Can you spare a match?

A lamp is a wonderful symbol. Its light can guide one's path through dark places; it uncovers what's hidden; it allows people to gather and community to exist where it might otherwise not.

I'm excited to be working with the LAMP for Haiti Foundation, a non-profit that's chosen to throw its lot in with some of Haiti's poorest urban dwellers in a slum community called Cite Soleil. For the past several years, LAMP's primary mission has been to stand in solidarity with the Haitian poor. To this end, it runs a medical clinic three days a week that provides entirely free care to anyone who comes through its courtyard gates. Also close to its heart is the promotion and protection of human rights, a growing part of its work.

While improving public health in a slum community is a difficult thing, I believe the equally difficult task is protecting rights where respect for the rule of law has been pithily summed up in the Kreyol proverb "Konstitisyon se papye, bayonet se fe." (The Constitution is paper, the bayonet is iron.) All it takes is a quick game of rock, paper, bayonet to figure out that in Haiti the bayonet trumps paper time and time again.

With that said, I'm going to be very hesitant to make diagnoses or prescriptions for "fixing" Haiti in this space. I'm an outsider with a lot of book knowledge and very little experience in such things. Rather, I hope this can be a space where I can share some experiences and thoughts as I learn more about this amazing place.

I'll be working for LAMP for the next several months as a legal intern in their new and exciting human rights office situated right in Cite Soleil. I've already been here three weeks and the fact this is my first post means I've got some serious catching up to do. I hope you might check in from time to time to learn some more about Haiti, LAMP, human rights, public health, international development, and pragmatic solidarity with the poor, marginalized and oppressed. That, plus some recounting of things that have kept me laughing despite the hardship that's omnipresent here.

So thanks for joining me as I refill the oil, put in a new wick, strike a match, and light my lamp -- I hope you'll stick around for a while.