 And so welcome to our Vicki session on Haiti. And thank you all for coming. A number of Burlington residents have gone to Haiti, and we wanted to bring them together to talk about their experiences, especially since the earthquake. And we want to start with these images. If you want to just tell about what these represent, I'm going to turn off the lights. Then I'll turn the lights back on, and we'll see who the cameras are. OK, barblessing. Hi, everybody. How about you go up there, Barbara? OK. I didn't quite prepare for this, but it's dark. It's dark. You can't see me. That's all the better. The microphone is there. No, no, no, no, we're refusing it, right? So these images were taken, well, the exact year of them, I think, was somewhere between 2011 and 2012. I can't. They're a smattering of images between 2010 and 2013. I think that's probably the best way to put it. You'll see pictures in here that are of Port-au-Prince. They go into Duchy-T, which is in the Grand-Ence. You'll see pictures of the mountains. We were in Cannes Cove, which is above Port-au-Prince and above Petchamville, for those of you that are familiar with Haiti. The Grand-Ence is the most remote part of an inaccessible part of Haiti. Duchy-T is a place where the Vermont Haiti Project people have a project going on, so I was up there a lot with them, of course. Could you say about that project? About the Vermont Haiti Project? Yeah. What can I say about it? The Vermont Haiti Project works with a local Haitian who lives in Port-au-Prince. They get through medical, UVM medical people up there, doing relief work. This is all those way, way pre-earth faith. And they form relationships and kept those relationships and help those families out, raise money for those families that they've worked with. And the Duchy-T is where their family is from originally before they migrated to Port-au-Prince. The gentleman who they support, his name is D'Spon. He wanted to start a school up there, so they were working towards that end to acquire land and go to school and all that. And I know that they began work on that school, but I don't have any pictures, or I don't really have an update on their project. The pictures you're seeing here are from the Haiti Circle Friends Project that was in Haiti for three years ongoing. These are all people that participated in the project. It was a volunteer-based project. That's all the white folks you see running around. And they flew in, and this certainly doesn't represent all the volunteers that went to help children and women in particular, and families in general, to overcome the issues of being torn away from their families, children being torn apart from their families due to extreme poverty. What occurs in Haiti is becoming more and more well-known in Haiti. Hello. Becoming more, I guess, I'm reading lately that it's becoming more of a general practice. People are getting more hip to the fact that there are children who are not orphans, and they do need homes, and they do need support, and they don't have social human service and family social structures, support from the government to help their families in Haiti. So they must depend on people from the outside to help them. And I guess more and more people are turning towards this. I guess it's, I'm not going to say we started this model because I don't imagine that's true, but I can say that we were very innovative with this model of child care when we did start with Haiti. And if it is true in fact that there are more people that are using this particular model for care for children, all better as far as I'm concerned. So these pictures are here right now. This is going from Port-au-Prince. We stopped them all the way before we get to the city of Lecais and head up in over the mountains to get over to Duchety. We stopped for a break and these guys were just a whole bunch of them were fishing. So I put in a smattering of daily life, volunteer life, people working, trying to make money, bringing in food for themselves and to bring to Lecais, to sell, to support themselves and their family. You can see pretty wild, the way they're still working with this netting system of gathering the fish. Soon after this, you'll see a little bucket of, I don't know what kind of fish we have, those little tiny things, it's little white things. And hi, Doreen. So this is all of these people here gathering the little shirtees in the bucket and one of my favorite photographs. So there is some of, most of these are my photographs. There is a segment that are not my name taken by a volunteer. And so it's going to give you the idea of what it is to be very rural in a very rural life and you can see how this is self-sustaining here with food. And you can see, we'll see if we have them already when it loops around to being important friends for the, how people are growing their own food. In fact, we had a project called Farming for Families and where we rented a big piece of land, a big plot of land and started gardening and everybody garden and in fact, in point of fact, we did so well with that garden that we were actually selling food to another house that was taking care of children and reduced costs to what they may have bought it for in the marketplace and better quality for this was picked that morning. So, but most food is fresh and meaty anyway. So it's not really a huge problem. So that's really all I have to say about this. You'll see pictures of the earthquake. I've got some in there, but some of the damage which is a place in there. And here you'll see, it's obviously a presidential palace where the whole dome is toppled forward. I'm very pleased to read that Robin and I had spoken in depth about Haiti at many times, but particularly relevant to this presentation about the notion of the ongoing revolution of Haiti because Haiti's revolution way back in the 1700s or whatever, certainly was never really fulfilled to the benefit of her people. So this gives you a little insight into Ceasar's bought on the side of families that are literally tore apart by extreme, extreme, when I say extreme, I mean extreme poverty. And there we are, just getting a little, you see in my little set that Annie, my puppy, is very famous in Haiti and sharing people up along the way. And here we are, just kind of take the images in and you hear other people talk about their expertise and what they know about Haiti. And this is just really meant tonight to provide a visual background to the sharing that other people might be able to give us. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. You're welcome. Right. Oh, that's... Oh, my. Oh, well. So here we are again, welcome to the others who came in and what I would like to do before we, everyone, we start sharing our experiences. I think this is a good start to see the images of Haiti. And over here is a timeline, okay? And I made this for our discussion back at Champlain College a few years ago and it only lived this far. So I added the rest of the years but as a person who got to know Haiti through the art primarily and the music and the religion, as time went on and I went back several times the politics became very all-consuming as it was all consuming to the people there. And I got to know Jean-Bertrand Aristide or at least I interviewed him in his office when he took office in 1994, nine months, when he was overthrown by Cedros and then he came back into office and for a third term when he was again overthrown in 2004. And when I interviewed him there it was so moving because it was, he said, we have 13 years to bring education to all the children, to bring health care and to present Haiti to the world on the 200th anniversary of the Haitian Revolution. He was really absorbed with that and so were many people they were planning special boat trips that would go from Africa to Brazil to Haiti to show the way in which the sanitary had worked and Haiti was in fact was something like a third of all the slaves that came to the new world came to Haiti and were used in a horrible way in terms of the sugar industry and cutting the sugar cane. So anyway, that shows that and then we know that after, shortly after the earthquake, a guy was elected, selected more or less to run the government named Martelly and then there was another election and this guy, Jose, he didn't know how to say his name. Joe Nell. Who the hell, Moise? Yeah, Moise, Moise is now refusing to step down although revolutions in the street have been happening since last February which is when I was there, I documented my little story there I couldn't get to the hotel I wanted to go to and spent the time at a wonderful sort of rustic alternative tourist center and that's sort of what the situation is right now. For example, it's terrible, it's more than terrible. There was a story about how a guy who sells trinkets got a loan for $150 to be able to put things on his table for Carnival and then Carnival was canceled because of a variety of reasons. Apparently not the coronavirus but because of conflicts between the police and the army and so on. So this poor guy is meant to pay someone back and has no money in so people have no money and they're trying to live and feed their children. So that's just a general overview and so maybe Julia could speak to us Julia Portillo from Champlain College has been there more recently and we have a map here so that you can tell us where, where it is that you go. Sure, sure sure, yeah. I think if we come up here that would be good for the camera. Yeah. Can I ask a question? When you're talking about Haiti now, what is the attitude of the United States? What's going on between the United States and Haiti? Well Trump supports this guy, Moise. The people are angry because Moise has used the money that was provided by obtaining gas and oil from Venezuela and part of the deal was some of the money that the government made by selling that gas would be used for the people's needs and it wasn't so. He has not admitted that he committed anything wrong so far and but the people are just adamant and that's why the picture that I used on the publicity shows a Haitian man waving a Venezuelan flag because they support Venezuela and Trump may always join the countries against Venezuela and against Moderna so the people said what? You're asking, you're, we've received the gifts in a sense of oil from Venezuela and now you're saying that our country is joining the gang against Venezuela? Does that make it clear that Guaido you mean? Huh? Is that the alternative to what I call that? To Maduro, Guaido, in other words, the United States is urging them somehow to deal with that guy that the United States appoint? Yeah, yeah, I mean, Trump has been pressuring all of the Latin American countries to support Guido instead of Moderna so the people said, no, we've been receiving the generosity of Moderna all this time. How can we turn against him? But maybe you've met more of us so let us know what you've experienced. Okay, great. Well, thank you for inviting me, I'm sorry I was late, I got hung up at home with the kids and carried a little later than I thought so apologies for not delay, but it's a pleasure to see you all. My name's Julian Portilla and I work at Champlain College, I work in mediation and applied conflict studies program there and I teach several classes a year at Champlain and I also actively work in mediating things in lots of different places, mostly Mexico, where I was born and where I'm from, I work at Fisher's and NGOs and governments trying to find ways to make Fisher more sustainable in Mexico and I also happen to work in Haiti because as part of my work as an mediator, I am on a roster of mediators at the, there is, you've all heard of the Inter-American Development Bank, it's a multilateral bank composed of all the member nations on the continent, so there's 26 borrower nations and there's several more lender nations, so the US, Canada, Japan, Korea, the European Union are lender nations, but also the Latin American country, the same borrower nation is also lender nations and so the Inter-American Bank, like most of the big multilateral banks, lends money for big infrastructure projects for public products, so it's where if a government needs money for an airport or an industrial park or a mine or an energy plant or something like that, they go and they borrow from the Inter-American Bank if they're on this continent and so that's their sort of mission, public infrastructure basically, so then a private bank in the sense that they're not lending money for business ventures exactly, they're becoming an infrastructure bank and they're member owned if you will, but by national governments, it's sort of a community bank to the Americas. Now as you imagine, that bank has all kinds of policies and politics internally about how to lend money, who to lend it to and under what conditions, and they have all the multilateral banks, the World Bank and the African Bank and the Central Asian Bank, East Asian Bank and all the regional banks, they have a certain set of safeguards and policies that they oblige the borrower nations to comply with, so in other words, if you're gonna rip a road through a forest, you have to do some mitigation work if you're gonna put a mine next to a community, you have to do some mitigation work, if you're gonna put a mine or a dam on Indian land, you need to figure out how are you gonna engage the Indians in the community process and find out how you can address the damage, let's say that your project has been caused. And so there are safeguard policies at all these multilateral banks and if those policies are not followed, then communities affected have the opportunity to ask for a redress process from the bank, in other words, they can say, we think your policies are not being followed by the implementer, the implementer's always government, so the bank doesn't implement projects, the bank lends money to governments when the government makes the things. And then the community, who is affected by those things, has the right to say bank, we don't think your implementing partner is doing a good job. So I got a call a couple of years ago to go to Haiti because after the earthquake, there was a lot of conversation about how to help Haiti and of course there was all the disaster relief stuff and so forth and one of the biggest misconceptions about the disaster relief in Haiti is that while tens and hundreds of millions of dollars were pledged, very little of that was actually ultimately delivered by the people who pledged it, including the United States. But one of the conversations that was going on at the time was how can we make Haiti less dependent on poor prints, poor prints, like a lot of Caribbean and Latin American countries, Haiti is a very centralized place and so everything starts and ends in poor prints and whatever sort of economic thing you may have going on in another part of the country, sooner or later something happens within important prints. And so the idea is how can we pull people out of poor prints, people looking for different opportunities, people looking for work, and Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton and negotiating a lot of favorable terms for Haiti to export clothing basically to the United States from Capacean, Capacean is up here and Capacean for those of you who are a Haitian history bus was a central part of the revolution that his promise was ever fulfilled and I mean would you say that or would you say that? In any case, in Capacean they decided to get money from the United American Bank, United American Bank in this case donated money, it's not something they do often because they're a bank after all, but they gave about $500 million to build what they call an industrial plant on land in near Capacean, so over here. And that factory or that industrial plant displaced a group of farmers. So there's about 400 farmers farming on land around this river that feeds out into the ocean and it's a really important source of water of course as you might imagine there, let's refer to land. But the studies of the bank for whatever reason or the Haitian government rather said that that was the place for the industrial plant, so they laid out an industrial plant there and in so doing they forcibly removed the farmers from farming on that land. They didn't live there, but it's what they call economic displacement in development terms and so these folks were economically displaced because they couldn't work with the land that they'd been working for years and years and as a result the Haitian government, so it turns out and the Haitian law doesn't allow for compensation of land if you are displaced by the government because it wasn't a farmer's land, they were paying what they call farmer's rights to the government to work the land but they didn't own the land. So by Haitian law they didn't have the rights to any compensation but of course they've been farming there for years and Haiti is a food and security nation and a net importer of food and so to lose farms in a rural part of Haiti is a tough blow to local agricultural and food security stuff up there. The bank and the government of Haiti tried to find lands to replace for these farmers and for a variety of reasons couldn't do it and so they ended up compensating the farmers with cash payments. The bank policy says if you displace people you should not pay them cash because that's not a way to restore livelihoods. Like any of us, if you lost your job and got a bunch of money, that'd be great for a little while but after you paid your debts and maybe bought something extra and paid for a couple of funerals and took the Port of Prince to see your aunt or whatever, that money's gone and so you can't restore your livelihoods with cash or rather it would be a challenge to do so. So some people didn't buy land with that cash children. Some people bought small businesses that they continue to work today. Others bought small businesses that didn't work out and so this community got together and they filed and completed the bank and they asked the bank to come to the meeting so for the past two years or three years now I had been mediating between the bank, the government of Haiti and the farmers on proper compensation or at least the follow-up to that compensation plan which the focus of which has been to restore the livelihoods of the farmers and so at the moment we came to an agreement at the end of last year and so this year begins the implementation process or rather is that we came to an agreement in December 18 and so all of the 19 was the first year of implementation as the second year of implementation and the term of the problem was making reference to it very hard to do any real series of limitations because it's very hard to move anything when the actual approach of the political opposition to Germany and the U.S. was to shut the country down. They said, you know, they look, lock the country down was the term for it and they did. Kids couldn't go to school, people couldn't get to hospitals, can't go to the store, no goods, moving in on their footprints and for the first time in a long time economically speaking the country is going to shrink economy for the first time in a long time so it's a terrible standoff, it's that real terrible, it's a little bit cost. And that delay of course our implementation process up north but yeah, that's kind of an overview, there's a lot more to say, but that's a good one. Pardon? Did the factory actually happen? Oh yes, yes, the factory has been there for a long time now, close to seven or eight years, seven years and we target and other big box stores to receive lots of Haynes clothing fabricated by South Korean factories on the industrial plant that was financed by the bank built by the Haitians. So the plant as you can imagine it's just infrastructure, it's cement, water, electricity, buildings, security, fencing, that kind of thing and then it's up to private industry to come and build a factory on the plant. And so the South Koreans who were made the first factories there made a deal with the Haitians and the Americans to put their plants, or their factories, their garment factories on this plant and then being on the north, of course, it's easier to get to Florida and so shipping costs are low and there's preferential imports and tariffs for Haitian goods coming in from that plant. And I am not a big defender of negative elements by any stretch, but it's worth pointing out in the name of fairness that these plants do provide about 13,000 jobs in an area where there were none. 13,000 jobs at minimum Haitian wage which is about $6 a day, not a great upward mobility in those jobs, the factory jobs. However, if you multiply by six by 13,000 that's a big amount of money every day, every week, every month. And so it's a big influx from a macroeconomic perspective. I'm channeling the banks are going to. So that position of the bank. That's the, that's the, sorry, what is the deal? What did you, the fireworks games? They were doing the renegotiating of them. So it's all about laugh units. And so the deal was if you imagine 400 units of people eligible for compensation, imagine that each of those 400 units gets two tickets and one ticket is a job at the factory. For anybody, I don't know the sound rate, but the folks who were bothered were very tired to be able to get to the front line to be able to get an interview and to get a job at the peak. It's called the package to end the cargo, the peak. And let me just finish out the shape of the agreement and add it in some more questions. So that's one ticket. The second ticket is only a number of following options. You can buy land and the government will pay for it with bank money. If you bought land and you want improved land and you want some better harvest or yields or production or if you want to find better ways to take your product to market, there is equipment and technical advice on that side of things. If you want a scholarship to get into the trade school locally, you can do that. If you are in what they call a very vulnerable segment and you neither can farm nor want to farm nor have the skills to go and get training in the trade, you can do what's called a graduation program. So this is with a sort of heifer international kind of program where you get some animals and you get some home improvement. So either roof improvement or better access to water. And then after six months, after some training, if you choose to go for micro-ecletive, you can do that. But everybody was very clear that if you want to make people go further in the debt right off the bat. So there was a sort of initial asset giving. And then should you choose to go further, you can go on the micro-ecletive scale. And if you qualify for a graduation program, in other words, you didn't kill off the chickens or the goats that you got and you maintained a certain attendance level of trainings and so forth. Oh, there's also stipend for that over the course of the six months when they build up their skills and their animals so that they can have enough to either... What are their demands now? Well, the demands for a long time were to restore the livelihood. So that's why they got the conversation in the first place. The demands now are, can you please do this? So implementation has been extremely slow. The Haitian government is very difficult to work with. And while they've all agreed to it, the bank has agreed to finance it. Getting it done is another story. And so that's why I continue to go. And we have twice monthly calls and three times a year I go down there and we're trying to sort of make things happen. And it's just tricky for a number of people. So am I understanding correctly that seven years and it's still not a fully functioning program? More or less, I bet. You want to give it a little. Let me ask you a question and then answer that question. Well, I've heard Robin speak a lot about kind of the criticisms of the Clinton government. Yes. About Haiti. Yeah. And I'm not exactly sure. Do you want to address what happened with Clinton? Well, the Clintons have gone to Haiti for many years. They went in their honeymoon, right? During their honeymoon, yes. And I lost out with Haiti. Yeah. Yeah. And so they like Haiti, but I think there's been a lot of criticism since the earthquake that the Clintons haven't, they've stepped forward, but they haven't stepped forward effectively. Others, so many other people have come. I mean, marvelous, one of many that went down there, Sean Penn went down. And according to the book by Amy Lilitz, has done a really good job as a celebrity, actually creating a camp for displaced people, which, the idea of a camp is to help displace them again, back to their homes or finding another home. And he worked out a system where, what she approves of. But the Clintons seem to have gotten a lot of criticism. And what do you think of them overall? They're in there. Well, I think they placed a lot of eggs in Jean Bertrand, their speedbasket. And I think they were the primary motivator for him coming back for third time. And I think that by that time, it wasn't a very good choice. I think that largely because of him, he has gone back to a system of warring gangs who are fighting for power and the security apparatus. Because of our speed? Largely, yes. I mean, RSD was certainly a facilitator of that. It's an old traditional heyday that goes back to the idea to have warring gangs fighting as one another. And it is in the absence of a real state-funded and run security mechanism. It's what people turn to. You turn to private security, which ultimately turned into gangs. It's sort of a paramilitary force. So in the absence of a coherent state force, that's what happens. It's kind of howzy in that sense. You're saying when he came back in 2011, right after the earthquake, that's when he returned. No, no, no, I'm sorry. Looking at your time for you, I find that very useful. Where's the RSD, this guy? 2000, yeah. So he predates that big earthquake, the first earthquake? Yes, I'm sorry. The first one. Yeah, yeah, RSD was there before the big earthquake. Actually, Kharag was there during the earthquake. Yeah, he has the green line. So Krival was before RSD. And then when RSD was overthrown in 2004, there was a hiatus there and a curative with them. And then Krival came again. And Krival was a supporter. I mean, he was a candidate of La La Las, which is the name of RSD's movement. And that's what's sort of surprising to me that Krival, who was a modern progressive person, was empowered for so two long terms. And yet, well, then he was there as the earthquake fell and the White House fell and he died shortly thereafter as I... Well, he's finished his term. He's one of the, I believe, he might be the only modern ancient president who had finished his term without getting booted. I don't know, from right side to maybe, yeah. Yeah, and then died shortly after, but he finished. To your question, seven years, why is it taking so long? So the first compensation process lasted about four years. And then there was a hiatus and then they filed a complaint and the bank took it up three years ago and then you finished the agreement at the end of 19 to give you a sense of the timeline. Yeah. What's the out-of-situation security now? Yeah, right. Oh, it's terrible. It's really, really bad. It's in flames, so it's terrible. I mean, you mean the H&S and the flames? Yes, so the question was about H&S security situation and it's really, really awful. Well, I didn't catch the beginning of the presentation. When were you there? I went to Haiti right after the earthquakes and I was there for almost full time until 2014. Okay, great. In and out. Yeah, yeah. So you can only do? Yes, of course, right. So the situation since the protests and the counter-protests have started has been really bad. So for right of year now it's been terrible. It sort of lightened up for a while. There was a bit of an accord. There was some attempts at dialogue. The UN was very active trying to get some dialogue together that has now collapsed. And the opposition who had once agreed to only protest on weekends and to let the country go back to normal function most days is now sort of on the fence about what they're gonna do. Lots of kidnappings, lots of violence. The president himself, Jean-Yan Moniz, is accused of having killing squads going across and making targeted killings, especially in the countryside. And the political class in Haiti is bad as bad as it gets. It's bad everywhere. It's bad here. It's bad all over Latin America. Really bad in Latin America. And in Haiti it's as bad as it gets. It's terrible. The opposition is terrible. The parties in power are terrible. The security situation is terrible. It's maddeningly and heartbreakingly tragic and poor. Yes, it means we're in top 10 poor countries in the world. It's really tough to spend time there and have your heart beat out because it's a really tragic situation. Is Paul Farmer still working there? I don't know if Paul Farmer's still working there. You know, Juden could answer that, but she... Yeah, I'm pretty sure that it is. Is it? Yes, okay. It's an institution. Yeah, part of the health. Part of the local, the countryside. Yeah. No, a friend of mine, his mother had cancer, and they didn't know about it. He hooked him up to grow partners in health. Oh, fantastic. It's the only issue though. So it's... And this is from last year. Fantastic. They're still... They're still... I mean, it's hard to do anything about it. Yes, it is, yeah. That's the old function. Yeah, I've been there. I've been to his hospital. It's beautiful. Is it? It's amazing. It's his beacon in the middle of nothing. It's up on the mountaintops? Yeah, if you remember one of those slides, it sort of looks across the valley up into the mountains on the other side. It's really exceptional, like right over that way, but you can't... You have to go down and around and up and over to get there. But yes, it's very state of the art of a third community oriented. It's really interesting. They had like... It's one of the most interesting things I remember about it was like where the air conditioners there, they had like bacteria zappers. Oh, cool. So when there was like people, all these people coming in sick, there was people who didn't know there, the UN peacekeepers were cholera epidemic to Haiti as well. And so there's tons of very sick people and so they keep the air. It was very... They had big rooms like this where they were connecting to doctors in the state so they could learn from them or the procedures together. It was really quite impressive in there. And it continues. That's wonderful. Yeah, it's still there. Oh, sure. Yeah, that's great. There's a very good book that I found really helpful to orient myself with to Haiti which is called The Truck That Went By. It's about developing in Haiti after the earthquake. Yeah, yeah. And thank you. I'll look it up on my phone in just a second. Yeah. Do it in cats. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So Jonathan Katz. Yeah. Excellent book. He was a... Was it Wodder's or AP? He was working. AP. Yeah. So he was the local AP guy, the Associated Press guy in Haiti and a great storyteller. And it's really jaw-dropping a lot of the stuff that he talks about. He touches it always from the earthquake to Preval to... He talks about Chantin. And he talks about Gacol in the factory that I just mentioned. And he talks about... I don't remember if he talks about a phone phone. But he certainly talks about Collar, quite a bit. Yeah. And actually, the Collar had the dinner. The UN does get bad after that. Yeah. And a lot of it deservedly. So it was actually the waste disposal company that was pulling waste disposal out of the UN compound and rather than treating it appropriately, was dumping it into the stream, the nearest stream. Which, by the way, in Haiti, this came from the area of... It's very common in Haiti. Yeah. So the level of desperation in Haiti, I always find shocking to share with people that there are two water treatment plants in all of Haiti. One in this industrial park, to treat the industrial waste. And the other industrial park in Haiti, down in Port-au-Prince. That's it. That equals the number of psychologists that they have there as well. Probably. Yeah. Trash disposal, non-existence. You know, the rivers are choking trash everywhere you go. And it's a desperate removal. Deforestation on a massive scale, like you can't believe. I mean, if you just look on a Google map picture, like a satellite picture, you can see the line between the Dominican and Haiti. Not because you can see the border guards standing there with their uniforms, but because one side is stripped clean and the other side has lots of forest. And that, by the way, if you ever read the stuff by Jared Diamond and Collapse, he paints a really interesting contrast between the Dominican and Haiti, where, through their own brutal dictatorships, and Haiti, or the Dominican, made the very conscious decision to go with some environmental conservation and some forestry management to preserve water and to create other ventural industries for the Dominican at the cost of human rights and brutal targeted killings of, what do you call it? Armors. No. What do you call it? People who cut wood. Barnards. Barnards, yeah. Thank you. So lots of illegal logging. He's very bad at the forest. Beautiful old charcoal woods, hardwoods, mahogany woods, and really valuable hardwood stuff, rosewoods, all those kinds of stuff. Then on the Dominican side, it's still there, and on the Haitian side it got stripped clean because of the need for carbon, for coal, for charcoal, right there. And so the sort of, so assistance agriculture in need for charcoal ended up stripping on trees. And the Haitian side, because the July 8th regime was never interested in figuring out what to do with their natural resources. They wanted a pillage. The Dominicans were doing plenty of pillaging and at the same time had some voting plan that as a result of their really heavy-handed leadership, and the council wanted people to save them out of forest. Not the ideal way to do conservation and not do, but there it is. So are the natural resources that they're using in the factories of the north part, are they, they're grown there in Haiti? The factory pretty much just needs water. And so the, What are they making? Oh, they make clothing, and they make paint, actually, is the other thing, they have the paint factories and clothing factories. So where do they get fabric? Good question. I don't know, I don't know any answer to that. I doubt it, I very much doubt it. I bet they import it from Malaysia or Bangladesh or something like that. I'd be very surprised if it came from Haiti. Is the port functioning that is right near there? That was the other idea that they would be really developing an alternative port to import the prints. Yes. You know, the new factory, but I was reading something that said that that hadn't happened. So if that hasn't happened, then how do they get the clothing to fabric to make it into clothing? To afford it, right? You know, I don't know the answer to that one. If it's not, they'll just put it on a truck and send it to the port of prints, which to be on purpose, they haven't got paid the first prints yet. I don't know what else to do. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I can tell you that the port authority in Haiti was recently stripped of the privilege of managing reports in Haiti, because they got caught doing, taking too much on the top for themselves in their cronies. So that happened straight away. Yes. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. The one simple, you know, say what you want about multilateral action, big infrastructure lenders in general, the policies of the multilateral lenders and the safeguards are, for the most part, far better than the national legislation of the countries in which they work, which means that the standards that the implementer nations have to achieve are generally speaking higher than their national standards and that the laws are obligated to. So for example, the transfer of the ports to another authority was at the behest of the bank who said this isn't working and we're going to withhold the next disbursement of this loan unless you transfer the authority from the ports, from those guys to these guys. Yeah? What are some of the other criticisms of the inter-American banks and multilateral banks with respect to Haiti? There's plenty. There's lots. There's lots. I mean, you can start with the basic conversation about the development model. And that's really the big one. So what is development? What is progress? How to fight poverty? You might argue that the sort of idea of mines, dams and roads is a little bit outdated in terms of how to make for stronger social fabric and how to provide for self-sustaining, self-driven development ideas. Right? And actually, right at this very moment, last week, this week and next week, the bank is consulting people all over Latin America about their new policies. Their new policies are better. And so on the face of it, people say these policies are better. But then when they invite indigenous groups and they always invite indigenous groups for specific meetings, credit or credit to do, the indigenous criticism is always, we don't want what you're bringing. We don't want what you're building here. We don't want your road. We don't want your power plan. We don't want your mine. We don't want your factory. Yeah, we don't want that stuff. Is there a disconnect, essentially? Yes. Yeah, so at the moment, the bank's policy is on rights to people who are forcibly displaced. One of those rights is not, I don't want your project here. It's not to be able to say, I don't want this here. That's changing in the modernization. That's what they call it, the modernization of the policy framework. And at the moment that's changing to where there has to be a consultation and there has to be a conversation. It doesn't necessarily give you the right to veto yet. It's a little bit soft in that regard, but it's better than what it is. And where there are Indigenous lands concerned, you have to abide by a whole bunch of human conventions. The International Labor Organization has this convention, it's called 169. You hear about it all over Latin America because it's a big deal because it's the one international legal instrument that obligates you to have free, prior, informed consent to projects on Indigenous lands, which gives them the right to say no. Lots of criticisms are available of multi-lateral things. If you are of the idea that you need roads and hospitals and electricity to reduce poverty, then it becomes a very difficult conversation because I do believe those things. It's very hard to live without electricity and I have refrigeration and not have hospitals and not have roads to get your goods to market and to bring things to you and all the things that young people want because they've seen them before. At the same time, the price that you pay for that form of development can be very high. And so these constant trade-off questions and I think contemporary development is an endless series of difficult trade-offs. Yes, for those, I suppose everybody here knows a little bit about the history of Haiti, right? The reason why I think it is so kind of colonized by European powers from the beginning is that Haiti was a slave country, right? It was a French colony and in 1804, the slaves rebelled and had a revolution and created the first black republic in the Americas, really. And ever since then it seems to me that it has been really exploited by the capitalist powers. And still, right? Still, and I think that a lot of what's happened to Haiti is because it stood up against France in 1804 and has been trying to create its own society ever since. Yeah, you can say that the big colonial powers have been being paid ever since. Ever since. Yeah, it was a source of interest. It's almost punitive, you know? Absolutely. One might argue that the Asians are complicit in this as well. Why? And so I think, too, I mean, I'm certainly not a supporter of colonialism, but having said that it hits on the essence of an unsuccessful revolution because when Trusso attended to, with the uprising of the Haitian people back, I don't know, it was 1804, but 1804. Yeah, I was trying to be drove Napoleon out. Okay, so, and I mean, he basically, he became a European in his own right and began to conduct the politics in the government in the image of the French people that they just would just boot it out of the country. And so, and it's just seemed to me, from what I've read and seen, that it's just perpetual reenactment of coming to power. I'm putting it this way, I went to somewhere where I was, I think it might've been a hospital or something, it was a public place, a government kind of public place. And I walked in and the whole wall was filled with pictures of presidents. I mean, the whole wall, there was probably 30 pictures on the wall of people who've passed in and out a power of Haiti. It's never, it's never, it's, the government that was established after that has never righted itself to treat its people properly. No, I, you know, I don't judge. That's all in the legacy of colonization and, you know, mimicking the model that existed and didn't work. And didn't, it still is a world. What happened to Aristide in the end? Wasn't he kidnapped by the CIA? He got, well, I'm not sure the United States turned against him. Yeah. I don't know how he ended, I think he left for the country. Well, Robin did, I mean, I would disagree with you that I don't think the United States was ever for him. I mean, they were intensely embarrassed that he'd won the first time against Mark Bazin, who was a World Bank kind of guy. And everyone was totally surprised that Aristide got 67% of the vote and more people turned out than ever before in Haitian history. And then he was overturned in nine months. And, you know, the US was behind the people who ran the coup. I guess, and Clinton brought him back by helicopter and deposited him on the White House of Port-au-Prince. But that was under pressure. And Haiti could, and Aristide could only have, fulfill his five years, you know, he didn't have the extra time that he was out of power to add on, so he could only be in power for like, what is it, two years there. And then, and then Treval came in. But he had to make deals with Clinton in order to return. And one of the deals was to privatize a number of the industries, which he pretended to do. I mean, it was obviously a very fraught relationship. I think he didn't satisfy the United States when he came back. And Treval took power. And then he, and then, believe it or not, Aristide won again in the year 2000. What happened then? Then things got really difficult because some of the elections were challenged, mainly for the senators in the legislature and so on. And the United States put sanctions on. I'm not quite sure how complete those were, but it really crippled the government and crippled what Aristide could fowl to him. What he could do in terms of implementing more schools and so on. And then, and then the United States supported a bunch of ex-military people in the Dominican Republic who were armed and swept into the country and swept around the country, it came to Port-au-Prince and to kidnap Aristide and put him on an airplane too. I don't know if it was in the 90s, the way Aristide was portrayed in our media. I mean, he was particularly harsh. I mean, there was almost like a soft allegation that there was something that gets psychological challenges. It's almost like what they did to Castro. But I mean, I'm just saying in terms of the way he was portrayed in our media here. And then it went kind of back and forth this evening. I mean, that was just my recollection and impression at the time. It wasn't particularly, they weren't particularly praising Aristide for some of the items that you know here in terms of accomplishments in education and healthcare as well as other areas of social. And I think he was challenged with, you know, permitting drug people to come in, but actually that, the flow of that, I mean, I think Martin Lee really had more, much deeper connection, say, to the Kali cartel. And after that, drugs circulated from Haiti to the United States in the real flow after 2004. So it's been really a difficult time. Aristide came back right after the earthquake and has lived in it pretty quietly, it seems, but he does run a university medical school and people graduate from it. And I gather he has a close relationship with the Cuban doctors that come to Haiti. So in that sense, he's quietly doing good work, but he's been a very low-key profile. Isn't he a Jesuit priest? He was a priest. He gave that up at some point and got married and has kids, two dollars. He lives in Tabar, which is about 10-minute drive down the road from the airport, maybe 20-minute ride, it's kind of flatland. They all get in front of the fish property and that's about it. See him around and then that's where I see this. Now, John, you've been quiet, you sit over here so that the camera can hear your voice and stand if you want to. John has also been to Haiti and tell us your story. So, John Rasperson, I also teach chairplay, filmmaking, and I was in Haiti from 2013 until 2016. I was, this is what I call it here. For two years, I was in La Carte, which is right here, it's in the South province. I, in my experience, it was, I can't work with nuns. I have a long experience working with nuns here in a program like AmeriCorps and the nun that ran it and they were based in Baltimore and they started, they had a nun that originated here and they, so the program, they were like, hey, do you want to come down? And we, they had a center in Slum in La Carte, they liked the lowlands, like the hurricane, Matthew went right through here all the way up but it really, it's the most expensive land like any place, it's the highest point. Anyway, so I went down there and I was teaching filmmaking at this community center and we made some pieces and I was there two years and my last year was in conference and in terms of like major, I don't know, it was a wonderful experience. I was there in a time, I mean, incredibly poor but it was also a time of political stability. I was in the sweet Mickey years and Martelli so he was the famous musician who became president and it was, it was, I mean, the stuff that has changed like it was very, very safe, I never, and he is very safe, especially if you're my color and it's safe for Haitians as well. When I was there, it was in terms of security, the diaspora, Haitians lived in the States or in Canada and Europe, they'd come back sometimes especially after the earthquake, it was problematic and now it's, as Julian was saying, the last time I was there was in, I'd go back before the trouble, I was going back like twice a year to make videos with these dogs who started a bakery in the slum, you know, small time employment and it was a cool economic endeavor and I was doing stuff to promote it but it just, in terms of security, just people that I know that are in poor Princeton, they're from the slum, they're being kidnapped. I mean, it's gotten really bad, it's not the diaspora anymore, it's just, it's so desperate and it is like when I was there, when it was, you know, during that checkpoint, it was stable and very, very safe to do anything. I got around by riding a motorcycle and I had great trips just around the country and easy and it was, it was never, I was never stopped, I was never harassed by the police or just by the Shimmer, like the armed people, the militias that go out. But it has deteriorated, like where's the money? It's the slogan in terms of the petroleum. It is now and it's very dangerous just for people, like it was, as soon as they shut down, like the bakery, and this is just a small thing, a large scale, it's just everywhere, everything was drowning because everything does run out of poor prints, so for example, you know, the small bakery that employed like 20 people, everything comes from poor prints, so all flower because there is a port in Kybe, but it's, it is so central. So anything, any fuel, that was one thing, the TAPTAP system of Haiti is, you know, you're covered in diesel after, you know, fumes after riding the TAPTAPs, but that was shut down because, and it's kind of, the crisis in a sense started when the fuel price was raised, it was overnight and it was international, and they decided, okay, it was like double, and it started this crisis because that's how everybody gets around, there's no, the public transportation of these pickup trucks with great paintings, and once those, that really started to rumbling because that affected everybody, like the Timor-Sean, the merchants, they can't, they have to get to the market and you live along my way, and so, and then it was then the embezzlement of the money that was the subsidies from Venezuela, it came out, and it is really just in terms of, I was scheduled to go in October and it was bad in the summer and it kind of got better, but then it was, it's dark, dark, dark times right now, and it's really, really sad. Like schools were closed for six months? Why? Because of the current president, Joe Nelmoy is, the banana man, this is taken in, he, they wanted to leave power, and the thing is, if he leaves power, I don't know, it's after them. He's not a good guy, he's bad news, but what comes after him, I have no idea in terms of there is no structure, and it's really, if he does step down, what comes? The parliament isn't meeting now. No, is that right, but it's not a problem? It's not in session, or it hasn't been called, or they haven't, because of the protests? No. Well, or there's a, they didn't, they didn't have an election, and so a third of the parliament left the building, and they don't have quorum to call a session. And the idea, in theory, was that that would allow Joe Nelmoy to raise a new constitution, and put the house in order, because the constitution is actually fairly weak in terms of, on the executive, and so it's very hard as a president to do anything, assuming you want to do anything. It's very, very difficult, and so the idea is that he would watch a new constitution, and a new kind of constitution convention that that has yet to materialize. So it's a built state, or almost? Not yet, but I don't know, it's a question, but I don't know how you define it, this meeting. I mean, now, I don't know, it is held together, but it's, I mean, I don't, it is so weak. They're just Moïs, and after Moïs, there is not, there's not a structure in terms of, the one thing is, during the UN, they stepped up, when I was there, they were there for the first two years, and then they left. Well, I mean, they've been there forever, they were like an occupying, but the one thing that they did, and this was like the militias, the chimaire, like were you, and I, kids that I knew that would come to my filmmaking classes, I saw pictures of them on YouTube with guns, because some politicians in the area had armed them, and they don't, I mean, they're just neighborhood kids, incredibly poor, but some politicians came out, and they had their automatic weapons. Automatic weapons. Yeah, automatic, well, and it is kind of like, to arm, and it is a political crisis. Are there local governments? Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, there is, and it all is, you have like a mayor, if I was in Kai, they fund that, there's a provincial government. The government is, it's like a Kafka novel, in a way, in terms of bureaucracy. Patient bureaucracy is incredibly complicated, and just to get insurance for a motorcycle is, it's a wild ride. So it's kidnapping people, and what are they doing with them? That's the thing, I don't know what, they must, yeah, but whatever little money they have, they don't have money, or at least the students, maybe they think they have money, but the student goes to an IT school in Port-au-Prince, so it's a university, but I mean, they're terrified, and these are students that were out there going, terrified just to stay out after dark, terrified to go to school because of the kidnappings, and especially the darks, like the one huge thing with this IT school, because school was close to six months, they had to catch up, and the students had, there is no public school in Haiti, and this university is private, but everything is paid school. And so you pay your money, you gotta give it, so okay, we're gonna have like super intense classes, but the students kind of revolted because it's very dangerous, and like tap-taps, the pickup trucks that are public transportation wouldn't run because of the danger of robbery. So what can they get, maybe a cell phone, everybody has a cell phone, maybe some pocket money, or you contact the family, and then the family maybe ponies up. And then what do they do with the people that kidnap? Like my experience with kidnapping, which is very rare, and this was like a French, I knew a colleague of hers was kidnapped a lot, this was like in 2015. She was held for a while, I think until she worked for a French NGO, I don't remember the name, but she was released, and she said it was fine, she was figured with a toothbrush and toothpaste and food, she was really scared, but they, I don't remember how much they asked for her. But yeah, I mean bad things can happen, and that's a different story with the outside, with the blonde, that's a different level, but yeah, I mean it's very desperate, people are very desperate, like then there was a huge influx of patients to Chile about two years ago, three years ago, and it was like there was Chile, they do now, the visa, you could come, there are certain countries that Haitians can go to, and so it was like a gold rush, everybody was going to Chile, and people are desperate, like if you ask what do you want to do, all Haitians want to leave, because, and so like the Chile thing was really big, Chile eventually stopped that, they, there was like xenophobia. And what did Chile then, they migrated north, and now they're on the Mexican, they are coming to the United States. Yeah, the U.S. so they try to get in the USA, yeah. In Mexico, they're in Mexico? Yeah, the people who've gone to Chile, many of them have then gone to Mexico to try to get in the U.S. and they can't, right? Right. And this is open to you also. I mean, has Haiti always had a market economy? Have they ever experimented with any kind of socialist reforms, or is that something that we kind of ground upon? No. I mean, as far as I know, it was plantation economy, cartocracy, chaos. Okay. Yeah, I don't think there's ever enough order of this to do any kind of socialist experiments. Yeah, okay. On the grass roots in the country side, there's something called a combit. A combit. And you'll see pictures of that. It's everyone getting a ho and hoeing the earth and putting the seeds in together as a group thing. And that's an aspiration, I think, amongst the people that, hey, let's join in a combit, let's have, let's make it work. And to my mind, that would be one of the hopes if, when Haiti hits rock bottom, that people will look at those, sort of forgotten institutions of the country side and try to institute them again. That's from the bottom up, it's not top down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. What is it to net exporter? In the A quarter of people? Yeah, yep, they import their food. Broaden, how much? Wherever, you know, all over the place. I don't know, I don't know if that's a good question. Well, if much of the land can be, is there only? I think like the factory took away farmland, right? So that kind of, like overall picture of a health of an economy, is not part of the criteria that the bank uses. You know what I mean? I think if you ask the economists at the bank, they would say that the 15,000 jobs that you get out of the loss of the 400 farmers. You know, you can talk about cultural questions, you can talk about the collective thing that Robert was talking about. And the real critics, the head critics say he created a food crisis where there wasn't one. Right, well that's what you know, understanding what the implication was on food. Yeah, now you could also say how much can 400 small, I mean no, none of the farmers had more than four hectares, which is like eight acres. Most of the plots were about, you know, an acre, acre and a half, two acres. Microfarms, typical, like, you know, self-sufficient, or not self-sufficient, I wouldn't try to say, I would just be saying that, you know, where you feed yourself, sustenance. Yeah, but the issue is also that every Haitian has some sort of plot of land, and most Haitians have some sort of plot, so they can subsist on what they grow, and whatever extra they can grow, they can sell, and there it can get extra money to buy whatever they need to do, or to bring it down to market. A lot of the pictures that are in there of the market scenes are just those, are people that have a small piece of land, and it can be a quarter of the size of just this much of that room, and it's next to their house, and they work it, and they often, very often, you work together. It's difficult to work that land. It's very rocky, it's very hard. It's not like Champlain Valley soil by any stretch. So I think that to take away 400 farms is a very, very big deal. I remember it being about there when it was all coming down, and it was not a popular notion in the country at all. So you take your six dollars a day, that brings a family of $1,300 a year. So you have to actually question how far is $1,300 getting the Haitian economy? And I'm here to tell you, Haiti's expensive. It is? Very expensive. Like in terms of rents and stuff? Well, fuel for one is the big one that's gone up. That was the most accessible process. Expensive of food, it's expensive. Diapers, if you're going to get these, they've been kind of, anything you buy here, you can buy there, you can find this sooner or later. But it's all, it's basically out of reach for most people. If you go to the doctor, it's expensive. Ah, so not socialized medicine? No, oh my God, they're wrong. It's ridiculous expensive to be with people in the funeral costs of 80. The funeral, there you go. But this is incredibly important. In 2013, like it was the exchange rate was like a dollar for 50 good. And like now it's around a hundred. So it's, I mean, and the, that has inflation, the inflation is just, it's awful. But there are some very rich soil lands in Hades, like the Artibana Valley, which is north of Port-au-Prince. And that's where rice was grown. And for a while, Hades was self-sufficient in rice from those farmers. However, the trade policies were set in and I'm not sure when that happened. But Miami rice was imported into Hades. And it undersold their Artibana rice. The farmers went out of business and had to leave and come to the capital. In fact, you know, the progressive organizations even believe that the efforts that were made by AID and others to reforest the tops of the mountains and the farmlands in the rural areas with forests was a scheme to force them out of their farms and back into Port-au-Prince so they could work in the sweatshops, you know, to try it. So there was a feeling that there were efforts being made to find workers for the sweatshops and to depopulate the countryside. Now, I don't know to what degree that's actually what happened, but I mean, I know that happened, but whether it was planned that way or not. But certainly the Miami rice was a big deterrent to self-sufficiency. And also the Miami rice is sprayed with, what is it? Miami rice is very low in certain vitamins and it was given to people in the prisons who got very sick from it, so it's been a sad story all along. So I sort of remember in the 70s, patients going to Germany for medical education, for university education. Germany? Yeah. Uh-huh. So there must have been something in the 70s that was a rise in where the country was going. That they were sending universities students out for education. And they were being paid by the government? They were getting education, the same thing, education, science, but maybe by Germany. Yeah, okay. But there was what, you know, in my little winnable, it was just this, there was an opportunity for university students to get education outside the country. So how that then sort of crashed back then? Well, the 70s was doing the time of the Papadok and then Papadok died towards the end of the 70s and Babydok took over until 86. And part of the reason why there was such a big groundswell against him was because of the swine flu issue. And I made a film, it's not on this film though, but it's called Hades Piggyback. The pig that a farmer or a rural person had was in a sense that person's piggy banks, where he or she could access cash if there was a crisis in the family or to send the kids to school or something by killing the pig and selling it or pig licks and so on and so forth. So then the swine fever issue swept across the Caribbean. The United States arranged with Duvallier and his Tonto Marcoots to really just to kill every pig. And so that was another super disaster that struck the Asian people to be deprived of their pigs. They tried to hide them. They, a bunch of, anyway, lots of stories about the pigs. And then the United States tried to repopulate with nice white American pigs that all required a concrete home to sleep in and a loop that would be brought, would be imported. Yeah, and that's all documented in Hades Piggyback. It's a very frustrating place for those of us in the United States. Well, I didn't know that. Well, see, I see it. It seems to me that there's a connection that makes everybody's life miserable in the third world, and that's the superpowers, in general, and on that extent. And to be thinking about that, maybe without the exploitation of Haiti by France and then the United States might be a whole lot better. The other Caribbean or other Caribbean countries, you know, in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands are quite some time. Now, there's another peachy-dandy government at work. But, you know, there, that was, St. Thomas was a major slave trading port during those years of the centuries there, and they have, as many other Caribbean countries have involved into self-respectable, somewhat respectable self-governing models. And that Haiti has failed to do so, you know? Where, well, certain Haiti's larger than St. Thomas, but it's just sort of, and I could pick other Caribbean countries to talk about it compared as well. It just seems to say, Haiti's never been able to really rise above the challenges presented to it. It's lack of accountability. Well, one thing, and then here, and this is where I can get on with you about it, with America in comparison to the United States, is if you don't educate your people, then that's where you win your battles. You keep everybody dumb and down, and they can't do anything. You know, I was telling Robin, we were talking, so you know how many of those people, the upper class of Haitians, they don't even live in Haiti full-time. They're all in Miami, and Texas, and all these other places. They don't even live in Haiti half the time. You know, they've got guards outside of their houses. They've got maids inside of their houses. And if you're a lucky Haitian, you get to be employed by one of those people who will help take care of your family and send your kids to school. And outside of that, the choice for the average Haitian, the middle class is very, very small in Haiti, and so the rest of the population is left this big with the, can't read and write. All right. I'm really sad that a woman who isn't here tonight who has traveled to Haiti a lot, June Levinson, if you know her. She used to live in Burlington. She now lives in Brattleboro. She maintains completely with a small grant and some of her own money, a garden project in schools in Haiti. And so she employs, pays a salary of several agronomists who go around to the different schools and apparently some of them are up there near a Haitian. And she goes down there herself. She sleeps in the homes of her agronomists sometimes on the floor. She tells me she travels on their motorcycles. I mean, she is one of the most grassroots, creating a grassroots little NGO that has survived through her grit and determination. And she couldn't get up here today unfortunately, but she would have some good stories to tell if she was here. And so I'd like Doreen to say something, my partner in filmmaking and Mr. Tahiti so many times and that we do have a project with some of the artwork from the animated film that we made in Haiti. Did you bring any copies of that film? Yes. It's a terrific little film. You've ever seen it? No, I haven't seen it. It's terrific. Really? That's a lot of fun. But it doesn't take it long. Incredible. Yeah, I like that one. Yeah. Yes, yes. It's interesting. But yeah, so we did this film. I mean, I've just been doing an interview with Seven Days and we were talking of Doreen Kraft. Robin and I made films together for a decade. And this film really had a wonderful life. And by that, I mean that the French embassy loved this little movie. It's 20 minutes, it's animated, it's the history and mythology of Haiti. And they loved it. And so they put it in every embassy in the world. And so it had this crazy, like we never made any money with any films that we made. And this little movie just kind of had feet all over the place and traveled far and wide. And several languages. And several languages. And one of the things that Robin, when she went back to Haiti last year, and we lost communication with Robin and all of us were going out of our minds and calling the senator's office and trying to figure out where you were until we got contact. One of the missions was to figure out how to bring all of the original artwork that was created for this movie to bring it back to Haiti. They're gorgeous, gorgeous artwork by artists that are beloved by Haiti. And many of them have died since that time. And we've wanted to do this for a long time and of course have probably waited till it's, well, at this point it's not doable. Because there isn't an institution to work with to think about creating some kind of, not just security for them, but just care and preservation and the ability to share them. I mean, we want them to be with the Haitian people. So what is that? And the Santradar, which we worked with for many years and creating this project and others, that doesn't exist any longer. It sounds like from the stories tonight that maybe a hospital is maybe the only place that has withstood the test of time for being a valid center for receiving this and for the ability of people to be able to go there to see it themselves. So that's a project we're, Yeah, air conditioning is real, so. Yeah, right. So that's a project that's on our agenda together to try to figure that out. So where's the artwork now? It's at Robbins. By this room. Well, I can- But beautifully phrased with the glass. Yeah. In the hospital. Oh yeah, in the Runefrair, the Runefrair community hospital, the Hoodcorp family. I talked to you a little bit about them. That's when I went down there in response. The Virgin Islands was one of the first responders to the earthquake because they could get small airplanes into small landing fields outside the board of prints. And so one of the, of course, the hospitals were the center of attention and the, I can't remember the exact name of the hospital, but the Hoodcorp family started the hospital. It's like Runefrair Hospital, basically. And it would be appropriate for that sort of thing, big center kind of hallway, big square plays with walls and stuff where people can, things could be hung, people could watch and sing. Yeah, I'd be happy to share that. They're very joyful. Most of them. Yeah, they're perfect. Of the pieces. They're beautiful. Hospitals are beginning more and more to understand the importance and the role of art in healing.