Now the U.N is the SAVIORS! Really?!
Time to cook up some dirt cookies for the U.N., 'eh, Haitians?
"Haitian slum calm, but racked by hunger" by Mike Williams, Cox News Service | July 6, 2008
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - The signs of past violence are everywhere in this sprawling, desperately poor neighborhood of 300,000, where disease and starvation claim countless lives.
Residents say they don't know whether the quiet is due to a crackdown in recent years on the criminal gangs that once ruled Cité Soleil with impunity or simply to exhaustion brought on by hunger.
Haiti is the hemisphere's poorest country, where an estimated 80 percent of the 9 million residents struggle to survive on less than $2 per day. The food crisis making headlines around the globe has hit Haiti hard, nowhere worse than Cité Soleil, long a symbol of the Caribbean nation's suffering.
Children dressed in rags beg strangers for food, and then wander away among pungent trash piles, sidestepping pigs rooting in streams of raw sewage. Adults bathe outdoors using dippers and plastic bowls, standing in the mud beside teetering shacks thrown together with rusty sheet metal, cardboard, and other refuse.
TRILLIONS for WARS, BILLIONS for BANKS and ISRAEL -- and what for the poor black folk?
NUTHIN'!!!!!!
But shops are open and some merchants are making sales. There are few shoppers, though, and thousands of people seem to wander among the endless lines of shacks. Young men sit aimlessly at storefronts, some openly glaring at strangers and scowling as police patrols pass on foot or in vehicles.
But many residents thank the Haitian police and the blue-helmeted peacekeepers from the United Nations for Cité Soleil's current calm. Over the past several years, the combined forces have arrested or killed several key gang leaders, breaking up the groups that once held sway.
Yeah, sure they do: Haitians Accuse the U.N. of Massacre
Cité Soleil's mayor, Wilson Louis, says the neighborhood has turned something of a corner. With a functioning government established and secure streets, the troubled slum is chipping away at such problems as sanitation and infrastructure, he said.
"But our biggest problem is that there are no jobs," he said. "Easily 75 percent of our young men have no opportunity."
The US government has announced a $20 million aid project to bring jobs to Cité Soleil, and dozens of charities work in the slum, building houses and running food kitchens, schools, and small employment programs.
I wish Americans could get the same deal -- although knowing the U.S., all that $$$ will be stolen by contractors.
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