Back in Gonaives – curiously enough a city I mentioned in my previous blog as I was watching news of hurricanes battering the Caribbean just a few weeks ago. Well, Hurricane Ike left a bit more than a mess here – 16 feet of water, and an estimated 2.5 million cubic meters of mud. If you’re wondering how much that is – don’t look to me for witty analogies. It’s a lot. To give you an idea, one UN staffer estimated it would take 200 trucks, working seven days a week, one full year to remove it all from the city. And since I’ve seen about five such trucks in my three days here so far, I’m guessing they are going to have to tweak that estimate a bit.
This city sufferes in the best of times. Electricity, even when there hasn’t been a hurricane, is available for only about 8 hours a day. There has been none for weeks here now, and it’s not likely coming back any time soon. I’m writing this from the UN compound in Gonaives, though I better write quickly before they find out I’m American and hold me hostage for a few billion in UN dues teh US owes. Touchy subject. The work here is slow, and difficult. People are desperately poor, anxious, and increasingly angry, and that’s a bad combination for food distributions, which can spark some trouble if you’re not very careful in how you carry them out. Most convoys of food go out with UN security attachments. CRS has been distributing sort of on the QT from the Missionaries of Charity and other out-of-the-way sites without security, and that’s worked well so far.
I know aid workers are supposed to be neutral, and since I don’t consider myself an aid worker, perhaps I don’t have to be. But Haiti is just hard – a hard place to work, a hard place to shoot photos, and hard place to live. It’s not one of my favorite places. If that’s me, writing from the electrified and well-fed compound of the UN, imagine what it is for 350,000 Haitians living in Gonaives, with a few hundred tons of mud beneath them.
September 28th, 2008 | by David in Humanitarian Aid
What follows are my own personal opinions, as are all expressed in this web site, and completely free of connection to any agency or person mentioned herein.
Stopped down after 6 weeks in Lebanon to do some work here in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. I was here in 2002, during the height of the intifadah, and it’s hard to imagine, but things have actually gotten worse. In Gaza, they’ve gotten much worse. The current sanctions by the US, Israel, and the EU – along with the closures of the Gaza borders by Israel – have Gaza on the ropes. No one can work in Israel now, since Hamas came to power early this year, which effectively cuts the lifeline to employment that most in Gaza depend upon. Unemployment is now at 65% there. 75% of Gazans live below the poverty line. In the West Bank, Israel is building a Barrier Wall that’s 703 kilometers long, and as high as 25 feet tall. It seperates the West Bank from Israel itself – for security the Israeli’s say, but it’s much more than that, as things often are in this region. The Barrier Wall snakes as far as 20 kilometers into the West Bank, east of the Green Line established in 1967, the defacto border of Israel, though Israel will argue that – to take in most of the Israeli settlements built, illegally, in the West Bank in that time. One Palestinian NGO I spoke with in the West Bank estimates that, all told, between the wall itself, and the many access roads, settlements, and no-go areas for Palestinians throughout the Occupied Territories, that 48% of the West Bank is off-limits to Palestinians. There are more than 500 checkpoints and barriers in the West Bank, imposed by the Israeli Defense Force, that West Bank residents must navigate every day, choking movement within and throughout the region. But we don’t hear about any of this in the United States.
This region is complicated, and layered in a deep and bloody history so complex that it defies casual description or summation. But it also demands some explanations – and most of all it demands that the truth about what is happening in the West Bank and Gaza be disseminated – which it is not, especially in the US media. Having traveled to more than 45 countries around the world now, I have never been so angered or frustrated by my experiences anywhere as I have here. For anyone who reads this, please take this strong advice: learn the truth about what’s really going on in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. As Americans, we have a responsibility to know what our money supports, and how it reflects on us as a nation, and as people within that nation. I believe that Israeli’s have the right to live in peace, within secure borders. And I believe that Palestinians, also, have the same right. What we don’t see in America, because the message is not allowed by a stringent and aggressive Israeli media machine to reach us, is that those rights are daily being subjugated by the Israeli military who occupy the West Bank and Gaza. The injustices perpetuated daily there only inflame the situation, and stoke the fires of a new generatioon of radicals that the US then uses to justify our total and unfliching support of Israel.
We need to know this because it’s our money, as Americans, that supports it. Israel is the largest single recipient of US aid money – by far – in the world – more than $1.5 billion a year. Couched now in the guise of “countering terrorism,” it would seem Israel has carte blanche to continue its efforts in Gaza and West Bank – efforts that have repeatedly over the years been sanctioned and condemned by the United Nations and the International Court of Justice as illegal, and as many times completely ignored by the Israeli government, almost always with the backing of the United States.
I am not naive about this situation. There are elements in Palestine who seek the destruction of Israel, and every legitimate state has the right to protect itself from such elements. But it’s time we learn the truth about this dynamic, and stop as a nation being international apologists for Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – and worse, strong financial backers of it. A two state solution for both Israel and Palestine is the only solution. Let’s stop blindy supporting the injustices that perpetuate the current stalemate and use what little international clout we have left as a nation to solve this problem before another generation of Palestinians, and Israeli’s, grow up with the hate they are each taught from birth to feel towards the other.
September 25th, 2006 | by David in Humanitarian Aid, Travel
I took some time today to try and track down a family I interviewed last week. Their father, Kamel, was dieing of cancer, and the family was living in a school in East Beirut being used as a shelter. They moved the day after the ceasefire, and we tracked them to a home in the southern suburbs of the city today. That area was pounded during the fighting here – the explosions from these strikes were the ones that rattled my windows for the first week I was here. Whole buildings are toppled, their floors stacked like pancakes, one on top of the other. We finally tracked them to a small house on a side street, across from a flattened apartment building. The residents there said the family had left – gone home to Nabitiye to bury Kamel, who died Tuesday evening. It wasn’t a surprise – he clearly had only days to live when I saw him last week. But it’s one of the many small tragedies of this war – that a man, terminally ill with cancer, couldn’t get home to his village, and died in a stranger’s home here in Beirut. All over the country this week, people like Kamel’s wife and teenaged sons are on the move, heading home to find out if in fact they have a home to return to.
August 17th, 2006 | by David in Humanitarian Aid, Travel
Ironic that after 33 days of air and sea bombardment you would celebrate a ceasefire with fireworks and anti-aircraft fire. But there it is – the skies over Beirut are filled with explosions again tonight. This time, it is friendly fire. It wasn’t at 6 this morning when a few blasts rocked the southern suburbs – parting shots by Israel two hours before the ceasefire took place I went out today to a school I’d visited the first day I arrived here. Within hours of the ceasefire, many of the people living there were already packing up. Battered cars and vans were loaded with foam mattreses, tied tight to the roof, and driven off to wards the rubble of the south. It remindds me so much of the return to Kosovo in 1999. People don’t wait for resolutions or promises before they head home. Many are there as I write this tonight. And even though this ceasefire is tentative at best – like chaining two pit bulls together and telling them to be good until someone gets home to watch them – it was nice to see smiles today on the faces of those who have been suffering here.
August 14th, 2006 | by David in Humanitarian Aid, Travel
32 days in, and we are slouching towards a ceasefire. Two days after showering the city with leaflets warning of new attacks in new areas – and a thunderous morning of bombings yesterday – both sides have agreed to the terms of a UN resolution. While terms at such times, under such conditions, may be worth little more than the paper they are printed on – like the leaflets that fell here – Beirut feels different tonight. Perhaps people are just hopeful. But 31 hours now away from the time the Israeli military pledges to cease operations, there is also a real fear that those hours will be filled with the sounds of Israeli jets. This being a quiet Saturday night, thus far, people joke of a noisy Sunday ahead. But such jokes belie a deeper fear. One day, and night, at a time, and we will see what the next hours bring.
August 12th, 2006 | by David in Humanitarian Aid, Travel
I was outside today when thousands of leaflets began fluttering down from the sky. It was a warning from the Israeli military that three new areas of the southern suburbs will now be targetted. It’s amazing how beautiful a sky full of paper looks – I’ve never seen it before. More amazing perhaps given the ominous message that paper bears. Though life continues here, days like today remind everyone that this place is still a war zone. Shops close early, people clear the streets long before dark. And even though Israeli planes hit Beirut during the day – there was a reported attack by a helicopter on either an antennae or a light house today, depending on who you ask – the night brings with it its own special sort of fear. It really is something primal, I suppose. I feel it even here, far enough away from the areas being routinely bombed to be safe. I cannot imagine how it feels further south, where they are waiting tonight for more than paper to fall from the skies above Beirut.
August 10th, 2006 | by David in Humanitarian Aid, Travel
Writing now from Beirut, having arrived a few days ago on a ship chartered by the Canadian government to evacuate the last of their nationals from Lebanon. The last days and nights have been filled with the enormity of arriving in a war zone, though the central part of the city where I am now staying is oddly removed in many ways from the nightly air raids of the southern suburbs. There are booms and flashes as new targets are hit north and south of the city, but the war here is more tangibly visible in the long lines now forming for gas, which is in increasingly short supply. The station I walk past each morning on my way to the office here had 32 cars in line yesterday morning – the point at which the line turned a corner and I could not count the others waiting. If the fuel goes, the electricity goes, and if that goes the troubles here will compound overnight. In speaking with the displaced who are crowding the makeshift centers here – mostly schools and other public buildings now housing hundreds of thousands of Lebanese fleeing the war – there is fear and anger and frustration, all that would be expected as the politicians debate nightly the terms of an agreement that is paper to them, but very much more than that to those sheltering from Israeli bombs here in Beirut. With the situation here still very fluid, it is hard to travel, and we are on a self-imposed dusk curfew. Still, I hope to get out of the city and head as far south as I can once it is relatively safe to do so. As it now stands, no passage right now is considered safe, and aid agencies who have staff here are by and large in “stand by” mode, awaiting the chance to move supplies to those most in need down south. More from Beirut as I can.
August 6th, 2006 | by David in Humanitarian Aid, Travel
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