Byenvini!
As part of our fifth anniversary celebration, La Sosyete Fos Fe Yo We has moved to a new home, at imamou.org. Over the next few days and weeks we’ll be adding more content including information on my upcoming book, but for now you can definitely check out the brand new shiny forums we have, and the links to other places. Enjoy and welcome back.
Again, our ISP killed the website and its database, as well as a second website that was being run by the webstaff. We’ve had it with Aplus.net and have started the plan to move to a new provider AND a new website here at imamou.org. Over the next few days, we’ll be migrating material from the other websites for the Sosyete Fos Fe Yo We here, including the forums and the Faithweb site material. Thanks for your patience with our continued technical woes. Our new ISP, Site5, seems pretty wonderful and hopefully we will no longer have the problems we were running into with Aplus.
Perhaps I am reading this incorrectly, but I don’t know that I agree that we are “mischaracterizing” anything in saying that he is holding up aid to Haiti.
Yes, there has been other aid to Haiti, and yes, there are things about this bill that aren’t good and should be worked on. Yes, his copies of letters to Mitch McConnell look good, AND yes, if the bill is an authorization for 2011, it’s not for 2010 as has been suggested and it’s “new money” as opposed to money already promised.
However, a basic fact remains.
Whatever kind of money it is, whatever year it’s promised for, whatever he wants to believe about his intentions – a bill was passed by the US House of Representatives authorizing money to be sent to Haiti and Senator Coburn is using his Senatorial powers to hold on to it and keep it from being passed.
From the standpoint of Haiti? Promised aid is not coming until Coburn stops his hold.
So can we stop splitting hairs and remove the hold already, Senator Coburn? You are a medical doctor. “Do no harm” certainly applies to holding up the delivery of much-needed funds to help those in Haiti that you claim to care about. Focus your spending laser beam somewhere where people won’t die while Senators and Congressmen get around to making up their minds. Remove the hold.
My blog is suffering a similar fate to Haiti; it was destroyed by a force outside itself and nobody seems to want to help me get it fixed. Yes, that’s a petty comparison and it’s probably silly for me to be making it, but it is something that just occurred to me right now that blog is mirroring life. But that’s not what I’m here to write about today.
What I want to write about is a follow-up on a conversation that many of us have been having, on and off the Internet. It’s been just short of nine months since the earthquake destroyed Port-au-Prince. Yes, destroyed. Have you seen the pictures? Have you heard the stories? This is not just a small inconvenience with a couple of houses down the block that got their windows broken out. This is a major catastrophe with literally millions of people displaced, thousands dead, and a majority of the landscape pulverized into rubble. NINE MONTHS LATER people are still living in tents (and mind you when I say “tents” I am not saying the latest and greatest pop-up camper from Erewhon, I’m talking about a sheet or a tarp tied with some strings to the next sheet or tarp, like the “tents” you might’ve made in the kitchen when you were a kid with some chairs and a blanket.
The people of Haiti are expected to go through hurricane season like this. Yet people all over the world poured their hearts out in January and gave money, and many governments promised lots of money to help. The government of the country I currently live in was no exception; Hillary Clinton promised more than a billion dollars for rebuilding the city of Port-au-Prince alone, back in March.
But where’s the money?
Word’s out today that ALL this US$1.15 billion is still sitting on someone’s desk waiting to be freed. Heads should roll, you say. Someone should make this stop, you say. One person should not hold millions of lives hostage, you say. I agree. Who is this person? Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Because he disagrees with one provision of the massive bill, he’s been holding out on this bill, and thus stopping any U.S. aid from getting to Haiti, for NINE MONTHS.
Our website was destroyed in late May due to a database collision at our internet provider. It’s taken us some time to sort out the problem and get the template back. We also tried to get the website itself back – there was a lot of serious and important posting about the 12 January earthquake – but as yet we can’t recover that data.
If any of our readers happen to have copies of any of the material that appeared here before 31 May, I’d love to see copies of it. Email to andezo at gmail dot com and I’d be eternally grateful. Right now I can reconstruct about 50% of the material but that means a great deal is still missing.
More to come soon as we restore the site!
-T