Community Event: Haiti medical-media fundraiser

Kwan Booth Sun, 24 Jan at 12:03pm
Community Event: Haiti medical-media fundraiser

According to the most recent reports, over 150,000 people have died in Haiti and while aid appears to be stabilizing on some fronts, there has also been criticism of not only how aid has been disbursed but also the role of the media in creating a cycle of "disaster porn" through it's depictions of the Haitian people.

In response to this an independent team of medical and media workers from the Bay Area, with a history of working in the Haitian community, is preparing to head to Port au Prince in early February.  The team plans to deliver medical supplies, provide aid directly to residents and deliver news stories and 1st person accounts from survivors.  The goal is to leverage personal and professional connections to bypass larger organizations, sometimes charged with slow and inadequate responses, and interact directly with the Haitian people. 

The tour will be led by well known community worker Pierre Labossiere, a respected Haitian activist who has been working with the Haiti Action Committee for years to build connections between Haitian and American progressives groups and raise awareness of human rights violations occurring on the small Caribbean nation. 

Accompanying Labossiere will be a team of nurses volunteering from around the Bay Area and a media team from the San Francisco Bayview newspaper and KPFA lead by journalist and community activist JR Valrey, who directed a similar media mission to Haiti in 2003.

If you'd like to support the mission drop by the Black Dot Cafe, 1195 Pine St., in West Oakland tonight at 7pm. The fundraiser will include updates from Labossiere and Oakland attorney Walter Riley, who was in Haiti as part of the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund when the Earthquake hit.

Contributions can also be made directly to the Hurricane Relief Information Network, a nonprofit project based in the San Francisco Bayview district created to provide direct on the ground help to Katrina Survivors and similar disasters.

 

About Kwan Booth
Kwan Booth is the co founder and Sr. Community Manager for Oakland Local. A West Oakland resident, Booth is also a creative writer, media consultant and cultural curator. He was recently a recipient of the Society of Professional Journalist’s Sigma Delta Chi award for a series on air quality and health issues in West Oakland. He writes at Boothism.com