Roadblocks of corpses: the media and Haiti

If Haiti was visited by an “apocalypse” or “Dantean” horror in the aftermath of the earthquake of January 12, then there was one news story that perfectly captured it.

The streets of Port-au-Prince, the devastated capital, were littered with roadblocks made of corpses. Earthquake survivors, out of either anger or trauma, or perhaps Caribbean voodoo superstition, had piled bodies high across the streets, in protest at their neglect.

The story made headlines around the world. Oddly, though, for such a visceral image, the headlines didn’t appear to be accompanied by photos of the scene.

Still more oddly, then, the story was attributed to a photographer, Time Magazine’s Shaul Schwarz. Schwarz had told a Reuters reporter he had seen two such roadblocks on his travels across the city, and Reuters sent the story global.

Aid that works, and aid that doesn’t

The first thing that you notice when you step into a feeding centre in Africa is the stench. It is the smell of the effort to clutch onto life, fetid, desperate. It is difficult to conceive of anyone being able to put up with it for long.

But, when you work in such a centre, you learn you can put up with it. It becomes a part of the environment. You learn to see that battle for survival as something proud, that your work supports, and not something pathetic, that you pity. After a while in such a place, in some famine-hit part of rural Africa, say, you come to find the successes more exhilarating than the failures are depressing.

What is the What

Originally published in the Irish Times. Posted here again now due to Valentino Achak’s Deng’s visit to Dublin.

One night in the summer of 2001, I stood in a field, in thick mud, holding a clipboard and a torch. The torch showed up a row of primitive huts, and I moved from hut to hut, shining my torch inside, sometimes finding wide-eyed faces, mostly of children. “Where are your parents?” I asked. “Fetching wood”, they answered, though it was 4am, and I made marks on a sheet on my clipboard. Many huts were empty. As I walked, adult shadows flitted past, and there were sounds of running and shouting. Torch beams perforated the night, as colleagues walked down other, parallel lines of huts.

Review essay: Where Oil Is King

Aid, Trade and the Angolan Kleptocracy

From the Dublin Review of Books, Summer 2008

In early 2001, in a small meeting room in a rehabilitated building in the town of Kuito, in Bié province in Angola, the local security officer for the United Nations told us of a new government policy that was likely to impact on our work. It was called limpeza, meaning cleaning, or cleansing.