By Lawyer, Professor, Bill Quigley
Hundreds of thousands of people are living and sleeping on the ground in Port-Au-Prince. Many have no homes, their homes destroyed by the earthquake. I am sleeping on the ground as well - surrounded by nurses, doctors and humanitarian workers who sleep on the ground every night. The buildings that are not on the ground have big cracks in them and fallen sections so no one should be sleeping inside.

There are sheet cities everywhere. Not tent cities. Sheet cities. Old people and babies and everyone else under sheets held up by ropes hooked onto branches pounded into the ground.
With the rainy
season approaching, one of the emergency needs of Haitians is to get tents. I have seen hundreds of little red topped Coleman pup tents among the sheet shelters. There are tents in every space, from soccer fields and parks to actually in the streets. There is a field with dozens of majestic beige tents from Qatar marked Islamic Relief. But real tents are outnumbered by sheet shelters by a ratio of 100 to 1.
Rescues continue but the real emergency remains food, water, health care and shelter for millions.
Though helicopters thunder through the skies, actual relief of food and water and shelter remains minimal to non-existent in most neighborhoods.
Haitians are helping Haitians. Young men have organized into teams to guard communities of homeless families. Women care for their own children as well as others now orphaned. Tens of thousands are missing and presumed dead.
The scenes of destruction boggle the mind. The scenes of homeless families, overwhelmingly little children, crush the heart.

The Need for Increased Legal Empowerment

We must avoid the trap of interpreting disadvantaged or poor strictly from a material paradigm.

Sincerely,

Paula LaPierre

By Wadner Pierre
This opinion article first published by an Australian website: www.newmatilda.com

Haitian expat blogger Wadner Pierre delivers his preliminary survey of the complex issues of relief and representation arising from the 12 January earthquake
I am overwhelmed, frustrated and even angered by what some journalists have written about Haiti since the 12 January earthquake and I cannot believe some of the images I have seen on news channels such as CNN and MSNBC.

It's true that some journalists are doing their very best to give a real picture of the situation on the ground in Haiti — and some are just doing what their bosses have asked (or ordered) them to do.

But the mainstream media, especially in the United States, has focused the attention of their audiences on the fact that Haiti is the poorest country in the Americas and concentrated on the efforts of the US, the richest country in the Americas, to mobilise disaster relief services.

In doing so, they are overlooking many important questions: Why is Haiti so poor? Why did the United States have to wait until a deadly catastrophe like the earthquake to deliver assistance to Haiti, located just 90 minutes by air from the coast of Florida? Why have successive US governments failed to support real democracy in Haiti? Why, in 1991, did the CIA under George Bush senior plot with Haiti's elite class to carry out a coup against Haiti's first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, currently in exile in South Africa? And then why in 2000–2004 did George W Bush's administration fail to support the elected Aristide government?