Amies et amis internautes,
Voici un lien vers le numéro spécial (72 pages) de fin d'année du journal Le Matin:
Le Matin, lundi 27 décembre 2010 - jeudi 7 janvier 2011.
Compliments à M. Daly Valet et à son équipe de journalistes.
LCDP
jeudi 30 décembre 2010
mardi 28 décembre 2010
Le séisme en Haïti, l'événement le plus marquant de 2010
Photo: Ivanoh Demers, La Presse
Par Charles Côté, La Presse
Source: cyberpresse.ca, 28 décembre 2010.
L'année 2010 a commencé le 12 janvier à 16h53, avec ce qui est devenu l'événement marquant dans le monde, selon les Québécois: le tremblement de terre en Haïti.
Selon le sondage SOM-La Presse, le séisme qui a ravagé Port-au-Prince et ses environs, avec ses images spectaculaires de désolation et de douleur, est l'événement le plus marquant selon 41,2% des personnes sondées.
Le questionnaire proposait un choix de neuf réponses.
Ce premier rang concorde avec la couverture exceptionnelle que cette catastrophe a reçue dans les médias québécois. Selon Influence Communications, depuis 2001, il s'agit de la nouvelle la plus médiatisée au Québec sur une période de sept jours. Plus que les attentats du 11 septembre 2001 ou l'investiture de Barack Obama en janvier 2009.
Pour 2010, la marée noire dans le golfe du Mexique arrive au deuxième rang: 38,7% des répondants l'ont choisie à titre d'événement le plus marquant dans le monde pour l'année qui s'achève.
Au troisième rang, le feuilleton des mineurs chiliens est l'événement le plus marquant pour 8,7% des répondants.
Moins de 1% des répondants ont choisi les inondations au Pakistan, catastrophe naturelle la plus meurtrière de l'année.
Les événements à caractère politique ou social, comme les révélations de WikiLeaks ou la crise financière ayant touché la Grèce, le Portugal et l'Irlande, retiennent moins l'attention.
À ce chapitre, il aurait été intéressant de voir comment la guerre en Afghanistan se serait classée si elle avait fait partie des réponses proposées. Elle occupe le troisième rang des événements les plus cités dans les médias de partout au monde en 2010, selon Influence Communications.
Extase olympique
Après la douleur haïtienne, les Québécois ont été plongés dans l'extase sportive, avec les Jeux olympiques de Vancouver.
La compétition a été suffisamment excitante pour que trois champions olympiques se retrouvent parmi les huit personnalités les plus marquantes de l'année.
Et la médaillée de bronze Joannie Rochette, patineuse québécoise dont la mère est décédée pendant les Jeux, arrive au tout premier rang, devant la chanteuse Céline Dion, habituée des palmarès.
Les autres champions sont le hockeyeur Sidney Crosby (septième rang), qui a marqué le but gagnant du match de la médaille d'or pour l'équipe canadienne, et le skieur acrobatique Alexandre Bilodeau (huitième rang), qui s'est distingué en étant le premier Canadien à gagner une médaille d'or olympique au Canada.
Les Québécois sondés ont-ils résisté à leur côté sombre? Russell Williams, ex-colonel et meurtrier, considéré comme la personnalité ayant le plus marqué l'actualité en 2010 selon un sondage annuel de La Presse Canadienne mené auprès des médias du pays, ne figure pas au palmarès SOM-La Presse.
Cinq personnalités politiques et un saint (le frère André Bessette, canonisé cet automne) complètent le top 10.
Le premier ministre du Québec, Jean Charest, occupe le 4e rang, après le premier ministre canadien, Stephen Harper, mais peut-être pas pour les bonnes raisons.
En effet, au chapitre des dossiers les plus marquants au Québec en 2010, on trouve au premier rang «l'accumulation des dénonciations dans les médias de scandales de corruption». C'est le choix de 43,8% des répondants.
Au deuxième rang: le «refus du gouvernement de tenir une commission d'enquête sur l'industrie de la construction», le choix de 22,9% des répondants.
Si l'on ajoute la commission Bastarache et l'article du magazine MacLean's sur la corruption au Québec, le thème de la corruption a été retenu par plus des trois quarts des répondants.
Il ne reste que des miettes pour les autres choix de réponse: la performance de l'équipe olympique canadienne, du Canadien en séries éliminatoires ou des Alouettes et leur deuxième Coupe Grey consécutive. La naissance des jumeaux de Céline Dion est tout de même l'événement marquant de l'année pour 1,1% des répondants.
lundi 27 décembre 2010
FUNÉRAILLES DU PROFESSEUR PARNELL MARC
À tous ceux et à toutes celles qui furent son ami et/ou ses élèves, j’annonce avec infiniment de peine la triste nouvelle du décès de l’éminent professeur de mathématiques pour certains d’entre nous, de professeur de Physique pour d’autres, de Statistiques pour quelques-uns, français, anglais, latin pour d’autres et j’en passe. Il faut aussi mentionner que l’ingénieur professeur Parnell Marc a été membre fondateur de plusieurs écoles secondaires dont le Collège Classique d’Haïti. Il a contribué à la formation de plusieurs promotions d’ingénieurs, de médecins, d’avocats, de professeurs et de bacheliers.
Le Professeur Parnell Marc a rendu l’âme le Mardi 21 décembre 2010 à Longueuil dans la province de Québec au Canada. Son épouse lui tamponnait le visage lorsque, subitement, il a ouvert grandement les yeux pour les refermer à jamais. Il était à ce moment-là à 11h24 du matin. Disons paix à son âme.
En plus de son épouse, madame Simone Pasquier Marc et de ses deux fils Jean Philippe et Parnell Herman Junior, Maître Marc, comme tout le monde l’appelait, laisse dans le deuil plusieurs proches parents dont sa sœur ainée Lucy et sa sœur cadette Emmanuelle. Maître Marc est maintenant assis entre ses deux autres sœurs qui l’aimaient beaucoup Marie-Laure Marc et la Révérende Sœur Ludovicque Marc, ancienne supérieure de la Congrégation des Filles de la Sagesse.
Veuillez noter les informations suivantes:
L’exposition
Date: mercredi 29 décembre 2010 de 14h00 à 22h00
Lieu: Complexe funéraire Urgel Bougie, 1025, St-Laurent Ouest, Longueuil
Les funérailles
Date: Jeudi 30 décembre 2010 à 11h00
Lieu: Église Co-Cathédrale St-Antoine, Angle des rues St-Charles Ouest et Chemin Chambly, Longueuil
Suggestion Au lieu de fleurs, la famille suggère qu’un don soit fait à l’Association des Aveugles et des Amblyopes Haïtiens, 700 rue Saraguay Est, Pierrefonds, QC, H8Y 2G7
André Laquinte
Montréal, le 22 décembre 2010
jeudi 23 décembre 2010
DÉCÈS DU PROFESSEUR PARNELL MARC
À tous ceux et à toutes celles qui furent son ami et/ou ses élèves, j’annonce avec infiniment de peine la triste nouvelle du décès de l’éminent professeur de mathématiques pour certains d’entre nous, de professeur de Physique pour d’autres, de Statistiques pour quelques-uns, français, anglais, latin pour d’autres et j’en passe. Il faut aussi mentionner que l’ingénieur professeur Parnell Marc a été membre fondateur de plusieurs écoles secondaires dont le Collège Classique d’Haïti. Il a contribué à la formation de plusieurs promotions d’ingénieurs, de médecins, d’avocats, de professeurs et de bacheliers.
Le Professeur Parnell Marc a rendu l’âme le Mardi 21 décembre 2010 à Longueuil dans la province de Québec au Canada. Son épouse lui tamponnait le visage lorsque, subitement, il a ouvert grandement les yeux pour les refermer à jamais. Il était à ce moment-là à 11h24 du matin. Disons paix à son âme.
En plus de son épouse, madame Simone Pasquier Marc et de ses deux fils Jean Philippe et Parnell Herman Junior, Maître Marc, comme tout le monde l’appelait, laisse dans le deuil plusieurs proches parents dont sa sœur ainée Lucy et sa sœur cadette Emmanuelle. Maître Marc est maintenant assis entre ses deux autres sœurs qui l’aimaient beaucoup Marie-Laure Marc et la Révérende Sœur Ludovicque Marc, ancienne supérieure de la Congrégation des Filles de la Sagesse.
La date et le lieu des funérailles vous seront communiqués très bientôt.
André Laquinte
Montréal, le 22 décembre 2010.
mardi 21 décembre 2010
12 bonnes résolutions love & sexe pour 2011
Photo: pampa-blogs.
Par Alice Buckler
Pampa Presse, vendredi 17 décembre 06:28
Source: yahoo.com.
Janvier : On vit son couple comme un espace de liberté !
S’il n’y avait qu’un seul conseil à suivre, ce serait celui-là. Et pour cause, il vient d’un « pro » : Marc Dannam est auteur d’un guide sur le sujet (Osez… pimenter la vie sexuelle de votre couple, éd. La Musardine). « On est mariés, on fait ce qu’on veut ensemble et ça ne regarde plus personne… »
Oui → « Toutes les folies sont permises si elles sont menées d’un absolu commun accord », dit Marc.
Non → Se mettre des limites, se forcer dans un sens ou dans l’autre…
Février : On laisse les soucis à la porte de la chambre !
La séance psy sur l’oreiller, c’est fini. Si vous voulez raconter vos problèmes d’enfance, râler contre le dossier Bigboss ou sur l’intervention ratée du plombier, il fallait le faire pendant le repas !
Oui → Si on est trop bavarde, on ne parle pas pendant l’amour. Pas du tout.
Non → Faire les comptes à voix haute ou prévoir les prochaines vacances (« On va encore chez ta mère à Noël ? »).
Mars : On s’impressionne !
C’est plus excitant et valorisant de coucher avec quelqu’un qui nous impressionne : que ce soit pour ses talents de cuisinier, ses mots compte triple au scrabble ou son regard de braise, pour être désiré(e), il faut faire envie. C’est pareil pour vous.
Oui → Avoir une vie professionnelle et sociale remplie, mais sans la ramener.
Non → Traîner sur le canapé en pyjama, en regardant Plus belle la vie.
Avril : Au lit, on innove !
Pire que la belle-mère, la routine est l’ennemie du couple. Et comme le sexe est le ciment du couple, il faut tuer la routine sexuelle…
Oui → Prendre l’initiative d’une nouvelle position, d’un lieu insolite…
Non → Faire l’amour le même jour à la même heure…
Mai : On sublime sa féminité !
Avec les beaux jours qui arrivent, les hommes apprécient d’avoir une compagne un minimum apprêtée. Sans se transformer en Barbie, prendre soin de soi est une attention de tous les jours, qui paye à long terme. Si votre amoureux voulait coucher avec une personne poilue, en jogging, il le ferait avec son meilleur pote. De même, votre chéri n’est en théorie pas un sosie de Homer Simpson…
Oui → Un maquillage subtil, une jolie tenue, une crème hydratante : vous saurez trouver la touche féminine qui vous convient.
Non → Participer aux concours de rots.
Juin : On attise la jalousie !
Quoi de plus flatteur que d’être aux bras d’une personne observée, convoitée, désirée ? Coucher avec quelqu’un, c’est bien. Coucher avec quelqu’un sachant que d’autres rêveraient d’être à notre place, c’est encore plus agréable…
Oui → Glisser l’air de rien un prénom masculin et sourire en rougissant quand il nous questionne.
Non →Dire à longueur de temps : « Personne ne m’aime, personne ne me désire… »
Juillet : On se fait la lecture !
On profite du soleil ambiant pour faire monter la température… en lisant ! Il existe toute une littérature érotique, de la nouvelle érotico-rose au récit trash, chacun trouvera son goût d’intensité et son style…
Oui → On se fait la lecture à voix haute, lumière tamisée…
Non → On lit aux toilettes.
Aout : On achète coquin !
Sans tomber dans les vibromasseurs pour deux ou le bondage, rien de tel que quelques accessoires coquins pour dynamiser ses rapports ! Lingerie, gels de massage, menottes, faites-vous plaisir ! Le leader du marché, http://www.adameteve.fr/ , vous propose « une vie sexuelle variée et passionnée » !
En solitaire ou en couple, le shopping sexy est un préliminaire comme un autre.
Oui → On se surprend avec des costumes qui illustrent nos fantasmes (infirmières, pompier, etc.).
Non → On déballe sa lingerie coquine aux copines.
Septembre : On pimente… sa cuisine !
Martine Fallon, auteure de Love cuisine (éd. Luc Pire), propose de rebooster sa libido via son assiette ! Outre le classique gingembre, elle évoque le zinc, la canelle, le shitaké ou encore l’asperge. Qu’on y croit ou pas, on peut toujours tenter, nan ?
Oui → On cuisine ensemble et on déguste au lit !
Non → On sert un plat aphrodisiaque au repas familial du dimanche midi.
Octobre : On étudie ses classiques !
En bande-dessinée, en illustré, « pour les nuls », il existe plus de 4 600 références de Kama-Sutra sur le site http://www.amazon.fr/. Marc Dannam a même écrit un guide sexy qui répertorie 49 positions selon les 7 péchés capitaux !
Oui → Inventer des Jeux olympiques du sexe, avec épreuves et bons points !
Non → Feuilleter le livre en ricanant car on ne se trouve pas assez souple…
Novembre : On fait une pause !
Pas question ici de « break » ou de rupture temporaire, mais plutôt de découvrir un nouvel art sexuel : le tantra. Tout le monde (enfin, les moins de 20 ans…) a en tête American Pie et Paul Finch, vêtu d’une tunique en coton bio, qui tente de retenir son éjaculation…
Oui → S’entraîner en découvrant l’ouvrage d’Osho (Tantra, spiritualité et sexe, éd. Almasta).
Non → Faire durer la pause tout le mois !
Décembre : On maîtrise la sexualité à double rôle !
Pour conclure cette année en beauté, Marc révèle le double rôle de la sexualité épanouie : « Une sexualité pleine, c’est l’expression de l’amour que l’on se porte, mais aussi ce que les libertins appellent la « sexualité récréative ». Ces deux facettes peuvent coexister pour une vie sexuelle épanouie. »
Oui → On vit la philosophie « Love&sexe » à fond !
Non → Pas de non, pour 2011 on ne veut que du oui, oui, oui !
Alice Buckler – Pampa Presse
samedi 18 décembre 2010
samedi 11 décembre 2010
Haïti/élections/ Quel que soit le vote des électeurs, Préval décide à l'avance que le vainqueur est: Jude Célestin
Blague réçue d'une amie
Un japonais, un américain et un haïtien sont en pleine causerie.
Le japonais dit: "chez nous au Japon, la technologie est tellement développée qu'on organise les élections aujourd'hui et demain on a les résultats".
Et l'américain de répliquer en disant: "chez nous aux USA, la technologie est tellement développée qu'on organise les élections le matin et le soir, on a les résultats".
L'haïtien étonné répond en disant : " je croyais, que nous les haïtiens étions les derniers de tous mais là, je constate que vous êtes vraiment en retard".
Ah bon! reprirent les deux premiers, très surpris.
Mais oui! Reprend l'haïtien en ajoutant : " chez nous, avec les Lavalassiens, la technologie est tellement développée qu'on connaît les résultats avant même les élections"...
Un japonais, un américain et un haïtien sont en pleine causerie.
Le japonais dit: "chez nous au Japon, la technologie est tellement développée qu'on organise les élections aujourd'hui et demain on a les résultats".
Et l'américain de répliquer en disant: "chez nous aux USA, la technologie est tellement développée qu'on organise les élections le matin et le soir, on a les résultats".
L'haïtien étonné répond en disant : " je croyais, que nous les haïtiens étions les derniers de tous mais là, je constate que vous êtes vraiment en retard".
Ah bon! reprirent les deux premiers, très surpris.
Mais oui! Reprend l'haïtien en ajoutant : " chez nous, avec les Lavalassiens, la technologie est tellement développée qu'on connaît les résultats avant même les élections"...
dimanche 28 novembre 2010
Haïti-élections: suivre le déroulement de la journée de vote, dimanche 28 novembre 2010
Amies et amis internautes,
Cliquez sur le lien suivant pour savoir comment se déroule la journée d'élections sur tout le territoire de la République:
haitielections2010.com, dimanche 28 novembre 2010
Bonne journée !
***
Cliquez sur le lien suivant pour savoir comment se déroule la journée d'élections sur tout le territoire de la République:
haitielections2010.com, dimanche 28 novembre 2010
Bonne journée !
***
samedi 30 octobre 2010
10 signes qui prouvent qu’il vous trompe
Par Alice Buckler
Source: yahoo.com
1/ Il vous fait des cadeaux sans raison
Attention, ne fustigez pas votre compagnon s’il revient avec un bouquet de fleurs ! Ce qui est louche, ce sont les cadeaux soudains, nombreux et disproportionnés. « C’est plus fort que moi, s’analyse Vincent, 42 ans. Chaque fois que je vois ma maîtresse, je reviens avec des roses. Quand on est partis en week-end avec ma maîtresse, j’ai même offert des boucles d’oreilles à ma femme ! »
2/ Il a changé ses mots de passe
Vous allumez l’ordinateur, et là, plus rien de fonctionne : adresse mail, réseaux sociaux, tous ses mots de passe ont été modifiés !
« Je me doute que mon mari me trompe : Il a modifié tous ses mots de passe et il est tout le temps en discussion instantanée avec des gens que je ne connais pas ! » Comme Martine, 27 ans, essayez d’analyser le PC : l’historique des sites consultés est effacé, il sursaute si vous regardez par-dessus l’écran… Il a vraisemblablement quelque chose à cacher ! A moins que ce ne soit une surprise-party ?
3/ Il ne lâche plus son téléphone
Alors qu’avant vous lui lisiez ses textos et écoutiez son répondeur, il est devenu impossible pour vous d’y accéder. Il l’emmène même sous la douche ! Pour fouiller tranquille, piquez-le-lui juste avant son départ. Il ne s’en rendra pas compte et vous aurez la journée pour jouer au détective : messages reçus, envoyés, noms étranges dans le répertoire, etc. Vous pourrez même accéder aux factures en ligne (connectez-vous au site de l’opérateur, vous recevrez le mot de passe par SMS sur le portable en question).
4/ Il a brusquement plus de travail
Depuis quelques mois, il bosse de plus en plus, a des réunions, des déplacements, des séminaires… Pourtant, pas de promotion en vue ni d’augmentation. Il a juste besoin de plus de temps pour compenser ses longues pauses-déjeuners à l’hôtel ou ses samedis en Normandie !
5/ Il n’a plus aucun désir sexuel
A bien y réfléchir, ça fait des semaines, voire des mois qu’il ne vous a pas touchée. Il n’a même pas remarqué vos nouveaux dessous. Quand vous tentez une approche, il vous repousse prétextant la fatigue ou fait l’amour machinalement, sans gestes tendres ou préliminaires. Si vous êtes frustrée, lui a fait l’amour toute la journée, il n’a pas envie de recommencer avec vous ce soir !
6/ Il a changé de look
Des années que vous tentez de troquer ses tee-shirts délavés contre une chemise et tout d’un coup, la totale : chemise, ceinture, nouvelle coupe, il s’est même mis au sport et à la crème hydratante ! Soit il a participé à une émission de relooking, soit il a besoin de paraître 10 ans de moins…
7/ Il ne fait plus de projet
Les vacances ? Moui, on verra ! Changer de voiture ? Ce n’est pas essentiel ! Un enfant ? Certainement pas ! De toute évidence, votre conjoint a du mal à faire des projets à moyen ou long terme : d’ici l’automne, il ne compte plus être avec vous !
8/ Vous ne faites plus rien ensemble
Vous avez du mal à vous rappeler la dernière soirée passée avec lui : il regarde la télé dans la chambre, va chez ses amis sans vous. Quant à une soirée en amoureux n’y pensez pas !, il faut garder les enfants (ou le chat)…
« J’avais du mal à faire semblant mais je n’osais pas lui en parler, avoue Marc, 32 ans. J’ai préféré laisser pourrir la situation et qu’elle parte d’elle-même. » Lâche, mais efficace…
9/ Il bégaie, n’arrive pas à se justifier
Vous êtes tombée face à un indice flagrant : capote, rouge à lèvres sur la chemise, facture de restau romantique… Face à ça, au lieu d’être honnête et d’avouer, votre partenaire rougit, bégaie, invente un scénario invraisemblable qui dit tout et son contraire et n’arrive pas à s’en sortir…
Fabrice Clément, auteur des Mécanismes de la crédulité, explique que dans certains cas, on a besoin de croire : « On ne veut pas voir quelque chose qui pourtant semble nous crever les yeux. Prenez le cas d’une femme dont le mari rentre tard à la maison, avec une tache de rouge à lèvres sur sa chemise. Il se passe quelque chose d’étrange : la femme voit cette tache, mais très rapidement elle semble l’avoir oubliée. »
10/ Il donne trop de détails, a un nouveau meilleur ami
Il va au sport avec Jeff, va boire un verre avec Jeff, envoie un texto à Jeff… Une nouvelle personne apparaît soudainement dans sa vie, il passe tout son temps avec, mais vous ne savez presque rien de lui et de ce qu’ils font ensemble ! Etes-vous certaine que Jeff n’est pas Jeffa, la nouvelle collègue sexy ?
→ Sachez que la façon de découvrir l’infidélité a une incidence sur le taux de divorce : des chercheurs américains (Afifi, Falato et Weiner, dans Journal of social and Personal Relationships, Université de l’Arizona) ont démontré que le taux de divorce est de 43% si le trompeur l’annonce lui-même, de 68% s’il est dénoncé par un tiers et grimpe à 86% si l’infidèle finit par avouer après avoir nié…
→ Si vous ne savez pas comment réagir à l’infidélité de votre partenaire, voici quelques conseils d’Yvon Dallaire. Psychologue, sexologue, thérapeute conjugal, il a écrit de nombreux ouvrages, propose des ateliers de formation, des conférences et des ateliers.
« Il faudra apprendre à gérer la souffrance de la tromperie sans la nier, pour ne pas tomber dans le rôle de la victime. Cela doit être l’occasion de faire le bilan de votre couple : vous êtes coresponsable du déséquilibre relationnel qui a amené l’infidélité, il faut rétablir cet équilibre. Il vous sera essentiel d’exprimer vos sentiments, vos craintes, mais soyez patient : le temps vous apportera le recul et la sagesse pour dédramatiser l’événement qui ne sera qu’un mauvais souvenir. »
Alice Buckler – © Pampa Presse
Source: yahoo.com
1/ Il vous fait des cadeaux sans raison
Attention, ne fustigez pas votre compagnon s’il revient avec un bouquet de fleurs ! Ce qui est louche, ce sont les cadeaux soudains, nombreux et disproportionnés. « C’est plus fort que moi, s’analyse Vincent, 42 ans. Chaque fois que je vois ma maîtresse, je reviens avec des roses. Quand on est partis en week-end avec ma maîtresse, j’ai même offert des boucles d’oreilles à ma femme ! »
2/ Il a changé ses mots de passe
Vous allumez l’ordinateur, et là, plus rien de fonctionne : adresse mail, réseaux sociaux, tous ses mots de passe ont été modifiés !
« Je me doute que mon mari me trompe : Il a modifié tous ses mots de passe et il est tout le temps en discussion instantanée avec des gens que je ne connais pas ! » Comme Martine, 27 ans, essayez d’analyser le PC : l’historique des sites consultés est effacé, il sursaute si vous regardez par-dessus l’écran… Il a vraisemblablement quelque chose à cacher ! A moins que ce ne soit une surprise-party ?
3/ Il ne lâche plus son téléphone
Alors qu’avant vous lui lisiez ses textos et écoutiez son répondeur, il est devenu impossible pour vous d’y accéder. Il l’emmène même sous la douche ! Pour fouiller tranquille, piquez-le-lui juste avant son départ. Il ne s’en rendra pas compte et vous aurez la journée pour jouer au détective : messages reçus, envoyés, noms étranges dans le répertoire, etc. Vous pourrez même accéder aux factures en ligne (connectez-vous au site de l’opérateur, vous recevrez le mot de passe par SMS sur le portable en question).
4/ Il a brusquement plus de travail
Depuis quelques mois, il bosse de plus en plus, a des réunions, des déplacements, des séminaires… Pourtant, pas de promotion en vue ni d’augmentation. Il a juste besoin de plus de temps pour compenser ses longues pauses-déjeuners à l’hôtel ou ses samedis en Normandie !
5/ Il n’a plus aucun désir sexuel
A bien y réfléchir, ça fait des semaines, voire des mois qu’il ne vous a pas touchée. Il n’a même pas remarqué vos nouveaux dessous. Quand vous tentez une approche, il vous repousse prétextant la fatigue ou fait l’amour machinalement, sans gestes tendres ou préliminaires. Si vous êtes frustrée, lui a fait l’amour toute la journée, il n’a pas envie de recommencer avec vous ce soir !
6/ Il a changé de look
Des années que vous tentez de troquer ses tee-shirts délavés contre une chemise et tout d’un coup, la totale : chemise, ceinture, nouvelle coupe, il s’est même mis au sport et à la crème hydratante ! Soit il a participé à une émission de relooking, soit il a besoin de paraître 10 ans de moins…
7/ Il ne fait plus de projet
Les vacances ? Moui, on verra ! Changer de voiture ? Ce n’est pas essentiel ! Un enfant ? Certainement pas ! De toute évidence, votre conjoint a du mal à faire des projets à moyen ou long terme : d’ici l’automne, il ne compte plus être avec vous !
8/ Vous ne faites plus rien ensemble
Vous avez du mal à vous rappeler la dernière soirée passée avec lui : il regarde la télé dans la chambre, va chez ses amis sans vous. Quant à une soirée en amoureux n’y pensez pas !, il faut garder les enfants (ou le chat)…
« J’avais du mal à faire semblant mais je n’osais pas lui en parler, avoue Marc, 32 ans. J’ai préféré laisser pourrir la situation et qu’elle parte d’elle-même. » Lâche, mais efficace…
9/ Il bégaie, n’arrive pas à se justifier
Vous êtes tombée face à un indice flagrant : capote, rouge à lèvres sur la chemise, facture de restau romantique… Face à ça, au lieu d’être honnête et d’avouer, votre partenaire rougit, bégaie, invente un scénario invraisemblable qui dit tout et son contraire et n’arrive pas à s’en sortir…
Fabrice Clément, auteur des Mécanismes de la crédulité, explique que dans certains cas, on a besoin de croire : « On ne veut pas voir quelque chose qui pourtant semble nous crever les yeux. Prenez le cas d’une femme dont le mari rentre tard à la maison, avec une tache de rouge à lèvres sur sa chemise. Il se passe quelque chose d’étrange : la femme voit cette tache, mais très rapidement elle semble l’avoir oubliée. »
10/ Il donne trop de détails, a un nouveau meilleur ami
Il va au sport avec Jeff, va boire un verre avec Jeff, envoie un texto à Jeff… Une nouvelle personne apparaît soudainement dans sa vie, il passe tout son temps avec, mais vous ne savez presque rien de lui et de ce qu’ils font ensemble ! Etes-vous certaine que Jeff n’est pas Jeffa, la nouvelle collègue sexy ?
→ Sachez que la façon de découvrir l’infidélité a une incidence sur le taux de divorce : des chercheurs américains (Afifi, Falato et Weiner, dans Journal of social and Personal Relationships, Université de l’Arizona) ont démontré que le taux de divorce est de 43% si le trompeur l’annonce lui-même, de 68% s’il est dénoncé par un tiers et grimpe à 86% si l’infidèle finit par avouer après avoir nié…
→ Si vous ne savez pas comment réagir à l’infidélité de votre partenaire, voici quelques conseils d’Yvon Dallaire. Psychologue, sexologue, thérapeute conjugal, il a écrit de nombreux ouvrages, propose des ateliers de formation, des conférences et des ateliers.
« Il faudra apprendre à gérer la souffrance de la tromperie sans la nier, pour ne pas tomber dans le rôle de la victime. Cela doit être l’occasion de faire le bilan de votre couple : vous êtes coresponsable du déséquilibre relationnel qui a amené l’infidélité, il faut rétablir cet équilibre. Il vous sera essentiel d’exprimer vos sentiments, vos craintes, mais soyez patient : le temps vous apportera le recul et la sagesse pour dédramatiser l’événement qui ne sera qu’un mauvais souvenir. »
Alice Buckler – © Pampa Presse
mercredi 13 octobre 2010
Chili/Mine/Sauvetage des 33 mineurs
Cliquez sur le lien suivant pour voir la sortie du premier des mineurs, un peu avant minuit le 12 octobre 2010:
mercredi 15 septembre 2010
« Batti Batti , o bel Masetto » de l' opéra "Don Giovanni" de WA Mozart
Amies et amis internautes,
Cliquez sur le lien suivant pour écouter et voir:
Cyndia St-Cyr Montès: soprano; Denyse St-Pierre: pianiste, 3 min 56 sec, août 2010.
Cliquez sur le lien suivant pour écouter et voir:
Cyndia St-Cyr Montès: soprano; Denyse St-Pierre: pianiste, 3 min 56 sec, août 2010.
jeudi 9 septembre 2010
McGill 19e parmi les 200 meilleures universités au monde
Source: La Presse canadienne, mercredi 8 sep, 07 h 29
MONTRÉAL - L'Université McGill est classée première au Canada et 19e au monde pour la qualité de ses services éducatifs selon le nouveau classement de QS World University Rankings.
C'est la 7e fois de suite que l'université montréalaise fondée en 1821 se place e parmi les 25 meilleures institutions du monde de ce classement, ce qui réjouit la rectrice, Heather Munroe-Blum.
Les trois premiers rangs du palmarès de QS World University Rankings sont respectivement détenus par l'Université de Cambridge, en Grande-Bretagne, et les universités Harvard et Yale, aux États-Unis. Treize des 17 premières places appartiennent à des universités américaines.
L'Université de Toronto se classe au 29e rang; l'Université de la Colombie-Britannique est 44e et l'Université de l'Alberta est en 78e place.
L'Université de Montréal se classe au 136e rang alors qu'elle occupait la 107e place l'année dernière. Aucune autre institution québécoise n'est parvenue à figurer parmi les 200 meilleures universités du monde.
MONTRÉAL - L'Université McGill est classée première au Canada et 19e au monde pour la qualité de ses services éducatifs selon le nouveau classement de QS World University Rankings.
C'est la 7e fois de suite que l'université montréalaise fondée en 1821 se place e parmi les 25 meilleures institutions du monde de ce classement, ce qui réjouit la rectrice, Heather Munroe-Blum.
Les trois premiers rangs du palmarès de QS World University Rankings sont respectivement détenus par l'Université de Cambridge, en Grande-Bretagne, et les universités Harvard et Yale, aux États-Unis. Treize des 17 premières places appartiennent à des universités américaines.
L'Université de Toronto se classe au 29e rang; l'Université de la Colombie-Britannique est 44e et l'Université de l'Alberta est en 78e place.
L'Université de Montréal se classe au 136e rang alors qu'elle occupait la 107e place l'année dernière. Aucune autre institution québécoise n'est parvenue à figurer parmi les 200 meilleures universités du monde.
dimanche 5 septembre 2010
Québec/ Jean Cournoyer
Amis et amies internautes,
Parmi les hommes politiques qui m'ont le plus impressionné au Québec, au Canada et en Amérique du Nord, je cite: Jean Cournoyer.
Je dirai une autre fois ce qui me fascine chez cet homme.
En attendant, cliquez sur le lien suivant pour commencer à apprendre un peu qui il est:
wikipedia/Jean Cournoyer.
Parmi les hommes politiques qui m'ont le plus impressionné au Québec, au Canada et en Amérique du Nord, je cite: Jean Cournoyer.
Je dirai une autre fois ce qui me fascine chez cet homme.
En attendant, cliquez sur le lien suivant pour commencer à apprendre un peu qui il est:
wikipedia/Jean Cournoyer.
jeudi 2 septembre 2010
Astrophysique/ Stephen Hawking soutient que Dieu n'a pas créé l'univers
Stephen Hawking - Photo: REUTERS/Sheryl Nadler, 20 juin 2010
L'astrophysicien britannique Stephen Hawking soutient que Dieu n'a pas créé l'univers et que les lois de la physique ont rendu le "big bang" inéluctable.
Source: matin.branchez-vous.com, jeudi 2 septembre 2010 à 13H19
Par Olivier Caron
Le célèbre scientifique britannique Stephen Hawking soutient que l'univers n'a pas eu besoin de Dieu pour être créé.
Dasn un nouvel ouvrage, intitulé «The Grand Design», l'astrophysicien soutient en fait que l'univers peut se créer à partir de rien. Il ajoute qu'il n'y a pas de place pour Dieu dans les théories de création de l'univers. Cela intervient en contradiction avec certains propos compris dans son best-seller de 1998, «A Brief History of Time», dans lequel il n'écartait pas le rôle de Dieu dans la création de l'univers.
«La création spontanée est la raison pour laquelle il y a quelque chose plutôt que rien, la raison pour laquelle l'univers existe, la raison pour laquelle nous existons» soutient le scientifique dans l'ouvrage qui paraîtra en librairies le 9 septembre. «Parce qu'il existe une loi comme la gravité, l'univers peut et va se créer à partir de rien» ajoute Hawking.
Des extraits de l'ouvrage, coécrit avec le physicien américain Leonard Mlodinow, sont publiés jeudi sur le site Internet payant du Times britannique. Toujours dans le Times, Jonathan Henry Sacks, leader de la communauté juive britannique, s'oppose aux propos de l'astrophysicien et lui répond que la science ne nous apprend rien sur Dieu.
Le sujet fait passablement réagir jeudi. Le site Internet du Guardian mène entre autres un sondage en ligne auprès de ses lecteurs, et plus de 85% partagent l'opinion de Stephen Hawking.
Le professeur de 68 ans a travaillé au département des mathématiques appliquées et de physique théorique de l'Université de Cambridge pendant près de 30 ans. Le scientifique est surtout connu pour ses travaux sur les trous noirs et pour le fait qu'il est atteint, depuis ses 21 ans, d'une maladie dégénérative appelée sclérose latérale amyotrophique. Il se déplace en fauteuil roulant et communique avec un synthétiseur vocal.
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Autre lien: capital.fr, article de Michael Holden.
samedi 21 août 2010
Wyclef Jean
Amis et amies internautes ,
Les liens suivants vous pemettront d' écouter et / ou de voir le chanteur hip hop Wyclef Jean :
Les liens suivants vous pemettront d' écouter et / ou de voir le chanteur hip hop Wyclef Jean :
- Good magazine/ If Wyclef were President, 1 min 26 sec, 29 octobre 2008. Wyclef serait-il américain ?
- Si j'étais Président / Si j'étais président, version 1 , grichmannii , 3 min 42 sec , 4 mai 2006 .
- Si j'étais Président / Si j'étais président, Version 2 , WycleVevo , 3 min 45 sec , 24 novembre 2009 .
- Si j'étais président , version 3 , TommyTV , 8 min 02 sec , 21 avril 2008.
- Gonaïves, mskolniksoze , 3 min 47 sec , 29 mars 2007.
- " Michael Jackson me doit de l'argent ", Entrevue Avec Kim Halling , The Voice TV , 9 min 53 sec , 27 novembre 2007.
- « Million Voices », au jour Mandela 2009 du Radio City Music Hall , à 5min 15 sec , 30 juin 2009.
- " Oh Madiba ", au jour Mandela 2009 du Radio City Music Hall , à 5min 48 sec , 30 juin 2009.
- rap Wyclef Jean freestyle , Obama, président américain, TommyTV , 6 min 51 sec , 13 avril 2008.
Sur les pages de ces chansons, le trouvera des liens vers d'autres chansons de l'artiste.
N.B. Depuis le 26 août une nouvelle chanson de Wyclef est disponible sur le Web. Il y parle de sa rencontre avec le Président Préval le 19 août et du rejet de sa candidature par le CEP le 20 août:
- Wyclef Jean pran kanè, Fabeduc, 3 min 37 sec, 26 août 2010.
_________________________
Derniere mise à jour : 26 août 2010
lundi 16 août 2010
Comment les femmes d'opinion voient-elles la beauté en 2010 ?
Mon épouse est abonnée à Vita Magazine.
Vita Magazine parle des femmes de plus de quarante ans.
Sur la page couverture de chaque numéro, il y a toujours la photo d'une femme québécoise de quarante ans et plus qui accorde une entrevue au magazine. Cet été, en couverture, il y a la photo de la très charmante Chantal Fontaine qui nous séduit dans la télésérie Virginie depuis le milieu des années 90 ! Elle a aujourd'hui 44 ans.
En tant qu'homme de plus de quarante ans, je prends toujours plaisir à lire attentivement cette intéressante revue.
Dans le numéro d'été 2010, il est question aussi, entre autres sujets, de la beauté des femmes de plus de quarante ans.
En général, les femmes de plus de quarante ans ont l'impression de plaire moins. Et pourtant, quand un homme, quel que soit son âge, les regarde dans un lieu public, elles sont capables de détecter à distance quelle partie de leur corps attire davantage son attention... Je vous fais grâce de mes observations personnelles, pour le moment...
Je vous invite donc à consulter le magazine Vita, Été 2010, en cliquant sur les liens suivants:
Vous y regarderez quelques courts vidéos où, tour à tour cinq femmes célèbres du Québec (la plus célèbre à mon avis étant Madame Denise Bombardier, n'en déplaise aux quatre autres) partagent avec le lecteur/la lectrice, leurs expériences et leurs points de vue sur la beauté des femmes.
Des témoignages très intéressants, des opinions très franches: en écoutant/regardant ces femmes, les hommes de plus de quarante ans apprendront beaucoup, y compris mon sympathique ami et collègue de Toronto, Lemane Vaillant et moi-même.
_________________
NDCDP.-
Madame Nyrvah Bruno a eu la gentillesse de nous signaler sur Facebook ce matin, l'article suivant qui rapporte l'opinion d'Andy Rooney sur les femmes de plus de 40 ans:
Rythme FM: Les femmes de 40 ans et plus selon Andy Rooney, vendredi 5 février 2010. Ayant pris connaissance de cet article, je me suis empressé d'écrire aujourd'hui cette page à propos de Vita Magazine que je me promettais d'écrire depuis près de deux mois !
dimanche 1 août 2010
jeudi 29 juillet 2010
Cornelia Shutt dite Ti Corn
*
Cornelia Shutt, Photo Haïti en folie et La Presse, 22 juillet 2010
Amies et amis internautes,
Haïti n'est pas seulement un singulier petit pays où les hommes et femmes compétents n'ont jamais eu la chance de la gouverner (e.g., Boyer Bazelais, Louis-Joseph Janvier, Anténor Firmin, Louis Déjoie, Frantz Merceron, etc.).
En 2011, le nom de Madame Mirlande Manigat s'ajoutera-t-il oui ou non à cette liste de candidats compétents qu'Haïti et ses amis n'ont pas permis de devenir chefs d'état, leur préférant plutôt, paradoxalement et systématiquement, à chaque fois, un candidat parmi les moins aptes à gouverner ?
Laissons de côté un moment la politique haïtienne pour écouter une brillante artiste haïtiano-allemande: Cornelia Shutt, dite Ti Corn.
- Haïti chérie: vetou55, 2 janvier 2008, 2 min 29 sec.
- Haïti chérie (partiel) et autres segments de chansons : makaksaleOpa, 21 juin 2009, 1 min 51 sec.
- Déclaration d'amour: makaksaleOpa, en duo avec Jean-Claude Martineau (Koralen), 21 juin 2009, 6 min 04 sec.
- Colibri: vetou55, 6 février 2008, 3 min 53 sec.
- Colibri: makaksaleOpa, 21 juin 2009, 3 min 30 sec.
- Sim te konen ,et, Haïtiens nan battey: makaksaleOpa, en trio avec Koralen, Renette, 21 juin 2009, 8 min 59 sec.
- Simbi O: makaksaleOpa, 20 juin 2009, 3 min 57 sec.
- Plakatap bourikman: makaksaleOpa, 21 juin 2009, 6 min 50 sec.
- Erzuli Dantò pa kitém déyò: makaksaleOpa, 21 juin 2009, 5 min 09 sec.
- Péleren: makaksaleOpa, 21 juin 2009, 4 min 42 sec.
- Haïti chérie, Ti zwazo: kwaiyimey, 2 avril 2009, 5 min 19 sec (*).
Voici le site Web de la folkeuse: ticorn.com.
Vous pourrez lire l'article suivant de Jean-Christophe Laurence, Cyberpresse, 22 juillet 2010:
Ti Corn: «Allemande en dehors, haïtienne en dedans».
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(*) Vidéo no. 11.- Dans ce vidéo, les chansons de l'artiste sont utilisées comme musique de fond. Le vidéo ne provient évidemment pas de l'artiste. LCDP tient à souligner qu'il ne partage pas les appréciations politiques positives ou négatives, écrites en sous-titres sur les photos de certains chefs d'état dans le vidéo 11, pour la période 1990-2009. En outre, la photo identifiée comme étant celle de Franck Sylvain est peut-être celle de Daniel Fignolé.
dimanche 25 juillet 2010
Haïti après séisme/ Clinton and the country that never was
By By Tom Chiarella
Source: esquire.com , July 19, 2010, 6:30 AM
While most of the world has stopped paying attention to Haiti, he has become the de facto leader of the effort to rebuild the country after the historic earthquake. The problem is, there wasn't much there to begin with.
After five days in Port-au-Prince, I sat at the hotel bar and ordered a Prestige, the beer of Haiti, the beer of preference — a pretty damned good beer, if you ask me. I liked the word, Prestige, which somehow rolled French off my tongue. And I liked the way the bartenders wrapped the fat brown bottle in a white paper napkin, which in the evening heat clung like gauze to a wound. A jazz trio played under the eaves at one end of the courtyard, well enough that I wondered who they'd played with and what they knew. Next to me: a baby-faced accountant, here from Kentucky to audit microcredit payments, Ryan, the only person at the hotel I could stand to drink with.The rest of them were NGO volunteers or medics in for a week, insular, high-minded, and somehow vacant in their mutual moral purpose. Just then, some of them were swimming in the hotel pool, a half dozen American nurses and a pair of Canadian surgeons, playing a game of Marco Polo.
Keep in mind: This is now. A kind of now, anyway. Late spring 2010, just five months past the great earthquake that rocked the already roiling city. To the south was a city lot, half full with a twenty-foot pile of wreckage that once constituted an Italian restaurant. A sweeping pile of rubble projected eight feet into the road, having been carried there, one bucket at a time, by an old guy who worked the lot all day with a worn-down mattock. Rubble dropped there on faith in an unscheduled collection. Traffic bent and slowed around it, a little more each day. In that rubble: a child's sock, half a purse, bloated rolls of toilet paper, a key chain, the wet skin of a grocery bag, and notes regarding inventory off the top of a desk long since splintered, or salvaged, or stolen. Used-up gaskets. Broken bottles. Bits of food, too. Pits. Rinds. That was just what I'd seen that morning, when the guards from the hotel let me step into the street for a look while they stood watch, shotguns cocked.
Around the corner, facing the main entrance of the hotel, stood a tent city — more cardboard than plywood, more plywood than tin, more tin than tent pole, more tied-down blue plastic sheeting than anything else — unspooling itself across the Champs de Mars, the former national plaza, rooting fifty thousand people right up to the ruined national palace. That was west. To the north, more: churches, guts blown outward, still somehow uncollected in the street; collapsed apartments, one cement deck piled upon the other, unexcavated and peopled, everyone supposed, by skeletons. Through these streets walked the Haitian citizenry, scores of them, hundreds, thousands. Haitians selling fruit, selling floor mats, selling chickens, washing windows, cooking corn on rusted hibachis, proffering bags of drinking water.
That night in the hotel, with the jazz throbbing, it started to rain. I pulled out my cell phone and texted the single soul I knew in the city of 2.4 million, Emmanuel Midi, my twenty-five-year-old fixer, who'd dropped me there an hour before. I had no idea where he went at night. I thumbed out my concern: Are you safe in this rain?
I'm ok! he texted back. Thanks for asking! I liked the kid. Everything with him was exclamation points.
I didn't know much about the geography of Haiti, but I had known enough to look for Cité Soleil, the notorious slum, as the plane landed. The district occupied a dark, gray clump of land near the airport, at the water's edge. People had warned me about it. The night before I left, in New York, I had watched half of a documentary about it, Ghosts of Cité Soleil, then nudged around the Internet long enough to find State Department travelers' warnings naming it the most dangerous place in the world. It seemed a place apart, beyond reckoning somehow, a place the Haitian government ignored and the UN struggled with — and one that some part of my most greedy heart wanted to see. Then I got my first up-close look at Port-au-Prince, straining, crumbling, collapsing in every quarter, and Cité Soleil was forgotten again.
In the mornings, I sometimes stood in my T-shirt, hands in pockets, on the steps of the hotel, staring across the street at the wall of the tarpaulin city. The hotel clerks fussed at me about going outside. Even when it was a park, when you could see through the arbors right to the walls of the palace, the Champs was not particularly safe. "You can't see past the tents," one told me. "So there is nothing to see." I persisted until he came out from behind the desk, unlocked the folding gate, then unlocked the front door, then stood watching me watch the camp.
One morning, someone in the camp had a rooster. Three men — one shirtless, one pantless, the other fully dressed for work — rousted by the crowing, prowled the curving exterior of a clutch of tents. Two women stood over a charcoal fire, heating up bread. Even at 5:45, the traffic was sometimes loud enough that the rooster was difficult to track. The men closed in. Then the bird went quiet.
Then, in one moment, all three caught sight of me for the first time. The shirtless one walked straight to the edge of the traffic, intent on me. The pantless one at his heels. They called to me, "Monsieur! Mister!" Not good. I turned, and the door swung open for me — a guard, shotgun crooked in his elbow. He said something I couldn't make out. "Bonjour," I replied. But he stopped me to clarify. They're pimps, he was saying. Pimps who watch the doors. You cannot go out there. After that I didn't.
In an office in Harlem, the day after I return from Haiti, after he picks my seat, after he makes sure there is water, Bill Clinton, the UN special envoy to Haiti since 2009, draws a deep, yoga breath because it's the end of the day but his day has not yet ended. He looks flat-out dog-tired. He keeps a piece of gum tucked between his molars and his cheek, bouncing his jaw on it once in a while. In his hour-long narrative about the past, present, and future of the country, time and again, the two of us are his rhetorical pair, conjoined in the propositions he draws up for Haiti.
Let's say we were going into the textile business...
Suppose the two of us had some money we wanted to take down to Port-au-Prince...
We should go down there together and take a look...
"You and I are sitting here today because at critical points in our lives, from the time we were quite young, whatever adversity we faced, we knew that there was some predictable, positive consequence that would flow forward if we did the right thing — if we studied hard, made good grades, went to college, whatever." Clinton's givens are broad enough to be inarguably illustrative. "Really poor people, people in really poor places, don't have predictably good outcomes for good behaviors. It's a disorienting experience. Poor countries need predictability," he says. "In Haiti, we have to build systems."
Systems. This makes sense. No one in Haiti seems to believe there are any reliable systems, except perhaps cell-phone coverage and mango distribution.
At a UN conference in March, Clinton raised $9 billion from fifty-nine donors. Can that be used quickly enough to provide lasting, constructive improvement of the systems that already exist? Clinton draws a breath, tilts his head, and starts up with the list. The list of what must be rebuilt is weighty and long. Clinton ticks them down, one finger to the next. The federal workforce, never that strong to begin with. Schools — not just the ones that collapsed but a system of universal elementary education, which never existed. Infrastructure. Small-business credit.
"Then the health-care system needs to be built. I used to say rebuilt, but then I realized there really wasn't one before," he says. "Now I say built."
He pauses, and at that moment the muffled room demands a grandfather clock, something to emanate a giant tick. Any noise marking the movement of time. "We'll have to rebuild the infrastructure," he says, as if reminding someone at the back of the room. "We'll have to rebuild the agriculture."
Port-au-Prince was still a city of cement rooms, like this one, hanging two flights above the cloud of the street, cement deck barely cured, cinder-block walls, two doorless entries. On my first morning in Port-au-Prince, it was being used for a meeting between an NGO and some men from the Teleco settlement, just across the street. This was the work of the city.
By 10:15 there were twelve men carrying clipboards, fresh from working in the drainage ditches, there to speak with the rep from an NGO called the International Rescue Committee — Kate Montgomery, twenty-eight, American, stationed in Haiti for two months now — to make their pitch to extend a program called Cash for Work. They came to argue for jobs that paid slightly less than minimum wage and were available to only 315 of the camp's 3,600 citizens, jobs that consisted of climbing into trenches to shovel out soupy, shit-glistening, goop-covered trash. There was a Creole translator and an engineer. As the meeting progressed, more men arrived to show unity, until there were twenty-nine in the room, crammed in the doorways.
The IRC would extend the program for another twenty-four days, Montgomery said, but also reduce the total number of workers from 315 to 180. She insisted on a plan to select new candidates with selection limited to only one worker per family, with a minimum of 40 percent women.
The entire event was like watching a book-selection meeting at a subcommittee of the local library. After, the men retreated to an open terrace, where they huddled up and grumbled through a set of agreements. They wanted a force of 315. Montgomery agreed. Done.
Inroads for women, accountability, respect for process — reasonable accomplishments. Something like progress. It just wasn't clear what would happen now — what the relationship would be between this room and the camp. I asked one of the men, "Are Haitians used to working in committees?"
The man pffed and shook the sweat from his head. He smiled, jabbed the air, and said, "Only committees with knives."
There was only one dog left in Port-au-Prince. A ribby yellow bitch, teats dragging in the filth. She jogged along the narrow sidewalks, in and between the fruit piles. She ran alongside the filthy channels being cleared for the storms, skirted the edges of the places where people cooked in the open. Or found a corner and disappeared. Skinny yellow bitch. I saw her a dozen times a day. More. Each time miles from the last place I saw her. The Haitians didn't seem to notice. To them she must have been a mere detail, like the pile of charcoal sold for heating a kitchen stove or the blanketload of mangoes sold in the streets, because a Haitian mango is still a righteous thing. I saw the dog in a riverbed as men dug for sand to sell to the concrete factories. Another time tramping along a drainage ditch, carrying a pup in her jaws, and once at the gate of a tent city, with a compound fracture at the bottom of her right front leg. No one noticed. No one pitied the dog of Port-au-Prince.
At one point, I said to Emmanuel, "There's the dog again."
He replied, "It's not the same dog, Tom."
I knew this, of course. It was my joke with him, because the dogs in Port-au-Prince all looked the same. Very much the way you'd expect the people to look — somehow cracked, anxious, and broken. Though the people, despite everything that's happened, were nothing like that. They looked generally insistent, a little pissed, trapped in the middle of a story they will tell later. This is not to say they aren't sometimes dirty, or hungry, or that they look particularly pure of heart. There is a juicy malice in Port-au-Prince, my fixer told me. Assault. Rape in some camps. At night, I heard guns — fired at the police, at the UN soldiers, from one gang to the next, I would learn. But by day the streets were full; there was food in the small stands set up each morning, carried in on the backs of women whose ancient supply lines healed themselves many weeks ago, in a fashion that continues to elude construction interests.
I can call Emmanuel that, by the way: fixer. It's not a derogatory term, not a colonialist leftover. I asked, "Would you rather I call you a translator?"
He pursed his bottom lip, shook his head. "No, fixer is good, I think." He taught himself to speak English as a teenager — by reading newspapers, listening to tapes, and watching DVDs. He had a thready, negligible accent but occasionally struggled with diction, though he was stubborn about asking for help.
He knew why I was there and he knew exactly how to help me. "Fixer is a good word. I think a fixer is what people want," he said. "A fixer does many things." He knew that I was going to speak to Clinton following my visit. All week I listened as he opened doors with this information, calling me "L'homme du Clinton" — getting me into camps, into meetings and classrooms where I had no business, leading me to bleary men who'd spent the night climbing into three-by-four-foot drainage tunnels in order to drag out every manner of rotting obstruction found in the darkness.
"Bill Clinton — he's a fixer, I think," Emmanuel said one day.
In the hotel courtyard on the night with the jazz and the rain, I bought Ryan a drink. He was probably about twenty-eight, black hair, cheap, neat haircut. Twice since the quake he'd come to Port-au-Prince to audit payments on microcredit loans. This involves, he told me, sitting in a windowless room in a bank, peeling open envelopes dropped by the poorest Haitians, mostly women, payments on tiny business loans. Microfinance has been a boon in places like India, Indonesia, and Haiti, he told me, and repayment rates are generally higher than 95 percent. Ryan won't tell me the name of the bank or the address of the office. I laughed. Why would you hide the name of the bank? "I promised my boss," he said. He ordered more amaretto.
The currency itself — Haitian gourdes — smelled, he said, each packet a little different from the last. Rotting fruit. Sewage. Gritty, unnamed dirt. Sometimes the bills were so black, it was hard to tell their denomination, except by rubbing the corners with baby wipes. The payments were generally spot-on, however. "Haitian women are good with money," he said. They must have to hide it, he told me, who knows how.
Ryan motioned over his shoulder. "Why don't you interview Patricia Arquette?"
I thought, George Clooney, maybe, because he organized the initial telethon. Or Sean Penn, who's been living in a tent city in Port-au-Prince for months now. But why Patricia Arquette? Had she made some particular strides that I hadn't heard about?
Ryan shrugged. "I don't know," he said. "I'm just saying she's right there." He hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the table behind us. There she was, hunched forward, hands on her knees, speaking quietly to two Haitians. I could hear her say three words: tents, extreme, and equity. Patricia Arquette.
The bartender, a little guy named Sam, proffered a Prestige without my asking.
Then I told Ryan about my day: the city, the rubble, the driving, the dog, the stopping to watch NGO volunteers. I had seen enough of their work to recognize what it was: difficult, slow, frustratingly small but inarguably important.
"If I were you," Ryan said, "I'd want to see a little nothing."
A bearded white guy, one of the medics, entered the pool area with eight boxes of pizza. I could see from here: Domino's.
"Nothing," I repeated.
"You should go to Titanyen," he said. "You should get out of the city."
I couldn't place the name.
"It's where they buried the bodies," he said.
"Is there a memorial?"
"Nope," he said, shaking his head, absently wiping his lip. "Nothing."
All week, night and day, the city was lousy with traffic, the streets a storm of careening progress. Tap-taps, brightly colored private buses, jammed so tight with the flesh of passengers that men crouched in the aisles, throttled ahead, behind, around us; trucks downshifted through signal-less intersections; bicyclists were brushed and bumped. There were knee-deep potholes, which the locals filled with cut-up tires, and potholes as wide as the street itself. In six days, I saw four operating streetlights.
One afternoon we blazed through the city to a tent hospital run by a group called Medishare. Our driver, Renor, a solid, dapper guy, drove like a Haitian, brave and batshit crazy. It was a green SUV deal, a Nissan something, with a shitbox transmission and not a single seat belt.
The hospital's chief medical officer, Dr. Vince DeGenarro, a New York kid who's been working in Haiti on and off for six years, had seen every manner of trauma related to the lack of seat belts. By nature, Haitians are unprepared for disaster, he said. "You've seen the way they drive," he said. "This is how close the Haitians are to disaster: Trauma is a leading cause of death in Haiti. Car accidents, pedestrians getting hit. It's just a constant."
DeGenarro pointed to the surfeit of gauze, tubing, suture kits, all available by the handful, to the cases of saline solution open on the floor. Every bed in the hospital was taken, by all manner of patient — ancient double amputees next to babies no bigger than an unusually generous croissant.
"We can practice medicine because we have the resources," he said. "You go to Port-au-Prince General right now and you won't see anything like this. You'll see nothing. Nothing. Haitian nurses are really good, but they aren't getting paid for months at a time, and if they go to a cupboard for a liter of saline solution and there isn't one, what are they going to do? There's no magic. It's a question of resources. There is no fight without resources. So they send people home to die."
These stories still seem to give Clinton a little charge, a dim sense that he can fix things — even something as potentially unfixable as the health-care system in Port-au-Prince. "It may be time for me to fill another plane with supplies for the hospital," Clinton says when I tell him about the Medishare tent and the hopeless state of Port-au-Prince General.
Then he resets, locates priorities. "But you have to start where people live. In the camps, we need more sanitation and protection from blowdown. In the streets, we need more jobs. We need to begin reconstruction. Then do something on the education front that puts money into the hands of families so we can build an education together."
A few days after my conversation with Clinton, I speak with Dr. Paul Farmer, Clinton's fellow special envoy to Haiti and the legendary cofounder of Partners in Health, a kind of medical safety net for citizens of the Third World. "All of the medical struggles we've had in Haiti have centered around very uncreative ideas about how to finance health care," says Farmer. "It's a country of nine million people where only a couple hundred thousand have insurance. The uncreative financing models came out of the international finance community, like the World Bank in the 1980s. Very regressive policies made it very difficult for someone trying to provide high-quality health care for poor people. Truth is, the devastation of the earthquake creates the perfect moment to undo all of that, fairly quickly.
"For me, that's a fresh chance to rebuild a system where, when people need complicated care, they can be referred from a clinic to a hospital or even a tertiary-care hospital. I worked with President Clinton on a very similar effort in Rwanda. And the Rwandans, they came back from hell."
Haitians speak about the end of the old Haiti. They have for months now, yearning, as Farmer does, for this fresh start. "It's the rising," says singer and Haitian icon Wyclef Jean, "and what I mean by the rising is destroy to rebuild. If we can't get it right, if we didn't, let's destroy completely and start from scratch again. Haiti has an opportunity now to start from scratch, and what that means is, we can get real schools in there. There's a chance of getting real hospitals. There's a chance of teaching a population how to read and write, where kids can get a degree and actually do something with the degree right now."
Titanyen, fifteen miles north of Port-au-Prince: the place to see nothing. There was a small sign on the north side of the road with an e-mail address. Down this road they buried tens of thousands, more perhaps, of the city's unknown dead in the weeks after the quake. There were trash burns on the side of the road; we passed a dead donkey, its body folded and blown up like a gas bag. We saw a large cross on the face of a hill. Burned or painted there, I wasn't sure. The SUV spun along bit by bit, down and across a precarious washout and up onto a small plateau.
"This is the start of it," Manu said. I called him that sometimes. He pointed up into the hills, past a truly massive burn mark, perhaps 150 yards across. "It goes very far into the hills." We got out.
The air was dense and sour. Emmanuel spat. Then I did. It was not foul really, but I have to say it sat there, in my throat, like it knew what it was. The place appeared to be your basic wilderness: a set of ragged ridges, something to climb or ignore. But there was one long rise, smoother than the others, more berm than ridge — flat along the top, elongated, like a thigh muscle in the earth. "I see it," I said to no one.
The hill was grid-lined with stones in large rectangles, marking the land. Graves, I figured, or tombs. The Duvaliers dumped bodies out here for decades — enemies, torture victims, prisoners. Maybe these were search grids. But the areas were too large and irregular.
"People want to build out here," Emmanuel explained. "Those lines are for houses."
I could not figure this. I really tried.
"People want new cities," he said. "All this land could be a new city."
We looked south, at the sight of Port-au-Prince, a dark cluster in the distance, and the fifteen miles of open land between here and there.
"People would build on a graveyard?" I said.
Emmanuel flattened his lips, the way he did when I said something vaguely dumb. "People need houses," he said. "That whole city is graveyard now."
We stood and stared, the light open and unfailing. A dark cloud of smoke worked its way from the water, thinning itself up the slope of the city, toward the mountains. Then black smoke rose again, at the water's edge, moving like a wave up the shore.
"Something's burning," I said. "That's a fire."
"No," Emmanuel assured me. "It's just Port-au-Prince. Just how it blows, I guess."
There came a day when Emmanuel was sulking a little in the courtyard of an NGO office. Hurt, hungover, or troubled — something was off.
In his presence, I'd asked some aid workers about Cité Soleil. I wanted to know: Which NGO handled that site? Why had it taken two weeks for its people to get aid?
The aid workers, some of them in only their second month in Haiti, said things like, "Boy, we don't go near it" and "We were told not to even drive by." These answers had set Emmanuel off.
"I could take you there," he grumbled when we were alone. "These people talk about the poorest place on earth, the most dangerous place on earth. When you talk about a place in that way, that's what it becomes. That is Haiti, too."
At lunch that day, Emmanuel asked me directly, "What about what we do ourselves?"
I had insulted him somehow. "Haitians, you mean?"
He looked at the cars parked end to end along the curb, at the men playing dominoes on the hood of a spray-painted car and the unfractured rock wall behind them. Port-au-Prince looked like any city just then, a place where everyone who passes has some thread in the fabric of a larger, vaguely logical narrative.
"We do things for ourselves," he said. "My friends and I go to Cité Soleil every Saturday."
"To do what?"
"We teach classes," he said. "We teach about manners. And responsibility. Eight of us. You want to go to Cité Soleil?"
We stood, Emmanuel I and nine citizens of a camp called Delmas 33 in Port-au-Prince, on the shallow banks of a basin of concrete. Down here, where the water collected, where the ground was a carpet of broken concrete, the tents were sparse. When I asked what this place was before the quake, all nine of them answered at once. Emmanuel listened, then turned to me and said, "A form."
"A form?"
Emmanuel winced. "Farm," he said.
"Then where did the rubble come from?" I asked.
"The trucks bring them the rubble," Emmanuel said. "These people want the rubble, to raise up the land."
At any mention of something lacking — supplies, heavy equipment, food, hope — Clinton flinches toward action. His own. "I obviously need to go down there and get those camp leaders together again," he says. This time he twists his chin with his fingers a little and gets just the tiniest bit exasperated, with time, with the way efforts pale months later, maybe with the relentless need of it all. "See, in the aftermath of the quake, I would go down there, but I didn't like to go unless I had something to bring them. I could do more good up here, mobilizing services. I got them 120 trucks, 90 of which are now on the streets. What I tried to do every single day was find the gaps and fill them."
Clinton sits about as still as a man can. He can't be blamed for suppressing a yawn in the middle of a ribbon of policy statements — it's late, he's getting old, and he's been working — but he likes the story of the men trying to raise the ground in the Delmas camp, and he bangs on the gum pretty good when talking about the problem of the rubble. "You may have seen where someone said it may take us two and a half years to clean the rubble out of Port-au-Prince even if we had a thousand trucks all working round the clock, because of the volume of material," he says. I had not heard this calculation. Seemed optimistic. I've learned there is no exaggerating the exaggeration of this city.
"That's premised on the assumption that the roads are bad, and we have to take the rubble out to centralized dumps and all that." He shifts from one hip to the other, then sits forward. "So I got 'em working on a thing now where they go into, let's say, a two-square-block area, and let's say there are twenty lots that are devastated. They collect all the rubble and store it right there on two or three lots, whatever you have to do. You clear the others out and let people rebuild by lottery."
He pauses there, maybe wants a little love for having come up with that.
"We're going to have to be clever," he says. "But if people can see the homes coming back, and if we could put many, many more people to work, I think that would make a huge difference."
Clinton's team had set me up with pretty much the only prescheduled meeting I had all week in Haiti, with a fish farmer. I had learned about the fish farmer at a midyear meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative. "In business, things really pretty much always get solved," Clinton said that day. "Competitors will study every previous solution to death and then build on it. In humanitarianism, big ideas get fairly isolated. So I try to look for big ideas that have been isolated for whatever reason and show people the possibilities." So I asked to see this big idea, this fish farm.
In the dense heat of the Haitian backcountry, in a compound verdant and overgrown, I shook hands with the operator, a gentle man, Valentin Abe, forty-seven, small, strapping, smiling, bespectacled.
"Tilapia," Abe said as he circled the perimeter of the first tank, one of thirty-six corrugated-aluminum tanks wrapped in a concrete base, twenty feet across, each half submerged in the earth. He explained the filtration system that used local bean stalks, pointed out the solar panels that powered the facility, and canisters that caught and reduced the waste from each tank, producing a potent organic fertilizer. He gave that to the local farmers for free. Ingenious, all of it.
Born in the Ivory Coast, educated in the States at Auburn, Abe, an efficient man, begged me not to ask questions until he had explained everything: There are three major lakes in Haiti, all of which had suffered heavily from overfishing. Local fishermen, who had once pulled twelve hundred tons a year from the largest lake, were down to forty-two just four years ago. These lakes needed to be stocked yearly, but the only time that happened was after disasters. "It got to the point where I was hoping for something awful to happen so we could see some progress. And that is nothing to pray for," he said.
Abe, who had argued to a deaf legislature for more than a decade that Haiti should start a national hatchery, finally decided to try it himself, investing his own money to set up three tanks to breed and raise fingerlings. Then he developed an army of five-by-five portable cages and gave these, fully stocked with fingerlings, to the farmers the first year, and supplied them with feed. At the end of a six-month cycle, Abe bought back the largest 70 percent of the catch, financing each farmer's next cage, stock, and feed in the process. He left the remaining 30 percent to the fishermen. The average family in his first village had lived on $400 a year. Abe's cages produced $1,200 per cycle. Suddenly, children were going to school, water systems and sanitation improved.
"The thing you have to remember with Val," Clinton says, "is he knows what fish farms can mean. That they can be an absolute disaster to the environment. I'm from Arkansas, where we grow a lot of catfish. Abe insists on this top-quality feed, developed here. I mean that stuff is efficient. That's what I mean by a reliable system, reliable return. I was there, I saw families of eight living in one room with hardly any roof at all. He changed all that."
It's a good system, I told Abe, so good, I don't know what would stop a fishing company from coming in and doing it on a large scale, using cheaper feed. Abe nodded. "Yes," he said. "This is a worry of mine. It really is."
That same point gets Clinton excited, makes him point straight at me. "Right," he says. "That's exactly why I want anyone who comes in there to have to be licensed to work with Valentin and with the farmers. Things could be expanded. Just stick with the program that does the most people the most good. It's an exciting program, it really is. Given enough time and support, Valentin Abe really could feed the whole country.
"Haitians have the incentive. They need organizational structure and the support to get things done. That's what I'm trying to do: move things along. I want them to consider all their big alternatives. I want them to consider becoming a wireless country, consider becoming an energy-independent country. I want them to close their landfills, recycle everything, and use the rest for energy. Wouldn't it be great if they became the first wireless nation in the world? They could, I'm telling you, they really could."
Noon on a Saturday. I asked for this — this drive through Cité Soleil. One car directly behind us, another four feet in front. I rode middle seat in the back. Our guide, a school headmaster, gestured to an open area on the left, perhaps sixty yards across. Two bullet-ridden cement towers, a string of plywood sheets bearing half a slogan, leaning against sawhorses. A young man wheeling a bicycle with no front tire. A woman pulling lines of children, three and four at a time. An oil drum. Another oil drum. A box of lumber. Something burning. As long as we moved fast, it was hard to make any of it out. It was not really much of a tour.
"This is Bill Clinton Town," Manu translated. "That's what they call it."
There was more said in French then, more to be translated. I didn't know what to make of the Clinton line, couldn't tell if the nickname was a tribute or an irony, because everyone in the car started speaking much louder. Two cars in front of us was a UN security vehicle, in our same lane, driving our same speed toward the shore. Emmanuel shook his head to let me know not to worry. And I didn't much, not even when the UN vehicle slammed to a stop and four camo-suited UN soldiers emerged. Then the crowd pressed in tight against the cars, and the yelling started. One young man, ham-boned against our passenger door, took a long cold look into our car, eyes moving from face to face. I stared right at him like a dumbass. The headmaster told Renor, our driver, to back out, which was difficult given the crowd, and as soon as the UN guys heard him get it in gear, a hand smacked our hood. Another soldier leveled his rifle at our car.
More yelling. Assurances this time. Someone made room behind us, Renor made the K-turn, and we headed away from the scene. "It was just a fight," the headmaster said in French. "Pas mal."
This was not the Haiti I'd seen, where no one was willing to give up going on, to quit on normalcy. These people dropped normalcy, same way normalcy long ago forgot about them. The headmaster was right; it really was not bad. But in that moment, it did seem to me like the Haiti — angry, stressed, ignored, worn, explosive — that Haiti might become.
We went north, out of town, then turned and passed a soccer field loaded with children. "This was donated by Wyclef Jean. Wyclef put it right here in Cité Soleil," the headmaster noted. "He wanted it this way."
Finally I ask Clinton flat-out why the Haitians like him. Why are they so willing to listen to him, above any other leader?
He looks at me, a glance at once narrow and earnest. "Was that your experience then?"
"Yes. They're frustrated. And they have questions. But why do they want your answer in particular?"
"I've tried never to have my words outrun my deeds in Haiti," he says, "which is always a huge problem in every poor place on earth, especially in a great lively culture like that one, where people are demonstrative, and they love to talk, and they love to sing." He smiles in his et cetera fashion, as if everyone knows what he is talking about.
He lays claim to his lessons: "You can't forget there are people listening when you say you are going to do things, and I try not to overpromise. Mostly, I think people who have been worked over and messed around with, they kind of get it. Now, I also believe they could withdraw their support from me if they feel I don't do anything."
He stops. When he starts again, the eyebrows go up.
"I wake up every day sick at heart that we aren't doing more."
Three hours before the UN soldier leveled that rifle at the car I was in, we'd arrived for class. The children had already tramped across the street from Cité Soleil, up the muddy, uneven path, and come in behind the cinder-block walls to the compound where the six-room schoolhouse stood. Haitian children had proven a witty chorus to my stay, naming and renaming me in the camps — le ministre, l'homme blanc, le président — asking nothing from me except proximity. In Teleco, I reached into a gutter to dredge out a Ping-Pong ball, Purelled the hell out of it, and gave it to a six-year-old boy. He whispered his giddy words of thanks before the boy next to him grabbed it and ran. Those kids, gripped by 93 degrees of midmorning boredom, need balls.
At the school, still around the corner, I could hear them singing. Emmanuel assured me that most of them had seen white people. "They may stare, you know, but we work on that with them," he said. We walked past a room where a young woman was filling bowls with cereal. "That is my girlfriend."
"Pretty," I told him.
He shouted to her and told her that I said she was pretty. She smiled and waved.
Just before we stepped around the corner into the class, he said, "Will you teach the class, Tom?"
"Me?" I said.
"Yes," Emmanuel said. "I think they will want that. You can teach them about a good handshake. Being respectful. About manners. The children will listen to you."
"Manu," I said. "My own sons don't listen to me."
He laughed and shifted from one foot to the other. "I do," he said. "And I think they want you to speak."
I took a peek. It was a classroom all right, about fifty children, some of them holding their infant siblings. Clean clothes, sitting up so straight. All of them singing. In the middle of the room, the program director was calling out to them. My name was there on the board in that universal white school chalk, M. TOM CHIARELLA, ESQUIRE MAGAZINE, even the angle of the article: "Possible ou impossible?"
I'd asked that question a dozen times that week about Haiti: possible ou impossible?
Ryan, the young accountant, thought it might be impossible.
Nothing is impossible, the fish man assured me.
Nothing is impossible, the chief medical officer said.
The maître d' said, Difficult is not impossible.
Wyclef Jean, deep in his studio back in New Jersey, told me: "In the course of history we have to define what the word impossible means. You put Haitians anywhere, and they're going to rise to the occasion."
And there was Clinton, the ex-president and, for better or worse, the CEO of the leaderless nation: "I don't want to be naive. It's going to be a stretch. It'll be hard, but I'm excited about it. Enough so that after a couple of heart incidents and being sixty-three years old, I am prepared to spend three years on it. They want the right things for their country."
So Emmanuel went ahead while I stood there thinking: What the hell did I know about manners? And how would I lead that discussion around to the big question — possible or impossible? He came back for me then and asked if I was all right. I'm just thinking, I told him. Then Emmanuel Midi, fixer extraordinaire, standing on the blessed eastern edge of the most dangerous place in the world, gave me the best advice of all, uttered the words that rang clearest, the ones that anyone who presumes to care about Haiti should hear.
"Okay," he said, "but now we have to hurry."
_____________________
Source: esquire.com , July 19, 2010, 6:30 AM
While most of the world has stopped paying attention to Haiti, he has become the de facto leader of the effort to rebuild the country after the historic earthquake. The problem is, there wasn't much there to begin with.
After five days in Port-au-Prince, I sat at the hotel bar and ordered a Prestige, the beer of Haiti, the beer of preference — a pretty damned good beer, if you ask me. I liked the word, Prestige, which somehow rolled French off my tongue. And I liked the way the bartenders wrapped the fat brown bottle in a white paper napkin, which in the evening heat clung like gauze to a wound. A jazz trio played under the eaves at one end of the courtyard, well enough that I wondered who they'd played with and what they knew. Next to me: a baby-faced accountant, here from Kentucky to audit microcredit payments, Ryan, the only person at the hotel I could stand to drink with.The rest of them were NGO volunteers or medics in for a week, insular, high-minded, and somehow vacant in their mutual moral purpose. Just then, some of them were swimming in the hotel pool, a half dozen American nurses and a pair of Canadian surgeons, playing a game of Marco Polo.
Keep in mind: This is now. A kind of now, anyway. Late spring 2010, just five months past the great earthquake that rocked the already roiling city. To the south was a city lot, half full with a twenty-foot pile of wreckage that once constituted an Italian restaurant. A sweeping pile of rubble projected eight feet into the road, having been carried there, one bucket at a time, by an old guy who worked the lot all day with a worn-down mattock. Rubble dropped there on faith in an unscheduled collection. Traffic bent and slowed around it, a little more each day. In that rubble: a child's sock, half a purse, bloated rolls of toilet paper, a key chain, the wet skin of a grocery bag, and notes regarding inventory off the top of a desk long since splintered, or salvaged, or stolen. Used-up gaskets. Broken bottles. Bits of food, too. Pits. Rinds. That was just what I'd seen that morning, when the guards from the hotel let me step into the street for a look while they stood watch, shotguns cocked.
Around the corner, facing the main entrance of the hotel, stood a tent city — more cardboard than plywood, more plywood than tin, more tin than tent pole, more tied-down blue plastic sheeting than anything else — unspooling itself across the Champs de Mars, the former national plaza, rooting fifty thousand people right up to the ruined national palace. That was west. To the north, more: churches, guts blown outward, still somehow uncollected in the street; collapsed apartments, one cement deck piled upon the other, unexcavated and peopled, everyone supposed, by skeletons. Through these streets walked the Haitian citizenry, scores of them, hundreds, thousands. Haitians selling fruit, selling floor mats, selling chickens, washing windows, cooking corn on rusted hibachis, proffering bags of drinking water.
That night in the hotel, with the jazz throbbing, it started to rain. I pulled out my cell phone and texted the single soul I knew in the city of 2.4 million, Emmanuel Midi, my twenty-five-year-old fixer, who'd dropped me there an hour before. I had no idea where he went at night. I thumbed out my concern: Are you safe in this rain?
I'm ok! he texted back. Thanks for asking! I liked the kid. Everything with him was exclamation points.
I didn't know much about the geography of Haiti, but I had known enough to look for Cité Soleil, the notorious slum, as the plane landed. The district occupied a dark, gray clump of land near the airport, at the water's edge. People had warned me about it. The night before I left, in New York, I had watched half of a documentary about it, Ghosts of Cité Soleil, then nudged around the Internet long enough to find State Department travelers' warnings naming it the most dangerous place in the world. It seemed a place apart, beyond reckoning somehow, a place the Haitian government ignored and the UN struggled with — and one that some part of my most greedy heart wanted to see. Then I got my first up-close look at Port-au-Prince, straining, crumbling, collapsing in every quarter, and Cité Soleil was forgotten again.
In the mornings, I sometimes stood in my T-shirt, hands in pockets, on the steps of the hotel, staring across the street at the wall of the tarpaulin city. The hotel clerks fussed at me about going outside. Even when it was a park, when you could see through the arbors right to the walls of the palace, the Champs was not particularly safe. "You can't see past the tents," one told me. "So there is nothing to see." I persisted until he came out from behind the desk, unlocked the folding gate, then unlocked the front door, then stood watching me watch the camp.
One morning, someone in the camp had a rooster. Three men — one shirtless, one pantless, the other fully dressed for work — rousted by the crowing, prowled the curving exterior of a clutch of tents. Two women stood over a charcoal fire, heating up bread. Even at 5:45, the traffic was sometimes loud enough that the rooster was difficult to track. The men closed in. Then the bird went quiet.
Then, in one moment, all three caught sight of me for the first time. The shirtless one walked straight to the edge of the traffic, intent on me. The pantless one at his heels. They called to me, "Monsieur! Mister!" Not good. I turned, and the door swung open for me — a guard, shotgun crooked in his elbow. He said something I couldn't make out. "Bonjour," I replied. But he stopped me to clarify. They're pimps, he was saying. Pimps who watch the doors. You cannot go out there. After that I didn't.
In an office in Harlem, the day after I return from Haiti, after he picks my seat, after he makes sure there is water, Bill Clinton, the UN special envoy to Haiti since 2009, draws a deep, yoga breath because it's the end of the day but his day has not yet ended. He looks flat-out dog-tired. He keeps a piece of gum tucked between his molars and his cheek, bouncing his jaw on it once in a while. In his hour-long narrative about the past, present, and future of the country, time and again, the two of us are his rhetorical pair, conjoined in the propositions he draws up for Haiti.
Let's say we were going into the textile business...
Suppose the two of us had some money we wanted to take down to Port-au-Prince...
We should go down there together and take a look...
"You and I are sitting here today because at critical points in our lives, from the time we were quite young, whatever adversity we faced, we knew that there was some predictable, positive consequence that would flow forward if we did the right thing — if we studied hard, made good grades, went to college, whatever." Clinton's givens are broad enough to be inarguably illustrative. "Really poor people, people in really poor places, don't have predictably good outcomes for good behaviors. It's a disorienting experience. Poor countries need predictability," he says. "In Haiti, we have to build systems."
Systems. This makes sense. No one in Haiti seems to believe there are any reliable systems, except perhaps cell-phone coverage and mango distribution.
At a UN conference in March, Clinton raised $9 billion from fifty-nine donors. Can that be used quickly enough to provide lasting, constructive improvement of the systems that already exist? Clinton draws a breath, tilts his head, and starts up with the list. The list of what must be rebuilt is weighty and long. Clinton ticks them down, one finger to the next. The federal workforce, never that strong to begin with. Schools — not just the ones that collapsed but a system of universal elementary education, which never existed. Infrastructure. Small-business credit.
"Then the health-care system needs to be built. I used to say rebuilt, but then I realized there really wasn't one before," he says. "Now I say built."
He pauses, and at that moment the muffled room demands a grandfather clock, something to emanate a giant tick. Any noise marking the movement of time. "We'll have to rebuild the infrastructure," he says, as if reminding someone at the back of the room. "We'll have to rebuild the agriculture."
Port-au-Prince was still a city of cement rooms, like this one, hanging two flights above the cloud of the street, cement deck barely cured, cinder-block walls, two doorless entries. On my first morning in Port-au-Prince, it was being used for a meeting between an NGO and some men from the Teleco settlement, just across the street. This was the work of the city.
By 10:15 there were twelve men carrying clipboards, fresh from working in the drainage ditches, there to speak with the rep from an NGO called the International Rescue Committee — Kate Montgomery, twenty-eight, American, stationed in Haiti for two months now — to make their pitch to extend a program called Cash for Work. They came to argue for jobs that paid slightly less than minimum wage and were available to only 315 of the camp's 3,600 citizens, jobs that consisted of climbing into trenches to shovel out soupy, shit-glistening, goop-covered trash. There was a Creole translator and an engineer. As the meeting progressed, more men arrived to show unity, until there were twenty-nine in the room, crammed in the doorways.
The IRC would extend the program for another twenty-four days, Montgomery said, but also reduce the total number of workers from 315 to 180. She insisted on a plan to select new candidates with selection limited to only one worker per family, with a minimum of 40 percent women.
The entire event was like watching a book-selection meeting at a subcommittee of the local library. After, the men retreated to an open terrace, where they huddled up and grumbled through a set of agreements. They wanted a force of 315. Montgomery agreed. Done.
Inroads for women, accountability, respect for process — reasonable accomplishments. Something like progress. It just wasn't clear what would happen now — what the relationship would be between this room and the camp. I asked one of the men, "Are Haitians used to working in committees?"
The man pffed and shook the sweat from his head. He smiled, jabbed the air, and said, "Only committees with knives."
There was only one dog left in Port-au-Prince. A ribby yellow bitch, teats dragging in the filth. She jogged along the narrow sidewalks, in and between the fruit piles. She ran alongside the filthy channels being cleared for the storms, skirted the edges of the places where people cooked in the open. Or found a corner and disappeared. Skinny yellow bitch. I saw her a dozen times a day. More. Each time miles from the last place I saw her. The Haitians didn't seem to notice. To them she must have been a mere detail, like the pile of charcoal sold for heating a kitchen stove or the blanketload of mangoes sold in the streets, because a Haitian mango is still a righteous thing. I saw the dog in a riverbed as men dug for sand to sell to the concrete factories. Another time tramping along a drainage ditch, carrying a pup in her jaws, and once at the gate of a tent city, with a compound fracture at the bottom of her right front leg. No one noticed. No one pitied the dog of Port-au-Prince.
At one point, I said to Emmanuel, "There's the dog again."
He replied, "It's not the same dog, Tom."
I knew this, of course. It was my joke with him, because the dogs in Port-au-Prince all looked the same. Very much the way you'd expect the people to look — somehow cracked, anxious, and broken. Though the people, despite everything that's happened, were nothing like that. They looked generally insistent, a little pissed, trapped in the middle of a story they will tell later. This is not to say they aren't sometimes dirty, or hungry, or that they look particularly pure of heart. There is a juicy malice in Port-au-Prince, my fixer told me. Assault. Rape in some camps. At night, I heard guns — fired at the police, at the UN soldiers, from one gang to the next, I would learn. But by day the streets were full; there was food in the small stands set up each morning, carried in on the backs of women whose ancient supply lines healed themselves many weeks ago, in a fashion that continues to elude construction interests.
I can call Emmanuel that, by the way: fixer. It's not a derogatory term, not a colonialist leftover. I asked, "Would you rather I call you a translator?"
He pursed his bottom lip, shook his head. "No, fixer is good, I think." He taught himself to speak English as a teenager — by reading newspapers, listening to tapes, and watching DVDs. He had a thready, negligible accent but occasionally struggled with diction, though he was stubborn about asking for help.
He knew why I was there and he knew exactly how to help me. "Fixer is a good word. I think a fixer is what people want," he said. "A fixer does many things." He knew that I was going to speak to Clinton following my visit. All week I listened as he opened doors with this information, calling me "L'homme du Clinton" — getting me into camps, into meetings and classrooms where I had no business, leading me to bleary men who'd spent the night climbing into three-by-four-foot drainage tunnels in order to drag out every manner of rotting obstruction found in the darkness.
"Bill Clinton — he's a fixer, I think," Emmanuel said one day.
In the hotel courtyard on the night with the jazz and the rain, I bought Ryan a drink. He was probably about twenty-eight, black hair, cheap, neat haircut. Twice since the quake he'd come to Port-au-Prince to audit payments on microcredit loans. This involves, he told me, sitting in a windowless room in a bank, peeling open envelopes dropped by the poorest Haitians, mostly women, payments on tiny business loans. Microfinance has been a boon in places like India, Indonesia, and Haiti, he told me, and repayment rates are generally higher than 95 percent. Ryan won't tell me the name of the bank or the address of the office. I laughed. Why would you hide the name of the bank? "I promised my boss," he said. He ordered more amaretto.
The currency itself — Haitian gourdes — smelled, he said, each packet a little different from the last. Rotting fruit. Sewage. Gritty, unnamed dirt. Sometimes the bills were so black, it was hard to tell their denomination, except by rubbing the corners with baby wipes. The payments were generally spot-on, however. "Haitian women are good with money," he said. They must have to hide it, he told me, who knows how.
Ryan motioned over his shoulder. "Why don't you interview Patricia Arquette?"
I thought, George Clooney, maybe, because he organized the initial telethon. Or Sean Penn, who's been living in a tent city in Port-au-Prince for months now. But why Patricia Arquette? Had she made some particular strides that I hadn't heard about?
Ryan shrugged. "I don't know," he said. "I'm just saying she's right there." He hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the table behind us. There she was, hunched forward, hands on her knees, speaking quietly to two Haitians. I could hear her say three words: tents, extreme, and equity. Patricia Arquette.
The bartender, a little guy named Sam, proffered a Prestige without my asking.
Then I told Ryan about my day: the city, the rubble, the driving, the dog, the stopping to watch NGO volunteers. I had seen enough of their work to recognize what it was: difficult, slow, frustratingly small but inarguably important.
"If I were you," Ryan said, "I'd want to see a little nothing."
A bearded white guy, one of the medics, entered the pool area with eight boxes of pizza. I could see from here: Domino's.
"Nothing," I repeated.
"You should go to Titanyen," he said. "You should get out of the city."
I couldn't place the name.
"It's where they buried the bodies," he said.
"Is there a memorial?"
"Nope," he said, shaking his head, absently wiping his lip. "Nothing."
All week, night and day, the city was lousy with traffic, the streets a storm of careening progress. Tap-taps, brightly colored private buses, jammed so tight with the flesh of passengers that men crouched in the aisles, throttled ahead, behind, around us; trucks downshifted through signal-less intersections; bicyclists were brushed and bumped. There were knee-deep potholes, which the locals filled with cut-up tires, and potholes as wide as the street itself. In six days, I saw four operating streetlights.
One afternoon we blazed through the city to a tent hospital run by a group called Medishare. Our driver, Renor, a solid, dapper guy, drove like a Haitian, brave and batshit crazy. It was a green SUV deal, a Nissan something, with a shitbox transmission and not a single seat belt.
The hospital's chief medical officer, Dr. Vince DeGenarro, a New York kid who's been working in Haiti on and off for six years, had seen every manner of trauma related to the lack of seat belts. By nature, Haitians are unprepared for disaster, he said. "You've seen the way they drive," he said. "This is how close the Haitians are to disaster: Trauma is a leading cause of death in Haiti. Car accidents, pedestrians getting hit. It's just a constant."
DeGenarro pointed to the surfeit of gauze, tubing, suture kits, all available by the handful, to the cases of saline solution open on the floor. Every bed in the hospital was taken, by all manner of patient — ancient double amputees next to babies no bigger than an unusually generous croissant.
"We can practice medicine because we have the resources," he said. "You go to Port-au-Prince General right now and you won't see anything like this. You'll see nothing. Nothing. Haitian nurses are really good, but they aren't getting paid for months at a time, and if they go to a cupboard for a liter of saline solution and there isn't one, what are they going to do? There's no magic. It's a question of resources. There is no fight without resources. So they send people home to die."
These stories still seem to give Clinton a little charge, a dim sense that he can fix things — even something as potentially unfixable as the health-care system in Port-au-Prince. "It may be time for me to fill another plane with supplies for the hospital," Clinton says when I tell him about the Medishare tent and the hopeless state of Port-au-Prince General.
Then he resets, locates priorities. "But you have to start where people live. In the camps, we need more sanitation and protection from blowdown. In the streets, we need more jobs. We need to begin reconstruction. Then do something on the education front that puts money into the hands of families so we can build an education together."
A few days after my conversation with Clinton, I speak with Dr. Paul Farmer, Clinton's fellow special envoy to Haiti and the legendary cofounder of Partners in Health, a kind of medical safety net for citizens of the Third World. "All of the medical struggles we've had in Haiti have centered around very uncreative ideas about how to finance health care," says Farmer. "It's a country of nine million people where only a couple hundred thousand have insurance. The uncreative financing models came out of the international finance community, like the World Bank in the 1980s. Very regressive policies made it very difficult for someone trying to provide high-quality health care for poor people. Truth is, the devastation of the earthquake creates the perfect moment to undo all of that, fairly quickly.
"For me, that's a fresh chance to rebuild a system where, when people need complicated care, they can be referred from a clinic to a hospital or even a tertiary-care hospital. I worked with President Clinton on a very similar effort in Rwanda. And the Rwandans, they came back from hell."
Haitians speak about the end of the old Haiti. They have for months now, yearning, as Farmer does, for this fresh start. "It's the rising," says singer and Haitian icon Wyclef Jean, "and what I mean by the rising is destroy to rebuild. If we can't get it right, if we didn't, let's destroy completely and start from scratch again. Haiti has an opportunity now to start from scratch, and what that means is, we can get real schools in there. There's a chance of getting real hospitals. There's a chance of teaching a population how to read and write, where kids can get a degree and actually do something with the degree right now."
Titanyen, fifteen miles north of Port-au-Prince: the place to see nothing. There was a small sign on the north side of the road with an e-mail address. Down this road they buried tens of thousands, more perhaps, of the city's unknown dead in the weeks after the quake. There were trash burns on the side of the road; we passed a dead donkey, its body folded and blown up like a gas bag. We saw a large cross on the face of a hill. Burned or painted there, I wasn't sure. The SUV spun along bit by bit, down and across a precarious washout and up onto a small plateau.
"This is the start of it," Manu said. I called him that sometimes. He pointed up into the hills, past a truly massive burn mark, perhaps 150 yards across. "It goes very far into the hills." We got out.
The air was dense and sour. Emmanuel spat. Then I did. It was not foul really, but I have to say it sat there, in my throat, like it knew what it was. The place appeared to be your basic wilderness: a set of ragged ridges, something to climb or ignore. But there was one long rise, smoother than the others, more berm than ridge — flat along the top, elongated, like a thigh muscle in the earth. "I see it," I said to no one.
The hill was grid-lined with stones in large rectangles, marking the land. Graves, I figured, or tombs. The Duvaliers dumped bodies out here for decades — enemies, torture victims, prisoners. Maybe these were search grids. But the areas were too large and irregular.
"People want to build out here," Emmanuel explained. "Those lines are for houses."
I could not figure this. I really tried.
"People want new cities," he said. "All this land could be a new city."
We looked south, at the sight of Port-au-Prince, a dark cluster in the distance, and the fifteen miles of open land between here and there.
"People would build on a graveyard?" I said.
Emmanuel flattened his lips, the way he did when I said something vaguely dumb. "People need houses," he said. "That whole city is graveyard now."
We stood and stared, the light open and unfailing. A dark cloud of smoke worked its way from the water, thinning itself up the slope of the city, toward the mountains. Then black smoke rose again, at the water's edge, moving like a wave up the shore.
"Something's burning," I said. "That's a fire."
"No," Emmanuel assured me. "It's just Port-au-Prince. Just how it blows, I guess."
There came a day when Emmanuel was sulking a little in the courtyard of an NGO office. Hurt, hungover, or troubled — something was off.
In his presence, I'd asked some aid workers about Cité Soleil. I wanted to know: Which NGO handled that site? Why had it taken two weeks for its people to get aid?
The aid workers, some of them in only their second month in Haiti, said things like, "Boy, we don't go near it" and "We were told not to even drive by." These answers had set Emmanuel off.
"I could take you there," he grumbled when we were alone. "These people talk about the poorest place on earth, the most dangerous place on earth. When you talk about a place in that way, that's what it becomes. That is Haiti, too."
At lunch that day, Emmanuel asked me directly, "What about what we do ourselves?"
I had insulted him somehow. "Haitians, you mean?"
He looked at the cars parked end to end along the curb, at the men playing dominoes on the hood of a spray-painted car and the unfractured rock wall behind them. Port-au-Prince looked like any city just then, a place where everyone who passes has some thread in the fabric of a larger, vaguely logical narrative.
"We do things for ourselves," he said. "My friends and I go to Cité Soleil every Saturday."
"To do what?"
"We teach classes," he said. "We teach about manners. And responsibility. Eight of us. You want to go to Cité Soleil?"
We stood, Emmanuel I and nine citizens of a camp called Delmas 33 in Port-au-Prince, on the shallow banks of a basin of concrete. Down here, where the water collected, where the ground was a carpet of broken concrete, the tents were sparse. When I asked what this place was before the quake, all nine of them answered at once. Emmanuel listened, then turned to me and said, "A form."
"A form?"
Emmanuel winced. "Farm," he said.
"Then where did the rubble come from?" I asked.
"The trucks bring them the rubble," Emmanuel said. "These people want the rubble, to raise up the land."
At any mention of something lacking — supplies, heavy equipment, food, hope — Clinton flinches toward action. His own. "I obviously need to go down there and get those camp leaders together again," he says. This time he twists his chin with his fingers a little and gets just the tiniest bit exasperated, with time, with the way efforts pale months later, maybe with the relentless need of it all. "See, in the aftermath of the quake, I would go down there, but I didn't like to go unless I had something to bring them. I could do more good up here, mobilizing services. I got them 120 trucks, 90 of which are now on the streets. What I tried to do every single day was find the gaps and fill them."
Clinton sits about as still as a man can. He can't be blamed for suppressing a yawn in the middle of a ribbon of policy statements — it's late, he's getting old, and he's been working — but he likes the story of the men trying to raise the ground in the Delmas camp, and he bangs on the gum pretty good when talking about the problem of the rubble. "You may have seen where someone said it may take us two and a half years to clean the rubble out of Port-au-Prince even if we had a thousand trucks all working round the clock, because of the volume of material," he says. I had not heard this calculation. Seemed optimistic. I've learned there is no exaggerating the exaggeration of this city.
"That's premised on the assumption that the roads are bad, and we have to take the rubble out to centralized dumps and all that." He shifts from one hip to the other, then sits forward. "So I got 'em working on a thing now where they go into, let's say, a two-square-block area, and let's say there are twenty lots that are devastated. They collect all the rubble and store it right there on two or three lots, whatever you have to do. You clear the others out and let people rebuild by lottery."
He pauses there, maybe wants a little love for having come up with that.
"We're going to have to be clever," he says. "But if people can see the homes coming back, and if we could put many, many more people to work, I think that would make a huge difference."
Clinton's team had set me up with pretty much the only prescheduled meeting I had all week in Haiti, with a fish farmer. I had learned about the fish farmer at a midyear meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative. "In business, things really pretty much always get solved," Clinton said that day. "Competitors will study every previous solution to death and then build on it. In humanitarianism, big ideas get fairly isolated. So I try to look for big ideas that have been isolated for whatever reason and show people the possibilities." So I asked to see this big idea, this fish farm.
In the dense heat of the Haitian backcountry, in a compound verdant and overgrown, I shook hands with the operator, a gentle man, Valentin Abe, forty-seven, small, strapping, smiling, bespectacled.
"Tilapia," Abe said as he circled the perimeter of the first tank, one of thirty-six corrugated-aluminum tanks wrapped in a concrete base, twenty feet across, each half submerged in the earth. He explained the filtration system that used local bean stalks, pointed out the solar panels that powered the facility, and canisters that caught and reduced the waste from each tank, producing a potent organic fertilizer. He gave that to the local farmers for free. Ingenious, all of it.
Born in the Ivory Coast, educated in the States at Auburn, Abe, an efficient man, begged me not to ask questions until he had explained everything: There are three major lakes in Haiti, all of which had suffered heavily from overfishing. Local fishermen, who had once pulled twelve hundred tons a year from the largest lake, were down to forty-two just four years ago. These lakes needed to be stocked yearly, but the only time that happened was after disasters. "It got to the point where I was hoping for something awful to happen so we could see some progress. And that is nothing to pray for," he said.
Abe, who had argued to a deaf legislature for more than a decade that Haiti should start a national hatchery, finally decided to try it himself, investing his own money to set up three tanks to breed and raise fingerlings. Then he developed an army of five-by-five portable cages and gave these, fully stocked with fingerlings, to the farmers the first year, and supplied them with feed. At the end of a six-month cycle, Abe bought back the largest 70 percent of the catch, financing each farmer's next cage, stock, and feed in the process. He left the remaining 30 percent to the fishermen. The average family in his first village had lived on $400 a year. Abe's cages produced $1,200 per cycle. Suddenly, children were going to school, water systems and sanitation improved.
"The thing you have to remember with Val," Clinton says, "is he knows what fish farms can mean. That they can be an absolute disaster to the environment. I'm from Arkansas, where we grow a lot of catfish. Abe insists on this top-quality feed, developed here. I mean that stuff is efficient. That's what I mean by a reliable system, reliable return. I was there, I saw families of eight living in one room with hardly any roof at all. He changed all that."
It's a good system, I told Abe, so good, I don't know what would stop a fishing company from coming in and doing it on a large scale, using cheaper feed. Abe nodded. "Yes," he said. "This is a worry of mine. It really is."
That same point gets Clinton excited, makes him point straight at me. "Right," he says. "That's exactly why I want anyone who comes in there to have to be licensed to work with Valentin and with the farmers. Things could be expanded. Just stick with the program that does the most people the most good. It's an exciting program, it really is. Given enough time and support, Valentin Abe really could feed the whole country.
"Haitians have the incentive. They need organizational structure and the support to get things done. That's what I'm trying to do: move things along. I want them to consider all their big alternatives. I want them to consider becoming a wireless country, consider becoming an energy-independent country. I want them to close their landfills, recycle everything, and use the rest for energy. Wouldn't it be great if they became the first wireless nation in the world? They could, I'm telling you, they really could."
Noon on a Saturday. I asked for this — this drive through Cité Soleil. One car directly behind us, another four feet in front. I rode middle seat in the back. Our guide, a school headmaster, gestured to an open area on the left, perhaps sixty yards across. Two bullet-ridden cement towers, a string of plywood sheets bearing half a slogan, leaning against sawhorses. A young man wheeling a bicycle with no front tire. A woman pulling lines of children, three and four at a time. An oil drum. Another oil drum. A box of lumber. Something burning. As long as we moved fast, it was hard to make any of it out. It was not really much of a tour.
"This is Bill Clinton Town," Manu translated. "That's what they call it."
There was more said in French then, more to be translated. I didn't know what to make of the Clinton line, couldn't tell if the nickname was a tribute or an irony, because everyone in the car started speaking much louder. Two cars in front of us was a UN security vehicle, in our same lane, driving our same speed toward the shore. Emmanuel shook his head to let me know not to worry. And I didn't much, not even when the UN vehicle slammed to a stop and four camo-suited UN soldiers emerged. Then the crowd pressed in tight against the cars, and the yelling started. One young man, ham-boned against our passenger door, took a long cold look into our car, eyes moving from face to face. I stared right at him like a dumbass. The headmaster told Renor, our driver, to back out, which was difficult given the crowd, and as soon as the UN guys heard him get it in gear, a hand smacked our hood. Another soldier leveled his rifle at our car.
More yelling. Assurances this time. Someone made room behind us, Renor made the K-turn, and we headed away from the scene. "It was just a fight," the headmaster said in French. "Pas mal."
This was not the Haiti I'd seen, where no one was willing to give up going on, to quit on normalcy. These people dropped normalcy, same way normalcy long ago forgot about them. The headmaster was right; it really was not bad. But in that moment, it did seem to me like the Haiti — angry, stressed, ignored, worn, explosive — that Haiti might become.
We went north, out of town, then turned and passed a soccer field loaded with children. "This was donated by Wyclef Jean. Wyclef put it right here in Cité Soleil," the headmaster noted. "He wanted it this way."
Finally I ask Clinton flat-out why the Haitians like him. Why are they so willing to listen to him, above any other leader?
He looks at me, a glance at once narrow and earnest. "Was that your experience then?"
"Yes. They're frustrated. And they have questions. But why do they want your answer in particular?"
"I've tried never to have my words outrun my deeds in Haiti," he says, "which is always a huge problem in every poor place on earth, especially in a great lively culture like that one, where people are demonstrative, and they love to talk, and they love to sing." He smiles in his et cetera fashion, as if everyone knows what he is talking about.
He lays claim to his lessons: "You can't forget there are people listening when you say you are going to do things, and I try not to overpromise. Mostly, I think people who have been worked over and messed around with, they kind of get it. Now, I also believe they could withdraw their support from me if they feel I don't do anything."
He stops. When he starts again, the eyebrows go up.
"I wake up every day sick at heart that we aren't doing more."
Three hours before the UN soldier leveled that rifle at the car I was in, we'd arrived for class. The children had already tramped across the street from Cité Soleil, up the muddy, uneven path, and come in behind the cinder-block walls to the compound where the six-room schoolhouse stood. Haitian children had proven a witty chorus to my stay, naming and renaming me in the camps — le ministre, l'homme blanc, le président — asking nothing from me except proximity. In Teleco, I reached into a gutter to dredge out a Ping-Pong ball, Purelled the hell out of it, and gave it to a six-year-old boy. He whispered his giddy words of thanks before the boy next to him grabbed it and ran. Those kids, gripped by 93 degrees of midmorning boredom, need balls.
At the school, still around the corner, I could hear them singing. Emmanuel assured me that most of them had seen white people. "They may stare, you know, but we work on that with them," he said. We walked past a room where a young woman was filling bowls with cereal. "That is my girlfriend."
"Pretty," I told him.
He shouted to her and told her that I said she was pretty. She smiled and waved.
Just before we stepped around the corner into the class, he said, "Will you teach the class, Tom?"
"Me?" I said.
"Yes," Emmanuel said. "I think they will want that. You can teach them about a good handshake. Being respectful. About manners. The children will listen to you."
"Manu," I said. "My own sons don't listen to me."
He laughed and shifted from one foot to the other. "I do," he said. "And I think they want you to speak."
I took a peek. It was a classroom all right, about fifty children, some of them holding their infant siblings. Clean clothes, sitting up so straight. All of them singing. In the middle of the room, the program director was calling out to them. My name was there on the board in that universal white school chalk, M. TOM CHIARELLA, ESQUIRE MAGAZINE, even the angle of the article: "Possible ou impossible?"
I'd asked that question a dozen times that week about Haiti: possible ou impossible?
Ryan, the young accountant, thought it might be impossible.
Nothing is impossible, the fish man assured me.
Nothing is impossible, the chief medical officer said.
The maître d' said, Difficult is not impossible.
Wyclef Jean, deep in his studio back in New Jersey, told me: "In the course of history we have to define what the word impossible means. You put Haitians anywhere, and they're going to rise to the occasion."
And there was Clinton, the ex-president and, for better or worse, the CEO of the leaderless nation: "I don't want to be naive. It's going to be a stretch. It'll be hard, but I'm excited about it. Enough so that after a couple of heart incidents and being sixty-three years old, I am prepared to spend three years on it. They want the right things for their country."
So Emmanuel went ahead while I stood there thinking: What the hell did I know about manners? And how would I lead that discussion around to the big question — possible or impossible? He came back for me then and asked if I was all right. I'm just thinking, I told him. Then Emmanuel Midi, fixer extraordinaire, standing on the blessed eastern edge of the most dangerous place in the world, gave me the best advice of all, uttered the words that rang clearest, the ones that anyone who presumes to care about Haiti should hear.
"Okay," he said, "but now we have to hurry."
_____________________
samedi 17 juillet 2010
Alberto Granado, un grand homme du 20e siècle
Amies et amis internautes,
La lecture du livre du Dr Alberto Granado, Sur la route avec Che Guevara, m'a permis de découvrir cet homme qui m'était inconnu jusque-là. Argentin d'origine, biochimiste de formation, il s'est finalement installé à Cuba à l'invitation de son jeune ami argentin Ernesto (Che) Guevara, après le triomphe de la révolution cubaine.
Le professeur Granado a fondé en 1962 la Faculté de médecine de l'Université de Santiago.
Le Dr Granado est un chercheur qui a su faire avancer la science tout en restant proche et en servant d'idéal et de modèle à son ami Che et sans doute à d'autres révolutionnaires latino-américains.
Pour avoir une première idée de la vie et de l'oeuvre de cet homme exceptionnel, cliquez sur les liens suivants:
wikipedia en anglais: Alberto Granado.
wikipedia en français: Alberto Granado.
mardi 13 juillet 2010
Évolution de la population mondiale
*
Amies et amis internautes,
En 2010, la population mondiale est de l'ordre de 7 milliards d'habitants. Elle atteindra le seuil de 8 milliards en 2025 et celui de 9 milliards en 2045. Cette dernière sera alors un pic.
Le taux de croissance de la population mondiale qui avait atteint un pic de 2,2% par an en 1963, était descendu à 1,1% en 2009.
Le nombre de naissances après le pic de 163 millions vers la fin des années 1990, a atteint 134 millions en 2009 et l'on s'attend à ce qu'il reste constant à ce niveau. Actuellement, le nombre de décès se situe à 57 millions par année et l'on espère qu'il atteindra 90 millions par année vers 2050.
Le taux de croissance de la population, selon les projections, ne cesse de décroître (voir le graphique ci-dessus), et la population mondiale devrait alors, vers 2045, se mettre à décroître elle aussi.
Pour plus de détails sur l'évolution de la population mondiale, vous pourrez consulter les liens suivants:
- En anglais: Wikipedia/world population. Un article très détaillé et donnant beaucoup de références.
- En français: Wikipedia/population mondiale.
- Current world population - 1 : worldometer.info.
- Current world population - 2 : ibiblio.org.
- Current world population - 3 : princeton.edu.
- World population: youtube/rgumbrecht.
vendredi 9 juillet 2010
AlJazeera/Ligne de failles/Haïti: la politique de la reconstruction
Pour écouter ce vidéo, cliquez sur le lien suivant:
- AlJazeera/Haïti: la politique de la reconstruction (10 février 2010, 23,5 min).
Un très intéressant documentaire.
Voici d'autres reportages sur Haïti: - AlJazeera/Riz Khan: La reconstruction d'Haïti (16 février 2010, 22,5 min).
- AlJazeera/ Counting the cost-rebuilding Haïti (29 janvier 2010, 22,75 min).
vendredi 11 juin 2010
Divorce After 40 Years of Marriage: 4 Tips to Ensure it Doesn't Happen to You
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By Sarah Treleaven, June 11th 2010 2:45 AM
Source: Thatsfit.ca.
Trying to piece together why Al and Tipper called it quits after 40 seemingly happy years together? Dr. Tina B. Tessina (aka "Dr. Romance"), psychotherapist and author of Money, Sex and Kids: Stop Fighting about the Three Things That Can Ruin Your Marriage, explains and offers some tips on how to avoid coming apart like the Gores.
Q: What are the most common causes of late-life divorce?
A: Couples who have been married for decades can take the relationship for granted, and focus elsewhere, like career or children, and either neglect the couple relationship, or build up resentment over time because they don't do the work to clear it out. It's also possible that couples who don't stay in intimate contact can grow apart and find they're focused on completely different things.
Q: Are the causes of late-life divorce often different than the causes at other stages of life/marriage?
A: Yes, it's often more ennui than fighting. It's boredom rather than stress. It's estrangement rather than hostility.
Q: Why are so many of them initiated by women?
A: Because late in life men become complacent, but after children are grown women want to restructure their lives.
Q: What advice would you offer a couple that wants to avoid struggling with their marriage in late life?
A: Unpack the baggage. If you have difficult events in your past, don't hide from them. Do your grieving, get therapy, work through whatever the issues were, learn the skills you needed then (like standing up for yourself, communicating effectively, setting boundaries, problem-solving) Whatever old wounds you refuse to deal with will come up in each new relationship until you figure them out, so do the work and don't put it off. It will hurt a lot less than you think, and take less time than you fear.
Dr. Romance's four simple steps to create a successful marriage:
1. Talk frequently and honestly to each other: Share your ideas and issues about sex, about anger, about disappointment, about your appreciation of each other, about the meaning of life, about everything. Regular talks about what's going on in the relationship mean problems, resentment and frustration don't get a chance to build. Every member of your family has a right to his or her opinion. Understanding what your child or spouse wants doesn't mean you agree, but your child should know why you're overriding his or her preferences. Regular family meetings - where everyone including the children expresses feelings, negative and positive, and all of you work together to solve problems - help you develop teamwork.
2. Create partnership: Strive to work together to solve anything that comes up and learn to be a team, a partnership. Don't get stuck on who's right or wrong. Instead, focus on what will solve the problem. If you focus on solutions instead of criticizing, you can have fun coming up with creative ideas. Use your business communication skills when solving problems.
3. Keep your connection going: Frequent communication, sex, affection, touching, understanding and concern for each other will keep the 'juice' flowing in your marriage, and keep it from getting stale. Brief separations will help you remember how important your connection is.
4. Be positive: Have a sense of humor, give each other the benefit of the doubt, care about each other. Laugh together as much as possible, and don't forget to appreciate each other. Motivation to stay together comes from appreciation and celebration.
lundi 7 juin 2010
Haïti/Régime de Papa Doc ( extraits de documentaires)
- Entretien du Président François Duvalier avec Judith Jasmin (1959) - Partie I , 27 mars 2009, 10 minutes.
- Entretien du Président François Duvalier avec Judith Jasmin (1959) - Partie II, 27 mars 2007, 5,33 minutes.
- Entretien des étudiants haïtiens avec Judith Jasmin en 1959, 30 mars 2009, 6 minutes.
- Entretien de jeunes haïtiens et du professeur Leslie Manigat avec Judith Jasmin en 1959 , 30 mars 2009, 9,33 minutes.
- Entretien de Leslie Manigat et de Joseph Châtelin avec Judith Jasmin en 1959, 30 mars 1959, 10 minutes.
- Entretien de Jules Blanchet avec Judith Jasmin en 1959, 30 mars 2009, 3,6 minutes.
- Autres entretiens avec Judith Jasmin en 1959, 30 mars 2009, 7,5 minutes.
- Entretien du professeur Douyon avec Judith Jasmin sur la famille haïtienne en 1959, 30 mars 2009, 5,4 minutes.
- Président François Duvalier (1968) - Partie I , 12 avril 2007, 6 minutes.
- Président François Duvalier (1968) - Partie II, 12 avril 2007, 8,33 minutes.
- Président François Duvalier (1968) - Partie III, 12 avril 2007, 7,75 minutes.
- Président François Duvalier (1968) - Partie IV, 12 avril 2007, 5,2 minutes.
dimanche 23 mai 2010
Sarodj Bertin, fille de Mireille Durocher Bertin, représentera Haïti au Concours Miss Univers 2010
Source: moun/Sarodj Bertin.
Le site Web Moun présente les qualités intellectuelles de Sarodj Bertin.
Elle réunit en elle à la fois une beauté physique rare et une belle intelligence: elle a de qui tenir.
Compliments et bonne chance à Sarodj.
samedi 24 avril 2010
Impôts sur le revenu des particuliers: comment les réduire ?
Amies et amis internautes,
Ces jours-ci, les gens remplissent leurs rapports d'impôts sur le revenu.
Pour ceux qui sont résidents du Canada (ou du Québec), la date limite est proche: c'est le 30 avril !
La tâche pour nous les québécois est double: on a deux rapports à produire: l'un au fédéral, l'autre au provincial.
Je vous communique le lien suivant qui vous permettra de vous faire une petite idée de ce que peuvent bénéficier les payeurs de taxes français. Chacun pourra alors, spontanément, faire la comparaison avec ce qu'il est possible de faire ici, au Québec et au Canada.
C'est très intéressant.
Cliquez ci-dessous:
vendredi 23 avril 2010
Cancer Update
Amies et amis internautes,
Voici un texte à lire absolument:
John Hopkins Hospital/Cancer update, 17 July 2009.
Je remercie mon amie, le Dr. M. Pierre-Louis, pour m'avoir communiqué cet article aujourd'hui.
Voici un texte à lire absolument:
John Hopkins Hospital/Cancer update, 17 July 2009.
Je remercie mon amie, le Dr. M. Pierre-Louis, pour m'avoir communiqué cet article aujourd'hui.
mardi 20 avril 2010
Le droit d'exercer sa profession de médecin
Amies et amis internautes,
Voici un lien vers un documentaire qui ne manquera pas de vous intéresser:
ONF: Médecins sans résidence
_____________________
N.B. Voici le lien vers le site de l'Office national du film du Canada où vous pourrez visionner gratuitement un grand nombre de films sur des sujets variés.
Cliquez ici: ONF, ou là: ONF-NFB.
Notez que ce lien est aussi placé dans la colonne de droite du blog dans la rubrique: «Les blogs et les sites Web que je visite souvent».
Voici un lien vers un documentaire qui ne manquera pas de vous intéresser:
ONF: Médecins sans résidence
_____________________
N.B. Voici le lien vers le site de l'Office national du film du Canada où vous pourrez visionner gratuitement un grand nombre de films sur des sujets variés.
Cliquez ici: ONF, ou là: ONF-NFB.
Notez que ce lien est aussi placé dans la colonne de droite du blog dans la rubrique: «Les blogs et les sites Web que je visite souvent».
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