Colette Lespinasse is director of the Support Group for the Repatriated and Refugees (GARR, by its French acronym) in Port-au-Prince. Here are her thoughts on solutions to the crisis in which 1.9 million homeless people are still living in precarious tents and other makeshift structures, six months after the earthquake.
Americans may believe the United States is set up for the middle class, and Europe is set up for the bourgeois. Or let’s put it this way: America is a great place to buy kitty litter at Wal-Mart and relatively cheap gas. But it is not designed for me, a professional without a lot of money. That’s who Europe is for: people like me.
Diallo Ibrahima traveled to France from his homeland of Mali with dreams of a decent life. Nine years later, he’s still waiting. “I came here to find a better life,” he said at Place de Bastille, in central Paris, where he and hundreds others had camped out for nearly a month. “And I still haven’t found it.”
Simon was 11 years old when soldiers from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) forced him into the military. “When the SPLA came to us, the older people ran away,” Simon, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, explained. “I didn’t run because I was a child. So they captured me. When I refused, they kept beating me. I didn’t want to go but they forced me to join the SPLA.” The SPLA, the predominantly Christian Black African south’s military, fought against the mostly Muslim Arab north in a two decade-long civil war that left two million dead.
During the last two great depressions in the U.S., hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of people organized to meet their basic needs when the mainstream economy and centralized monetary system failed them. Unemployed poor folks got together to create time dollar stores and cooperative mills, farms, health care systems, foundries, repair and recycling facilities, distribution warehouses, and a myriad of other service exchanges. Many of these were based on the hour as a unit of account, and often everyone’s hour was equal and could either be exchanged for another hour of service or its equivalent in goods.
Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces by Raúl Zibechi offers an exciting account of why social movements in Bolivia are so resilient and powerful, making the publication of this book timely; it focuses on the most vibrant social movements that preceded the election of one of the most dynamic and intriguing presidents among the region’s new left.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019