The relief effort has also been hindered by the racism and religious intolerance of those like evangelist Pat Robertson, who blamed the tragedy on a "pact with the devil." Kidder's response to Robertson? "If there's an Antichrist, then he might be it. You can quote me on that."
Kidder remains hopeful about Haiti's future, but only so long as international support is both generous and concerned about the long term. He recalls the Haitian proverb that inspired the title of his book on Farmer, PiH, and Haiti: "Beyond mountains there are mountains." Haitians use this proverb in two ways, he says: "There is no end to obstacles — but there is no end to opportunities."
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Related:
Earthquake!, Quake and Shake, Department of conjecture, More
- Earthquake!
Picture buildings from Southie to West Somerville reduced to rubble. Dozens of three-alarm fires all over town. Tunnels flooded with seawater.
- Quake and Shake
A tenderhearted yarn spinner tells an anxious little girl a story about a talking bear hawking honey. A nerdy young debt collector comes home to find a six-foot amphibian bent on recruiting him to save Tokyo from a natural disaster. Both scenarios emanate from the brain of award-winning Japanese writer Haruki Murakami.
- Department of conjecture
The Haiti disaster will not serve to turn a state from toss-up to safely Republican as the George W. Bush Administration's calculated response to Hurricane Katrina did in Louisiana.
- Trouble the Water
The direct, artless footage conjures a real-world Cloverfield , except with people who are resourceful and worth caring about.
- Covering a tragedy
The earthquake that ravaged Haiti on January 12 posed a major challenge for the Boston Haitian Reporter , the lone English-language outlet focused on Boston's sizable Haitian community. The quake and its aftermath were of vital interest to the Reporter 's core audience, but local, national, and international media were already tackling the story with resources that the Reporter simply didn't have.
- Disaster, then détente
From the first days after the earthquake struck Haiti — long before anyone knew how dire the situation was, let alone how the US government would respond — pundits were wagging their tongues about the potential political implications. A poor response, they said, would invite comparisons to the Bush administration's bungled handling of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
- Teach the controversy
An Iranian cleric says immodest women are the cause of earthquakes
- Aftershock
From the second that the Richter scale registered at 7.0 in Haiti, a desperate grief rippled through Hyde Park, Dorchester, and other corners of this region, which is home to the third-largest Haitian population in America.
- Looking back to climb forward
It's been four years since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. Its causes and ramifications, though, extend much farther into both the past and the future. So say Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman, Brooklyn-based spoken-word and multimedia artists known together as Climbing Poetree.
- Dam shame
In a few weeks, the country will remember one of the greatest disasters in its history.
- 11. Bobby Jindal
In delivering the Republican response to Barack Obama’s first joint-houses speech as president in February, the governor of Louisiana and erstwhile 2012 presidential hopeful was deemed a resounding flop — by members of his own party. His lack of charisma and gee-whiz oratory (as well as his dorkiness) quickly drew unfavorable comparisons to Kenneth the Page from NBC’s 30 Rock , whose political career now seems to have a higher trajectory than Jindal’s. Bonus hurricane-chutzpah points for bringing up Katrina in his speech criticizing government-funded economic-relief programs, for which his state took in billions of federal dough.
- Less

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News Features
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