The state of community development in Haiti one year after the devastating earthquake that wrought destruction on the Caribbean nation was assessed by Boston University students and faculty last night at the Howard Thurman Center.
“Haiti: One Year Later,” attended by 100 students, was hosted by Amnesty International, the Vagina Monologues and the Haitian Cultural Association, and stressed the issue of violence and rape against women in the Haitian camps.
“Basically we’re trying to raise awareness for Haiti,” said College of Arts and Sciences sophomore Kristen Martin, secretary of Amnesty International at BU. “Since the earthquake, there has been an increase in the incidents of sexual violence in the camps in Haiti.”
The evening began with a speech by a HCA president Herve Mathelier, a junior in the College of Engineering, who was discussing the beauty of his native country and the misconceptions and negative stereotypes associated with it.
“I’ve been to over 10 Caribbean countries,” Mathelier said. “Maybe I’m biased, but Haiti has one of the most beautiful natural landscapes that I’ve ever seen. . .but the media and the American public, they’ll never show you these things.”
Mathelier said that Haitians are proud of their country and that people must visit the small nation to understand it.
CAS senior and Amnesty International president Shahzad Noorbaloochi discussed the general facts of post-earthquake effects.
“Three-hundred sixteen thousand people died, 300,000 were injured and a million people were left homeless,” Noorbaloochi said.
“Infrastructure isn’t something you can create in a year,” Noorbaloochi said. “What we have here in America it’s been created over hundreds of years and something that keeps building upon itself.”
“It needs a strong base to build itself and normally that base comes from the government, and the government in Haiti really isn’t helping the people out too much.”
A video was then screened to illustrate horrifying rape cases in Haiti. Haitian women spoke about how the police did not care about the people’s rights, which usually deters them from reporting rape cases.
The vice president of the Haitian Cultural Association Katlyne Demosthene told the audience a personal story about her aunt’s subjection to sexual violence.
Demosthene said her aunt was captured from her home by a group of men, dragged to a cemetery and brutally raped. It took her aunt three months to tell this horrifying story.
An actor from a BU production of The Vagina Monologues, a play dramatizing femininity, then performed one of their monologues as a preview for next Friday’s production.
The monologue, performed by College of Communication freshman Chelsea Roberts, also featured a Haitian woman.
“I guess I was really interested in learning more about what’s going on in Haiti now because I guess I did a lot of research and work in high school when it first happened but I don’t really know much about how it is today,” said CAS freshman Anna Diorio.
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