Brooklyn Creole

• Haitian jazz band Mozayik was at Solomon's Porch in Bed Stuy last Saturday. I brought back a slideshow.

• A benefit for New Orleans was happening the same night not too far away at the Brooklyn Lyceum. I have shots of some of the artwork exposed. The benefit also featured several ballrooms, lots of food and live brass. See slideshow.
  

brooklyn - haiti - mozayik - new orleans - SURGE

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My Question to Ted Turner

See more photos.

I'm here at the Ted Turner/UN event at Reuters. I just asked Ted Turner what he thinks of Yon Ayisyen's comments that I outlined in my last post. Namely, that it is not always clear how effective the UN Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) is in peace-keeping and even in effective elections observing. I asked him since he gave them so much money, whether he'd heard about that?

He thought that generally his impression was that they were effective. He said that he thought the US itself should be doing more about Haiti because it is in the US' backyard. He said that he thought that the resources used towards Afghanistan (or was it Irak?) would have been better used in Haiti.

GV-UN - reuters - Ted Turner - haiti

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Thinking Back on Yon Ayisyen's Impressions on the UN Mission in Haiti

Earlier this year, I wrote several roundups for Global Voices of the opinions of a young and often solitary Haitian blogger, Yon Ayisyen on the UN mission in Haiti. The blogger and a lot of Haitian public opinion have not always been thrilled with the mission's performance. And since I have not lived in Haiti for some time, I think it's probably best that I let those earlier translations speak for themselves.

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Leading up to this year's presidential election in February, Yon Ayisyen was concerned that the UN was not necessarily "keeping the peace", contrary to their assertions. From Global Voices:

In a post titled Elections and Insecurity, one of of four posts made on Saturday (February 4) he doubts head of UN Mission to Haiti (MINUSTAH) Juan Gabriel Valdes' assertion that insecurity has in any way diminished in the lead-up to the election. While Mr. Valdes has appeared repeatedly on Haitian television in the past two weeks claiming that insecurity has subsided, Yon Ayisyen observes the opposite:

[S]omeone I know was shot in broad daylight in the streets while his companions were being kidnapped. Yet officials intoxicate the population with claims that "insecurity has dropped."

Later on, during the election itself, Yon Ayisyen (Fr) complained that UN Mission officers stood away from and outside of voting booths when they were supposed to be observing and checking for irregularities.

By and large, I'd say that Yon Ayisyen's feelings about the UN Mission echo what I have read or heard from my relations in Haiti: that they are often not intervening where they should or according to mission.
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GV-UN - ted turner - reuters - haiti - United Nations

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Ted Turner @ Unites Nations Today - 4PM Live Online

From Global Voices Online:

When you talk, will this man listen? Let's find out on Tuesday.


What is your opinion of the United Nations? What kind of impact has it had on your country and people? How should it be reformed? Who should lead it?

Global Voices is hoping to share your views in a conversation with the U.N.'s largest private donor, media mogul Ted Turner- a.k.a. "The Mouth of the South."

HOW TO JOIN US ONLINE: On Tuesday September 19th at 4pm New York time, 19:00 20:00 GMT (please note corrected time!), Ted Turner will sit down with Reuters journalist Paul Holmes and conduct a conversation which will be webcast live online around the world. Click here to watch the webcast and read more about the event.

HOW TO SHARE YOUR QUESTIONS AND VIEWS: As you watch or listen, you can join the discussion by clicking here and participating in a live online chat. I will be in the room, along with Caribbean editor Georgia Popplewell Alice Backer, and Kamla Bhatt. The four of us will be raising our hands aggressively to ask questions on your behalf.

HAVE MORE IMPACT BY BLOGGING: A great way to help influence the conversation is by blogging your views on the subject before the event even starts. Please tell us what questions Paul Holmes ought to be asking Ted Turner, and what you think the conversation should focus on. When you write your blog post, please be sure to tag it with "gv-un" in Technorati and/or del.icio.us. Or share the link with us as trackback to this post, or paste it in the comments section of this post.

Note that Turner has some fairly strong criticisms of big U.S. media. He has said that if he was still running CNN, he would do some things differently and focus more on international news.

Is the legendary "Mouth of the South" as good at listening to and conversing with people from around the world as he is at broadcasting his own views?? Let's put him to the test. It should be interesting.

Global Voices Won the Knight-Batten Award!

Photo by Georgia Popplewell.

This morning in DC, Rebecca McKinnon, Georgia Popplewell and I (pictured in that order) represented Global Voices Online at the Knight-Batten award ceremony in DC.

We won!!! Our 6 co-finalists were all amazing and came from all over the country so it was quite an honor to go home with the main prize. They included an impressive hurricane information site by the Sarasota Tribune and several interactive community-based news sites. (See Knight-Batten press release.)

It was both exhausting (we each made a presentation) and exhilirating but in the end all the emotions were worth the while. I talked about starting my blog to amplify a more complex set of voices from Haiti than usually featured in mainstream media. Then I showcased three of the bloggers in Francophonia: Tony Katombe from the DRC, Pierrot Dupuy from La Reunion and Le Blog de [Moi] from Martinique. Hopefully video of the presentation will be up soon on the Knight-Batten site.

Georgia live-blogged the conference over at Caribbean Free Radio here, here and here. The Global Voices community is ecstatic! Rachel Rawlins, our Managing editor, posted this on the GV website to announce the news.

It is great to see all the hard work that gets put into GV rewarded.

See more photos from this morning.

global voices - knight-batten

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Happy (Belated) BlogDay

BlogDay 2006

Call this the late edition. This is very very late. But better late than never. Blogday was August 31. An important day when bloggers celebrated their existence and highlighted the work of other bloggers dear to them. I was obviously "out to lunch" or out partying somewhere, enjoying time off from my day job.

In this great post on the topic, Rebecca McKinnon, co-founder of Global Voices, asked bloggers the world over to answer several questions on their blogs so that the community of bloggers could be better understood. She also explained the significance of BlogDay: bloggers' free speech and filling of gaping holes in mainstream media.

Here is my list of belated answers to some of the questions she asked of bloggers. Ive decided to do that instead of the 5 blog picks the rest of the world is doing so as not to piss off any of the french-speaking bloggers I cover for GV, all of whom are superstars in my opinion.

If you are a blogger, it is not too late for you to partake too, BTW. Rebecca just asks that you leave a link or trackback in her initial post's comments section .

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• Why did you start blogging?

To get a couple of misconceptions about the place I come from (Haiti, and more broadly the Caribbean) off my chest. Not to portray it "positively" mind you but to portray it in its complexity, good and bad -- not bad alone.

• What do you blog about mainly?

Caribbean current affairs, with a broad understanding of the Caribbean and including its various non-Caribbean metropoles, Brooklyn where I live and of course Miami.

• Do you blog in your first language or in another language, and why?

I blog in English because lots of Haitians both in Haiti and abroad understand the language and because I live in the United States. Also english blogging about Haiti helps Caribbean partners better understand the country. My understanding is that many other non-American bloggers for whom English is not the 1st language do the same.

• When you blog, how would you describe what you write? Is it part of a conversation? Is it ranting? Is it a daily diary? Is it journalism? Is it some or all of these things at different times? Does the definition matter?

The definition matters little to me but I'm pretty sure that I synthesize and analyze information that is hard to find in MSM and that I package it with my own brand of uniqueness.

• Have blogs started to have an impact on politics in your country? Have they started to influence what stories get covered in your country’s media? We’d love to know some examples.

Not that I know of. Although there is a vivid and opinionated Haitian internet (mostly run from abroad) there is not yet a proper Haitian blogosphere either in our out of Haiti.

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It is worth noting that on BlogDay, Le Blog de [Moi] named me as one of her 5 picks for the day, finding me to be gay-friendly and well written. If you can't read French, here is a translation:

Wanna know what's going on in the francophone or anglophone Caribbean via local bloggers? Just click! All live from Brooklyn.

Thanks [Moi]! You have a hell of a blog too and it's always a pleasure to read you. Click here for translations of [Moi]'s often hilarious, always biting posts that I made for GV.


BlogDay 2006 - blog de [moi]

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Reunion's Blogging Eruption

Reunion is a Creole-speaking island in the Indian Ocean, to the east of Africa near other creole or french speaking islands such as Mauritius, Mayotte and Madagascar. It is also a French overseas department, like its Caribbean counterparts Martinique and Guadeloupe. It's got a very active blogosphere relative to those counterparts and to many francophone countries for reasons I am not entirely sure about. I am cross-posting here what I wrote about it on Global Voices yesterday.

(Pictured Left: 2004 Volcano Eruption, Reunion, by Hugo aka Hughes Leglise.)

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Alongside the Democratic Republic of Congo, Reunion a French Overseas Department located in the Indian Ocean to the East of Africa has one of the most active blogospheres in the francophone world. Its portal Reunion Permanente either explains the bustling activity or illustrates it. The portal even keeps track of overseas Reunion bloggers such as Sandy of Reunion-USA2 who lives in the United States; her blog seeks to explain her reactions to American culture. One particularly prolific island-based netizen, Pierrot Dupuy, keeps a blog updated several times a day that focuses on the island's and nearby independent Mauritius' current affairs. Another blogger, Jean-Paul, summarizes the island's main news on his blog Dijoux.re every sunday.

Recent preoccupations in the country's news and blogs have included a local Chikungunya fever epidemic and its effects on local tourism, frequent mostly scenic lava flows of the local volcano of which France-based blogger Audrey from Reunion Passion consistently shows pictures. A recent alleged corruption scandal involving local official Samia Badat was also widely blogged by Zarabes, the blog of the local Indian moslem community. (Ironically, as the blog's header explains, the creole word Zarabes which is used on the island to designate the mostly moslem Indian population actually derives from the French word for Arab.) And it should come as no surprise that the sometimes tension-filled relationship to France, including a successful fight against housing discrimination practices perpetrated in mainland France against overseas French citizens from Reunion, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyane and other French overseas departments and territories, constitutes a recurring theme.

Among the week's highlights, Jean-Paul at Dijoux.Re, offered (Fr) the latest on the local volcano, namely that it is still erupting but that local authorities have been preventing locals from admiring its spectacle in the last couple of years. On the Chikungunya front, the blogger explained (Fr) that two biologists have linked an anti-rubeola vaccine to a possible cure. Meanwhile, on a lighter note, US-Based Sandy at Reunion-USA2 explained (Fr) the significance in America of the interracial romance movie Something New.

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For more daily La Reunion blog updates, visit the La Reunion page at Global Voices or subscribe to its RSS feed. For those who blog La Reunion, Global Voices also has available a nifty JSS Feed i.e. live headlines that will look like the live Haiti headlines I have running to the right of the home page at the top of the "Links" section. (See right side of the La Reunion JSS feed page for what the headlines will look like.)


la reunion - blogs - blogging - indian ocean

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Haiti Video Game+ A Father's House+ West Indian Parade

Ayiti Cost of Life Socially Conscious Video Game

• Not all agree that video/virtual reality games are a tasteful way of raising awareness on hot button issues (cf controversy on Darfur is Dying virtual reality game). That said, Gary Dauphin explains that a video game is being designed that will challenge players with the day-to-day task of making ends meet for a poor person in Haiti.

My Father's House

• While you're at Gary (aka ebogjohnson.com)'s blog, notice this slideshow of his father's house before it sold in 2003. (The blog post about the slideshow is here.) All well and good, you're thinking. Yes, except if you also read this other post of his months ago where he explained a thing or two about his father's philosophy on economy, aesthetics, throwing things away (or not) and fixing things endlessly. (This set of habits should sound familiar to some of those hailing from Western Hispaniola --okay fancy way of saying Haiti--or places like it. It does to me. Ha!)

New York West Indian Day Parade

• Yes I attended, yes I have footage. No the footage is not ready to post because I plan to use it as an exercise in learning to use YouTube. Yes, there are other sites you can visit that have lots and lots of pictures, namely this page at sakapfet.com.

ayiti cost of life - gary dauphin
- west indian parade - brooklyn - haiti - caribbean

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I Finally Met Georgia!

I've been talking about Georgia Popplewell for months and linking to her Trinidad-based blog and podcast Caribbean Free Radio often. She introduced me to Global Voices by recruiting me as an author for the Caribbean region and then I started covering francophonia for them. It's been almost a year. We conversed and collaborated almost daily in the virtual world but had never met in person. I finally met her during her last trip to NY. We had a wonderful Brooklyn dinner and I got a great shot of her and her cousin and baker extraodinaire Christiana at Chez Oskar! (Georgia is the lady in blue.)

Of course we got to play the six degrees game as we discovered that she hung out in South Africa years ago with M, the very woman who introduced me to Fort Greene. Guess who was cat-sitting for M while she was off meeting Georgia in South Africa? Moi, of course.



caribbean free radio - georgia popplewell - chez oskar - fort greene - brooklyn

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