Tag Archives: Third World urban movements

Life … at Ste. Catherine Laboure

8 May

Yesterday I spent the day in Cite Soleil, a populous shanty town on the shores of the Caribbean in Port au Prince. Part of the afternoon took me to the Cite’s only hospital, Ste. Catherine Laboure.  It is a state-run hospital with green and cream painted walls and a big wrought iron green gate, and a friend of mine, Dr. John Carroll from Peoria, Illinois, volunteers his time there periodically throughout the year.

So he showed me around: the Salle d’Urgences with its three gurneys and beat-up grey cabinet of meds, the puddle filled ground floor courts and corridors, then up an outer set of stairs to the wards.(There also a few operating rooms but they are in disuse now.)

Ste. Catherine was run for almost two years after the earthquake by Doctors Without Borders. They managed the place, supplied equipment and medicines and offered their services for free. Last December, the Haitian health ministry took it over again and everyone still working there has noticed the difference. With a combination of user fees and inadequate supplies, the flow of patients as diminished considerably, I was told. The user fees aren’t high – and are now dispensed with for children under 5 — but for people with no money, prohibitive nonetheless.

But the really shocking thing about Ste. Catherine is the fact that for a district of 300,000 people, this is all there is: three gurneys, maybe 30 or 40 hospital beds, no OR, and worse, a small, vastly underpaid staff that leaves at 4 pm.

We walked through the upper wards that, not surprisingly, were filled mostly with babies and children. Dr. Carroll told me the nurses there earned about $70 a month. And as we looked around the walls with their peeling paint and uncapped electric outlets and empty oxygen tanks, it struck me that the one good thing the Haitian government might do would be to turn Ste Catherine into a star hospital. Clean it, re-paint it, fix the wiring and install the best equipment. Double the pay of the staff so that it would be a magnet for good doctors and nurses. Keep it open 24 hours a day and do everything in its power to show people not only that it is there, but can be run better by Haitians than the famous foreign doctors of DWF/MSF.

As we spoke, Dr. Carroll suddenly cut himself off mid-sentence and walked over to a tiny baby lying in a yellow-painted iron crib, inert and no longer breathing. As he applied CPR to the delicate chest, I could see the lack of response, the closed eyes, the miniscule lips slowly turning blue. I went for a nurse and Dr. Jeanty, the pediatrician, searched around to find a hand-held breathing apparatus. After what seemed an interminable amount of time, the baby began to breathe again.

The baby’s name was Robertson, and his 16-year-old mother, Genevieve. Shortly after four, the staff having left for their bus home, she remained there, like all the other patients and their family members, alone with her sister and fragile baby. Whether Robertson would make it through the night, no one could say.

Argentina’s Recuperated Factories: now a feature film

6 May

There have already been some interesting documentaries made about the dramatic process of workers on the edge of poverty taking over the factories, schools and other workplaces that employed them before hitting the financial skids. And then running them just fine.

Now there is a feature film as well – albeit one with a name that could well be a documentary — Industria Argentina: Las Fabricas para Quien Trabajan.

It is the first feature film of a young man named Ricardo Diaz Iacaponi, who worked as sound man on a 2004 doc on the same subject (I’m guessing it was ‘The Take.’) In this case, however, Diaz wrote a script based on numerous conversations with people now successfully running their own workplaces, including the Hospital Israelita, the Viyetes icecream factory and the Navales Unidos ship yard, to name just a few. And he hired well-known actors like Carlos Portaluppi and Soledad Silveyra to play the roles of workers, their family, plant managers and lawyers.

I’m not surprised that a feature film has now come out of the factory recuperation movement. As I myself found when I was interviewing people from the MNFRT for the final chapters of Broke But Unbroken, the personal circumstances and challenges and emotional turmoil they all went through were indeed epic.

Every  single one of them was at some point brought to edge of a Spielberg-like abyss, where it was a question of either be captured by the villains – i.e. accept defeat and  the bleak prospects of permanent unemployment — or leap across, and running the factory.

The real story, moreover, comes with a happy ending worthy of any movie: whatever the ups and downs of the Argentine economy and the particular workplace, the rewards have been huge — and life-changing —  for all those workers whose collective history has now inspired a movie.

Slums and Slumdogs

21 Feb

Just last week I finally got round to seeing Danny Boyle’s film Slumdog Millionaire, a film I liked and that touched a couple of memory nerves. I spent about 3 weeks in Mumbai in April 2007, and got into the habit of watching Who Wants to be a Millionaire (with its actual – and far more handsome – host, Shahrukh Khan) every evening with my landlady. I also went several times to Dharavi, the slum where the popular movie was partially filmed and home to one of the committees inside the social movement I was studying there, the National Slum Dwellers Federation. in fact, one chapter of my book, The Success of Poverty, is devoted to this large (some 2 million members) and vibrant grassroots movement.

Today my local paper carried an article criticizing the movie for the way “it grossly minimizes the capabilities and even the basic humanity of those it claims to speak for.” The article was written by Mitu Sengupta, an assistant professor at Toronto’s Ryerson University, for whom the film “delivers a patronizing and ultimately sham statement on social justice for” the poor who live in Dharavi.

I understand both the necessities of film-making (and its inherent time constraints) as well as the views of the author. Dharavi is indeed a place where people work, live, run businesses of all sizes, organize and struggle collectively for a better life. This was apparent in the various interviews I did with members of NSDF, and in the entire global movement of slum dwellers, grouped into an global organization called Shack/Slum Dwellers International. Readers can check out its website at www.sdinet.org.

And they can read an article I wrote about Dharavi and some interesting architectural designs students at the KRVIA have come up with for rehousing slum dwellers.

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