by Amy Wilentz | Mar 20, 2013
After the 2010 Haitian earthquake, I visited the Physicians Without Borders emergency clinic in Léogâne. Patients with varying degrees of injuries were waiting for attention on the long driveway there. The doctor I talked to that day was full of posturing and foolishness, unlike most of the doctors I’d met who work with this group. In the long line of patients was one boy who’d lost both arms when his house fell on him, and of course both his hands, as well. He was three years old.
He was waiting and waiting — for hours.
Eventually, late that afternoon, I brought him and his mother to Port-au-Prince to get more pain medicine and to make sure his wounds had been properly dressed and fixed.
by Amy Wilentz | Mar 4, 2013
This is the cover of a children’s book published by Grasset-Jeunesse in September, 2004, in France — six months after Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown for the second time. The co-authors are Joëlle Rodoreda and Véronique Willemin.
I found it in my son’s bookshelf just the other day. It’s about a dog named Aristide who is so shy he doesn’t want to go for a walk. And when Aristide is pulled along on his leash by a little French boy named Jean in a park somewhere in France, he gets so embarrassed that he actually turns pink!
Well, it doesn’t mean much — but the cover’s good.
by Amy Wilentz | Feb 28, 2013
I bet you’ve never read a blog post written by a dead person before.
But Google has turned me into a zombie. See above: they have me long gone, departed for more than a decade.
Personally, as you can tell from the fact that I am putting this up on my blog in real time, I am not quite dead yet, though some might take issue with that statement.
Also, just for the record: I happen not to have been born in 1927. Somewhat later…
by Amy Wilentz | Feb 23, 2013
Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier after his return to Haiti; photo altered to provide Baby Doc with Papa Doc’s thick spectacles
So for the second time, Jean-Claude Duvalier didn’t see fit to attend an appellate court hearing on his human-rights abuses on Thursday. His lawyers hopped up and down, denouncing the appeal for various picayune and Kafka-esque points of “law.”
I’m not surprised. Are you? Why would a person like Duvalier, raised and then elevated to power on an utter disrespect for any concept of the rule of law in Haiti (although he probably has come to respect the Swiss courts…) — why would such a one agree to come before a Haitian court to be judged?
by Amy Wilentz | Feb 21, 2013
Tomorrow, Jean-Claude Duvalier is supposed to appear at a hearing concerning human-rights charges against him. This is not a hearing put together by people who just feel like demanding justice from the former Haitian dictator; it’s a hearing ordered by an appellate judge — a real judicial hearing.
Of course, Duvalier was also supposed to appear at this hearing on February 7, but simply failed to show up, demonstrating for any who doubted it his habitual disregard for Haitian institutions of justice. Rather than sending a paddy wagon to round him up and bring him in, the judge merely rescheduled the hearing.
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