Haitians

- Pushed to the edge of desperation, earthquake-ravaged Haitians dumped bodies into mass graves and begged for water and food Friday amid fear that time is running out to avoid chaos and to rescue anyone still alive in the wreckage. The U.S. military brought some relief, taking control of the airport, helping coordinate flights bringing in aid and evacuating foreigners and the injured. Medical teams, meanwhile, set up makeshift hospitals, workers started to clear the streets of corpses and water was being distributed in pockets of the city.

Two years ago, an enormous earthquake devastated Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, and the surrounding areas. While the cameras are gone, Haiti's recovery continues. Having recently visited Port-au-Prince, we can report that much has been accomplished - though the most important successes are not so obvious. As images of death and destruction dominated the post-disaster news coverage, compassionate Americans donated hundreds of millions of dollars to humanitarian organizations like ours, Baltimore-based Catholic Relief Services.

"Economic refugee.'' Suppose the Irish landing here in themid-1800s had been hit with that brickbat after the potato rust devastated their island home?Some 22,000 Haitians fleeing the disintegration of their country over the last decade have been struck with that sobriquet and sent home. Had this happened to the Irish, America might never have had the fighting spirit that makes Notre Dame so proud. It BTC might never have developed its diocesan schools, described by so many non-Catholics as innately superior to the public schools they desert.

Spike Gjerde of Woodberry Kitchen and Bryan Voltaggio of Volt are lending their support to a benefit for Up From Under, a project for building homes in Hait The Up From Under benefit dinner and silent acution, which is being held at Washington, D.C.'s Long View Gallery on Wednesday, will help raise awareness and funding to build homes for the homeless and those devastated by the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The Volt staff is preparing is preparing food for the benefit, alongside Gjerde, RJ Copper of Rogue 24, Matt Hill of Charie Palmer Steahouse and Mike Isabella of Graffiato.

THERE is a political problem baking under the hot sun at Guantanamo Bay, a political problem ringed with razor wire, housed in wooden barracks, living amid rats and scorpions while soldiers watch from guard towers.But the truth is that all political problems turn out to be people, in one fashion or another. This one is 267 people, held in a latter-day leprosarium on a U.S. naval base, waiting for a decision about what will become of the rest of their lives.They are Haitians, mostly adults, some children, who left their homeland in boats for the succor of the United States more than year ago. Their illusions about a voyage to freedom seem pathetic now. Immigration officials determined that all of them had credible claims for asylum.

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba -- As a federal judge in Brooklyn ponders whether to order their release, Haitian refugees complain that a new camp commander has herded them into a tiny compound that is being run like a prison.The 250 Haitians are legally eligible to seek asylum in the United States, but have not been allowed to enter because they or their relatives tested positive for human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS.Some relatives not infected by HIV have chosen to leave for the United States.

WASHINGTON -- Hours after the Supreme Court lifted an injunction that barred the forced return of Haitian exiles, the United States began sending refugees back to Haiti yesterday from the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.About 150 Haitians boarded a Coast Guard cutter yesterday afternoon for the trip to Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, said Lt. Cmdr. Gordon Hume, spokesman for the Joint Task Force managing the Haitian exile crisis.Haitians have been crowding into boats to flee a nation in political and economic turmoil since the military coup against the elected government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide on Sept.

WASHINGTON -- A federal judge in New York denounced the Clinton and Bush administrations yesterday for running a "prison camp" at a U.S. Navy base in Cuba for Haitian refugees infected with the AIDS virus and ordered the refugees freed immediately.U.S. District Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. of Brooklyn said "the Haitian camp at Guantanamo is the only known refugee camp in the world composed entirely of HIV-positive refugees." Keeping the 158 refugees there any longer "is totally unacceptable," he ruled.

SILVER SPRING - When a group of Haitian-American activists gathered in a swank penthouse the other night to discuss their homeland, they moved through the first couple of agenda items with ease. Try to send aid to the war-torn country? Sure. Press U.S. officials to give refugee status to Haitians entering the United States? Great idea, members agreed as they munched cookies and sipped coffee. Then Joseph E. Baptiste, the chairman of the National Organization for the Advancement of Haitians (NOAH)

PORT-AU-PRINCE -Jean-Michel Frederick lives at the Petionville Club, near the golf course's ninth tee, with a grand view of the valley and the harbor. n That would have meant prestige a few weeks ago. Today it means sleeping with his family on the side of a hill inside a patchwork tent made of sticks and bed linens, wedged into a human collage of 30,000 fellow Haitians displaced by the earthquake. "Of course, we do not choose to live here, but it is safe from the earthquake and the Americans are here," said Frederick, as he stood in line with his mother and a thousand others, clutching the green Catholic Relief Services ticket that promised his family a two-week supply of food.

Howard Community College's Marie Jean came to New York in 1984 as an 8-year-old Haitian immigrant, lost both parents within a year of arrival, and after frequently being denied food by foster parents, she relished attending school because, as she says, "That was the only place you knew you were going to eat. " Her life story reads like a stroke of misfortune. In 1992, Jean was involved in an automobile accident that left her in need of more than three dozen surgeries. She required rehabilitation and needed to relearn how to read and write.

I n Haiti, Focus on the Basics I recently returned to my family in Silver Spring after spending 55 hours trapped in the rubble of the collapsed Hotel Montana in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The intense emotions I felt while waiting for help, and those I experienced as I heard that two colleagues did not make it, still pale in comparison to what I felt when I was on the way to the U.S. Embassy after being pulled from the hotel rubble. The scale of destruction was truly heartbreaking.

PORT-AU-PRINCE -Jean-Michel Frederick lives at the Petionville Club, near the golf course's ninth tee, with a grand view of the valley and the harbor. n That would have meant prestige a few weeks ago. Today it means sleeping with his family on the side of a hill inside a patchwork tent made of sticks and bed linens, wedged into a human collage of 30,000 fellow Haitians displaced by the earthquake. "Of course, we do not choose to live here, but it is safe from the earthquake and the Americans are here," said Frederick, as he stood in line with his mother and a thousand others, clutching the green Catholic Relief Services ticket that promised his family a two-week supply of food.

Could you imagine a country so cruel and intolerant that it would deport undocumented immigrants from Haiti to their island home in the wake of the devastation there? President Obama's recent decision to grant temporary protected status (TPS) to Haitians ensured that the U.S. is not such a place. The widespread death and destruction in Haiti has clearly struck a chord in Americans' hearts. Last weekend's celebrity-filled telethon raised $57 million, and total U.S. giving has already exceeded an unprecedented $569 million as of Thursday thanks in no small measure to both wall-to-wall television coverage and Web sites, text messages and other advances of modern telecommunications.

At first, Stanley Hermane held up a toy phone to his ear as if an expectant caller had rung. Then the 21-month-old decided that the object was a baseball. Then it was a hammer that he banged with delight. The Haitian orphan that adoptive parents Michael and Monica Simonsen just brought back from the earthquake-ravaged country has already latched onto a favorite object - so much so that he seems unfazed by the reporters who keep coming to witness the latest chapter in his story.

Two years ago, an enormous earthquake devastated Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, and the surrounding areas. While the cameras are gone, Haiti's recovery continues. Having recently visited Port-au-Prince, we can report that much has been accomplished - though the most important successes are not so obvious. As images of death and destruction dominated the post-disaster news coverage, compassionate Americans donated hundreds of millions of dollars to humanitarian organizations like ours, Baltimore-based Catholic Relief Services.

WHEN I read the article, "A brand new Frankenstein monster" (Other Voices, April 3), my reaction was one of disbelief. I know that the author, Stephen Vicchio, is chairman of the philosophy department at the College of Notre Dame. I found it difficult to accept that an article such as this could have been written by one in his position. I found the tone and manner of the article to be petty and mean-spirited, and Dr. Vicchio's assertion absurd that various acts of Presidents Reagan and Bush (the "creators of a monster . . . complete with a bolt through his neck . . ."