[Grassroots-l] ANN: Waveplace in Haiti 2010

[Mark Tomizawa]

Tim,

Great! Keep us posted! We'll help find tools and solutions in the days and months and years ahead.

Thanks to your descriptions of what's going on and thanks to others with first-hand knowledge, my friends and I now have a truer understanding of the obstacles Haiti's people face and the assets they have to work with. Their existing strengths include the Haitian tradition of family and their long history of pitching in to help one another. Sometimes, well-meaning outsiders who are in a rush to help Haiti unintentionally overlook those inherent Haitian strengths or they undervalue them.

At times as outsiders we unintentionally reinvent the wheel. Or we fail to integrate our institutional efforts with powerful informal efforts on the ground. Or as outsiders we divert attention from community organizations and individuals that have years of proven success in Haiti, including people who already know what works, what's needed and how best to dispense it.

I just returned from DC where I spent nine days quietly recruiting support: a variety of highly visible people and also highly connected people who get big things done behind-the-scenes. What unites them is they all act neighborly and respectfully when they have time. They will make time. These people will pitch in occasionally at a distance or work with purpose over a longer stretch of time to help frontline responders overcome obstacles. These people want no pay for themselves and no money for their organizations. Doing powerful good is compensation enough for them. 

We'll watch your posts and others to see what's needed. I'll let you know once we've built our online presence and are ready to try out the system. Should be in a few days. 

Travel well! And thanks again for making it real and keeping it real.

Mark


On Mar 21, 2010, at 12:35 PM, Timothy Falconer wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> I'm sitting here with Beth Santos, about to board a plane to Port-Au-Prince, Haiti where we'll be joined by Bill Stelzer and John Engle.
> 
> After spending the night at John's house, we'll fly to the island of Lagonav where we'll start a two week workshop at Matènwa Community Learning Center with Chris Low, Benaja Antoine, 20 trainee mentors, and 26 children.  Our goal is for these twenty mentors to train another twenty mentors, so that they can all lead eight Waveplace pilots using XO laptops and Squeak Etoys, all in the next two months.  Hopefully this will set the stage for a much larger deployment this summer, starting with our expanded workshop in St John in late May (May 24th to June 2nd).
> 
> I'd like to extend a huge thank you to OLPC for redonating the 200 laptops that are being used by the 40 mentors and 160 children in Haiti.  Adam, Nia, Matt, and SJ have been invaluable to Waveplace in the last two months.  OLPC is truly a great organization.
> 
> I've been blogging each morning for the last ten days, and will continue to blog every morning throughout the next six weeks.   Follow along at:
> 
> http://waveplace.com/news/blog
> 
> We'll also be twittering frequently, so please subscribe to http://twitter.com/waveplace.
> 
> Anyway, here we go folks.  It's been a busy two months, but we'll be there in a few hours.
> 
> Take care,
> Tim
> 
> --
> Timothy Falconer
> Waveplace Foundation
> http://waveplace.com
> 610-797-3100

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