Gonaives & Hanna

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7597420.stm

Sigh. Cry. Pray. Repeat.

another neat tool

http://www.globalrichlist.com/index.php

Not really new information, but presented really well. Enjoy, and be challenged!

I went to a wonderful wedding

(not a wedding picture: Photo by Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images)

Hopefully I will write about it, and how nice my whole trip was, another day. Be it known that it did make me happy, even though I was reading a frustrating book. I will continue trying to be informed but focus also on love... we'll see how that goes.

From: The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time by Jeffrey D.
Sachs, foreword by Bono (Penguin Books, 416 pages, $27.95)

Malawi made proposals to the international community to help Malawianstry
to reach about a third of the total infected population (about 300000) with
ant-AIDS drug treatment within a five year scale up period.Yet international
processes are cruel. The donor governments toldMalawi to scale back its
proposal sharply because the first proposalwas "too ambitious and too costly"
the next draft was cut back to amere hundred thousand on treatment att hte
end of five years. Eventhat was too much. In a tense five day period the
donors prevailed onMalawi to cut another 60 percent from the proposal, down to
fortythousand on treatment. This atrophied plan was submitted to theGlobal
fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria. Incredibly, the donorsthat rund the
fund saw fit to cut back once again. After a longstruggle, Malawi received
funing to save just 25 000 at end of fiveyears - a death warrant from the
international community for thepeople of this country.

I'm still here...really!

Sorry for the long delay since my last post. My creativity is having an identity crisis, at least as it relates to this blog. Should I tell you about all the hand-baskets in which the world is travelling?


Should I tell you about how miscellaneous things I read that I think need more attention, or are fascinating? Should I tell you about my life's happenings? Should I close it down entirely, or make it only accessible to people I know, or make a commitment to practice writing everyday?

Should I admit that I'm a huge geek and have no time to write because I have to go look up the difference between practise and practice?

new tool

http://www.mdgmonitor.org/

The MDG Monitor shows how countries are progressing in their efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). With the 2015 target date fast approaching, it is more important than ever to understand where the goals are on track, and where additional efforts and support are needed, both globally and at the country level.

The MDG Monitor is designed as a tool for policymakers, development practitioners, journalists, students and others to:

TRACK progress through interactive maps and country-specific profiles

LEARN about countries' challenges and achievements and get the latest news

SUPPORT organizations working on the MDGs around the world

Photo credit: Danny in Malawi blog (in links "Many Gears") http://www.dannyinmalawi.blogspot.com/

Day 5 - Hike to Kay Piyat (Cap Ayet?)

Marie-Phila & Jidline, starting out on our hike

A flower on the hill

Banana Bicycle

our destination - cool water swimming hole!

Day 4

This may be an homage to McDonald's, but it is also the neighbourhood's name.

Down the street from the restaurant

Cleaning fish at the new resort

Mcdonald Welding shop

Days 2 & 3

Selena, the next door neighbour of my friend Marie-Phila

Pretty orange flowers

These next are in the front yard / cooking area of the Frecyneau family, friends from my last trip. The girl getting her hair combed is named Mirlande, she is twenty. Her daughter, Chichi (with tongue out) was often sick as a baby, but seems to be much healthier as a toddler - she even has dimples!

I'm here! I'm here! I'm here!

flowers at the almost-naval museum

I'm back in Haiti, MesiBonDye!

I had a slow start, especially with the heat here I can feel like I need to rest all of the time and sometimes need a kick in the pants to get going, but I am starting to collect a lot of photos so must not be sitting around all the time! I will blog when I'm in Canada, so as not to waste time editing constantly here, but in the meantime, to reassure you that I am alive and so is Haiti, here are some of my favourite photos so far this trip.

Day one:

my friends taking me down the path to see their cousin's new house

flowers under the bridge!

mama and kid The water tap at the new house

a ...reptile of some kind, with calabas gourdes

small Vindication

This morning I got a junk fax from Travel company with a very fancy website, whose name starts with M and has the phone number: 1-877-810-7899. I HATE Junk Mail, so I wrote them the following:

My Office received a fax publicizing your services. We are a government office and are not interested in such advertisements.

Further, this fax did not have a sender number, and seemed designed to appear as if it were a personal communication including an article in the Vancouver Sun, by a staff writer not listed with that organization. This is deceitful and unnecessary – If I had read of your current (as the article indicates) 40% discounts in a magazine advertisement, this would have been quite enough to get me to look at the company for my upcoming vacation. However, I am repelled by your form of advertisement and will not look to m- Travel anymore, and am forwarding this “article” to the Vancouver Sun copyright department.

Please remove us (613.xxx.xxxx) from your mailing list unless in response to a communication from one of our officers. Personally, I would recommend that you recognize the negative image created by this disregard for the environmental waste caused by mass, unsolicited mailings, and start exploring new ways to serve [and not annoy] your [potential] clients.

I felt very grumpy after writing it, because I feel grumpy after telling people off, even when I'm fairly certain I'm in the right. Anyway, I felt slightly better when I received this reply from the Sun:

Hello Valerie
Thanks for sending us this information - we became aware of this fake article late last week, but we didn't know it had made its way to Ontario!

We are hoping that the grammatical error in the headline and the poorly written article will tip people off to the fact that we had nothing to do with the "article". Our lawyers are trying to get the travel company to cease and desist faxing this out.

Thanks again for bringing this to our attention!

News Research Librarian
Pacific Newspaper Group Library

I'm disappointed that she doesn't say "we're suing their A%% 's off" but really, as long as they don't do it again, I don't actually need vengeance. (and this will be practice believing that!)

Russia to citizens: Have a baby, win a car

Posted on 11:08AM (EDT) on 2007-09-12

Make a baby, win a car!

Sounds like something straight out of a sci-fi game show, but this is not fiction.

In an effort to stem and hopefully reverse Russia’s declining population, residents in one region are getting the day off today to procreate.

That’s right, in Ulyanovsk, Russia, today[Sep 12] is Day of Conception.

The aim is to get pregnant, and to give birth on June 12, 2008, which, coincidentally, is Russia Day or Russia's Independence Day. Successful new parents will win prizes, including a car or new appliances.

rest of article at: http://www.revolutionhealth.com/blogs/newsbarista/russia-to-citizens-h-7327

Farewell to "Flush and Forget"

DEVELOPMENT: Farewell to "Flush and Forget"
Analysis by Lester R. Brown

WASHINGTON, Aug 24 (IPS) - In urban settings, the one-time use of water to disperse human and industrial wastes is becoming an outmoded practice, made obsolete by new technologies and water shortages.

Water enters a city, becomes contaminated with human and industrial wastes, and leaves the city dangerously polluted. Toxic industrial wastes discharged into rivers and lakes or into wells also permeate aquifers, making water -- both surface and underground -- unsafe for drinking. And their toxic wastes are destroying marine ecosystems, including local fisheries.

The time has come to manage waste without discharging it into the local environment, allowing water to be recycled indefinitely and reducing both urban and industrial demand dramatically.

rest of article @: http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39012

68 pounds of clothing

http://www.ehponline.org/members/2007/115-9/focus.html

According to the EPA Office of Solid Waste, Americans throw away more than 68 pounds of clothing and textiles per person per year, and clothing and other textiles represent about 4% of the municipal solid waste.

I hate facebook but love Canada

I'm concerned that people may get the wrong impression of me from my recent posts. I apologize if anyone is trying to catch up with me by reading this, and offer you this photograph which I hope will inspire your continued patience in me. Or something.

More on Trees...

@ http://racinette.blogspot.com/2005/08/forestry-as-good-thing-news-article.html

by Dr. Patrick Moore, chief
scientist of Greenspirit Strategies Ltd. in Vancouver.

Excerpts:
There is a misconception that cutting down an old tree will result in a net release of carbon. Yet wooden furniture made in the Elizabethan era still holds the carbon fixed hundreds of years ago.
__________















Although old trees contain huge amounts of carbon, their rate of sequestration has slowed to a near halt. A young tree, although it contains little fixed carbon, pulls CO2 from the atmosphere at a much faster rate.

__________

Using wood sends a signal to the marketplace to grow more trees and to produce more wood.
That means we can then use less concrete, steel and plastic -- heavy carbon emitters through their production.

Treehuggers nomore?

Their Bark Is Worse For Our Blight
Decade-long study says trees may not be good at offsetting carbon

Step away from the vegetation, treehuggers, and find something else to embrace. New research finds that when it comes to offsetting greenhouse gases, trees may not be up to the challenge. For 10 years, Duke University researchers plied a stand of North Carolina loblolly pines with higher-than-normal levels of carbon dioxide; they found that the foliaged friends grew more than non-gassed trees, but did not consistently absorb significantly higher levels of CO2. "The responses are very variable according to how available other resources are -- nutrients and water -- that are necessary for tree growth," says researcher Heather McCarthy. "It's really not anywhere near the magnitude that we would really need to offset emissions." For tree planting to have a discernible offsetting effect under the conditions they tested, the amount of fertilizer required would impact groundwater quality at a level "intolerable to society," says project director Ram Oren. Sigh. Ocean-hugging, anyone?

straight to the source: Wilmington Star-News, Associated Press, Margaret Lillard, 08 Aug 2007

straight to the source: LiveScience, Andrea Thompson, 08 Aug 2007

Easter Dinner

This is Sam, a Quebequois. You can tell he’s from Québec because he is eating potatoes, and pouring over them a yummy brown sauce.

Except it’s not gravy, it’s maple syrup!

I tried, it’s surprisingly good.

But then, I was so happy to spend Easter weekend with Sam, Marie-Eve, and the Robert clan, and the food was so scrumptious, that my taste buds might not have believed me and just assumed they were eating something yummy.

Merci Ma femme pour la belle vaccance!

A Haiti night

The last month or so I've been thinking about Haiti even more than usual, and last night I thought for a minute or so that I'd been transported back in my dreams: I awoke in the middle of the night because I was too hot, because my fan had turned off, because the power had gone out. People who've live in Ottawa longer tell me it is as normal an experience here as in Haiti, which just goes to show you...something.

Probably, that even when you think you're open minded and not unnecessarily patronizing, that your perception may not match the facts.

or maybe just that Canada isn't entirely a frozen waste-land.

Please...No More

Hmm... my blog is rapidly becoming just another advertising billboard. Sorry about that- nothing in my life right now seems worth you spending your life reading about. I volunteered at an outdoor movie theatre, ate a bag of candy, spiral bound a report at work. Oh, and I read a bunch of books about Haiti. If you want to read about them, you might as well just read them. In the mean time, adverts:

An orphanage that I visited in Haiti has since built a school. I think that is neat, because the orphanage kids will not get lower quality education, nor be completely isolated from their peers who are not institutionalized. The community students also get a chance to go to school, which is exciting. (Schools aren’t free once you factor uniforms & books (and often in indebted countries, tuition), so many Haitian children don’t attend.)

In exciting news, their latest update included the following bit of information:

A child, Tia, in the Twillingate area of Newfoundland, at age 5, saw a child sponsorship program on TV and with tears on her face ran to her father wanting to help the children who did not have what she had - food, clothes and medical help, etc. Seeing Tia's passion for the children, inspired her father, Randy Hann, an artist, to do a drawing of his daughter, Tia, with tears on her face holding the globe. This drawing is called "Please ... No More", and is on sale at the art shop of Randy and his family in Twillingate. All sales from the drawing have since been used to fund child support programs.

The Orphanage director was in Newfoundland visiting family, and met with the Hann family, who will now partner with HATS-Haiti to use the funds from the sale of this drawing "Please . . No More" to help start a lunch program for the school children from the community . That’s pretty cool- amazingly generous of Mr Hann, and the existence of generous people makes me happy, so I wanted to advertise for him here. (Although I don't support organizations who give away tiny amounts of the profits they've made from labourers, this is a different sort of fish, I hope)

http://www.randyhann.com/drawingsstyles.htm

Spiderella exposure

A friend sent me a note a while ago, that her friend's boyfriend made a movie, and it is so cool that I am still thinking about it, so thought I would share it with you.

The message reads:

I am writing to alert you to a new show on the CBC called exposure, showcasing some of Canada's amateur talent.

The lovely Paul, with whom i am madly in love, has submitted his most recent movie, entitle "Spiderella " to the website.

It is now up to us to view and vote for his movie. Bear in mind that it was conceived and directed entirely by Paul Fryer, including the piano soundtrack. The animation is a bit crude, but imagine what he could do with the proper equipment.

The movie is just under ten lovely minutes, and i hope you enjoy.

REMEMBER TO VOTE, and rate this movie, if you liked it (and even if you didn't - vote cause i told you to ). The top rated movies will recieve Exposure on the CBC tv program of the same name. Tell your friends. Get them to vote. I promise you, this is only the tip of what Paul is capable of. I know that i am biased, but this movie is
only one example of the millions of reasons that i love him. Give him a chance, his creative talents will win you over too...

http://www.cbc.ca/exposure/node/4589