NPR report on single moms struggling with camp life in Haiti.

In response to news of Hurricane Tomas, we’ve received a number of inquiries about the safety of C2C’s President and Chairman of the Board, who had planned to be in Port-au-Prince this week to monitor the newly open clinic (a clinic update to follow). I want to thank everyone for their concern – late Tuesday night the trip was canceled, so Liz and Keith are safely in Massachusetts.

The 1.3 million people virtually trapped in tent camps in Port-au-Prince, however, are significantly less-safe. Yesterday, the Haitian government made what some (I) might call an absurd public announcement to evacuate tent shelters and find secure housing. I mean no disrespect by this, but if it had been possible, wouldn’t many people have left the IDP camps months ago? I mean, it’s almost insulting, “We haven’t been able to provide an alternative, but we’ve figured out that tents aren’t a good long-term or hurricane-term solution and we advise that you get out of dodge.” Every man for himself, eh?

Because of the city’s poor drainage, streets strewn with rubble, and lack of trees or vegetation, flash floods could hit and rush through the dense tent camps. Also, cholera is a water-borne bacterial disease: poor drainage and sanitation plus a deluge of rain (estimated between 10″-15″) will complicate efforts to control the spread of the disease.

In sum, Liz and Keith have postponed their trip, and Haitians: look for high ground. A quick note on this: shipping containers make excellent housing structures. Check out Haiti Green Home.

Last week, C2C President Liz Sheehan and I were down in Port-au-Prince for meetings with partners at MSH, AmeriCares, and Grace Children’s Hospital. We’re rounding the bend of this marathon quest to open the first clinic, and with patients only a few days away – and an inauguration celebration planned for November 4th with guests including US Ambassador Kenneth Merten – we wanted to make sure everything was geared up.

Per usual, this was a great trip. Given all the back and forth we’ve been doing the past few months, I’m always pleased to see the lessons from one trip building upon the last. Each week I’m in Haiti I discover some new layer of complexity that temporarily confuses my Haitian world order until suddenly it snaps the landscape into focus and everything starts making a little more sense. For example, last week I was writing up patient exit surveys so that we can start digging at the heart of the “qualitative experience” in the C2C clinic, and one of my questions is “where else do you go for health information/care” and two of the options are “dokte fey” and “hougan”: an herbalist and male voodoo priest. Speculating about the frequency with which we’ll see either of those two answers pop up, I started talking to Handy Tibert, C2C’s Project Coordinator in Port-au-Prince, about Voodoo, which I’d previously associated with dolls and baby-eating ousted despots (See: Jean-Bertrand Aristide). This is a bit of what I learned (amplified by the incontrovertible source, Wikipedia):

Voodoo is everywhere. Haitians say that their country is about 80% Catholic, 20% Protestant and 100% Voodoo. Haitian voodoo’s what’s known as a syncretic religion: a religion that sought to reconcile opposing truths and faiths simply by combining them. Ask a Haitian for a photo of the voodoo lwa (deity) “Black Danbala” and she’ll show you a man I would call Moses. Ask for St. Peter and she’ll show you Legba. This makes sense: most Haitians’ ancestors were Africans brought to Hispanola with their own beliefs and were forced to adopt the Roman Catholicism of their slavers. The human goal of survival begets compromise; ergo Haitian Voodoo.

My interest with Voodoo is its pervasiveness. Everyone believes in its power; and some of it’s pretty dark. But mostly, it teaches people to think twice before being evil (again, except if you’re Aristide). Also, according to Handy, the person who’s right always wins the day; you’re only vulnerable if you’ve actually wronged someone. I mean, isn’t that the Catholic mantra? Religion’s a fascinating force, and I’m always curious about how it effects people’s perceptions of health and personal efficacy around its maintenance.

I worked in a community in Mozambique last year where some Christian missionaries were teaching poor Mozambicans that deep faith would cure their blindness, malaria, hunger, handicaps, etc. I wonder what voodoo’s panacea is? It’s no wonder that alternative, faith-based “medicines” enter communities lacking access to “Western” medical services with extraordinary power. So actually, I suppose what I’m curious about is how to get the two to work together. In communities where we start seeing the introduction of more modern care (I don’t know if that or Western are the terms I want to use here. Not concerned about being PC but accuracy…) how can we involve traditional healers in a way that’s respectful of the clout they have to generate support for modern interventions?

I’m not sure this will be something we see much of in Port-au-Prince, where modern medicine has an ample track record, and I need to do a lot more research into what Mambos and Hougans (female and male voodoo priests) actually teach about the cause and consequence of illness. Anyway, through these patient experience surveys, it will be interesting to learn about how they synthesize recommendations from traditional healers with the care they receive from C2C’s clinic.

GOOD LOOK: Bionic Lab from GOOD.is on Vimeo.

Below are three videos posted on the Hufffington Post today. The music that opens and closes each was a bizarre choice, so skip ahead to the interviews. It’s nothing new (nothing ever seems to be news from Port-au-Prince…let’s change that) but the lack of movement out of the camps and into “humane” livable housing structures rings especially loudly when the commentary comes from tent city residents themselves. Check it:

From today’s Financial Times:

The European Commission has thrown its weight behind the introduction of a financial activities tax in Europe, which would tax profits and remuneration at banks and other financial services companies, as it considers ways to raise money from the financial sector.

Officials in Brussels said on Thursday that the alternative idea – a financial transaction tax – was less suitable because of a “high” risk that business would simply move to other regions.

Depending on where the FAT (awesome acronym) revenue goes, this could be a great, though perhaps less “profitable” funding source for global development programs (See: yesterday’s post).

The Global Fund for AIDS, TB, and Malaria announced today that they’re about 8 billion short of their fundraising goals, which puts at risk the 2015 goal to: eliminate HIV mother-to-child transmission worldwide, prevent the spread of multidrug resistant TB, and eradicate malaria as a public health issue.

The Global Fund is a multinational pooling organization with independent project selection and evaluation processes, which is why folks like Jeff Sachs find its financing model so attractive (sans the bilateral, state-to-state politics).  As such, many are pointing to the economic downturn as to why more countries aren’t meeting the Fund’s pledge expectations.  Where there’s a challenge, so too is there often an opportunity for creativity, and that’s precisely what Senator Pete Stark from California is up to with House Resolution 5783.  The HR, otherwise known as the Investing in Our Future Act, amends the Internal Revenue Code to impose an excise tax on currency transactions exceeding $10,000 equal to 0.005% of the value of the currency acquired in the transaction (currency transaction tax).  This will capitalize (no pun) on currency speculation in which people buy and sell currencies to profit from fluctuations in their price, irrespective of their underlying value. Studies estimate that a worldwide 0.005 percent tax on dollar transactions would raise $28 billion a year and reduce speculative currency trading by 14 percent – ostensibly a win-win.  The gains from the tax would be used to pay for investments in children, global health, and climate change mitigation.

In a press release sent from his office in late July, Senator Stark (who is also Chairman of the Health subcommittee of Ways and Means) said, “Every day, there are $4 trillion worth of currency transactions.  The vast majority of these are speculative – banks trying to make a buck by out-guessing the system.  This speculation contributed to the last Wall Street crisis and makes our financial system less stable.”

Apparently 60 other countries are already supporting a global Financial Transactions Tax (FTT), which is a tiny tax on financial market transactions such as equity, bond, derivative or foreign exchange trades.  The Austrian Institute for Economic Research estimates that a global FTT could yield US$286 billion annually for a tax set at a rate of 0.01% and US$917 billion a year for a 0.1% tax rate. At a mid-range tax rate of 0.05%, an FTT would raise annual revenues of approximately US$650 billion – almost enough to cover the costs of the MDGs (~$170bil), the funds needed to help developing countries adapt to climate change and cover the budget deficits of developed countries.

The most pressing problem with speculation is the volatility of asset prices over the long run. The overshooting of exchange rates, stock prices, interest rates and commodity prices fosters a “predominance of speculation over enterprise” and thereby dampens the real economy and employment.  An FTT is thought of as an effective means of diminishing short-term speculative trades because it is collected each time a transaction occurs, which would have a stabilizing effect on asset prices and (I’m told) would thereby improve overall macroeconomic performance.  PLUS, then governments have this enormous source of revenue to spend fighting entrenched social issues.

Stark’s bill has been referred to the Committee on Ways and Means and the Committee on Foreign Affairs for a period TBD by the Speaker.  Let’s hope the US jumps on board, but I’ll keep my ear to the ground for any stirrings in Congress about a spec tax’s negative effects on banks.