The heavy drum..

Stéphane is a colleague and we talk about ICT4D Stéphane sent an email while preserving his battery. He had to find and then had to bury his sister-in-law Johanne and is looking for medical help for his 5 year old nephew Sam. He has other relatives bodies to find

One of thousands of stories from Haiti this week. Stéphane is one of the first persons I met from Haiti and from whom I heard a different kind of story of the place.

This week, I was privileged to read Edwidge Danticat's After the Dance.. a walk through carnival in Jacmel, haiti - writing about her experience of facing Carnival and writing beautifully about Haitian culture. There are many reviews which would be better than any I would write. Edwidge Danticat walks through a cemetery and I look at St James the Less and the Bourda Cemetery and wonder if I should do the same.
 I wonder if any Guyanese could write about Guyana like that.

When the earthquake struck, I kept hoping that Jacmel was saved. The news is about Port au Prince mostly.  Then today I learn that Jacmel has also been devastated.

Guyanese have been victims of the media, thinking that Haiti is some doomed place. Guyana is always saved from being the worst in the Caribbean because it is 'compared' to Haiti. We have been taught that the Haitian vodoun religion is evil. Hindu people learn to mutter  - forgetting that we are called devils too and some of us forget that the floods in Guyana were blamed on the same 'evil' that Pat Robertson and those who think like him have conjured up. 


That is what the evangelicals are muttering here. Maybe the President should get his  Christian pastor friends to go on the media and and say publicly that the Haitian people did not deserve this. 


I do not know how many  Guyanese will  blame the Haitians for not worshipping Jesus.. no not only Jesus. A friend tells me about a civil servant who returned from Haiti and told his staff that Allah is the only true God, he must not have known about Iran and Pakistan earthquakes.

A young friend told me that is true, that the Haitians had pact with the devil. I was angry, I cursed him as a descendant of a slave for listening to the crap that the enslavers left in his history to condemn other people who were also enslaved. I sent an article from the Guardian to him.

It was funny on Facebook how the American Idol show updates competed with the Haiti status updates on Tuesday night.

There are many options for donations relief. The Guyana Government wants to co-ordinate one. Red Thread has one, the Guyana Red Cross also has an appeal. Something about the Digicel text thing is annoying, maybe accountability. Some people have bar promotions I hear, the more you drink the more money goes to Haiti.

I wish I could go and help do something. While I am happy that the people I know have been found, there is guilt too, at being happy, because there some people who did not survive, or who are in pain. Like 5 year old Sam.
There is this Haitian proverb, After the dance, the drum is heavy.  I hope that this heavy drum  has come before the dance. I pray that Jacmel will have carnival again soon.