts—and all were for sale.Standing beside his tent, which was covered by a tarpaulin stamped USAID, Duffaut flashed a satisfied grin.“How much?” I asked.“Four thousand dollars [each],” he said, suggesting the price local galleries would charge.Not having more than $50 in my pocket, I had to pass. But I was delighted that Préfète Duffaut was open for business. “My future paintings will be inspired by this terrible tragedy,” he told me. “What I have seen on the streets has given me a lot of ideas and added a lot to my imagination.” There was an unmistakable look of hope in the old master’s eyes.“Deye mon, gen mon,” a Haitian proverb, is Creole for “beyond the mountains, more mountains.”Impossibly poor, surviving on less than $2 a day, most Haitians have made it their life’s work to climb over, under and around obstacles, be they killer hurricanes, food riots, endemic diseases, corrupt governments or the ghastly violence that appears whenever there is political upheaval. One victim of these all too frequent calamities has been Haitian culture: even before the earthquake, this French- and Creole-speaking Caribbean island nation of nearly ten million people did not have a publicly owned art museum or even a single movie theater.Still, Haitian artists have proved astonishingly resilient, continuing to create, sell and survive through crisis after crisis. “The artists here have a different temperament,” Georges Nader Jr. told me in his fortress-like gallery in Pétionville, the once-affluent, hillside Port-au-Prince suburb. “When something bad happens, their imagination just seems to get better.” Nader’s family has been selling Haitian art since the 1960s.The notion of making a living by creating and selling art first came to Haiti in the 1940s, when an American watercolorist named DeWitt Peters moved to Port-au-Prince. Peters, a conscientious objector to the world war then underway, took a job teaching English and was struck by the raw artistic expression he found at every turn—even on the local buses known as tap-taps.He founded Centre d’Art in 1944 to organize and promote untrained artists, and within a few years, word had gone out that something special was happening in Haiti. During a visit to the center in 1945, André Breton, the French writer, poet and a leader of the cultural movement known as Surrealism, swooned over the work of a self-described houngan (voodoo priest) and womanizer named Hector Hyppolite, who often painted with chicken feathers. Hyppolite’s creations, on subjects ranging from still lifes to voodoo spirits to scantily clad women (presumed to be his mistresses), sold for a few dollars each. But, Breton wrote, “all carried the stamp of total authenticity.” Hyppolite died of a heart attack in 1948, three years after joining Centre d’Art and one year after his work was displayed at a triumphant (for Haiti as well as for him) United Nations-sponsored exhibition in Paris.In the years that followed, the Haitian art market relied largely on the tourists who ventured to this Maryland-size nation, 700 or so miles from Miami, to savor its heady mélange of naive art, Creole food, smooth dark rum, hypnotic (though, at times, staged) voodoo ceremonies, high-energy carnivals and riotously colored bougainvillea. (Is it any wonder Haitian artists never lacked for inspiration?)Though tourists largely shied away from Haiti in the 1960s, when self-declared president-for-life François “Papa Doc” Duvalier ruled through terror enforced by his personal army of Tonton Macoutes, they returned after his death in 1971, when his playboy son, Jean-Claude (known as “Baby Doc”), took charge.I got my first glimpse of Haitian art when I interviewed Baby Doc in 1977. (His reign as president-for-life ended abruptly when he fled the country in 1986 for France, where he lives today at age 59 in Paris.) I was hooked the moment I bought my first painting, a $10 market scene done on a flour sack. And I was delighted that every painting, iron sculpture and sequined voodoo flag I carried home on subsequent trips gave me further insight into a culture that is a blend of West African, European, native Taíno and other homegrown influences.Although some nicely done Haitian paintings could be bought for a few hundred dollars, the best works by early masters such as Hyppolite and Philomé Obin (a devout Protestant who painted scenes from Haitian history, the Bible and his family’s life) eventually commanded tens of thousands of dollars. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C. added Haitian primitives to their collections. And Haiti’s reputation as a tourist destination was reinforced by the eclectic parade of notables—from Barry Goldwater to Mick Jagger—who checked into the Hotel Oloffson, the creaky gingerbread retreat that is the model for the hotel in The Comedians, Graham Greene’s 1966 novel about Haiti.Much of this exuberance faded in the early 1980s amid political strife and the dawn of the AIDS pandemic. U.S. officials classified Haitians as being among the four groups at highest risk for HIV infection. (The others were homosexuals, hemophiliacs and heroin addicts.) Some Haitian doctors called this designation unwarranted, even racist, but the perception stuck that a Haitian holiday was not worth the risk.Though tourism waned, the galleries that sponsored Haitian painters and sculptors targeted sales to overseas collectors and the increasing numbers of journalists, development workers, special envoys, physicians, U.N. peacekeepers and others who found themselves in the country.“Haitians are not a brooding people,” said gallery owner Toni Monnin, a Texan who moved to Haiti in the boom-time ’70s and married a local art dealer. “Their attitude is: ‘Let’s get on with it! Tomorrow is another day.’”At the Gingerbread gallery in Pétionville, I was introduced to a 70-year-old sculptor who wore an expression of utter despondence. “I have no home. I have no income. And there are days when me and my family don’t eat,” Nacius Joseph told me. Looking for financial support, or at least a few words of encouragement, he was visiting the galleries that had bought and sold his work over the years.Joseph told gallery owner Axelle Liautaud that his days as a woodcarver, creating figures such as La Sirene, the voodoo queen of the ocean, were over. “All my tools are broken,” he said. “I can’t work. All of my apprentices, the people who helped me, have left Port-au-Prince, gone to the provinces. I’m very discouraged. I have lost everything!”“But don’t you love what you’re doing?” Liautaud asked.Joseph nodded.“Then you have to find a way to do it. This is a situation where you have to have some drive because everyone has problems.”Joseph nodded again, but looked to be near tears.Though the gallery owners were themselves hurting, many were handing out money and art supplies to keep the artists employed.At her gallery a few blocks away, Monnin told me that in the days following the quake she distributed $14,000 to more than 40 artists. “Right after the earthquake, they simply needed money to buy food,” she said. “You know, 90 percent of the artists I work with lost their homes.”Jean-Emmanuel “Mannu” El Saieh, whose late father, Issa, was one of the earliest promoters of Haitian art, was paying a young painter’s medical bills. “I just talked to him on the phone, and you don’t have to be a doctor to know he’s still suffering from shock,” El Saieh said at his gallery, just up a rutted road from the Oloffson hotel, which survived the quake.Though most of the artists I encountered had become homeless, they did not consider themselves luckless. They were alive, after all, and aware that the tremblement de terre had killed many of their friends and colleagues, such as the octogenarian owners of the Rainbow Gallery, Carmel and Cavour Delatour; Raoul Mathieu, a painter; Destimare Pierre Marie Isnel (a.k.a. Louco), a sculptor who worked with discarded objects in the downtown Grand Rue slum; and Flores “Flo” McGarrell, an American artist and film director who in 2008 moved to Jacmel (a town with splendid French colonial architecture, some of which survived the quake) to head up a foundation that supported local artists.The day I arrived in Port-au-Prince, I heard rumors of another possible casualty—Alix Roy, a reclusive, 79-year-old painter who had been missing since January 12. I knew Roy’s work well: he painted humorous scenes from Haitian life, often chubby kids dressed up as adults in elaborate costumes, some wearing oversize sunglasses, others balancing outrageously large fruits on their heads. Although he was a loner, Roy was an adventurous sort who had also lived in New York, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.A few nights later, Nader called my room at Le Plaza (one of the few hotels in the capital open for business) with some grim news. Not only had Roy died in the rubble of the gritty downtown hotel where he lived, his remains were still buried there, six weeks later. “I’m trying to find someone from the government to pick him up,” Nader said. “That’s the least the Haitian government can do for one of its best artists.”The next day, Nader introduced me to Roy’s sister, a retired kindergarten director in Pétionville. Marléne Roy Etienne, 76, told me her older brother had rented a room on the top floor of the hotel so he could look down on the street for inspiration. “I went to look for him after the earthquake but couldn’t even find where the hotel had been because the entire street—Rue des Césars—was rubble,” she said. “So I stood in front of the rubble where I thought Alix might be and said a prayer.”Etienne’s eyes teared when Nader assured her he would continue pressing government officials to retrieve her brother’s remains.“This is hard,” she said, reaching for a handkerchief. “This is really hard.”Nader had been through some challenging times himself. Although he had not lost any family members, and his gallery in Pétionville was intact, the 32-room house where his parents lived, and where his father, Georges S. Nader, had built a gallery that contained perhaps the largest collection of Haitian art anywhere, had crumbled.The son of Lebanese immigrants, the elder Nader was long considered one of Haiti’s best-known and most successful art dealers, having established relationships with hundreds of artists since he opened a gallery downtown in 1966. He moved into the mansion in the hillside Croix-Desprez neighborhood a few years later and, in addition to the gallery, built a museum that showcased many of Haiti’s finest artists, including Hyppolite, Obin, Rigaud Benoit and Castera Bazile. When he retired a few years ago, Nader turned over the gallery and museum to his son John.The elder Nader had been taking a nap with his wife when the quake struck at 4:53 p.m. “We were rescued within ten minutes because our bedroom did not collapse,” he told me. What Nader saw when he was led outside was horrifying. His collection had become a hideous pile of debris with thousands of paintings and sculptures buried under giant blocks of concrete.“My life’s work is gone,” Nader, 78, told me by telephone from his second home in Miami, where he has been living since the quake. Nader said he never bought insurance for his collection, which the family estimated to be worth more than $20 million.With the rainy season approaching, Nader’s sons hired a dozen men to pick, shovel and jackhammer their way through the debris, looking for anything that could be salvaged.“We had 12,000 to 15,000 paintings here,” Georges Nader Jr. told me as we stomped through the sprawling heap, which reminded me of a bombed-out village from a World War II documentary. “We’ve recovered about 3,000 paintings and about 1,800 of those are damaged. Some other paintings were taken by looters in the first days after the earthquake.”Back at his gallery in Pétionville, Nader showed me a Hyppolite still life he had recovered. I recognized it, having admired the painting in 2009 at a retrospective at the Organization of American States’ Art Museum of the Americas in Washington. But the 20- by 20-inch painting was now broken into eight pieces. “This will be restored by a professional,” Nader said. “We have begun restoring the most important paintings we have recovered.”I heard other echoes of cautious optimism as I visited cultural sites across Port-au-Prince. A subterranean, government-run historical museum that contained some important paintings and artifacts had survived. So did a private voodoo and Taíno museum in Mariani (near the quake’s epicenter) and an ethnographic collection in Pétionville. People associated with the destroyed Holy Trinity Cathedral and Centre d’Art, as well as the Episcopal Church’s structurally feeble Haitian Art Museum, assured me that these institutions will be rebuilt. But no one could say how or when.The United Nations has announced that 59 countries and international organizations have pledged $9.9 billion as “the down payment Haiti needs for wholesale national renewal.” But there’s no word on how much of that money, if any, will ever reach the cultural sector.“We deeply believe that Haitians living abroad can help us with the funds,” said Henry Jolibois, an artist and architect who is a technical consultant to the Haitian prime minister’s office. “For the rest, we must convince other entities in the world to participate, such as the museums and private collectors who have huge Haitian naive painting collections.”At the Holy Trinity Cathedral 14 murals had long offered a distinctively Haitian take on biblical events. My favorite was the Marriage at Cana by Wilson Bigaud, a painter who excelled at glimpses into everyday Haitian life—cockfights, market vendors, baptismal parties, rara band parades. While some European artists portrayed the biblical event at which Christ turned water into wine as being rather formal, Bigaud’s Cana was a decidedly casual affair with a pig, rooster and two Haitian drummers looking on. (Bigaud died this past March 22 at age 79.)“That Marriage at Cana mural was very controversial,” Haiti’s Episcopal bishop, Jean Zaché Duracin, told me in his Pétionville office. “In the ’40s and ’50s many Episcopalians left the church in Haiti and became Methodists because they didn’t want these murals at the cathedral. They said, ‘Why? Why is there a pig in the painting?’ They didn’t understand there was a part of Haitian culture in these murals.”Duracin told me it took him three days to gather the emotional strength to visit Holy Trinity. “This is a great loss, not only for the Episcopal church but for art worldwide,” he said.Visiting the site myself one morning, I saw two murals that were more or less intact—The Baptism of Our Lord by Castera Bazile and Philomé Obin’s Last Supper. (A third mural, Native Street Procession, by Duffaut, has survived, says former Smithsonian Institution conservator Stephanie Hornbeck, but others were destroyed.)At the Haitian Art Museum, chunks of concrete had fallen on some of the 100 paintings on exhibit. I spotted one of Duffaut’s oldest, largest and finest imaginary village paintings propped against a wall. A huge piece was missing from the bottom. A museum employee told me the piece had not been found. As I left, I reminded myself that although thousands of paintings had been destroyed in Haiti, thousands of others survived, and many are outside the country in private collections and institutions, including the Waterloo Center for the Arts in Iowa and the Milwaukee Art Museum, which have important collections of Haitian art. I also took comfort from conversations I had had with artists like Duffaut, who were already looking beyond the next mountain.No one displays Haiti’s artistic resolve more than Frantz Zéphirin, a gregarious 41-year-old painter, houngan and father of 12, whose imagination is as large as his girth.“I’m very lucky to be alive,” Zéphirin told me late one afternoon in the Monnin gallery, where he was putting the finishing touches on his tenth painting since the quake. “I was in a bar on the afternoon of the earthquake, having a beer. But I decided to leave the bar when people starting talking about politics. And I’m glad I left. The earthquake came just one minute later, and 40 people died inside that bar.”Zéphirin said he walked several hours, at times climbing over corpses, to get to his house. “That’s where I learned that my stepmother and five of my cousins had died,” he said. But his pregnant girlfriend was alive; so were his children.“That night, I decided I had to paint,” Zéphirin said. “So I took my candle and went to my studio on the beach. I saw a lot of death on the way. I stayed up drinking beer and painting all night. I wanted to paint something for the next generation, so they can know just what I had seen.”Zéphirin led me to the room in the gallery where his earthquake paintings were hung. One shows a rally by several fully clothed skeletons carrying a placard written in English: “We need shelters, clothes, condoms and more. Please help.”“I’ll do more paintings like these,” Zéphirin said. “Each day 20 ideas for paintings pass in my head, but I don’t have enough hands to make all of them.” (Smithsonian commissioned the artist to create the painting that appears on the cover of this magazine. It depicts the devastated island nation with grave markers, bags of aid money and birds of mythic dimensions delivering flowers and gifts, such as “justice” and “health.”) In March, Zéphirin accepted an invitation to show his work in Germany. And two months later, he would head to Philadelphia for a one-man show, titled “Art and Resilience,” at the Indigo Arts Gallery.A few miles up a mountain road from Pétionville, one of Haiti’s most celebrated contemporary artists, Philippe Dodard, was preparing to bring more than a dozen earthquake-inspired paintings to Arte Américas, an annual fair in Miami Beach. Dodard showed me a rather chilling black-and-white acrylic that was inspired by the memory of a friend who perished in an office building. “I’m calling this painting Trapped in the Dark,” he said.I have no idea how Dodard, a debonair man from Haiti’s elite class whose paintings and sculptures confirm his passion for his country’s voodoo and Taíno cultures, had found time to paint. He told me he had lost several friends and family members in the quake, as well as the headquarters of the foundation he helped create in the mid-1990s to promote culture among Haitian youth. And he was busily involved in a project to convert a fleet of school buses—donated by the neighboring Dominican Republic—into mobile classrooms for displaced students.Like Zéphirin, Dodard seemed determined to work through his grief with a paintbrush in hand. “How can I continue living after one of the biggest natural disasters in the history of the world? I can’t,” he wrote in the inscription that would appear next to his paintings at the Miami Beach show. “Instead I use art to express the deep change that I see around and inside me.”For the Haitian art community, more hopeful news was on the way. In May, the Smithsonian Institution launched an effort to help restore damaged Haitian treasures. Led by Richard Kurin, under secretary for history, art and culture, and working with private and other public organizations, the Institution established a “cultural recovery center” at the former headquarters of the U.N. Development Program near Port-au-Prince.“It’s not every day at the Smithsonian that you actually get to help save a culture,” Kurin says. “And that’s what we’re doing in Haiti.”On June 12, after months of preparation, conservators slipped on their gloves in the Haitian capital and got to work. “Today was a very exciting day for…conservators, we got objects into the lab! Woo hoo!” the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Hugh Shockey enthused on the museum’s Facebook page.Kurin sounded equally pumped. “The first paintings we brought in were painted by Hector Hyppolite. So we were restoring those on Sunday,” he told me a week later. “Then on Monday our conservator from the American Art Museum was restoring Taíno, pre-Colombian artifacts. Then on Tuesday the paper conservator was dealing with documents dating from the era of the Haitian struggle for independence. And then the next day we were literally on the scaffolding at the Episcopal cathedral, figuring out how we’re going to preserve the three murals that survived.”The task undertaken by the Smithsonian and a long list of partners and supporters that includes the Haitian Ministry of Culture and Communication, the International Blue Shield, the Port-au-Prince-based foundation FOKAL and the American Institute for Conservation seemed daunting; thousands of objects need restoration.Kurin said the coalition will train several dozen Haitian conservators to take over when the Smithsonian bows out in November 2011. “This will be a generation-long process in which Haitians do this themselves,” he said, adding that he hopes donations from the international community will keep the project alive.Across the United States, institutions such as the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, galleries such as Indigo Arts in Philadelphia and Haitian-Americans such as Miami-based artist Edouard Duval Carrié were organizing sales and fund-raisers. And more Haitian artists were on the move—some to a three-month residency program sponsored by a gallery in Kingston, Jamaica, others to a biennial exhibition in Dakar, Senegal.Préfète Duffaut stayed in Haiti. But during an afternoon we spent together he seemed energized and, though Holy Trinity was mostly a pile of rubble, he was making plans for a new mural. “And my mural in the new cathedral will be better than the old ones,” he promised.Meanwhile, Duffaut had just finished a painting of a star he saw while sitting outside his tent one night. “I’m calling this painting The Star of Haiti,” he said. “You see, I want all of my paintings to send a message.”The painting showed one of Duffaut’s imaginary villages inside a giant star that was hovering like a spaceship over the Haitian landscape. There were mountains in the painting. And people climbing. Before bidding the old master farewell, I asked him what message he wanted this painting to send.“My message is simple,” he said without a moment’s hesitation. “Haiti will be back.”Bill Brubaker, formerly a Washington Post writer, has long followed Haitian art. In her photographs and books, Alison Wright focuses on cultures and humanitarian efforts.

if people only knew

From The Miami HeraldAugust 22, 2010 BY EDWIDGE DANTICATIt was the presidential bid heard around the world. However, to those who have been following Wyclef Jean closely, it was no surprise. I remember as early as 2004 hearing of a Wyclef Jean candidacy being discussed by friends and family members, some uneasy and others thrilled at the possibility. As much as carriers of Haitian passports are pestered at borders all over the world, Wyclef, who travels constantly, never traded his Haitian passport for any other.“His journey,” one friend told me, “will begin with his foundation [Yele Haiti] and end at the national palace.”The timing of his presidential run, Wyclef recently told Time magazine, had a lot to do with the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake that all but leveled Port-au-Prince and several other cities. Otherwise, he would have waited another 10 years to run. Now, unless Article 135 of the Haitian constitution — which requires habitual residence in the country for five consecutive years prior to the election — is amended or unless, in spite of reported death threats, Wyclef moves to Haiti for the next five years, he will not be able to run. Haiti’s electoral council has decided that he is ineligible because he has failed to meet the residency requirement. That too is no surprise. Had they ruled in Wyclef’s favor, they might have opened a Pandora’s box that might cast further doubt on their desire and ability to hold elections that are as fair and transparent as possible given the already tenuous and potentially volatile post-earthquake situation in Haiti.At this point, I should mention that I know Wyclef Jean. From the very beginning of his musical career, I have seen him perform on both small and large stages, but I have also seen him write a song on the spot while looking at footage of a dead friend. I have seen him play with his 5-year-old daughter, and I have seen him act as master of ceremony at both a brother and sister’s weddings. I cannot vouch for him as a presidential candidate (and less so as a president), but I must admit that I initially found his candidacy exciting. The idea that he might be our first forty-something, Creolophone, diaspora-hailed candidate — anticipating this very outcome, I had not allowed my mind to go as far as president — was rather electrifying. His entry into the race has energized thousands of disempowered young people. It has also brightened a fading international media spotlight on Haiti, where 300,000 people recently lost their lives and more than a million still remain homeless.Among both his supporters and detractors, Wyclef’s candidacy has also generated a passionate dialogue about the kind of leader Haiti needs at one of the most critical moments of its 206-year-old existence. The fact that only Haiti’s current president, Rene Preval, has been able to finish a full term in office speaks volumes about the office. Whoever becomes president of Haiti this fall will have the Sisyphean task of rebuilding a nation even as other potential disasters — health, economic and environmental — loom ahead. For example, should Haiti be struck by one or a string of hurricanes as it was it was two years ago around this time, there could be as many casualties as during the earthquake.Now that the decision has been made, we must return to the less exciting and more somber business at hand. Nine million people, many of whom live in deplorable conditions in makeshift shelters, deserve no less. Haiti’s next president must burrow in, and along with the people of Haiti, fight corruption, create housing, educational opportunities and jobs, among many other grueling and unglamorous tasks. He or she — there is one woman in the race — will have to keep expectations low while working as hard as possible to deliver tangible results to a long suffering population.I hope that my friend will not be too disappointed that these tasks will not fall on his shoulders. The burden will be enormous on whoever takes on the job. Now there will, of course, be people who lose interest in the race, who feel that they have no dog in the fight. I hope Wyclef Jean is not one of them. What he has promised to do before — create jobs and educational opportunities and inspire young people who have already lost so much to the earthquake that inspired him to run — he can continue to do through a reformed version of his Yele Haiti foundation and his music. As our roving ambassador, he can now do this more freely, without the statesman straitjacket and forced political lingo. He can speak directly to us and from his heart. He can console his young supporters and urge them once again to remain calm. And he won’t have to do it en francais. That could be his most important contribution yet to a country for which he has proven his love and devotion over and over again.Edwidge Danticat is an author whose most recent works are y “Eight Days” and “Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist At Work.”

can believe what i am reading, so unfair

From The Los Angeles Times:Money has been pledged to help the impoverished nation recover from a devastating earthquake. Now, a sound plan setting priorities is in order.By James Dobbins and Laurel MillerAugust 23, 2010The earthquake that leveled Haiti exposed fundamental weaknesses in its state institutions. Worldwide pledges of $10 billion create an unprecedented opportunity to fix them.Haiti’s own plans for recovery, presented to its international donors in March, contained a broad vision but no road map to prioritize and fix urgent needs.It is not enough to raise stronger buildings. What Haiti truly needs is a more resilient and effective government, starting with these key areas:Establishing an attractive business climate.Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, ranked 151 out of 183 countries in the ease of doing business, according to our analysis for the Rand Corp. Our research also concluded that it takes 195 days and 13 separate procedures to register a business. It’s equally difficult to get construction permits, credit or engage in foreign trade. As a result, industry accounts for only 16% of the nation’s economy despite Haiti’s low-cost labor and the favorable terms for importing goods from Haiti to the United States. As for the seaport, it’s 35% more expensive to bring a container of goods into Port-au-Prince than into any of the developed countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and takes 22 days longer.An efficient, one-stop shop must be established for businesses in Haiti. Then, as in a field of dreams, they may come.Reforming the civil service.Haiti has weak financial control of its ministries; each does its own procurement and suffers as much as 30% absenteeism among employees. Many are phantom employees who collect government paychecks while working other jobs. Poor record-keeping and noncompetitive bidding practices also invite corruption. Auditing is nearly nonexistent. Most government decisions rest in the hands of a few.Change must start with a census of all government employees, to determine their locations and roles. For current employees and future hires, job descriptions should be established with predetermined qualifications as well as metrics for hiring and firing, and performance incentives.Overhauling the dysfunctional judicial and corrections systems.Haiti lacks well-trained lawyers, judges and state-subsidized legal representation for the indigent. An estimated 75% of those in Haiti’s overflowing prisons languish for long periods without ever going before a judge. The police and justice systems barely link at all.In the short term, officials should establish a special pretrial detainee review for prisoners. This step could potentially free thousands of inmates who shouldn’t be in jail. In the wake of more than 200,000 earthquake deaths, Haiti should also accelerate the resolution of property disputes outside the court system using special panels. In the longer run, officials should develop a computerized system that creates one case log for each individual from arrest through exoneration or incarceration.Enhancing education through regulation and enforcement.The quake destroyed 5,000 schools. Even before that, children attended classes sporadically under a system of largely unregulated schools and undertrained teachers.Haiti now needs to tackle education reform and reward schools that embrace a rigorous curriculum, rather than dividing limited resources uncritically among many schools, most of them run by private, charitable or religious providers.For example, the state could subsidize private schoolteacher wages (in accredited schools that cap charges to families) on a par with public school salaries and link pay to academic proficiency. Teacher retraining will be necessary on a grand scale. School-based food programs have increased attendance in the past; this should be standard fare.Shifting all public healthcare to a performance-based contracting system.The earthquake destroyed 73 of Haiti’s 373 hospitals, clinics and medical training institutes; 200 staff members of the Ministry of Public Health died or were injured when their Port-au-Prince facility collapsed. Haitian-based healthcare is crippled amid a continuing imperative to monitor and prevent disease in tent camps, to treat mental illnesses stemming from the quake and to provide prosthetics and rehab therapy.Officials should shift operation of all health centers to nongovernmental organizations NGOs and other private institutions, leaving Haiti’s government to concentrate on setting policies and enforcing regulations for the system as a whole.Haiti can do none of this on its own. The Obama administration should strongly consider naming a point person to oversee all aspects of Haiti’s reconstruction. At the same time, the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, co-chaired by former President Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, needs to become the prevailing decision-making body, not just a talk-shop for donors and the government.The commission is off to a slow start. To make it work, major donors, most notably the United States, should submit all projects to it for coordination. If the U.S. does not embrace this discipline, no one else will.James Dobbins, the U.S. special envoy to Haiti under the Clinton administration, directs the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the Santa Monica-based nonprofit Rand Corp., where Laurel Miller is a senior policy analyst. The study "Building a More Resilient Haitian State" can be found at rand.orgCopyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times

more news brought to your by our blog, thanks for visiting

From The Episcopal Church Office of Public Affairs:August 24, 2010[Office of Public Affairs] The Episcopal Church Office of Mission Funding Sept. 29 will sponsor a daylong symposium on the "Spirituality of Philanthropy," uniting the theological and spiritual basis of philanthropy with a useful practicum on advanced fundraising strategies and techniques.Designed for directors of development at dioceses, parishes and other Episcopal organizations, the event will be held at the Episcopal Church Center in New York.The morning program will offer "The Theology of Abundance"; the afternoon session will cover "Popping the Question: The Romance of the ‘Ask.’"
   
Keynote speakers are:  • Paul Schervish, director of the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy at Boston College and author of "Gospels of Wealth: How the Rick Portray Their Lives" and "Wealth and The Will of God: Discerning the Use of Riches in the Service of Ultimate Purpose." • The Rev. Canon Charles K. Robertson, canon to the presiding bishop, former professor of ethics and communication and author of "Transforming Stewardship" and "Barnabas: A Model for Holistic Stewardship." • Nicholas Boothman, a corporate communications consultant and author of "How to Connect in Business in 90 Seconds or Less." • Kathy LeMay, founder and CEO of Raising Change and author of "The Generosity Plan: Sharing Your Time, Treasure and Talent to Shape the World."Built into the program are ample opportunities to meet the speakers.  Copies of their recent books will be available for sale and signing.Small-group discussions facilitated by a panel of fundraising experts will focus on practical approaches to fundraising, particularly in the area of major gifts. And Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori will celebrate and preach at the midday Eucharist.Registration, including all materials, meals and receptions, is $295 until Sept. 3 and $350 afterward.For more information contact Pam Barry, associate director of Mission Funding, (212)716-6002, pbarry@episcopalchurch.org.

blog updated each day, visit us again

From Episcopal News Service:By Otis Gaddis III, August 24, 2010Otis Gaddis III is a second-year seminarian from the Diocese of Washington at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale.[Episcopal News Service] In the fall of 2009 a group of seminary students gathered around a table at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale with the desire to facilitate an intentional ministry of large-scale, effective, grassroots evangelism focused primarily on spiritually homeless young adults that would foster the development of vibrant Episcopal faith communities where people could meet Jesus and be transformed into people who co-labor for Jesus’ Kingdom of love and justice.We started by reflecting on our own experience of coming to the Episcopal Church (most of us coming to the Episcopal Church as teens or young adults) and the experiences of people we knew personally who have found the Episcopal Church attractive. Among the people we knew, we found that most attended Episcopal Churches because they deeply appreciated the beauty of our church’s liturgy, its sacramental and mystical tradition and its positive view of reason. Yet, we also noticed that among this group there was a substantial subgroup for whom the initial decisive attraction to the Episcopal Church was its social justice advocacy and service for the poor, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people, women, racial minorities and the environment. It is toward this subgroup — whom we often call "progressives" — that we began to direct our attention, because from our own experience, there is a significant correlation between being a progressive and being spiritually homeless, especially if one is a young adult. We hear it all the time in our peer group, where young adults increasingly self-identify as "spiritual but not religious." Unfortunately, many in this demographic of spiritually homeless progressive young adults — who typically find the Episcopal Church attractive when they encounter it — do not know the Episcopal Church exists, so they could not even choose to make their home with us if they wanted to.Recognizing this, we discerned a call to raise a corps of entrepreneurial missioners — clergy and lay leaders with the passion and gifts to develop spiritual communities that will effectively mission to this large, spiritually homeless, progressive population. Furthermore, these entrepreneurial-missioners must articulate an understanding of the Gospel, which does not substitute social justice for Jesus (as if social justice were the Gospel itself) but rather fully recognizes our profound orientation toward social justice as a proclamation of Jesus within the tradition of Nicene-Orthodox Episcopal spirituality. As the evangelist embodies Jesus’ own fundamental orientation toward love and justice, the act of offering Jesus to others becomes, in this movement, a progressive act.As our conversation crystallized, we came to two conclusions: the Episcopal Church has a critical shortage of entrepreneurial missioners equipped to mobilize and coordinate the building and growing of the literally thousands of new Episcopal spiritual communities necessary for such a movement to be successful; and the widely held perception of progressivism and evangelism as oppositional prevents progressives with gifts for entrepreneurial mission from self-identifying as evangelists.When we looked around the church, we noticed small groups of people here and there attempting to engage these issues, but there was no systemic institutional effort to address these problems. So, we decided to do our part to develop that institutional infrastructure by creating an inter-seminary organization: The Episcopal Evangelism Network (EEN).
     
Our mission is to gather, equip and mentor entrepreneurial missioner seminarians and give them access to the practical training they need to start new mission-oriented communities or to rebuild spiritual communities that have significantly declined; and to create a safe space for progressive Episcopalians to integrate their values with their vocations for evangelism so that they are able to mobilize effectively the large share of progressive Episcopalians in the pews, of whom many themselves are uncomfortable witnessing to the spiritual transformation they experience as they encounter Jesus.We already are well on our way towards creating EEN formation groups at every school where Episcopalians study in significant numbers and knitting these groups into an inter-seminary network. Indeed, during the past year, we have found seminarian partners at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Episcopal Divinity School, Harvard Divinity School, Union Theological Seminary and General Theological Seminary. Moreover, we are having our first inter-seminary gathering in Baltimore, Maryland, Sept. 23-25 at a conference co-hosted by the Episcopal Village. For registration information, click here. The conference is free for seminarians. Speakers include Brian McLaren, Stephanie Spellers, Karen Ward, Donald Schell, Martin Smith, Simón Bautista and more. Other sponsors include the Church Publishing Group; the Fund for Theological Education; and the dioceses of Maryland, Long Island and Southern Virginia.– Otis Gaddis III is a second-year seminarian from the Diocese of Washington at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. For more information contact him at otis.gaddis@yale.edu.

how does this impact my state

From The Washington Post:GALLERYBy Edward CodyPORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI – When counselors asked the children at the Plas Timoun psychological therapy center to draw, what came out on the paper were images of crumbled houses, severed limbs and blood spurting from people trapped under the ruins.But Jasmine Etelus, 8, was drawing another kind of house the other day. It was a two-story, pink-painted structure in the gingerbread tradition of Port-au-Prince, with a blazing sun on the mountain-lined horizon behind it."It’s for a wedding," she explained.Jasmine is among uncounted thousands of children who were left traumatized by the earthquake that ravaged Haiti on Jan. 12, killing or maiming their parents and siblings and destroying their homes. But she is also among the approximately 600 children cared for at Plas Timoun, "Children’s Park" in Creole, a little haven run by Haiti’s Ministry of Youth and Sports.Michaelle Newstrom, a kindergarten teacher who runs the facility with 26 counselors and assistants in the upscale suburb of Petionville, said it got under way at the end of February with prodding from Elisabeth Préval, the president’s wife. Plas Timoun is one of two such centers run by the ministry, along with several more run by Haitian nongovernmental organizations or international aid groups such as Doctors Without Borders.Although they reach only a tiny fraction of the children psychologically scarred by the earthquake, the centers appear as islands of progress in a sea of despair. Over the months, for instance, Jasmine has been cajoled by art, singing and counseling, turning her thoughts from horror to happy wedding scenes at least for the time it takes to draw a picture.Before starting Plas Timoun, Préval visited her counterpart in the neighboring Dominican Republic to solicit help. Among other things, she came home with a half-dozen buses from Santo Domingo, the Dominican capital. The forest-green buses were parked in a shady parking lot, emptied of their seats and turned into instant classrooms.One bus is for art class. One is for pottery class, another for music. One is the library, called the "bibliobus." Dance is on an outdoor stage under a tree. Three shifts a day of about 200 children receive therapy, which is conducted so it seems to them like play.With President Rene Préval due to step down at the end of his term in February, Newstrom said, funding for Plas Timoun and the other facilities is uncertain. But foreign governments and aid agencies have pledged $10 billion in aid, and she expressed confidence that at least some of the funds will get steered to the center."I hope it doesn’t have to stop," she said. "The children really seem to like it here."As she spoke, a clutch of children gathered in the street and pushed at the iron gate, trying to get into the lot for the second shift of activities, which begins in the late morning.Newstrom said most of the children who show up still live in tents and under tarps in the homeless camps scattered across Port-au-Prince. Some attend school; others do not. Most days they get a meal at Plas Timoun – sometimes hot soup, sometimes U.S. military rations – which they often hoard to take home with them.It is not always enough. The other day, Newstrom noticed one boy bobbing and weaving when the children were supposed to be lined up for a flag-raising ceremony. She walked over to see what he was doing, she recalled, but before she could draw near, he fainted and fell to the ground.The boy, Victor Mayzer, 9, was dizzy – from malnutrition, Newstrom conjectured. She gave him a bowl of chicken-noodle soup and after a rest, he was back drawing pictures with the others. "I’m okay," he told an inquiring visitor and quickly looked away.But as the children gathered later to dance and sing Carnaval tunes in a circle around two of counselors playing a guitar and beating a drum, Victor held back, apparently not in the mood to join in.Newstrom danced a few steps toward him, urging him to participate. In response, Victor flexed his knees a few times to the rhythm and smiled wanly, but in the end he hung back and just watched.When they first arrive, Newstrom said, many children are withdrawn, silent and aggressive. Psychologists visit the facility regularly to care for those most severely affected by what they lived through Jan. 12. The visits to Plas Timoun probably cannot make them forget, she conceded. But as the months go by, she added, many open up and return to the normal concerns of children.Kieziac Genity, 8, was making a three-legged kitchen table in pottery class recently, for instance, but the boy seated next to her was molding the clay into a small rectangle. On close examination, it turned out to be a cellphone.

blog updated each day, visit us again

From The Alban Institute:by Peter L. SteinkeVisiting a relative who lives on the Great South Bay off the shores of Long Island, several of us joined him for a boat ride. We were on the bay in early afternoon, enjoying the breeze and fast ride. Some dark, scattered clouds cast shadows on the water, but the sky was mostly blue. The weather forecast called for sunshine with scattered showers in the evening. But several of the dark clouds suddenly bonded together. A strong breeze accompanied the darkening sky. Within minutes, everything became gray, concealing any sight of land. The wind-driven rain made visibility even more difficult. Unable to see land, the skipper turned to his boat’s compass to orient himself and the boat. Motoring slowly, he was able to dodge other boats on the bay as we headed for the now-invisible shore. Eventually, we saw partial outlines of beach houses as we approached land. Totally drenched and hyperalert on our own adrenaline, we docked at our destination. Oriented by the boat’s compass, we escaped harm’s way, landing safely.To be headed in a direction serves people well in life, just as it did for us on the bay. According to Edwin Friedman, a distinctive mark of a mature person is having clear life goals. Guided by personal goals, an individual is less likely to be distracted or detoured by the reactivity of others. Someone else’s behavior does not determine yours. Based on principles and values, you direct your life. Friedman often referred to the analogy of sailing to illustrate his point. Without a destination, a sailor on a lake meanders and drifts. The sailor will not adjust the sails to take advantage of the wind to proceed to the chosen landing place. If this is true on water, what about in life? Is orientation possible without destination?Considering all of the complexities and challenges facing churches, it is amazing that more of them are not on the brink of oblivion or in harm’s way. Many are not using a compass to navigate the hazy conditions created by cultural shift. When consulting with churches embroiled in conflict or paralyzed by passivity, I always ask the congregation, "Does this congregation have a clear sense of its mission?" Typical responses range from "poor sense of purpose" to "running in circles," from "lack of vision" to "our mission is not to have a mission." Questions like, Who are we? What is our primary focus? go begging for answers. Then when I ask individuals what they think the mission is, the answers are rote: "spread the word," "support the church," "love everyone," and "preach the Bible." No one has ever said, "Our mission is to turn the world upside-down," or "to join God’s ongoing promise to recreate the world," or "to let the world know that the resurrection means the world has not seen the last of Jesus Christ." Some members believed their congregation had a sense of mission because they had a mission statement. Sad to say, few knew what it was.Limping along without a focus is called mission drift. It is what happens when people come together to support an objective but forget what the objective is. People lose their reason for being, even though they go through the motions. Many things contribute to the sidetracking, such as compromising ideals in succumbing to a pressure group, searching for instant viability or solutions, grasping for saviors, fooling themselves that they are vital or viable simply because they endure, preoccupying themselves with nonessentials, exchanging their core beliefs for more marketable ideas, or failing to attend to what God is calling them to do in their little corner of the world.If mission is so essential to the congregation’s life and well-being, what exactly does mission mean? There is a movement called "the missional church." People assign marks or attribute certain actions to a missional church, but I find the term confusing. It is similar to saying "the ruling government" or the "athleticism of the athlete." Either a church is missional or it is not the church. Mission is the nature and purpose of the church, not some list of qualifiers.An additional confusion about the word mission comes from assuming mission necessarily results in growth. Distinguishing between congregations in survival mode (not growing) and those in mission (growing) is not honest and certainly not helpful. Every congregation, as a living system, is in the survival business. Thousands of congregations are decreasing in numbers, but some are also alive and sensitive to mission. Who is to condemn them to the category of survival? All things eventually reach their maximum growth. Are they then to be renamed as survival systems? Survival is fundamental to all organic life. Anything can be eliminated, obliterated, or cremated. Survival is not the church’s problem. The threat of it may even be the very stimulus needed for new action and direction. Countless churches are floundering, trying to understand why they exist. Mission drift is especially problematical for those churches that have experienced a steady decline in membership. A church that once numbered one thousand and now is supported by two hundred is a significantly different church. The mission is the same, but the refocusing needed for directing it escapes their imagination. Systems theory refers to an individual’s functioning position, a specific way of behaving. Organizations, like people, are emotional systems that also develop ways of functioning. As congregations decline, their functioning position changes, yet many continue to function as if nothing has changed.A congregation is a group of people who believe that more can be accomplished by joining with others. They come together with a purpose. To create more life, the people create a community of purpose. After many years of being together, though, people may wonder what happened to the purpose, to the vision, to the creativity, and to the meaningful service that once energized them. This is normal. Again and again, we have to explore why we came together. Congregations need to continue to review who they are and how they will respond. What are we trying to be? What is our calling at this time and in this place? Can we make a difference? Is there a purpose for our presence? If we are unaware of the particular view through which we are looking at the world, then we do not have any true choices about what we are going to see and how we are going to respond.Mission is the expression of the church’s deep, abiding beliefs. Mission provides the major standard against which all activities, services, and decisions are evaluated. Mission is the preserver of congregational integrity. It is about God’s love for the world, not about what I like or don’t like about my church. A major function of the congregation’s stewards is to be the creators and guardians of the mission. They defend the mission against resistant forces that would threaten or destroy it. They oversee the mission’s implementation. They keep the mission alive.Comment on this article on the Alban Roundtable blog  __________________________________________________________Adapted from A Door Set Open: Grounding Change in Mission and Hope by Peter L. Steinke, copyright © 2008 by the Alban Institute. All rights reserved.

thats funny

From The Miami Herald: The number of kidnappings in the hills above Port-au-Prince has increased as Haiti stands at a political crossroads.BY TRENTON DANIELTDANIEL@MIAMIHERALD.COMPORT-AU-PRINCE — A trio of gunmen stormed a gated home in the well-to-do Pelerin neighborhood, shot dead a Sunrise man and kidnapped a 16-year-old relative. Gregoire-Ronald Chery, 56, died of a single shot to the head. Nadege Charlot, his cousin, continued to be held Tuesday as kidnappers demanded a $100,000 ransom.Nadege’s abduction on Friday was the latest in a string of kidnappings in the hillside neighborhoods above Port-au-Prince, and it is raising fears that more could follow this election season.Almost eight months after the Jan. 12 earthquake killed an estimated 300,000 people, crime trends show an increase in kidnappings compared to this time last year. U.N. police have documented 68 abductions so far this year, compared to 51 a year ago.The winner of the Nov. 28 presidential election will be faced with the task of sheltering 1.5 million people made homeless by the January earthquake and removing 20 million cubic meters of rubble — and reducing the growing numbers of kidnappings.A recent U.S. travel advisory noted that bandits have attacked travelers leaving the Port-au-Prince international airport, and that at least two U.S. citizens were killed in recent months. Five have been kidnapped.Even relief workers have been targeted. In March, bandits abducted — and released — two staff members of Doctors Without Borders in Port-au-Prince. Two months later, kidnappers grabbed a British national from the Pan-American Development Foundation and his Haitian driver. The Brit was released. The driver was killed.“After Jan. 12, it looks like the good targets would be the NGOs,” said Reginald Delva, the head of a security consulting firm. “And I’m pretty sure they don’t have ransoms planned into their budgets.”Delva said about 30 private security firms work in Haiti, each with about 1,500 guards.Kidnappings in Port-au-Prince are down significantly from record highs of previous years — there were more than 800 in 2005. But the U.N. and others say they’re concerned about the 33 percent uptick they’ve seen so far this year over the same time in 2009. Many say they suspect politicians are tapping gang leaders to instigate unrest and carry out kidnappings to collect money to hire street protesters during the election.“I’m not afraid of gangs and insecurity,” said Haitian National Police General Director Mario Andresol. “I’m afraid of political turmoil. Anything can happen — trouble on the streets, big riots, big demonstrations. This is when a government gets sent away.”Rumors of an outbreak in violent demonstrations were abuzz in mid-August as prospective candidates and their supporters awaited the electoral council’s announcement on who would make the final cut.A delay in an announcement made some to wonder if the council was trying to avert the possibility of violence.INSECURITYAlthough the elections are the topic du jour, general insecurity is a close second.On Jan. 12, about 4,000 prisoners escaped the national penitentiary. Police officials believe some of the escaped prisoners have organized into gangs in neighborhoods such as Martissant, just outside Port-au-Prince.“These guys on the streets could create an insecurity situation,” Andresol said. “We’re after them. We arrested them before. We’ll arrest them again.”The majority of the abductions have focused solely on Haitians, especially those living in Pelerin, Thomassin and other relatively affluent areas.So far this year, 83 percent of the kidnappings have involved Haitians compared to 17 percent that involved foreigners, said André Leclerc, a spokesman for the U.N. policing unit.Kidnappers may be following the affluent to their neighborhoods under the guise of holding everyday discussions and conducting business deals, said Frantz Lerebours, a Haitian police spokesman.“Because the downtown area is broken, a lot of activity has gone up to Petionville,” Lerebours said. “Naturally, the criminals have followed.”Kidnappings are not the only violent crime worrying police.Chery, a Haitian fraud investigator with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, was gunned down at his cousin’s home in Petionville. Family members say the middle-class host family was targeted because there were relatives visiting from the United States.On Aug. 3, a doctor and opposition leader was shot dead after bandits stole his necklace and tried to take his wallet. A colleague said the killing was politically motivated; police say the case is under investigation.Other security concerns include a turf battle in the seaside slum of Cité Soleil that injured even bystanders — including four children — and protests that have demanded President René Préval’s departure. In June, unknown gunmen fired shots outside his home.And then there are rapes of women in some of the 1,300 camps scattered around the city. In the first two months after the quake, the Haitian grass-roots women’s organization KOFAVIV documented 230 rapes. The medical humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders has treated more than 200 victims of sexual violence.FRUSTRATIONEven as observers say kidnapping remains troublesome, they also say Haiti’s ratio of crime to population is low compared to Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia. But observers also say they worry that the Caribbean nation could see a surge as the population grows frustrated with what they see as an unresponsive administration and inadequate relief effort from abroad.“There are more violent places than Haiti,” said Bruce Bagley, chair and professor of the University of Miami’s Department of International Studies.“But I would expect crime, gang-related activity, and kidnappings to continue to rise as people become increasingly disaffected with the government and the international response.”Miami Herald staff writers Jim Wyss and Nadege Charles contributed to this report.

our service is updated everyday, come again

From Episcopal News Service:By ENS staff, August 31, 2010[Episcopal News Service] Randall Giles, composer, ethnomusicologist, and an Episcopal Church missionary in India, died Aug. 27 at a hospital in Pondicherry following a brief illness and a heart attack. He was 60.Since July 2000, Giles had been serving as director of the Institute for Indian Christianity and the Arts, a center that he helped to found.Based in Chennai, India, Giles "shared his love for music and liturgy in India and other parts of Asia" as a missionary of the Episcopal Church from the Diocese of Western Massachusetts for more than 10 years, explained the Rev. David Copley, mission personnel officer for the Episcopal Church.Copley described Giles as "a faithful servant and a passionate musician [who] will be missed by all those whom he touched throughout his ministry."Giles was involved in a project for the Episcopal Church’s former department of Anglican and Global Relations to record music from various provinces of the Anglican Communion. Titled "Throughout All the World," the series explored little-known Anglican music from places such as south India and the Church of Melanesia (in the Solomon Islands).His ministry "was broad and eclectic, ranging from running workshops for musicians, developing music for vacation Bible school programs, recording and documenting traditional music to supporting the development of liturgy and music," Copley said.As a composer, Giles worked in many styles and idioms. Among his published works are more than 40 carols, motets, anthems and other choral pieces. Other compositions include instrumental works and music for theater, film, and television.Giles enjoyed singing, and playing the violin and piano.Until his death, he had been serving as director of the Department of Music and Liturgy for the Church of South India’s Madras diocese, teaching privately and doing voice-overs for the Indian film industry, according to his website.Giles was born in Oregon City in 1950. His first studies in composition were with Mark DeVoto at Reed College, after which he earned his undergraduate degree at the University of York while studying with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies in London.He taught in the United Kingdom for two years, after which he returned to the United States to further his studies and to teach.He traveled to Liberia with the United States Peace Corps to help develop a music curriculum based on Liberian indigenous music for the Ministry of Education there. That was followed by a year with the Alaska State Council on the Arts, recording the music of four small rural villages during an Artists in the Schools residency. He subsequently returned to the U.K. to study with Sir Harrison Birtwistle and headed the music department at Queen’s College, London. He earned a master’s degree at Northwestern University studying with Alan Stout, after which he taught on the music faculties of Lewis and Clark, Marylhurst and Linfield colleges in Oregon.In 1991, Giles traveled to Madras (now Chennai), South India, where he was a visiting scholar at Saint George’s School, while beginning the writing of his Saint John Passion. That work was presented for his dissertation at the University of California, San Diego, where in 1992 Giles received a Doctor of Philosophy in Music degree.In 1993-1994, he returned to south Asia as a volunteer at a small school in Nepal, and to continue his study of liturgy and enculturation in the churches of South Asia. In 1999, he was invited to serve the Church of South India’s Diocese of Madras, to do parish-based work in music, and to work towards the founding of the center for Indian Christianity and the Arts.Giles is survived by his mother and a sister.

never miss a day, thanks for the blog

From The Miami Herald: Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank, thinks capitalism with a conscience might be the answer to some of Haiti’s ills.BY JIM WYSSJWYSS@MIAMIHERALD.COMThe father of microlending, Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, is hoping to midwife another idea — this one aimed at pulling Haiti out of the rubble.Yunus was in Miami on Monday to promote the concept of building a “social business fund” that will invest in companies that are using the tools of the boardroom to tackle social problems in Haiti.Speaking at Miami Dade College, Yunus said the idea is already showing success in his native Bangladesh.One of his flagship social businesses is Grameen Danone Foods, a joint venture between Yunus’ Grameen Bank and food conglomerate Danone. In that case, the multinational company agreed to make a special yogurt for Bangladesh that includes micronutrients lacking in the local diet. Two cups of the yogurt per week for one year can reverse the malnutrition that plagues about half of all children, Yunus said.Sold at sustainable but cut-rate prices, former beggars are being recruited as the sales force.While Danone can recover its investment, the social business model requires all profits be plowed back into the business to keep fighting the root problem: malnutrition.Such thinking could also be used in Haiti to tackle transportation problems, housing and health concerns, and the energy deficit, Yunus said. Monday’s trip to Miami was part of his effort to raise awareness and generate interest in the idea, he said.Some $5.8 billion dollars have been pledged to Haiti since the Jan. 12 earthquake. But many on the ground say there are few signs of rebuilding.Yunus said financing social businesses might provide the tangible, sustainable results the development community is seeking.He’s proposing that 10 percent of all charitable donations be put into the social business fund.“In charity, a dollar only has one life. You use it and it’s done,” he said. “As a social business, a dollar has an endless life, because it is recycled.” Even before the earthquake, the U.S. government was searching for ways to encourage investment in Haiti and Yunus’ model is intriguing, said U.S. Under Secretary for International Trade Francisco Sánchez.“This concept is more of a sustainable and enlightened philanthropy. We need to find more creative ways to make use of our philanthropic dollars,” he said. “Let’s spur entrepreneurship to create jobs and solve social problems.”Yunus became a rock star in international development circles when, in the 1970s, he used $28 from his own pocket to start a small-scale lending program for impoverished women in Bangladesh.Conventional wisdom held that the poor — with no collateral — were a credit risk. Yunus proved that the social networks created by community lending kept defaults low.The idea caught on. His Grameen Bank, which still works with some of that nation’s most downtrodden, has helped 8.3 million borrowers since 1976.Microlending programs have sprouted up around the world, including the United States. In Haiti, the group Fonkoze, has been offering microloans since 1994 and has more than 45,000 loans outstanding. In 2006, Yunus work was recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize.Yunus, who has yet to visit Haiti, said he sees many similarities between his own nation and the shattered island. He’s also sure that the success he’s seen back home can be replicated there.“Not that Haiti will change right away,” he warned. “But a process will begin.”