DAY ONE
Workshops and presentations all day long:

The six of us went to a gathering about the current hideous situation in Haiti. Three lawyer/political activists long involved in Haiti spoke -- Brian Concanon, Bill Quigley, and Mario Josef.
Josef is a Haitian human rights lawyer who has had to send his family to Florida to keep them safe. He, himself, sleeps in a different house every night and keeps no routines, in order to keep from being assassinated (he regularly receives death threats). Concanon spoke about working to implement human rights in Haiti and at some point realizing that, "The more I worked to implement U.S. values, the more I found myself fighting against U.S. policy."

Josef gave a brief history of Haiti, reminding us that Haiti was the first free Black country in the world, and that it has had to fight against the entire international community since its birth as a nation. He talked about the current massacres, the one on the soccer stadium and the one in Cite de Soleil -- often aided and/or carried out by the UN MINUSTAH forces. He told us that Haiti has experienced 34 coups d'etat since 1804, and that all those have been encourage, supported, and financed by the U.S. and other nations. Josef went on to recount some of the accomplishments of the Aristide administration, including building more than 100 secondary schools (pre-Aristide, there were about 30), doing away with the military, creating health clinics all over the country, and providing extensive legal services for the poor. After the 1991 coup and Aristide's return in 1994, he received 92% of the vote in the next election, which pissed of the Haitian elite as well as the U.S., and led to his kidnapping by the U.S. Marines.

Josef struck me as a powerfully brave and moral man, willing to risk his life to help bring genuine democracy to Haiti.

Bill Quigley is an attorney and law professor from New Orleans who has represented activists from the School of the Americas protests, the Saint Patrick 4, as well as prisoner-of-conscience, Father Gerard Jean-Juste in Haiti. Father Jean-Juste is the outspoken activist and priest from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, who has been held in jail by the Haitian military coup government for nearly a year.

At the time of the kidnapping of Aristide, a woman from Boston flew down to Port Au Prince on her own and stood alone in front of the United States' Embassy with a sign saying, "Shame!" A US Marine approached her with his gun pointed at her and said, " I should shoot you right now for disgracing our country."

During the next session we viewed a film about Patricia Isasa, who as a sixteen year old was disappeared and tortured for over two years in a concentration camp during the "dirty war" in Argentina. Before and after the film Patricia told us of her struggle to maintain her inner spirit while her body was being tortured. She is trying to have the perpetrators brought to justice and to that end is planning to start a foundation for this purpose and for the assistance of the survivors. She notes that the pictures of Abu Graib look just like what was done in Argentina. "They didn't even have to change the manuals" she said. On the Global Exchange website the information will soon be available about how the people in the US can help with this project. She tells us that one is always to young to be in a concentration camp.

At the end of the event we ran into Fr. Louis Vitale who told us he's planning to cross the line at Ft. Benning on Sunday.