Well, I am celebrating today.

After years of pressure from KOSANBA, the Scholarly Association for the Study of Haitian Vodou at UC Santa Barbara, the Library of Congress has agreed today to change its primary subject heading for the establishing religion of Haiti from the old derogatory term “Voodooism” to the more anthropologically and linguistically sound “Vodou.”

Sometimes one has to eat youn ti kras kòbo – literal Creole translation of “a little bit of crow” — in this rushing world. Below, I try to rectify some mistakes in my post of October 24 on the Caracol park in northern Haiti.

 One reason for today’s post is that a friend of mine who works in business in Haiti told me he felt I had been too harsh on Caracol – and I respect him, and wanted to give it some more thought. And upon reflection, I found my post to be a little, well, intemperate, which I do well, of course, and naturally! But usually without factual errors.

Many stories about Haiti don’t find a wider audience because they are so…. Haitian; hard to understand, dependent on a complicated base of knowledge about the place, somewhat impenetrable, really.

I recall that when I was working at Time magazine in New York, in the mid-1980s, we would get long “cables” from our valiant, tireless, far-flung Haiti correspondent, Bernard Diederich, who wrote the book Papa Doc and the Tonton Macoutes. Diederich’s cables would come clattering in over our machines, chk-chk-chking down the old-fashioned paper tracks, page after page.

The damage wrought by Hurricane Sandy has provided a clear lens through which to examine comparative media coverage of disaster.

Before the storm hurled itself across the East Coast, it had traveled through Haiti, where it killed at least 50 people and left thousands more homeless — this in a country still reeling from the devastation of the 2010 earthquake that killed perhaps 300,000 and left around 1.5 million homeless. If you read and watched the U.S. media, you would probably not know that Sandy had ever touched down in Haiti —  I looked hard for a story covering the Haitian casualties, and didn’t find one, although there was a lot of chatter on the Internet about Haiti and the storm.