Author: Jacob Kushner

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

Photo: Ben Depp.

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 a Freedom 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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RADIO: Lost Between two Nations

WLRN South Florida

Broadcast on WLRN Florida, November 17, 2011

When a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti in 2010, the United States stopped deporting Haitians. Earlier this year deportations to Haiti resumed. 24-year-old Franco Coby grew up in Fort Myers, but he was born in Haiti. And untiul this year, he had never been back. Jacob Kushner brings us the story of a man lost in his own country.

Listen to the story at WLRN’s Under the Sun.

Or Listen directly.

This story was part of Jacob Kushner’s 2011 reporting for the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting on deportations to Haiti.

U.S. Deportees to Haiti, Jailed Without Cause, Face Severe Health Risks

California Watch, Center for Public Integrity, Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, Huffington Post, Miami Herald, The Nation & The Nation Institute Investigative Fund, Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The United States has deported more than 250 Haitians since January knowing that one in two will be jailed without charges in facilities so filthy they pose life-threatening health risks.

An investigation by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting found that the Obama administration has not followed its own policy of seeking alternatives to deportation when there are serious medical and humanitarian concerns.

Click HERE to read the full investigation at FCIR. Versions of this story were published by California Watch, the Center for Public Integrity, Huffington Post, Miami Herald, the Nation Institue Investigative Fund, and the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, among other outlets.

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.

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VIDEO: U.S. Deportees to Haiti, Jailed Without Cause, Face Severe Health Risks

Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

The United States has deported more than 250 Haitians since January knowing that one in two will be jailed without charges in facilities so filthy they pose life-threatening health risks.

An investigation by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting found that the Obama administration has not followed its own policy of seeking alternatives to deportation when there are serious medical and humanitarian concerns.

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.

Click HERE to watch a video interview with Texas deportee Samuel Lizius, published by FCIR.

Click HERE to watch a video interview with Illinois deportee Samuel Durand, published by WCIJ.

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Clinton panel announces major new Haiti project

Associated Press

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti—The Haiti reconstruction panel co-chaired by former U.S. President Bill Clinton announced a major new project Wednesday to rebuild part of the capital damaged by last year’s earthquake.

The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission said it plans to spend $78 million to revitalize 16 neighborhoods and remove roughly 30,000 people from six major settlement camps that formed after the January 2010 disaster.

The commission said the project aims to move the 5,239 families living in six particularly vulnerable camps back into the 16 Port-au-Prince neighborhoods where most of them lived before the quake.

“This kind of collaboration will generate the lasting change, the permanent housing solutions that Haitians are depending on,” Clinton said in a speech after the commission’s announcement.

Click HERE to read the full AP story as it appeared at the Boston Globe.

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Clinton launches business loan program in Haiti

Associated Press

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Former U.S. President Bill Clinton launched a new business loan program in Haiti on Tuesday aimed at helping bolster an economy that was devastated by the January 2010 earthquake.

Clinton said the first loan in the $20 million program is being made to Caribbean Craft, which produces colorful goods such as carnival masks, sculptures and paintings for export and lost its workshop in the earthquake.

The company is receiving a loan of $415,000, with interest to be paid back to the program to help make additional loans in the future, Clinton told reporters as he toured Caribbean Craft’s workshop near the airport in Port-au-Prince. He said the money will help the operation hire 200 more workers. He didn’t say how many employees it has now.

Clinton, who has been active in Haiti reconstruction through his foundation and as co-chairman of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, said he had been “surprised and disturbed” to learn of the difficult loan terms available for even Haitian businesses with solid credit.

“One of the biggest problems in growing the Haitian economy is that there is really no facility that grants small business loans on reasonable terms,” he said.

Click HERE to see the full AP story as it appeared at Yahoo! News.

Healing the Haitian Soul

JazzTimes Magazine
The Port-au-Prince International Jazz Festival strives to mend a devastated nation

Across the street from the shacks made of sticks, tarps and scrap metal that house thousands of earthquake survivors in downtown Port-au-Prince, the delicate sound of a tenor sax serenades a sizeable audience of music enthusiasts. This is Haiti’s international jazz festival, resurrected after an earthquake destroyed its venue city in January 2010, killing some 230,000 people and displacing some 1.4 million.

So where does a jazz festival fit into the reconstruction of a nation where 800,000 people remain homeless and threatened by a deadly cholera epidemic, their national consciousness disheartened by the undemocratic election held last November? “You can’t only take care of housing and water—all that’s really important for sure, but culture is really linked to the Haitian people,” said Milena Sandler Widmaier, who organized the festival along with her husband, drummer Joel Widmaier. “People need to be fed in the mind as well—not only in their body, but in their soul.”

Click HERE to read the full story as it appeared at Jazz Times. This article appeared in the May 2011 print edition of JazzTimes magazine.

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Carnival celebration returns with defiance

Info Sur Hoy

JACMEL, Haiti – Tens of thousands of dancing and singing Haitians gathered this past weekend in the nation’s Carnival capital to celebrate the festival’s revival following a respite caused by the January 2010 earthquake (Click to view photos).

The sounds of hammers and saws could be heard throughout the final night of preparations as dozens of carpenters hurried to finish building the wooden bleachers where spectators stood along the parade route in the coastal city of Jacmel.

The speed and determination of the construction embodied a feeling of hope among many that Haiti is on track to rebuilding itself both culturally and economically.

Click HERE to read the story as it appeared at Info Sur Hoy.

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