Re: [MMM] Japan

On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 4:11 AM, jonszanto <jszanto@...> wrote:
>
> --- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> > Can you recommend an organization that you think will route the funds
> > correctly? After seeing what happened down in Haiti, I don't want to
> > deal with anything remotely resembling the Red Cross anymore.
>
> This is so sad to hear, Mike. I know you and I have corresponded a bit about your Haiti experience - do you think at least some of it was the untenable confluence of circumstances of Haiti itself? I'd like to hope so.

I don't want to hijack Daniel's thread, as this is supposed to be
about Japan, not Haiti. But I guess I should provide some
clarification about my earlier comment, being as the Red Cross has
another "donate for Japan!" campaign out, and here I am bashing the
Red Cross. I learned something about how all of this "disaster relief"
funding works while I was down in Haiti. It's probably relevant here
for anyone who wants to donate money so that they can get some insight
into how this all works. I hope we can allow for a brief digression so
that I can relate my experiences and allow everyone to make more
informed decisions about where they donate to.

Although this is a fact of life that most Haitian citizens take for
granted, the city is almost as messed up as it was the day the
earthquake happened. It's completely in ruins. There's no rebuilding,
people are still living in tents. As of last November, there were no
cranes and bulldozers putting anything up, no construction at all.
Driving around PAP at night was like driving around San Fran or Miami
600 years from now. Like you're driving through a 21st century Machu
Picchu or something.

I went to Port Au Prince twice, the second time staying for a month
and a half and serving as the IT director of Bernard Mevs hospital.
The hospital I worked at was and still is the most technologically
advanced hospital in Haiti. And that's not saying much. We had a
$600,000 telemedicine room that Cisco donated to us (which was never
used once, and could have been replaced with a laptop and Skype), but
we didn't have surgical meshes. We had a little telemedicine robot
that could run around and do stuff, but we didn't have diapers for the
babies. We had one broken ECG and we had to try and fix it in an
emergency situation with, I shit you not, guitar strings for
conductive material and duct tape. At one point, the ECG fell and
broke to pieces, and we put it back together to find that one of the
plastic pins had been discarded in the trash - one of the nurses put
on two pairs of gloves and went into a contaminated red biohazard
trash can to find it. I'm not going to tell you what was written on
top of the trash can. We also had no x-ray for most of my stay.

And this is the best hospital in the country. Despite its problems, it
was functional. The General Hospital, on the other hand, is best
described as being a place worse than hell. I will spare you the
specifics of what went down there and the publically owned labor
hospital. The Haitian doctors working there had no salary and were
basically working for free. Then they stopped working, because they
were also living in tents and couldn't afford to work for free. Then
they stopped taking American volunteers because of some Haitian pride
thing, which as Jon pointed out is yet another complexity going on
with all of this. So it just sucks all around.

So not only is construction down there not happening, but the state of
Haiti's medical care is that the most technologically advanced
hospital in it has no diapers, one McGyver'd and busted single-lead
ECG, no x-ray, and a cholera epidemic to deal with. Meanwhile, the
publically owned General Hospital has no money to pay their doctors.

But this is even with the Red Cross and the US's massively "pledged"
donation figures helping out, right? Well hold right there!
http://www.jacksonadvocateonline.com/?p=1500
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/05/12/eveningnews/main6477611.shtml
http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/poor-governance-to-blame-for-haiti-aid-quagmire-red-cross
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/09/29/world/main6909940.shtml
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/oct/4/haiti-still-waiting-for-aid-pledged-by-us-others/
http://www.disasteraccountability.com/blog/2010/10/13/the-haiti-relief-trust-funds/
http://www.nonprofitquarterly.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6791:stalled-donations-for-haiti&catid=155:nonprofit-newswire&Itemid=986
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2010/10/117_74510.html

Keep mental track of those numbers - in the hundreds of millions to
the billions we're seeing donated between all of these groups. Well,
right before I left, at the end of November, the American Red Cross
finally came down and hooked us up with somewhere between $1-2 mil,
which was supposed to last us for the year - provided we can prove
that we'll be able to sustain ourselves after that. So we finally got
enough to keep us afloat for a year, but probably not enough to buy
the stuff we need. And this is under the stipulation that we can "be
sustainable" in a year (hint: nothing in Haiti will be sustainable in
a year unless you pump money into the economy down there RIGHT NOW),
so we have to start charging patients more and effectively deny care
to the poorest class, which defeats the whole purpose of emergency aid
relief to begin with. But I shouldn't complain, because the GH, which
is several orders of magnitude larger than our hospital, got a measly
$4 million over one year.

Insofar as emergency disaster aid relief care is supposed to be going
anywhere, it should be going to the GH. This place is several times
larger than us and is legally not allowed to turn patients away (this
place is hell on earth). I'd rather them have just given us nothing
and put all of the funds at the GH. Or merged the two hospitals
together. The GH needs more than $4 million for one year to get
running. 4 mil is nothing. This is THE hospital in Haiti. $4 mil is
about $300k a month, and there are hundreds and hundreds of patients
in this hospital (might have been into 1,000, wish I could remember
the exact number). They don't even have working power there, it goes
in and out.

So I don't know where in the hell the relief money is going if it isn't going to
- Funding medical care in Haitian medical hospitals
- Rebuilding anything at all
- Getting people out of the tent cities or even giving supplies to the
tent cities

Nobody down there has any idea where all of these supposed hundreds of
millions of dollars are going. All we knew is that it wasn't going to
us. And the news reports are finally starting to reflect the reality
down in the field, which is that there is no money coming.

The point: Apparently this is not a one-off incident with the Red
Cross. Down in the volunteer community it's pretty well known that
there is a disparity between the Red Cross's press releases and the
harsh reality that occurs in situations like these. They've been
criticized for sitting on funds like this time and time again, and I
hope they don't do the same thing here in Japan. So just like now I'm
talking about how they still haven't given funds properly to Haiti,
apparently when the Haiti earthquake hit they were criticized for
still not having given funds properly to aid in the Indian Ocean
tsunami before that. They will often claim that they're "saving it for
longer-term development," which is the stupidest possible strategy
that you could take in the face of disaster relief.

So that is why I asked Daniel if he knew where I could donate to. I am
only one person involved here, and I hope that I and the other
volunteers that I'd speak to about this are wrong, and that that money
that was donated is somehow being used productively. But at this
point, it is my personal preference to give funds directly to the
organizations that are doing work, instead of going through glorified
middlemen like the Red Cross.

If anyone has any other questions about Haiti let's please take it to
metatuning so that I don't detract from Daniel's efforts to raise
awareness about the situation in Japan over here.

-Mike

Informative post Mike, I appreciate~

on a musical note i recommend
Harold Courlander's
The Drum and the Hoe
who was in Haiti the same time as Maya Deren both looking at Voodoo.
His account is probably the most positive one i think has been done.
The last part of the book has many transcriptions which makes it worth something all by itself.

You might remember his name as it is his story he collected in Africa that Partch used in Delusion.
and he was awarded a big sum when other stories of his appeared in Roots. [6 chapters]

Quite few years ago the smithsonian has a world music festival where a Haitian Voodoo group was scheduled to play every day at noon.
unfortunately after 20 min the first day someone went under and had to have an ambulence called.
The rest of the shows were canceled:)

I wrote a piece in france [15 years ago] called Haiti based on what he wrote down which i won't post at the moment as have in the past.

/^_,',',',_ //^/Kraig Grady_^_,',',',_
Mesotonal Music from:
_'''''''_ ^North/Western Hemisphere:
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island <http://anaphoria.com/>

_'''''''_^South/Eastern Hemisphere:
Austronesian Outpost of Anaphoria <http://anaphoriasouth.blogspot.com/>

',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',

a momentary antenna as i turn to water
this evaporates - an island once again

On 18/03/11 8:53 PM, Mike Battaglia wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 4:11 AM, jonszanto<jszanto@...> wrote:
>> --- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia<battaglia01@...> wrote:
>>> Can you recommend an organization that you think will route the funds
>>> correctly? After seeing what happened down in Haiti, I don't want to
>>> deal with anything remotely resembling the Red Cross anymore.
>> This is so sad to hear, Mike. I know you and I have corresponded a bit about your Haiti experience - do you think at least some of it was the untenable confluence of circumstances of Haiti itself? I'd like to hope so.
> I don't want to hijack Daniel's thread, as this is supposed to be
> about Japan, not Haiti. But I guess I should provide some
> clarification about my earlier comment, being as the Red Cross has
> another "donate for Japan!" campaign out, and here I am bashing the
> Red Cross. I learned something about how all of this "disaster relief"
> funding works while I was down in Haiti. It's probably relevant here
> for anyone who wants to donate money so that they can get some insight
> into how this all works. I hope we can allow for a brief digression so
> that I can relate my experiences and allow everyone to make more
> informed decisions about where they donate to.
>
> Although this is a fact of life that most Haitian citizens take for
> granted, the city is almost as messed up as it was the day the
> earthquake happened. It's completely in ruins. There's no rebuilding,
> people are still living in tents. As of last November, there were no
> cranes and bulldozers putting anything up, no construction at all.
> Driving around PAP at night was like driving around San Fran or Miami
> 600 years from now. Like you're driving through a 21st century Machu
> Picchu or something.
>
> I went to Port Au Prince twice, the second time staying for a month
> and a half and serving as the IT director of Bernard Mevs hospital.
> The hospital I worked at was and still is the most technologically
> advanced hospital in Haiti. And that's not saying much. We had a
> $600,000 telemedicine room that Cisco donated to us (which was never
> used once, and could have been replaced with a laptop and Skype), but
> we didn't have surgical meshes. We had a little telemedicine robot
> that could run around and do stuff, but we didn't have diapers for the
> babies. We had one broken ECG and we had to try and fix it in an
> emergency situation with, I shit you not, guitar strings for
> conductive material and duct tape. At one point, the ECG fell and
> broke to pieces, and we put it back together to find that one of the
> plastic pins had been discarded in the trash - one of the nurses put
> on two pairs of gloves and went into a contaminated red biohazard
> trash can to find it. I'm not going to tell you what was written on
> top of the trash can. We also had no x-ray for most of my stay.
>
> And this is the best hospital in the country. Despite its problems, it
> was functional. The General Hospital, on the other hand, is best
> described as being a place worse than hell. I will spare you the
> specifics of what went down there and the publically owned labor
> hospital. The Haitian doctors working there had no salary and were
> basically working for free. Then they stopped working, because they
> were also living in tents and couldn't afford to work for free. Then
> they stopped taking American volunteers because of some Haitian pride
> thing, which as Jon pointed out is yet another complexity going on
> with all of this. So it just sucks all around.
>
> So not only is construction down there not happening, but the state of
> Haiti's medical care is that the most technologically advanced
> hospital in it has no diapers, one McGyver'd and busted single-lead
> ECG, no x-ray, and a cholera epidemic to deal with. Meanwhile, the
> publically owned General Hospital has no money to pay their doctors.
>
> But this is even with the Red Cross and the US's massively "pledged"
> donation figures helping out, right? Well hold right there!
> http://www.jacksonadvocateonline.com/?p=1500
> http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/05/12/eveningnews/main6477611.shtml
> http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/poor-governance-to-blame-for-haiti-aid-quagmire-red-cross
> http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/09/29/world/main6909940.shtml
> http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/oct/4/haiti-still-waiting-for-aid-pledged-by-us-others/
> http://www.disasteraccountability.com/blog/2010/10/13/the-haiti-relief-trust-funds/
> http://www.nonprofitquarterly.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6791:stalled-donations-for-haiti&catid=155:nonprofit-newswire&Itemid=986
> http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2010/10/117_74510.html
>
> Keep mental track of those numbers - in the hundreds of millions to
> the billions we're seeing donated between all of these groups. Well,
> right before I left, at the end of November, the American Red Cross
> finally came down and hooked us up with somewhere between $1-2 mil,
> which was supposed to last us for the year - provided we can prove
> that we'll be able to sustain ourselves after that. So we finally got
> enough to keep us afloat for a year, but probably not enough to buy
> the stuff we need. And this is under the stipulation that we can "be
> sustainable" in a year (hint: nothing in Haiti will be sustainable in
> a year unless you pump money into the economy down there RIGHT NOW),
> so we have to start charging patients more and effectively deny care
> to the poorest class, which defeats the whole purpose of emergency aid
> relief to begin with. But I shouldn't complain, because the GH, which
> is several orders of magnitude larger than our hospital, got a measly
> $4 million over one year.
>
> Insofar as emergency disaster aid relief care is supposed to be going
> anywhere, it should be going to the GH. This place is several times
> larger than us and is legally not allowed to turn patients away (this
> place is hell on earth). I'd rather them have just given us nothing
> and put all of the funds at the GH. Or merged the two hospitals
> together. The GH needs more than $4 million for one year to get
> running. 4 mil is nothing. This is THE hospital in Haiti. $4 mil is
> about $300k a month, and there are hundreds and hundreds of patients
> in this hospital (might have been into 1,000, wish I could remember
> the exact number). They don't even have working power there, it goes
> in and out.
>
> So I don't know where in the hell the relief money is going if it isn't going to
> - Funding medical care in Haitian medical hospitals
> - Rebuilding anything at all
> - Getting people out of the tent cities or even giving supplies to the
> tent cities
>
> Nobody down there has any idea where all of these supposed hundreds of
> millions of dollars are going. All we knew is that it wasn't going to
> us. And the news reports are finally starting to reflect the reality
> down in the field, which is that there is no money coming.
>
> The point: Apparently this is not a one-off incident with the Red
> Cross. Down in the volunteer community it's pretty well known that
> there is a disparity between the Red Cross's press releases and the
> harsh reality that occurs in situations like these. They've been
> criticized for sitting on funds like this time and time again, and I
> hope they don't do the same thing here in Japan. So just like now I'm
> talking about how they still haven't given funds properly to Haiti,
> apparently when the Haiti earthquake hit they were criticized for
> still not having given funds properly to aid in the Indian Ocean
> tsunami before that. They will often claim that they're "saving it for
> longer-term development," which is the stupidest possible strategy
> that you could take in the face of disaster relief.
>
> So that is why I asked Daniel if he knew where I could donate to. I am
> only one person involved here, and I hope that I and the other
> volunteers that I'd speak to about this are wrong, and that that money
> that was donated is somehow being used productively. But at this
> point, it is my personal preference to give funds directly to the
> organizations that are doing work, instead of going through glorified
> middlemen like the Red Cross.
>
> If anyone has any other questions about Haiti let's please take it to
> metatuning so that I don't detract from Daniel's efforts to raise
> awareness about the situation in Japan over here.
>
> -Mike
>
>
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