A Ship called COMFORT!

bed capacity: In casualty receiving, I have 50 beds," said Lieutenant Commander Dan D'Aurora, the Division Officer for Casualty Receiving on the USNS Comfort. "We've got 12 operating rooms; we've got 20 recovery beds. We have 80 intensive care beds, 400 intermediate care and 500 minimal care."

"This is essentially a hospital within a ship," he said. "In other words, they took a supertanker into the drydock, they hollowed it out like a canoe and dropped in the hospital, plain and simple."

A hospital that is now staffed by more than 550 medical professionals, including doctors, nurses, psychiatrists and a variety of surgeons. They boarded the ship in the port of Baltimore Friday evening, arriving there on short notice from across the United States. Now, they are cruising toward Haiti at speeds of up to 24 kilometers per hour.

Ship pulled out of Baltimore, MD....  will probably be there six months!!! YEAH

Just so proud of my USA....

aid and benefits of a nearly $1 billion globally -- doctors and troops to the impoverished Caribbean nation. The U.S. Navy's floating hospital, USNS Comfort, dropped anchor TODAY -- day eight?? 550 medical staff, joining teams from about 30 other countries trying to treat the injured. Helping Haiti - my people!

A successful Slave Revolt

Haiti was created in 1804, the product of Toussaint Louverture’s and Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ successful slave revolt against the French. Illiterate Haitian peasants defeated Europe’s most advanced army through discipline and communal sacrifice. They repelled 50,000 French troops sent by Napoleon to preserve for France the “Pearl of the Antilles,” whose annual production of coffee and sugar had supplied all of Europe throughout the 18th century. Denied this lucrative supply post, Napoleon sold off Louisiana to U.S. President Jefferson: and thus, the territory of the United States was doubled thanks to the impertinent slaves of one-third of a smallish Caribbean island!

Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Dubois and William Faulkner all had links with and a fascination for the dark courage of this determined people — Douglass was Abraham Lincoln’s ambassador to Haiti and Dubois had family roots on the island, and Haiti and its people figured in William Faulkner’s novel, Absalom, Absalom. Even the Haitians’ opponents were charmed. A contingent of Polish conscripts under Napoleon’s ill-fated General Leclerc defected, and fought side by side with slaves who knew they faced either slavery, freedom, or death, yet chose freedom and the risk of death rather than submission. Much, much later, even under the opportunistic and cruel regime of Francois Duvalier (Papa Doc) at the height of the Cold War, the Haitian government welcomed Polish citizens without visas as an expression of undying gratitude. Blue-eyed Haitians can still be found in the southwestern region of the country.

After Columbus’ first voyage to the present site of Cape Haitian, Queen Isabela of Spain asked him to describe the land he called “Hispaniola.” According to legend he took a sheet of paper, crumpled it in his hand and placed it on a table before the Queen, to describe its rugged and mountainous landscape. The land has been Haiti’s blessing and its curse ever since: it was the most fertile and productive land in the world in the 18th century, yet is now a partial wasteland of deforested hills. Today hunger and poverty prevail. In the marketplaces shopkeepers peddle a hamburger-shaped comestible made of clay and sugar, made to “deceive hunger” for citizens in one of the world’s hungriest and most densely populated countries.

Mountains beyond mountains....

The mountainous terrain —“Deye mon, gen mon” (beyond the mountains, more mountains) — has isolated the different parts of the country from each other, retarding true nation-building. The geographical barriers are compounded by the local Creole language, which, while expressive and colorful, cuts off the citizenry from world markets and culture.

When the French colonists brought thousands of Africans in chains to Haiti, the only interest they had in those slaves was their muscle power. They did nothing to educate them. Slave owners even tried to prohibit their slaves from learning to read and write. Then the unthinkable happened. In 1791 a slave revolt broke out in northern Haiti. Napoleon's armies could not quell it. Ten years of bloody struggle followed. Finally, the slaves forced their French masters to withdraw, climaxing the first successful slave rebellion in history. They were, however, a nation of illiterates.


While the Haitians won their political independence, they remained culturally tied to France. Only a tiny minority of Haitians ever mastered the French language. Still, French language and culture were placed on a pedestal. If you craved social status, you had to speak French. Haitians who spoke only Creole, an oral language, were looked down upon. Such cultural and linguistic snobbery created a tiny elite who knew French. The masses who spoke only Creole remained illiterate. Until the middle of this century, no one bothered to put Creole in written form. Only when a Methodist missionary turned oral Creole into a written language did the literacy door finally begin to creak open for Haiti.

Almost every one of Haiti's constitutions has decreed compulsory education. Unfortunately, the government has never found the money to carry out that mandate. In addition, Haiti's chief religion, voodoo, has no sacred book. Thus it does not provide a stimulus either to learn to read or to produce printed material in Haitian's heart language. How different from Christianity, whose converts hunger to learn to read from God's Book!

Not being able to read gives you a kind of blindness. You may have eyes, but your brain cannot interpret what you see on the printed page. As far as comprehending, you may as well be blind. Unless you can read, you are walled off from technological advances, from important health and medical advice, from agricultural breakthroughs. Even God's written Word has no power for you unless someone reads it aloud to you.

From a Nazarene article....

http://home.snu.edu/~hculbert/linking.htm...... Haiti as our "Exhibit A." This small nation lies just east of Cuba on the western third of a mountainous island called Hispaniola. It was this island that Christopher Columbus discovered in 1492.


Spanish settlers followed Columbus to Hispaniola. They tried enslaving the native Arawak Indians. As you might expect, some of the Indians resisted losing their freedom. They were slaughtered on the spot. The rest of their fellow tribesmen began dying from gross maltreatment. From the first page of Haiti's modern history thus oozes the ruthlessness that Romans 1:31 associates with godless human beings.

Things did not improve in Haiti. French pirates arrived, hiding in coastal coves. Some started plantations of sugar, coffee, cocoa, indigo, and cotton. Plantations needed lots of cheap labor. By then the Indians had all died. So these Frenchmen headed for Africa to recruit workers at gunpoint. At the height of the West Indies slave trade, more than 700 ships regularly crisscrossed the Atlantic. Their cargo? Chained human beings. For thousands of Africans, a tropical paradise dissolved into a living hell.

In the late 1700s those slaves successfully revolted against their French masters. Tragically, even liberty from colonial masters did not stop the bloodshed. Repeated periods of civil unrest, brutal kings, and cruel dictators led one American couple to write a history of Haiti called Written in Blood. Another author poignantly says that Haiti is a country "whose soil has drunk more blood than sweat."

A lot of reading on Haiti History

James Theodore Holly, a Black American who was the first Episcopal bishop of Haiti, once called that Caribbean island nation: "the Mary Magdalene of the nations, possessed by seven devils."1 Among the devils which Holly went on to enumerate was voodoo, that syncretistic religion practiced by about ninety percent of the Haitians. His negative evaluation of voodoo's contribution to Haiti echoes that of several other writers.

Free Digital Publication

The January 2010 Edition of Shades of the Departed has been published.  There are twelve articles--including a dreadfully good piece of fiction--written by a variety of family historians and family archivists, all edited by our friend, the footnoteMaven.
ancestories1.blogspot.com

All I have to do is

Just Keep on Livin.....    and there will always be a story to tell.   Race, culture, our environment..... It's always revealing.  

I noticed Sunday night, Senator Reid . . .negative remarks... he's forgiven by Obama.....

what's up??? 

To get ahead of myself......     my word for the day is

racial animus......people who hold a racial animus toward Obama



an-i-mus    –noun


1. strong dislike or enmity; hostile attitude; animosity.


Former Rep. Harold Ford said "I don't believe in any way Harry Reid --- DEMOCRAT FROM NEVADA --- had any racial animus. I think there's an important distinction between he and Trent Lott."

The Words of MLK

BLACKS IN AMERICA (From Birmingham jail, 1963): "Before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched across the pages of history the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, we were here. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands."