Inside Sean Penn's Tent City in Haiti
Almost a year after the earthquake, the lives of many Haitians are filled with unimaginable horrors.
October 21, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/world/148561/inside_sean_penns_tent_city_in_haiti?page=entire"I'm black and Haitian, and I wouldn't go where you're going right now, in the dark," Marc, my ride, says as we're on our way to the Petionville golf course on the eastern edge of Port-au-Prince. Well, it used to be a golf course. Now it's packed with more than 50,000 homeless and is known as "Sean Penn's camp," because the actor's humanitarian organization, JP/Haitian Relief Organization, runs it. Everyone knows the camps are hotbeds of rape and violent crime, but we've planning all day for Marc to drop me off here to meet someone. His sudden worry about my getting out of the car is a little unsettling.
"I'm sayin', there's a reason all the aid organizations get their people outta there by like six," Marc explains. (I've changed his name for his safety.) But when I resist blowing off the meeting, he allows that this settlement might be a little safer than others.
Daniel Julien, my new friend who lives here and invited me over, says the same assuring thing when I meet him on a busy side street and we start walking into the sea of tarps, lit by a few floodlights on impossibly high poles. I squint into the glare as Daniel leads me toward his house. "Did I call it a house? I'm sorry, should I say tent?" he says, and laughs. He leads me past row after row of plastic supported by sticks until we arrive at our destination. "And here we are," he says. "My piece of Tent City."...
That's why everything smells like urine. To avoid the toilets, Daniel's family uses a bucket in a corner. The three of them keep their mud-floored plastic hovel fantastically neat, and empty the bucket constantly, but at some point I inhale sharply and breathe in too much of the stink. I puke into my mouth, and pretend I didn't. I suggest that we go for a walk.
Outside, it's clear that plenty of other residents are improvising bathroom facilities, too. The air is still, and within seconds my nose and throat are coated with the reek of hot rotting shit. "People have a lot of needs here," Daniel tells me while I spit as inconspicuously as possible. He's starting an organization called Redeem for Handicap. "There's a lot of amputees because of the earthquake, right?" I ask, looking for my footing on the steep muddy trail. "How do they get around here?" "Yeah, that's a problem," says Daniel.
But he points out that they're hardly the only ones struggling. There's a lady who lives right over here who lost her husband, Daniel gestures. She's got kids, and she's too sick to work, and she hasn't eaten in a week. This tall smiley fellow shaking my hand is difficult to understand because he's deaf from rubble that fell on his head. He needs a hearing aid. But Redeem for Handicap, or any other organization, can't raise money from the international community without a website…
(much more at link)
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So where did the Millions of $$$$ given go too? That is the real question? And oh by the way - where is Bush and Clintons charity movement?
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