Hope.Help.Haiti. Video

Thank you to Kayo Ichimura for this excellent video describing the Hope.Help.Haiti.event at BSC. As the video makes clear, we are proud of what we have done so far as a campus community, and we are determined to do even more.

Violence against women

Many women and girls in Haiti are in special need of help. They continue to be re-victimized by men who rob them of relief supplies or lurk around distribution centers in order to assault them sexually. Women are trying to band together and aid workers are developing elaborate decoy schemes, but the abuses continue. The collapse of an over-crowded prison during the quake itself has put thousands of dangerous men on the street, compounding a situation in which women were already particularly vulnerable.

Jared Diamond on Haiti

UCLA geographer Jared Diamond -- best known for his book Guns, Germs, and Steel -- explains how the human and physical geography of Haiti have contributed to its impoverishment. He also offers hope for Haiti's rebuilding, because of the hard work, optimism, and ingenuity of the Haitian people. Help can and should come from outside Haiti, but the rebuilding, he rightly says, is theirs to do.

Hope. Help. Haiti Coverage

The Hope. Help. Haiti event was a great success! Here are a few links to pictures and articles about the event...

• Article from The Brockton Enterprise

• Article from The Comment, the student newspaper at Bridgewater State College

• Some photos taken by a student
  

Haiti in the Hemisphere

The images that accompanied Dr. Hayes-Bohanan's presentation Haiti in the Hemisphere are available for others to view and to use in their own educational efforts. Copyright resides with the original publishers of some images; credit is provided on most of the slides.

Snapshot of Haiti from CNN

The article, "Numbers Tell Stories of Horror, Heroism in Haiti" gives recent numbers on victims of, needs in, and aid to Haiti. http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/01/26/haiti.by.the.numbers/index.html

Haiti's Children

Article by Craig Kielburger, Founder of Free the Children, on ensuring short- and long-term medical care to Haiti's most vulnerable population, the nation's children.

United Nations in Haiti

Read the background section of the MINUSTAH web site to learn of previous U.N. missions as well as the circumstances that led to the current peace-keeping mission in Haiti. Explore the rest of the MINUSTAH site to learn what countries have contributed to that mission, and what losses they have sustained, both in the course of peace-keeping operations and in the recent earthquake.

Haiti Mapping

Haiti is rapidly shifting from being among the most poorly-mapped populated places in the world to being mapped at high resolution in near-real time. This is a result of a remarkable confluence of several international, open-source mapping projects, all of which are focused on the development of maps that can help those who are helping Haiti. Clark Boyd describes the efforts on Public Radio International.

Explore Port-au-Prince on the Dutch Open Street Map. Spend some time exploring this map in detail; it shows collapsed buildings, hospitals, obstacles, and temporary encampments -- on the viewer's choice of street maps satellite imagery. These maps can literally save lives, by helping aid workers understand where the needs are, where the resources are, and connections are most easily made between the two.