Desdunes In Haiti Quotes

Everything in Haiti right now is a priority. ~ Michel Martelly

When you were the child of immigrants, you weren't just you; your success was also your parents' your cousins', your relatives' still struggling for life in Haiti or India, wishing they were you. It was your job, your preordained celestial existence or whatever, to make the most of it. ~ Ben Philippe

I've been dealing with pressure all life long. Coming from a very poor family in Haiti, moving to Paris, a new place, a new culture, a new language. I used that pressure to adapt, to do better than everyone else, and I moved around quite a bit as well. ~ Jimmy Jean-Louis

It is with this surety that we must stand with Haiti, a country whose spirit and people will never be broken, and work in solidarity toward the future the Haitian people deserve. ~ Paul Farmer

Since I do not believe that there should be different recommendations for people living in the Bronx and people living in Manhattan, I am uncomfortable making different recommendations for my patients in Boston and in Haiti. ~ Paul Farmer

So here I am, my father's daughter, as the light breaks through the forest, writing down the names of my children and my husband, my friends and even the world at large - like our brothers and sisters in Iraq or Haiti or Burundi - and beside these scrawled names, I am writing out the words of Scripture. Not like promises or talismans, not like magic spells, no. But to give language to what I yearn for, what I believe, and even what I hope. It's my way of walking in the counsel of the Holy Spirit, may our hearts be fixed and established on Jesus. I ~ Sarah Bessey

We are not meant to be in this country. We did not want to come. We were forced to flee or die. Americans perceive desperate brown masses swarming at their golden shores, wildly inventing claims of persecution for the opportunity to flourish in this prosperous land. The view from beneath the bridge is somewhat different: reluctant refugees with an aching love of their forsaken homeland, of a homeland that has forsaken them, refugees who desire nothing more than to be home again. ~ Edwidge Danticat

In 1916, President Wilson drafted the speech in which he declared, "It shall not lie with the American people to dictate to another what their government shall be." His Secretary of State Robert Lansing wrote in the margin: "Haiti, S Domingo, Nicaragua, Panama."6 That ~ Os Guinness

It's not easy to start over in a new place,' he said. 'Exile is not for everyone. Someone has to stay behind, to receive the letters and greet family members when they come back. ~ Edwidge Danticat

If it isn't also true for a poor single Christian mom in Haiti, it isn't true. ~ Jen Hatmaker

I kept going back while I was writing the novel - which never sold, may it rest in peace - and by the time it was finished I had too many connections to Haiti to walk away. ~ Ben Fountain

The biggest public health challenge is rebuilding health systems. In other words, if you look at cholera or maternal mortality or tuberculosis in Haiti, they're major problems in Haiti, but the biggest problem is rebuilding systems. ~ Paul Farmer

As far as we are concerned, we are ready to leave today, tomorrow, at any time, to join the people of Haiti, to share in their suffering, help rebuild the country, moving from misery to poverty with dignity. ~ Jean-Bertrand Aristide

It seemed from the media that we were being told that all Haitians had AIDS. At the time, I had just come from Haiti. I was twelve years old, and the building I was living in had primarily Haitians. A lot of people got fired from their jobs. At school, sometimes in gym class, we'd be separated because teachers were worried about what would happen if we bled. So there was really this intense discrimination. ~ Edwidge Danticat

I feel I should do everything I can to make a difference in Haiti. My main goal to help the people of Haiti is to give them homes, food, and jobs. It is heartbreaking to see little children sleeping on the ground in tents made of trash bags. I hope that we can put an end to this type of poverty not only in Haiti, but in the entire world. ~ Noah Munck

I covered Katrina, I've covered the tsunamis, all of them, the Haiti earthquake ... you get to a certain point in your career where you say, 'I want to now cover what I want to cover.' ~ Soledad O'Brien

Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere; some say the poorest in the world. ~ Helen Fisher

Civil and political rights are critical, but not often the real problem for the destitute sick. My patients in Haiti can now vote but they can't get medical care or clean water. ~ Paul Farmer

Eruptions of talent continue to happen in Haiti, in spite of everything. ~ Ben Fountain

The art of coalition command - whether it is here in Afghanistan, whether it was in Iraq or in Bosnia or in Haiti - is to take the resources you are provided with, understand what the strengths and weaknesses are and to employ them to the best overall effect. ~ David Petraeus

At least ten times as many people died from preventable, poverty-related diseases on September 11, 2011, as died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on that black day. The terrorist attacks led to trillions of dollars being spent on the 'war on terrorism' and on security measures that have inconvenienced every air traveller since then. The deaths caused by poverty were ignored. So whereas very few people have died from terrorism since September 11, 2001, approximately 30,000 people died from poverty-related causes on September 12, 2001, and on every day between then and now, and will die tomorrow. Even when we consider larger events like the Asian tsunami of 2004, which killed approximately 230,000 people, or the 2010 earthquake in Haiti that killed up to 200,000, we are still talking about numbers that represent just one week's toll for preventable, poverty-related deaths - and that happens fifty-two weeks in every year. ~ Peter Singer

The wages Haiti requires by law belong in the department of science fiction: actual wages on coffee plantations vary from $.07 to $.15 a day ~ Eduardo Galeano

Haiti is the kind of place that grabs your heart, and never lets go ... When you arrive in Port-au-Prince, the first thing that strikes you is how vibrant the colors are. Buses, buildings, fences, clothing, everything is brightly painted in primary hues. On closer inspection, you see the reality behind this brightly colored landscape: a dark, grinding poverty, the worst in the Western hemisphere. ~ Andrea Mitchell

What happened to Haiti is a threat that could happen anywhere in the Caribbean to these island nations, you know, because of global warming, because of climate change and all this. ~ Danny Glover

The whole military structure in Haiti that existed until the early 1990s was put in place by the American occupation. At the top there were Southern white officers, who led an army that crushed the indigenous resistance - the cacos. A high-ranking U.S. officer said when he arrived, "To think these niggers speak French!" Later, Haitian officers attended the notorious School of the Americas at Fort Benning. The threat from the U.S. is something that is always hanging over people's heads: If we don't behave, we'll have occupation again. ~ Edwidge Danticat

When you're married to the president, you come to understand quickly that the world brims with chaos, that disasters unfurl without notice. Forces seen and unseen stand ready to tear into whatever calm you might feel. The news could never be ignored: An earthquake devastates Haiti. A gasket blows five thousand feet underwater beneath an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana, sending millions of barrels of crude oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. Revolution stirs in Egypt. A gunman opens fire in the parking lot of an Arizona supermarket, killing six people and maiming a U.S. congresswoman.
Everything was big and everything was relevant. I read a set of news clips sent by my staff each morning and knew that Barack would be obliged to absorb and respond to every new development. He'd be blamed for things he couldn't control, pushed to solve frightening problems in faraway nations, expected to plug a hole at the bottom of the ocean. His job, it seemed, was to take the chaos and metabolize it somehow into calm leadership - every day of the week, every week of the year. ~ Michelle Obama

Never before has anyone figured out how to rent out American foreign policy, how to convert the position of secretary of state into a personal money machine. Hillary, with Bill's help, figured out not only how to shake down Russian oligarchs and Canadian billionaires by offering them control of America's uranium assets; she also figured out how to rob the island nation of Haiti in the wake of the 2010 earthquake. It's one thing to rip off the world's rich; it takes a special kind of chutzpah to steal from the poorest of the poor. ~ Dinesh D'Souza

We still have our people working in the cane fields in the Dominican Republic. People are still repatriated all the time from the Dominican Republic to Haiti. Some tell of being taken off buses because they looked Haitian, and their families have been in the Dominican Republic for generations. Haitian children born in the Dominican Republic still can't go to school and are forced to work in the sugarcane fields. ~ Edwidge Danticat

On February 8, 1928, known as Lindbergh day since it was the day he crossed the Atlantic Ocean the year before, Charles A. Lindbergh landed at the Campo Columbia airfield near Havana. Lindbergh had visited many countries in his plane, and he had the national flags of each country painted in the fuselage. Having flown from Haiti, on a Goodwill Tour of the Caribbean in his "Spirit of St. Louis," he had the Cuban flag painted on his a single-engine Ryan monoplane. It was the last country he visited before he donated the "Spirit of St. Louis" to the Smithsonian Institution, where it is still exhibited at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. ~ Hank Bracker

Also, people are not often aware of the way the United States' policies influence what happens in places like Haiti or El Salvador or Nicaragua. Or in Columbia right now. ~ Edwidge Danticat

We must consider bringing forward legislation that will facilitate the creation and implementation of businesses in Haiti. Overall, we must better position the country to compete for new market opportunities. ~ Laurent Lamothe

In spite of its poverty, its political upheavals, its lack of resources, Haiti is not a peripheral place. Its history has made it a center. ~ Yanick Lahens

There are transcendent collective events. There is anger spreading through the streets of Port-au-Prince in Haiti, anger marking in black the unallowable, the intolerable, anger that hurls itself beyond all that can reasonably be expected or demanded. This anger is the most precious gift of the disinherited to tourists and academics who have imprisoned their hearts through so many years of well-paid compromises and betrayals ~ Alphonso Lingis

If science ever gets to the bottom of Voodoo in Haiti and Africa, it will be found that some important medical secrets, still unknown to medical science, give it its power, rather than the gestures of ceremony. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

My decision to destroy the authority of the blacks in Saint Domingue (Haiti) is not so much based on considerations of commerce and money, as on the need to block for ever the march of the blacks in the world. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

For two hundred years Haiti has been swimming upstream. We were the first country in which independence was won by a group of slaves - black slaves. Across the water, the country that had just achieved independence - the U.S. - still practiced slavery. ~ Michele Montas

If any country was a mine-shaft canary for the reintroduction of cholera, it was Haiti - and we knew it. And in retrospect, more should have been done to prepare for cholera ... which can spread like wildfire in Haiti ... This was a big rebuke to all of us working in public health and health care in Haiti. ~ Paul Farmer

Thanks to the Betamax and Jason's diligent collection of tapes, she'd even been able to rerun the shows she'd missed while in Haiti. It was her job, she reasoned. And now she'd blown it! ~ Barbara Delinsky