Haiti Orphanage Report (UNICEF/IBESR 2013): Unpublished

This is the controversial UNICEF/IBESR report, conducted by Sociodig, a Haiti-based research company. I’ll let interested readers be the judge regarding the quality of the work. But as can be seen from the report, it was a massive amount of research. Quite simply, there is no study of orphanages in Haiti that comes close to itsRead More

BROKEN PROMISE: ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE HUMANITARIAN AID SECTOR

To explain, one has to understand the evolution of anthropology and humanitarian aid industry. The two are—or at least once were– intricately intertwined.

Anthropology of NGOs: How Activist Humanitarian Aid Agendas Corrupted Social Sciences in the Caribbean

The obscurantism of political and economic agendas has always pervaded discourse on Caribbean family patterns, but anthropology had a stronger materialist orientation in the early and mid-1900s, one that lent itself to rigorous analysis of causation. By the 1970s and 1980s, hope was fading. A fog of research agendas, convoluted analyses, ideational and cultural causalRead More

Children of Haiti: The Haitian Restavek and Child Slavery

The cry ‘child slavery’ grabbed world attention in 1998 when Haitian-born Jean-Robert Cadet published his shocking autobiography, From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American, in which he recounted his life as a restavek, the Haitian Creole word for child domestic servant. As the Cadet Foundation website tells potential donors, “As a restavek he lost hisRead More

Madam Sara vs. Komèsan: Subsidizing Self Destruction

Originally published in January 2012 on Open Salon Madan Sara The madam sara (or phonetically madan sara) is the itinerant female Haitian market woman. She is the principal accumulator, mover, and distributor of domestic produce in Haiti and as such represents the most critical component in what anthropologists have long called the internal Haitian marketing system, the one upon whichRead More

History of NGOs and Disaster in Haiti

If there’s a milestone year when NGOs began arriving in Haiti that year is 1954, when Hurricane Hazel struck the island. Hazel would go on record as the most destructive storm in Western history. Haiti got the worst of it. Hazel stalled over the country for three days, pounded the mountains and plains with overRead More

Earthquake in Haiti: Questionable Death Toll

Originally publish May 30th 2011 on Open Salon Death Count This is a response to a report that I wrote for USAID regarding the Haiti earthquake death toll. I don’t know if I am even free to discuss the report because it’s not official yet. However, what I can do is discuss the validity of theRead More

Haiti Earthquake Media Exaggerations: Violence, Murder & Mayhem

This is a chapter from a book that I am wrote, the Great Haiti Humanitarian Aid Swindle (2017). I originally published as it is here on Open Salon in 2011. I think it’s important because it summarizes the role that the mainstream media played inciting panic over insecurity after the earthquake. Anyone interested inRead More

Big Lies about Little People: The War Between UNICEF and the Orphanages, Battleground Haiti

Following the January 2010 Haiti earthquake there were a lot of exaggerations, truth-twisting and outright lies. But perhaps none exceeded those that came from the mouths of child protection workers and orphanage owners. With UNICEF and Save the Children leading the way, orphanages fanning the flames, and the press publishing almost anything anyone said–no matterRead More

Justice System in the Dominican Republic

Originally posted on Open Salon in 2012 The research and inspiration for this blog began when I was arrested and imprisoned for four months in a Dominican Penitentiary (I was falsely accused of organizing illegal boat voyages; subsequently tried and acquitted). The experience—not all bad–gave me an inside look at the Dominican penal system. WhenRead More

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