And remember what I said earlier about keeping in mind the TRILLIONS we spend on OCCUPATIONS and the BILLIONS that go to bailout banks and are sent to Israel. You can't get away from the fact that we have NOTHING for... whatever!?
The beat goes on:
Malnourished children sit outside their homes in Deschapelles, Haiti, Tuesday, June 17, 2008. Funding delays, a dysfunctional central government and transportation problems along crumbling rural roads are keeping aid from reaching critical areas such as the fertile Artibonite Valley, where one out of three children are malnourished. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)
Why is this allowed to continue?
Where is the world?
I'm devastated by the photograph of God's beautiful children.
Why have we failed them?
"Haiti food aid lags, hunger deepens" by Jonathan M. Katz, Associated Press Writer | July 20, 2008
DESCHAPELLES, Haiti --Every inch of Rivilade Filsame's body hurt, from his swollen, empty stomach to his dried-out, wrinkled skin. The 18-month-old had been crying for so long in the hospital malnutrition ward that his mother no longer tried to console him.
After soaring food prices led to deadly riots in April, the U.S. and the U.N. promised millions of dollars in aid to poor families like Rivilade's, as well as help for farmers to break Haiti's dependence on imported food.
But three months later, The Associated Press has learned that only a fraction of a key U.S. food pledge -- less than 2 percent as of early July -- has been distributed. Barely any food at all has gone to the desperate countryside, where more than half of Haiti's 8.7 million people live.
Even in the Artibonite Valley, Haiti's most fertile region, child malnutrition is rampant. Farmers -- reeling from last year's floods and a dry spring, and lacking equipment that was promised to increase their yields -- are eating the very seeds they should be planting to avoid future hunger.
One in three children is malnourished in the most rural areas of the Artibonite Valley, according to the Hospital Albert Schweitzer in Deschapelles, where Rivilade was treated in June. Doctors there admitted 113 children to the malnutrition ward from May through June, almost two and a half times more than last year. In April and May alone, there were 361 children under five who were severely malnourished and more than 2,500 others moderately so.
With families eating through their meager food savings and with the hurricane season in full swing, the food riots could be returning. On Thursday, U.N. police said, a small group of demonstrators burned tires and threw rocks at police and U.N. peacekeepers in Les Cayes, where the April riots began. The April riots spread from the countryside to Port-au-Prince and left at least six Haitians and a U.N. peacekeeper dead.
Hunger is a bitter irony in the valley known as "Haiti's rice bowl," where farms have been in decline for decades, unable to compete with subsidized U.S. food imported under low tariffs. Political instability has left the government without effective agricultural policies or ways to deal with nearly annual hurricanes and floods.
World Vision country director Wesley Charles blamed USAID for its delays in delivering food, saying U.S. funding was held up in Congress' emergency supplemental appropriations bill as lawmakers debated the portions that fund the Iraq War.
When AP journalists visited the Artibonite Valley in June, farmers hacked at the soil using the same hand-planting methods employed centuries ago by their enslaved ancestors. Lemare Forrestal, a 60-year-old farmer in the mountains, said his family sometimes resorts to eating corn and bean seeds.
Hunger victims filled the low-slung, tree-lined Schweitzer hospital complex in June. Flies buzzed from bed to bed as mothers spoon-fed vegetable mixtures prepared over charcoal fires in an outdoor kitchen.
A photo of Rivilade from months earlier showed a baby with fat arms and black hair. But his bald, naked body was covered with an old man's wrinkled skin. Diarrhea had shrunk his weight to 15 pounds, a quarter less than doctors say is healthy.
"He was fine, and then he got sick," said his mother, 22-year-old Nimose Jisesle. It costs 150 Haitian gourdes a week -- $3.95 -- to feed him, she said, but she earns just 100 gourdes, $2.63, selling knapsacks and firewood. His father went to the neighboring Dominican Republic to find work and does not support the child.
Suffering from diarrhea, pneumonia and mouth and skin infections, Rivilade was treated and fed with intravenous liquids and food. He was released a few days later with his weight up and diarrhea gone, said Dr. Erlantz Hyppolite.
Some of the children receive a super-high-protein mixture of peanut butter, oil, milk and vitamins known here as "Medika Mamba" that has also been used in African famines. But once they go home, mothers struggle to follow doctors' advice to thoroughly clean their homes and prepare more balanced meals for their children, Hyppolite said.
Some, he said, eat the peanut butter mixture themselves."Well, we know why this is happening, and we know that it is being done ON PURPOSE!
That is what is most evil of all.
Also see: Dirt Cookies
