Thursday, July 20, 2006

Further to the Haiti posts . . .



Further to the Haiti Diet post, and subsequent remarks from Canadian charity Starthrower Foundation founder Sharon Gaskell a few days ago, it occurred to me some people might wonder how Haitians became hungry, and had no money to pay for their children's schooling. (Starthrower raises money to pay for tuition and a bit of food for students in the Cap-Haitien area of Haiti).

Here's an excerpt from a book she recommends, Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder, about Paul Farmer and his own work in Haiti.

. . . [Most peasants] had their black, low-slung Creole pigs, which they kept like bank accounts, to pay for things such as school tuition. But in the early 1980s, they lost those as well. Alarmed about an outbreak of African swine fever in the Dominican Republic, afraid that it might threaten the American pork industry, the United States led an effort to destroy all the Creole pigs in Haiti. The plan was to replace them with pigs purchased from Iowa farmers. But these were much more delicate, much more expensive to house and feed, and they didn't thrive. Many peasants ended up with pigs at all. 'When school started the year after the slaughter, enrollments had declined dramatically, throughout the country and around Cange . . .

'Traveling' to Chile today and tomorrow


One last story to finish for the magazine, so I shall be immersed in central Chile all day, and likely for the next day or so as well. (Freelancers have to be sticklers for submitting copy that's error-free, with perfect grammar and punctuation and that, my friends, is what takes the most time.)

Then tonight I will pull together the photos of Santiago (Chile) and Valparaiso (some of which are on the web site) as well as the unpublished ones from the Casablanca Valley with its vineyards and wineries, which the editor particularly wants to feature.

Though I love working from home, the 'boss' is a bit of a whip-cracker. I can hardly wait to finish this last story so I can get out and enjoy the fabulous summer weather. Hard to believe July is mostly over!