Time Magazine on Haiti

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A Weekend News Digest Supplement

I apologize for not maxing out on my news pieces recently, but I’ve been busy with Administrative issues and creating other content.

Not to mention real life.

I’ve looked at Time Magazine for the first time in a while and I discovered a backlog of pieces on Haiti that I thought I’d present as a supplement for you.

As always, this is not all the pieces, just the ones I think long enough to quote and of interest to my readers.

From Yahoo News World

1 Could the Haiti Earthquake Have Been Predicted?

By JEFFREY KLUGER, Time Magazine

Wed Jan 13, 4:10 pm ET

The tragedy of the earthquake that struck Haiti Tuesday, Jan. 12, is easy to measure in the lives lost, homes destroyed and infrastructure wrecked. The paradox of the quake is equally evident: when a natural disaster so devastating hits, oughtn’t we have some way of predicting it? Hurricanes, blizzards, even volcanoes can be forecast well before their arrival, after all, allowing governments and people to make lifesaving preparations. Earthquakes, however, are stealth disasters, geological phenomena largely undetectable until just seconds before they occur. What scientists have long wanted to know is why quakes are so sneaky and what, if anything, can be done to read their warning signs better.

2 U.S. Military Readies Disaster Response to Haiti Quake

By MARK THOMPSON / WASHINGTON, Time Magazine

Wed Jan 13, 8:10 pm ET

When an earthquake ravages a country as poor and urbanized as Haiti, it produces the cruelest kind of synergy, as poverty breeds cramped living quarters that are left even more vulnerable by substandard construction work. While U.S. officials weren’t issuing estimates of casualties from Tuesday’s strong 7.0 earthquake, there was growing concern that pancaked buildings in Port-au-Prince, home to some 2 million people – and Haiti’s inability to quickly rescue those who are trapped – could lead to thousands, if not tens of thousands, of fatalities.

3 In a Moment of Hope, Haiti Is Plunged Again into Despair

By TIM PADGETT, Time Magazine

Thu Jan 14, 2:10 am ET

What makes the apocalyptic earthquake that ravaged Haiti on Jan. 12 especially “cruel and incomprehensible,” as U.S. President Barack Obama put it, is that it struck at a rare moment of optimism. After decades of natural and political catastrophes – including the violent 2004 overthrow of then President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and four deadly hurricanes in 2008 – a U.N. peacekeeping force and an international investment campaign headed by former U.S. President Bill Clinton had recently begun to calm and rebuild the Caribbean nation, the western hemisphere’s poorest. “We were hearing more positive things from Haiti for once,” says Danielle Romer, a Miami social worker with family in Haiti. “Things were coming around.”

4 What Haiti Needs

By BILL CLINTON, Time Magazine

Thu Jan 14, 9:20 am ET

Hillary and I went to Haiti for the first time in December 1975. A banker friend of ours had some business down there. He had built up a lot of frequent-flyer miles and called and said he was giving us a delayed honeymoon. We were married in October, and we went down there in December. Both of us just kind of fell in love with the country, and I have kept up with it ever since.

5 Haiti’s Agony: What It Will Take to Rebuild

By MICHAEL ELLIOTT, Time Magazine

Thu Jan 14, 9:55 am ET

Tragedy has a way of visiting those who can bear it least. Haiti is the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, a place where malnutrition is widespread and less than half the population has access to clean drinking water. At 4:53:09 p.m. on Jan. 12, at a point 15 miles southwest of the capital, Port-au-Prince, the Caribbean tectonic plate pushed against the neighboring North American plate along a line known as the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden Fault system. On the earth’s surface, the enormous energy created by that tremor – an earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale – tossed the car that Bob Poff, the Salvation Army’s director of disaster services in Haiti, was driving down the hill from the suburb of PÉtionville to Port-au-Prince “to and fro like a toy.” When the shaking stopped, Poff wrote on a Salvation Army blog, “I looked out of the windows to see buildings ‘pancaking’ down … Thousands of people poured into the streets, crying, carrying bloody bodies, looking for anyone who could help them.”

6 After the Destruction: What Will It Take to Rebuild Haiti?

By BRYAN WALSH, Time Magazine

Mon Jan 18, 5:05 am ET

At 7.0 on the Richter scale, the earthquake that hit Haiti on Jan. 12 was strong, but hardly record-breaking – very similar, in fact, to a 7.0 temblor that hit the San Francisco Bay area in 1989. But that’s where the similarities end. The 1989 San Francisco quake left up to 12,000 people homeless and killed 63. The 2010 Haiti quake, however, will likely make over a million people homeless, and its death toll could be 50,000 or much higher.

7 With the Military in Haiti: Breaking the Supply Logjam

By TIM PADGETT/PORT-AU-PRINCE, Time Magazine

Mon Jan 18, 5:05 am ET

When I arrived at Port-au-Prince’s Toussaint L’Overture International Airport on a U.S. Navy relief helicopter Saturday morning, the first glimpse of Haiti I caught below was what greets every flight into the western hemisphere’s poorest country: the vast Cite Soleil slum. But from a bird’s-eye view, at least, the cataclysmic earthquake that struck Port-au-Prince on Jan. 12 seemed to actually spare the shantytown’s humblest dwellings, the kind made of pallet-wood walls and corrugated tin roofs. The houses that took the worst beatings appeared to be newer ones built of more upscale concrete blocks, many of which had been reduced to gravel pits.

8 Haiti Tries to Go From Rescue to Recovery to Relief

By JAY NEWTON-SMALL / PORT-AU-PRINCE, Time Magazine

Tue Jan 19, 3:30 am ET

Michaud Jonas, 27, came to the flattened Palm Apparel factory in part to see if he could find his little sister’s body – and in part to find work. Jonas’ sister was one of hundreds trapped beneath the rubble of the t-shirt plant, perhaps the largest loss of life in a single building in a country full of death. By some employee accounts, the factory employed 2,000 people and about half were pulled from the rubble right after the earthquake that has claimed tens of thousands of Haitian lives since last Tuesday. Palm’s death toll may be several hundred, but there is no practical way to come up with an accurate count.

9 Haitians See Aid Distributed Unequally in Port-au-Prince

By JAY NEWTON-SMALL / PORT-AU-PRINCE, Time Magazine

Tue Jan 19, 4:50 am ET

All they wanted was some help. Some water, a little food, maybe some medical supplies. But what had started out as an interview with an earthquake victim turned into scary scuffle in downtown Port-au-Prince, the area worst hit by Jan. 12’s earthquake. Desperate Haitians clamored for my card on the misapprehension that somehow my Washington, D.C., office number might be the magic pill to alleviate their suffering. I gave out my cards, then produced scraps of paper when I ran out of them, writing down the numbers.

10 Haiti Rescue: Saving the Man Who Saved My Life

By BENJAMIN SKINNER, Time Magazine

Wed Jan 20, 2:25 pm ET

I was in Haiti in October 2005 researching my book on modern-day slavery when I contracted a severe case of malaria. A young Haitian man named Bill Nathan, then 21, who manages a shelter for homeless boys in Port-au-Prince, took me in and attended to me daily as I lapsed in and out of consciousness. He found the chloroquine that kept me alive.

11 Aftershock

By BRYAN WALSH, JAY NEWTON-SMALL AND TIM PADGETT, Time Magazine

Thu Jan 21, 2:35 am ET

Michaud Jonas returned to the ruins of the Palm Apparel factory to see if he could find his little sister’s body – and, possibly, a job. Hundreds of workers were buried under the rubble of this T-shirt-manufacturing plant in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Carrefour, and Jonas’ sister, 22, was one of them. The scent of decay around the neighborhood was overpowering. Yet though he mourned his loss – his brother and mother also died, when the family’s home collapsed – he looked ahead. “Here was the worst place hit, so maybe it’ll be the first place to recover,” he said. “I need to find a job so I can help what’s left of my family. They are depending on me.”

12 Haiti’s Medical Crisis: Treating Crushed Survivors

By JAY NEWTON-SMALL / PORT-AU-PRINCE, Time Magazine

Thu Jan 21, 10:35 am ET

Jean Marc Loremas, 46, carried his niece more than a mile from their home in the La Plaine area of Port-au-Prince to a sparsely populated industrial zone. There he nodded to two foreign guards in olive green fatigues and about a dozen semi-ambulatory earthquake victims already lined up on various pallets, crutches and canes before pounding on a metal sliding gate. “Shalom?” came the response as the eyehole shot back. Loremas explained his needs and soon an Israeli doctor came out to examine niece’s broken femur.

13 Haiti’s Orphaned Kids: How the Quake Is Speeding Adoptions

By SIOBHAN MORRISSEY / PORT-AU-PRINCE, Time Magazine

Thu Jan 21, 10:35 am ET

Dressed in an orange floral pinafore with her hair neatly pulled back into cornrows, 7-year-old Marie Guerline Clerge Bryditzki could serve as the poster child for increased efforts to place Haiti’s orphans in adoptive homes following the devastating earthquake.

14 Medics Scramble to Save Quake Survivors

By SIOBHAN MORRISSEY / PORT-AU-PRINCE, Time Magazine

Fri Jan 22, 1:10 pm ET

In his Thomas the Tank Engine buttoned-down shirt, Graddensky LaPlante of Carrefour looked like a typical five-year-old. But two gaping wounds in his scalp that cut clean to his skull and a bandaged right leg easily identified him as one of thousands of earthquake injured “When the earthquake happened, the roof just collapsed on him,” said his father Jean-Robert LaPlante, who had brought the child to the Admiral Killick Naval Base in Carrefour district of Port-au-Prince.

15 The Coast Guard in Haiti: First Responders, in for the Long Haul

By SIOBHAN MORRISSEY / ON THE U.S.S. TAHOMA OFF HAITI, Time Magazine

Fri Jan 22, 1:10 pm ET

When the U.S. Coast Guard arrived in Haiti on Day 3 of the Jan. 12 earthquake, they were overwhelmed by people needing medical attention. Their supplies were low and their equipment rudimentary. As first responders to the disaster they had a lot of improvising to do. “The first few days we were taking tree branches and breaking them for splints,” says OS1 James Sweetman, who originally was assigned to help out with security at a makeshift medical clinic at the Admiral Killick Naval Base in the capital’s Carrefour district. “We cut wool blankets for slings and made backboards out of doors.”

16 The Distant Memories of Haiti Before the Quake

By AMY WILENTZ, Time Magazine

Sat Jan 23, 11:05 am ET

When I went down to Haiti for the first time in 1986, it was for no good reason. It’s true I had a sneaking suspicion that there was a political crisis there, that the dictator-President Baby Doc Duvalier – was being forced out of power. But at the time, I was not a news rat. I’d read Graham Greene’s dark novel The Comedians, about a hotelier in Haiti under the rule of Duvalier’s brutal father Papa Doc, and it painted a picture of a country both alluring and disturbing – and conveniently nearby! I wanted to see the Tontons Macoute, the Duvaliers’ silent secret police, in their blue jeans, floppy hats and sunglasses, wielding their waistband pistols and billy clubs. I wanted to see chubby Baby Doc and his skinny-scary wife Michele Bennett. I spoke French, but otherwise I was very green as a foreign correspondent. I was both innocent and romantic, and that’s probably why I had the nerve to go there.

Too Short

  1. Haiti Earthquake Was the ‘Big One’ Says Top Seismologist
  2. After the Quake Comes the Disease. Can Haiti Cope?
  3. Haiti Donations by Text Message: Fundraising Goes Viral
  4. Haiti Earthquake: Will Criminal Gangs Exploit Chaos?
  5. Haiti Tries to Dig Out as Corpses Pile Up
  6. After the Quake: Should Haitian Refugees Be Given Special Status?
  7. The U.S. Military in Haiti: A Compassionate Invasion
  8. Haiti’s Earthquake: Are the Death Estimates Accurate?
  9. Haiti: After the Devastation, the Emotional Wreckage
  10. Haitians Anxious for U.S. Troops’ Aid in Port-au-Prince
  11. The Post-Quake Water Crisis: Getting Seawater to the Haitians
  12. Haiti and the Dominican Republic: A Tale of Two Countries
  13. Q & A: How to Rebuild Haiti Stronger
  14. For Taiwan, Helping Haiti Offers Rare Moment on World Stage
  15. Haiti and China: A Tale of Two Earthquakes
  16. Haiti: Returning to Work Helps Survivors Deal with Grief
  17. Haiti’s Signal FM: The Little Radio Station that Could

4 comments

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  1. Finally.

    Bad Characters.

    All Time Magazine.  All Haiti.  All the time.

    • TMC on January 24, 2010 at 00:40

    Who would ever have thought that Popular Mechanics would have a reason to write an article about MSF. Well, they did

    How Doctors Without Borders Set Up Field Hospitals in Haiti

    When a natural disaster destroys a city’s medical facilities, victims rely on field hospitals to function in their place. Setting up a self-sustaining hospital, however, requires a massive logistical effort that must be performed on a tight deadline. Conditions in  earthquake-stricken Haiti are especially challenging, since tons of equipment must be transported across long distances to an area with poor infrastructure and many inaccessible areas.

    No one knows the challenges of setting up a field hospital in a disaster area better than the staff at Doctors Without Borders, or Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), a nonprofit medical organization dedicated to humanitarian aid. MSF’s hospital in Haiti will contain two surgical units, a recovery area, an intensive care unit, an emergency room and rehabilitation services. All of this adds up to a whopping 45 tons of equipment supplied by MSF’s centers in Europe and Central America.

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