Anna Mehler Paperny and Eva Salinas
From Sunday’s Globe and Mail
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Toronto and Santiago — The building pitched. The windows rattled. Items flew off the shelves and the air was filled with the sounds of rumbling buildings and heaving earth.
Thrown from her bed at 3:34 a.m. by one of the biggest earthquakes ever recorded, Claire Buré ran to a door frame in her Santiago apartment and held on for dear life.
“It was panic.”
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Friday, February 26, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
A modest urban tweak it isn’t.
The city’s plan for the Lawrence Heights area aims, over a quarter-century and multiple construction-intensive phases, to build a model community from scratch and revolutionize the way people live, shop, work and commute in the 110-acre area.
There is no price tag on the project.
The 1,208 units of social housing alone will cost an estimated $350-million.
But it’s unclear how much it will cost to build the other 6,300-odd units of condominiums and townhouses the city envisions or for the green space and other renovations planned.
But the city and Toronto Community Housing Corporation officials who unveiled the latest plans yesterday were optimistic the long-term vision will become a reality.
Thursday, February 25, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
In the centre of what’s set to become Toronto’s massive social-engineering experiment, Hersi Abdirizack reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out two vials: tiny red specks in clear liquid.
Bedbugs in alcohol, he explains, shaking them slightly.
For the Somali entomologist turned tenant advocate, this is part of what community revitalization will mean in Lawrence Heights.
Today, the city will unveil its latest plans to reinvent one of Canada’s largest social-housing complexes and the chronically marginalized neighbourhood around it.
Saturday, February 20, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY AND TAVIA GRANT
TORONTO — No conventional bank in its right mind would give Cleoni Crawford a loan.
And she can recite, from memory, the responses she got when she tried.
” ‘You’re going to need a co-signer, there’s nothing we can do.’ ‘Do you have any assets, do you have any savings?'”
She rolls her eyes, holds her hands up, empty. “Um, hello?”
Ms. Crawford was operating her fashion-design business out of her home at Jane and Sheppard, lugging clothing samples on the bus to visit potential clients.
She also had a credit rating that would give a banker the shakes. In 2006, within seven months of graduating from the University of Toronto with a pile of student loans, she defaulted on her credit-card debt.
Monday, February 8, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
PAPAYE, HAITI — The Rosier family was always close. Just not this close.
Twenty-five people – parents, grandparents, children, nephews, cousins and in-laws – have been living in the family patriarch’s farmhouse in Haiti’s Plateau Central for close to a month.
Standing outside, hacking his palm trees to pieces to build shacks for his growing household, patriarch Ilson Rosier smiles and shrugs.
“They’re family – of course I have to take them in. We’ll do what we can.”
But his seven children and their families now sharing cooking, washing and living space are starting to worry how they’ll make ends meet.
The Rosier brood is among the hundreds of thousands who have fled devastated Port-au-Prince to seek refuge in the provinces.
Saturday, February 6, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
PORT-AU-PRINCE — The cemetery reeks of death. Dozens of tombstones are overturned. Crypts have been upended, inverted and emptied of their macabre contents. It would look centuries old were it not for the bright blue paint bouncing sunlight off the broken gravestones.
The overpowering smell comes from the far side of the labyrinthine cemetery, where a plot near the street has been excavated and filled with corpses. More than 2,000 of them.
The plan is to pave over the spot and turn it into a memorial to those killed in the earthquake. But for now it’s simply a mass grave, holding corpses covered with pale dirt and concrete dust.
“Next Ghede will be wild,” says voodoo priest Menahem Laurent, referring to a holiday in early November similar to the Latin American Day of the Dead. “There will be so many ghosts.”
Friday, February 5, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
With a report from the Associated Press
PORT-AU-PRINCE — Ten American Baptists face charges of child abduction and criminal association after trying to take 33 Haitian children across the border into the Dominican Republic without the government’s permission.
The group members, accused of flouting Haiti’s child-protection laws when the country is at its most vulnerable, were led out of a closed-door courtroom session yesterday afternoon, through a crush of reporters and onlookers and into police vehicles waiting to escort them back to the makeshift jail cells where they have spent the past week.
The Haitian government has imposed a moratorium on international adoptions following the earthquake, fearing that in the ensuing chaos the risk of child-trafficking, already a mounting problem in Haiti, would increase.
Thursday, February 4, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
CALEBASSE, HAITI — This is the town that sent its children away.
Its subsistence vegetable plots are all but destroyed; its buildings reduced to debris. If it was poor before the earthquake, it is desperately so now.
And the parents of Calebasse say they were just trying to do what was best for the kids they can no longer feed when they gave them to a group of American Baptists arrested for trying to spirit the 33 children across the border.
Many of them say they would try the same thing again.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
PORT-AU-PRINCE — Their classrooms are rubble. So are their houses – scattered around Port-au-Prince, most of them are living “sous les belles étoiles.” Many of their professors are missing or dead.
But in the fissured remains of their university, these would-be teachers are planning a revolution. They sit at desks, taking scribbled notes as their rapid-fire ideas overlap one another over the sounds of 400 families living in tents outside, and one lone, loud rooster by the window. As Haiti’s already inadequate education system lies in ruins – and with it, one of the country’s best shots at sustainable development – these upstart students are among those who hope to reinvent what it means to learn in Haiti.
“We don’t just want to rebuild. We want to begin over again,” says Michel Fresner, a first-year education student at the Centre Formation d’Education Fondemontal.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
PORT-AU-PRINCE — It’s a strange sight on a traffic-choked downtown street across from a park that has become a crowded tent city: several dozen young men locked behind the wrought-iron bars of a rectangular, birdcage-like structure outside a police station.
The police say the men are looters, caught in the act. An officer gestures over his shoulder to rolls of fabric, building materials and dusty electronics.
A prison it’s not. But for now, and for no one knows how long, that’s where the alleged looters will stay.
a business of misfits 