Author: Jacob Kushner

RADIO: Haiti Three Years After The Earthquake: Still Rebuilding A Life

WLRN South Florida

The earthquake that struck Haiti three years ago this month sent a concrete wall crashing down onto the 30-year-old dancer Fabienne Jean. Her right leg was crushed and had to be amputated. When Fabienne danced again, she was hailed as a symbol of Haiti’s post-earthquake recovery.

But as reporter Jacob Kushner discovered, the quest to rebuild one woman’s life would take much more than that. Kushner followed Fabienne’s story for nearly a year, reporting from Port-au-Prince, Boston and New York. Listen to the five-part series and see photos by Nick Kozak at wlrn.org.

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A Thread of Hope

On Wisconsin Magazine
At a factory in the Dominican Republic, workers are sewing UW apparel, providing for their families, and spreading hope that the global textile industry can change.

During an age in which nearly all clothing sold in the United States is made in developing countries by workers who are paid just pennies an hour, Alta Gracia Apparel is not your typical textile factory: its employees earn three times the nation’s minimum wage of $150 per month. They get health insurance, a pension, vacation days, and maternity leave. They sit in ergonomic chairs and drink water that they themselves have quality-tested for pathogens.

It’s hard to fathom that a decade ago, many of these same people produced hats for a company that paid them just eighty-four cents an hour, forced them to work overtime without extra pay, and sometimes verbally and physically abused them.

See the full article and photos that were published in the Winter 2012 edition of On Wisconsin Magazine.

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Election night 2012 live coverage for the Columbia Journalism Review

Columbia Journalism Review

CJR, in collaboration with Columbia’s Tow Center for digital journalism, covered the Nov. 6, 2012 election coverage. Seven student journalists from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism watched and read the coverage, working with CJR editors to report on digital innovation and integration of social media by news outlets as they presented election results. Their analysis ran in real-time on this live blog.

Jacob Kushner covered the cable TV networks and published these seven posts during election night.  

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Sudan: Clock ticks for Bashir on oil

The Foreign Report
Why Sudan’s economic problems – not its political ones – may pose the greatest threat to al-Bashir’s regime.

For thirty years almost without pause, governments in Khartoum – the capital of Sudan — have fought against their own people. The North-South civil war, which killed an estimated two million people and displaced four million more, ostensibly ended in 2005 with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that allowed for the ethnically diverse South to succeed last year from the Arab-controlled North. But even if that conflict reignites as recent fighting indicates it might, the Sudanese government is now facing a new and even harder-to-combat opponent: its own people in the Northern cities which the government has long counted on for support.

Read the full story as it appeared at the Foreign Report.

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USAID contractor Chemonics cited for numerous mistakes in Haiti

GlobalPost/GroundTruth
Despite a problematic track record, US continues to award multimillion dollar contracts to the DC firm.

NEW YORK — Two years ago, auditors revealed the Washington, DC, consulting firm Chemonics International and a partner company were employing only one-third as many Haitians as their contract required to clear rubble left by the January 2010 earthquake from city streets as part of the US government-funded “Cash for Work” program.

Read the full story as it appeared at the Global Post. 

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Haitians Face Persecution Across Dominican Border

NACLA

When a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Port-au-Prince, in January 2010, the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, responded immediately by sending doctors, rescue teams, and over $34 million worth of emergency aid. Since then, the Dominican government has constructed a state-of-the-art university in northern Haiti and worked with Haiti’s new government to improve conditions across the border.

But neither the Dominican state nor the majority of its citizens have shown any such mercy to the estimated 500,000 to 1 million Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent living in their midst.

Access the article through NACLA subscription services

Read the accompanying sidebar story, Life in a Border Town Marred by Tension (no subscription necessary).

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Haiti’s road to recovery

GlobalPost/GroundTruth

LES CAYES, Haiti — For years, the road from here to the coastal city of Jérémie has been paved with good intentions, but never with asphalt.

Well-meaning international organizations and donors built schools in the villages that dot the roadside, purchased goats for children to raise and sell and donated supplies for home repair. But those projects came and went, barely making a dent in the region’s gripping poverty. All the while, the road itself deteriorated into a 62-mile stretch of rocks and mud, making travel difficult and sometimes deadly.

Last week 40 passengers were killed when their bus overturned trying to cross the flooded Riviére Glace — Ice River —that dissects the passage, according to government figures from the incident.

Now, the passage known as National Route 7 is in the middle of a $142 million development project that in many ways is a model of the successful, long-term development Haiti desperately needs.

GlobalPost set out to find what insight this road can offer the myriad of small reconstruction projects underway here and throughout Haiti that are largely failing to bring about lasting change despite billions of dollars in post-earthquake reconstruction aid.

Read the full story as it appeared at the Global Post.

In One Haitian Village, a Gold Rush

Uncategorized

LAKWÉV, HAITI — From the small clay yard outside his house made of wooden sticks and mud, Jacques Charles holds a metal bowl filled with water and shows off the sliver of gold resting at the bottom. Then, he reveals the place where he found it—a 12-meter deep tunnel on the side of a hill that he’s been digging with a shovel for 22 days.

“I’ve found bigger ones than this, but you have to have good luck,” he says. “If the spirit doesn’t want you to continue living in misery, he can tell you where it’s buried.”

Read the full post as it appeared at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

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The Multiplier Effect: Driving Haiti’s recovery by spending aid dollars locally

GlobalPost/GroundTruth
Just a small fraction of foreign aid has gone to Haitian businesses, but an NGO network is trying to change that.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Just days after a cholera epidemic began infecting thousands of Haitians in October 2010, Salim Loxley received a phone call at his desk in Port-au-Prince from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), one of the largest-spending organizations operating in the post-earthquake nation.

“We need 4.5 million bars of soap by Friday,” said the man on the other end, anxious to distribute the soap to Haitians who were living in unsanitary displacement camps and vulnerable to the highly infectious disease.

Read the full story as it appeared at the Global Post. 

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Haitian farmers call on US to stop subsidizing its own

GlobalPost/GroundTruth
The 2012 Farm Bill could reverse a decades-long policy of agricultural subsidies that has undercut Haiti’s local rice production

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Deep within Haiti’s beautiful Artibonite Valley, a man wades barefoot through loose mud that comes up to his knees. Bending over, he takes individual strands of rice seed from a clump in one hand, stuffing them quickly into the mud one by one.

Were he a hopeful man, Denis Jesu-car, 32, would tell you that four months from now, he’ll be rewarded with a few large sacks of rice that he can then sell in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, earning him enough to buy food until the next harvest season and send his children to school.

But Jesu-car is no longer hopeful. That’s because this farmer who rents a small plot of land he tends without modern tools or fertilizer is competing with giant American rice companies that produce hundreds of thousands of tons of better quality rice — and ship them to Haiti at artificially low prices.

Read the full story as it appeared at the Global Post.

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ICE Data Shows One in Two Haitians Detained Have Not Been Convicted of Crimes

Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Despite the Obama administration’s policy to prioritize dangerous criminals for post-earthquake deportations to Haiti, data obtained by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting shows that nearly one in two Haitians detained by the U.S. government have not been convicted of crimes in the United States.

Impact Update: Days after my investigation revealed the Obama administration was illegally deporting immigrants to Haiti where they would be imprisoned under life-threatening conditions, the White House ordered a comprehensive review of 300,000 such deportation cases.

Read the full post as it appeared at FCIR. This is a follow-up story to an original, November 2011 investigation into U.S. deportations to Haiti.

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Four months and $2M US tax dollars later, Haiti’s new Parliament building sits unfinished, unused

GlobalPost/GroundTruth
Legislators say they must now dip heavily into their public treasury to finish the job

By 

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — One Friday last November, US Ambassador to Haiti Kenneth Merten joined Haiti’s President and then-Prime Minister at the edge of the Caribbean Sea in downtown Port-au-Prince.

To much fanfare, the trio inaugurated a $1.9 million US-funded building meant as a temporary home for Haiti’s Parliament, which had lost its old building and 32 of its staff members in the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010.

But more than four months later, that location remains vacant. The building is scattered with woodwork trimmings and debris from a costly ongoing renovation paid for by the Haitian treasury because legislators say the United States never finished the job. And critics in Haiti charge that the unfinished work and empty building stand as a powerful metaphor for much of what is wrong with USAID’s approach to development in Haiti: that it lacks coordination with and input from the Haitians themselves about how best to undertake reconstruction projects.

Read the full article as it appeared at the Global Post.

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Radio: Miami TV station owner brings spirit of Carnival to Florida Haitians

WLRN South Florida

By Jacob Kushner with Tate Watkins

February 21, 2012 (WLRN) – This week millions of people across Haiti will parade in elaborate costumes and dance to the blaring horns of rara and Haitian pop music as they celebrate the nation’s largest cultural event of the year, Carnival. As Jacob Kushner reports from Port-au-Prince, one Haitian-born Florida man is working to ensure that the hundreds of thousands of Haitian immigrants living in South Florida will be able to join them in spirit.

Listen to the story as it appeared on WLRN:

Organizer brings spirit of Carnival to Florida Haitians

Haiti’s politics of blame

GlobalPost/GroundTruth
As foreigners ask where aid money went, Haitians turn inward, demanding answers from their own government.

PORT-AU-PRINCE — For all the talk about a Haitian people who have grown impatient with the slow pace of a largely foreign-led reconstruction effort, what Haitians are clamoring for most is accountability from their own government for promises that remain unfulfilled two years after the earthquake.

Click HERE to read the full story as it appeared at the Global Post.

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U.S. spent $140 million on controversial post-quake food exports

Center for Public Integrity, GlobalPost/GroundTruth

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — In the months following Haiti’s devastating January 2010 earthquake, the United States government spent $140 million on a food program that benefited U.S. farmers but has been blamed for hurting Haitian farmers.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) sent 90,000 metric tons American of crops to Haiti as part of the Food for Progress and its related Food for Peace programs run by USAID and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The programs send abundant American crops to nations in need of emergency relief. That amounted to almost three quarters of the U.S. government aid to Haiti after the earthquake, according to documents obtained through aFreedom of Information Act request by the Haiti Justice Alliance, a Minnesota-based advocacy organization.

Read the full investigation as it appeared at the Center for Public Integrity.

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