Haiti

Haiti--Clinton's 51st state. RON YAFFEE Seal Beach

Dear Everybody-in-the-World: Sean Penn is very, very disappointed. You never call, you never write – heck, when it comes to rebuilding Haiti, you probably never even cared in the first place. Penn spoke plainly Friday at the Cannes Film Festival just hours before a gala fund-raiser to benefit three charities working in the earthquake-ravaged country.

Gray ribbons of fresh concrete streak the side of Clarisse Brisson's broken home, where she and her family are slowly making repairs. Inside, she reads Bible verses to sustain her. Next door, the neighbor's home is a heap of crumbled stone and rusted iron bars. "We are just living on a daily basis, watching and waiting," Brisson said, sighing and leaning her head against a bent metal doorjamb. "For a year. " A year ago, one of modern times' worst natural disasters struck one of modern times' poorest nations.

USC safety T.J. McDonald remembers the scrapbook. He saw it at quarterback Matt Barkley's home, a collection of photographs from the Barkley family's trip to Nigeria a few years ago, a journey that included humanitarian work. "I told him I would be interested in going on the next trip when they did something like that," McDonald said Tuesday. McDonald will get his wish next month. Barkley, McDonald and 13 other Trojans are scheduled to travel to Haiti, which continues to rebuild from the devastating 2010 earthquake.

Gregory Mevs leaped from his armored silver Toyota SUV and marched past the guards and mango trees into what serves these days as the center of the Haitian government. He was ready to dispense a million gallons of fuel to the earthquake-ravaged capital. But the paperwork was not in order. He needed the Haitian prime minister's signature. Ten minutes later, he had it. Mevs can do that. He has the prime minister's ear. He hobnobs with people like Bill Clinton, George Soros and the chief executives of the world's largest corporations.

'Hope for Haiti Now' When: 5 p.m. today Where: CNN, National Geographic When: 8 tonight Where: CBS, NBC, the CW, ABC, Fox, KOCE, BET, Bravo, Country Music Television, Comedy Central, E!, G4, HBO, MTV, Style, TNT, VH1 Rating: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)

The 10 American Baptist missionaries arrested on charges of abducting children from earthquake-ravaged Haiti had circulated fliers promising to give orphans "with no one to love or care for them" a better life in the Dominican Republic, and claiming to have government permission to do so. In fact, they didn't have the proper paperwork, authorities said, and the New Life Children's Refuge had yet to build its advertised orphanage. Many of the 33 supposed orphans turned out to have parents.

Cholera's recent resurgence in Haiti remains something of a mystery to health experts. The island nation had been free of the disease since at least 1960 -- until the outbreak Friday. Now cholera has claimed almost 300 lives, and the World Health Organization said Wednesday the outbreak likely hasn’t yet peaked. The disease can be horrific, as the National Geographic Channel explains. Cholera ravaged Britain with four epidemics in the mid-19th century, one killing 30,000 people in London alone.

The first e-mail went out within hours of the Jan. 12 earthquake, calling together some of Haiti's most prominent architects, engineers and urban planners. The next day, 50 people showed up at a house in the hillside suburb of Petionville and went to work. They have met every day since, gathering around a table in a courtyard under the shade of a spreading almond tree. Their goal is simple. It is also audacious. They want to plan a new Haiti. And not just new buildings. A new economy, a new political culture, a new way of thinking.

When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt arrived here in 1934 to mark the end of America's occupation of Haiti, he insisted on toasting the hand-over with local Barbancourt rum. Two decades later, the visiting Vice President Nixon personally mixed a Barbancourt rum collins for Haiti's president (who was, ahem, a whiskey drinker). And every voodoo priest and priestess in Haiti knows that soaking the ground with the golden rum -- not the three-star version, mind you, but the five-star, aged twice as long -- can raise the spirits of the dead.

Last week, a Haitian judge ruled that former dictatorJean-Claude Duvaliershould not stand trial for human rights abuses - not for lack of evidence but because the statute of limitations had expired. That decision must be overruled. Of course Duvalier should be prosecuted for atrocities committed during his brutal 15-year rule. There are plenty of victims willing to recount the beatings, arbitrary arrests and prolonged detentions they suffered. There is a trove of evidence detailing how Duvalier's army and shadowy secret police force, the Tontons Macoutes, killed and tortured untold numbers of civilians.

Boxer Andre Berto recently pondered the thought of his upcoming opponent, Victor Ortiz, battered, bloodied and flat on his back, and he said that scenario would not bother him in the least. Berto was not trying to hype a fight with misplaced machismo. Everything is relative, and blood in a boxing ring will never be worth much more than a shrug to Berto. He has seen things so much worse, so much more chilling. He got the phone call around 6 on the night of Jan. 12, 2010. He was home in Florida, training for the biggest fight of his career, a Jan. 30 matchup with Shane Mosley in Las Vegas.

Connoisseur Osier Jean steps into the sterile room, pauses and clears his mind. With notebook and flavor wheel in hand, he quickly turns to the task at hand: checking the quality. He sniffs, slurps and swirls, allowing his senses to take in the richness. The liquid is not wine, but caffeine-rich Kafe Kreyol, Haitian coffee. It is the country's latest effort to revive a once-flourishing industry that has been crippled by decades of deforestation, political chaos and crises.

Haiti has been without an army for more than 15 years. This week, however, President Michel Martelly is expected to announce a plan to reconstitute the military. That's unfortunate. The last thing Haiti needs right now — and the list of needs is extensive in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake and an ongoing cholera epidemic — is a $25-million plan to rebuild a failed institution. The country's military was disbanded in 1995 after decades of brutal repression and violence against civilians, including the killing of some 3,000 people during the 1991 coup that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Nearly 20 months after Haiti's devastating earthquake, women and girls have been badly neglected in recovery efforts, subjected to sexual violence and left without access to obstetric care even as they give birth to scores of babies in squalid tent cities, human rights activists say. Despite a mammoth humanitarian-care push in the wake of the Jan. 12, 2010, quake that killed as many as 300,000 people, serious gaps exist in the healthcare that women...

Haitian President Michel Martelly just marked his first 100 days in office, yet the bawdy kompa singer turned politician who vowed to remake his homeland is still struggling to fulfill his first obligation: forming a government. An opposition-led Parliament twice has nixed Martelly's choice for prime minister. Without one, Martelly and Haiti are left without a functioning government. A caretaker administration oversees Haiti's day-to-day affairs but lacks authority to set goals or direct a reconstruction strategy.

Morning arrives with the melody of the Haitian streets. A rooster crows, and two street preachers stand near the gates of a new tent city. They are both women, both wearing black kerchiefs over their hair. One shouts hoarsely into a bullhorn while the other sings sweetly from a "singing bible," a book of hymns. The sounds clash and blend, grate and harmonize, and the result is, incongruously, achingly beautiful, a sort of Haitian hip-hop gospel. It is 6:30 a.m., and the refugee settlement known as the Daihatsu camp is coming to life for another day. "God is looking for you!"

Programs like Friday's "Hope for Haiti Now: A Global Benefit for Earthquake Relief" do not exist to further musical careers, introduce new material or birth fruitful collaborations. Tragedies like last week's seismic disaster necessitate such urgent media efforts, and fundraising is their primary objective. Important information may also be transmitted; perhaps someone's consciousness will be raised. The pleasure, surprise or release that art can offer is merely added value. That said, several of the major names who came on board for Haiti went beyond the expected heartstring tugs.

Instead of the commuters typically packed into the bright blue and red "tap tap" pickup truck weaving through Haiti's capital, a man, shrunken, dehydrated, dressed in a diaper and attached to an IV, lay on the floor. As the ad-hoc ambulance in Port-au-Prince attested, cholera refuses to leave the country. The bacterial disease that ravaged Haiti last fall had spread quickly to all regions, but calmed down in the dry spring months. With the rainy season now in progress, clinics across the country are again bustling with seriously ill patients.

Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, there have been at least 60,000 civilian deaths that wouldn't otherwise have occurred. Or maybe that number is closer to 650,000. Between 1998 and 2004, 5.4 million people died in a war and its aftermath in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Or was it one-fifth that number? In Haiti, fewer than 46,000 people were killed in the January 2010 earthquake. Or perhaps the death toll was more than 300,000. The science of measuring mortality and morbidity is controversial.