With Passover around the corner, many of us are poised to recite the words, “Let all who are hungry come and eat.” But when nearly 1 billion people around the world are hungry or malnourished, these words become acutely daunting—particularly for communities recovering from disasters. More than three years after a major earthquake ravaged Haiti,…
At the age of 23, Oscar, a college student in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, was looking forward to a professional soccer career. Then came the January 2010 earthquake that changed his life. The campus building he was in collapsed — most of his friends were buried under the rubble — and Oscar, who asked to be identified…
The images beamed from Haiti seem to go from very bad to unbearably worse. The nation was already the poorest in the hemisphere before the January 12 earthquake crushed the landscape and killed hundreds of thousands. Then came the sight of more than a million displaced people living in over-crowded, squalid refugee camps. Then the…
Fundraising events for Jewish non-profits don’t usually turn out to be laugh riots. But tonight’s American Jewish World Service (AJWS) benefit at Jazz at Lincoln Center should have the audience rolling in the aisles. No, president Ruth Messinger’s not doing her banana-peel shtick; director Judd Apatow (“Knocked Up,” “Superbad”) will premiere a celebrity-studded tribute video…
My generation was raised to fear cookie dough. Salmonella could lurk in every rubber spatula, and terrible things would befall the child who ate a bite of a raw confection. Only baking could render the dough safe. Thanks to the recall of millions of eggs from Iowa’s Hillandale farms and Wright County Egg this past…
In this week’s Forward Reporters’ Roundtable, host Josh Nathan-Kazis speaks with staff writer Nathan Guttman about the implications of the results of the September 14 political primaries, and about our new political blog, MitzVote. Then, Forward editor Jane Eisner discusses what she witnessed on her recent reporting trip to earthquake-ravaged Haiti. <strong>Subscribe to Forward podcasts…
It took us several hours to drive from Port-au-Prince to the tiny village of Monwi Mon Ivwa. On rare stretches, the road was flat and paved, occasionally punctuated by a house standing half-finished and empty, a frustrating hint of what could be if Haiti were a normal place. But mostly the road was thick with…
Lubert Jean-Pierre is a 48-year-old Haitian father of six who used to sell charcoal in a makeshift roadside stand before the earthquake. At about 4:30 in the afternoon on January 12, he had gone to a small prayer meeting at a church in his neighborhood in Port-au-Prince. At 4:53, the building began to shake, the…
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