AllNationsInternational Blog

V-Day A Trip To Haiti

I write to you as I am leaving Port Au Prince, Haiti. I am moved, inspired, in deep sorrow, in outrage. I am filled with a vastness of contradictions that explode the heart and bend the mind. Beauty in the mountains, the sky, the earth, the stars, the air, the jasmine, the moon. Rhythms and music – Boukman Eksperyans, you can feel the entire world pulse through your body. Extreme poverty so devastating it is a serious form of violence. People living on as little as a dollar a day, living in squalor, in terror, in insane deprivation. Poverty and humiliation and rage creating gangs and shootings and kidnappings and of course women’s bodies are the battleground on which this war is fought.

One woman told a story of how one of her daughters was shot in the leg and died. (There is little to no medical support for the poor) then her husband was murdered. Then they came and gang raped her 14-year-old daughter and she tried to run away to a Protestant church for help, but they wouldn’t let her stay cause she was Catholic. She couldn’t go home, but had to get a job to feed her kids. She had no one to help her. She needed to wash and clean houses, but there was no one to take care of her kids. Her raped daughter had almost lost her mind and needed her attention. Her daughter couldn’t tell her who raped her cause she was too terrified they would come back and kill her.

This is a terrible story, but all too common in the slums. Seven-year-olds are raped by three men, people’s houses are set on fire in the middle of the night, children kidnapped and sold. Myriam Merlet, the Chief of Staff of the Ministry for Women said, “That since the 1991 coup d’etat, war taught a country to rape. Before there was rape of course, but it was not a common practice. Now when a man wants to rape, he rapes. It was used as weapon of war – the military institutionalized it and now when a robber gets into your house, he rapes you.” She said, “What is different about Haiti than other countries is that fifty percent of the women who are raped in the country are not raped in their house but they are raped by a stranger.”

The situation is grim in Haiti. But then there are the women working with their lives for change. These women are fierce and beautiful and devoted and passionate. They inspired me to be bigger, bolder, more devoted, to believe deeper, to keep going.

We were hosted and treated with care and kindness by the Minister of Women’s Affairs and Rights, Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue, and her extraordinary team, Myriam Merlet and Ann Valerie Timothee Milfort. It is a wonder to see Feminist activist women in power. There were press conferences, interviews, dancing under the moon, fruit punch, a siren armed motorcade that took us everywhere, a women’s march in the hot Haitian sun through the streets of Cap Haitian, chanting, dancing, wild passion, young and old, and there was Elvire Eugène, one of the great women activists of the world and her group, AFASDA, a Cap Haitian based, solely volunteer organization that networks and raises awareness about violence facing women.

We visitied a hospital where we discovered there is not even a camera to take pictures of corpses for autopsies. There are no procedures to seek or secure evidence for women who are raped. There is no ambulance or car or doctor to receive the dead. The woman who runs this unit, the director of the Forensic Institute, Marie Claude Jasmin said that coming to work is” like dancing folklore.”

There was no support, no resources. Everywhere we went in Haiti women were inventing something out of nothing. A common theme was women saying they couldn’t afford to think about what’s going on, they couldn’t let themselves get depressed. They simply had to keep going. There were three sold out V-Day performances of The Vagina Monologues in Port Au Prince in French and Creole. One performance in Cap Haitian was in a Catholic girls school where 500 people showed up on a hot steamy night. Many men stood at the end promising to stop the violence. There were meetings with local women’s groups and testimonies from women from Grand Ravine and Cité Soleil who gathered in Port Au Prince on April 3, National Haitian Women’s Movement Day.

One of the main problems in Haiti is the lack of justice, the failure of law, the lack of accountability. We visited the women’s prison – the only one in Haiti, built for 78 women, it now holds nearly 400. Women are crammed into small cells, sometimes holding up to 22 women in a single cell. Many of the women I spoke to have been there 1- 3 years and have never been charged. They get infections in their vaginas from the dirty water. They rarely have a visitor. Only a few had lawyers. Most have no idea when their case will be processed. There was a gas leak in one of the cells and the women there were feeling very ill. Many of the women were young – lots of teenagers. I interviewed one woman, Erina Dorjilus who was there because she had stabbed her husband. He had been violently beating her, kicking her, tying her up with steel strips. She showed us scars all over her body. The last time he almost murdered her and she grabbed a knife and stabbed him. She brought herself to the police. She had been in the prison for nine months and did not know if her husband was alive or dead. She had never been charged and she had not seen her children as they had no idea where she was. It was Kafkaesque. The disappearance of people – kidnappings, arrests, murders, is a theme. The people of Haiti have been forgotten and made invisible by the world.

We made this trip to see how V-Day could join forces with the women of Haiti. When we asked what they most needed, they were totally clear. They wanted a Safe House in Port Au Prince. One out of every three woman is raped or beaten in Haiti. There is nowhere for women to escape. THE GOOD NEWS, THE MIRACULOUS NEWS IS THAT WE ARE NOW IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE MINISTRY OF WOMEN AND HAVE AGREED TO HELP THEM OPEN THE FIRST V-DAY SAFE HOUSE FOR WOMEN IN HAITI. Our new safe house will be a place of refuge and more importantly will be a place where women who have been abused get treated for trauma and trained for jobs. Marie-Laurence had already scouted ten houses before we left. The excitement level was that high.

We hope the house will open very soon and we would so love any support that you can give us. We have committed to supporting the house for three years with the hope that at the end of this time the Haitian government will take on the house as its own. There are already plans for a huge V-Day next year in Port Au Prince.

The trip simply ripped my heart open. We are all responsible for what happens to the people of Haiti. If I have learned anything in these years, it is that we are intrinsically connected. I urge each of you, to read about Haiti, to think about Haiti, to get active in groups that are working to change the situation there, to give generously to our new Safe House. V-Day stands with the women of Haiti today and will remain with the women of Haiti until this terrible violence ends and each Haitian woman is free and safe.

Eve Ensler

Elle Richfield Doing Census work

Volunteer Service in the DR

Census and Feeding of 140 children in barrio San Pilipe

Volunteer Service in the DR

Child Protection Volunteer Arrives

Volunteer Service in the DR

Elle Richfield is from London, England, and volunteering for a month in the Dominican Republic. Her focus is on early childhood education. Soon to start her Master Degree she thought she would test her life vision in a country with educational challenges. She comes from a fine family. Her mother works as a physician with an interest in genetics. Her father own a company that manufactures children’s clothes. When we were visiting the hospital the other day she exclaimed while looking at some babies “They are wearing my father’s clothes.” She recognized the print and apparently these clothes were donated by her father’s company and found their way to the Dominican Republic.

Elle is highly intelligent and passionate about children’s rights. She would like to work for the United Nations serving children and developing programs to protect them from abuse and unfair treatment. She has a special eye for these issues on her heart. She noticed the other day a child working in a sweatshop we passed who was clearly underage to be participating in commericial labor.

Elle will be working in serveral schools this month to get a broad experience of the educational structures of the Dominican Republic.

Father Dale

All Nations International Meeting

We will be having a meeting on 2/7 from 3pm – 6pm.

Location: Central LibraryOne Margaret Mitchell Square
Atlanta, GA 303032nd Floor Meeting Room
404-730-1700

Topics:We will show video footage of the Dominican Republic, discuss future events and projects. Please let me know if can or cannot attend the meeting. You can invite a guest(s).

Thank you,
Ronald Rogers
rrogers@allnationsintl.com
404.944.1065

Service: Another Way To Love One Another

Service is an opportunity that everybody has to contribute to the world. It’s like breathing in and breathing out. Although we need to breathe in, it’s equally important to breathe out. It’s important to receive and it’s important to give, and to give of ourselves in the way that actually serves who or what is being served.

We all have a responsibility to contribute because this is not a world that’s set up to just come in here, take, and leave. Obviously if that’s what was going on, our world would be depleting. Eventually, it would be empty. Our world would become something desolate and lacking in life force.

When there’s not sufficient caring and regard for ourselves and our neighbors, then things do become depleted and lacking in ways. There’s disease, pollution, and corruption. There’s pain and suffering. What we need to do is find ways to give back and overcome the sense that we don’t know what to do. So it’s wise to ask, “What can I do?”

I ask myself if I have the willingness to make myself available to do something that’s not about me — especially when it would be about a situation that could use assistance and I’m there and able to do it. I choose not to look around and say, “Well, couldn’t somebody else help because it’s not convenient with my agenda or what I had planned?” I choose to serve.

I consider myself to be my brother’s keeper. Even if my brother violated me, abused me or was unkind and disrespectful, that’s not a reason to be that way myself. At your brother’s or sister’s time of need, consider if it’s in your place to give to them in some way. It’s a tremendous measurement of someone’s divinity to have the willingness to put aside the injustice or negativity that’s in the world and do something to help and uplift.

Part of the test in being of service is to be open to not knowing what we’re going to do in order to serve. I’m for approaching service where it isn’t necessarily highly organized or detailed. If we get too rigid and regimented about what serving is supposed to be, we don’t leave room for the spontaneity and aliveness that comes with the divine presence.

I encourage service as a way of demonstrating we are loving and caring for one another. There are qualities in service, in caring and giving to others, that contribute to the upliftment of our world. So we can resolve that, regardless of what we choose to do today, we choose to love one another and do some good. Let’s choose to serve in some way.

John Morton

Vocational school

The main school our children go to is called Chocolaterra. It is a huge, empty warehouse that has been semi converted into a school. There are 5 classrooms with around 50 students per room. No running water or bathrooms. They do have desks, but the teachers do not get paid much and supplies are limited. Most of our older boys have a difficult time, as the attention span is short and they do not have much of a base education to follow along. That is why it is so important to get this vocational school up and running for them. The picture is the room above the clinic that we hope to share with the girls program (run by Bianca, my Peace Corp worker) until something more substantial is renovated.

Liz McKie

We always have a chance to make a difference in the world!

This is a start of a new year and new opportunities surround me! I get excited just thinking about it, how as one simple person I can make a difference. Now I am joined with others, we can have a huge impact on entire communities. This year we are off to a fresh start, with a new Executive Director Lisa Mastain, our new Treasure Caroline Santora and our new Secretary Kim Verbrugge. We have networked in Puerto Plata and surrounding communities with other Nonprofits and NGO’s to form an alliance of help for Dominicans and Haitians alike. The beauty of our new programs is that we focus on the family, which is the foundation of this culture. If we can help keep the poorer families in tact with medical assistance, food, education and basic needs they are more likely to keep their children in school and get an education, which is the only real tool out of some abhorrent circumstances. Our pilot program is focusing on vocational training for the older children who perhaps have not done well in regular public school.

Liz McKie

Service was Joy

“I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”
Rabindranath Tagore