This post, from my series of posts on the history of Haiti, taken from Dr. Paul Farmer’s book Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor gives excerpts of the history of Haiti, especially surrounding the massacre that took place in Raboteau. An interesting side-note here is that the city of Philadelphia dumped a barge of toxic waste on Haiti, which ended up sitting at the port not far from the slum of Raboteau.

The following are taken from Chapter 2 Pestilance and Restraint: Guantanamo, AIDS and the Logic of Quarantine:

“Landmark human rights trials have taken place recently in Haiti, a first. The most important of these occurred in Gonaïves, once famous as the place where Haiti’s declaration of independence was signed, after the slaves’ decisive 1803 victory over Napoleon’s forces.”

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These excerpts are from Dr. Paul Farmer’s book Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor , written in 2004. I am putting up a series of posts from this book, because Dr. Paul Farmer is well respected in the mainstream as well as in the Christian community. He has worked in rural Haiti for more than 20 years. This post shares Yolande’s story, she fled Haiti after being beaten for promoting adult literacy and ended up in Guantanamo where she was treated even worse.

Currently Guantanamo is prepared to receive thousands of Haitian refugees, let’s do everything we can to make sure they will not be treated the same way they were the last time they visited this US base.

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These excerpts are from Dr. Paul Farmer’s book Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, written in 2004. I am putting up a series of posts from this book, because Dr. Paul Farmer is well respected in the mainstream as well as in the Christian community. He has worked in rural Haiti for more than 20 years. Being a doctor, he is also closely involved with various aid agencies and speaks of the structural violence within our culture that Haitians have been the brunt of since they kicked Napoleon’s ass in 1803 and became the first nation of free slaves that was, unfortunately for them, a little too close to the shores of our ‘great’ nation (USA).

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Paul Farmer has worked in rural Haiti for more than twenty years. He is a doctor and anthropologist and has written several books on health inequalities. Known as Dokte Paul throughout Haiti, he has improved rural health by teaching basic health practices as the best preventive medicine. He has also worked in Russia, Chiapas and various other desperate places and has even had a book written about him: Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World by Tracy Kidder.

I personally don’t know much about Haiti, what I do know has come from reading Dr. Paul Farmer’s book Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Dr. Farmer knows the people of Haiti, he has worked with them and listened to them for years, healing them as best he can. The current situation in Haiti could have been avoided to some degree if more people had listened to Dr. Farmer years ago. This book, Pathologies of Power was written in 2004 and gives clear insight into the various levels of abuse that the people of Haiti have been subjected to for years from the international community, most specifically the US of A. There is not much I can do for the people of Haiti from where I sit except to share these insightful words. We are directly responsible for the terrible ongoing situation in Haiti.

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