Mami Wata 3: Water for the Haitians

It was 10 years ago I went to Cuba for the first time and, surrounded by Spanish-speaking black people, for the first time, for the first time felt I was Home.

This is the absolutely unsurprising result of my upbringing. First memory is of my mother's arms, rocking chair, Puerto Rico, looking out the window at the dazzlingly twinkling stars and thinking that the tree frogs' undulating song was the music made by the stars. Then Africa. Etc.

So I just had to have this album of Buika, inspired by Almodovar and the cross-dressing 91-year-old ranchera singer Chavela Vargas, and recorded in Cuba, la perla de los Antilles.



Buika's tale of globalization and political exile is told in today's NYT. I have to go track down Chavela.

In other news, the cholera outbreak I predicted in Haiti, the result of unburied dead and polluted water, has begun. I did advise, after checking out carefully, contributing to Water Missions International, which, though Christian, is single-handedly doing an honest and top priority job to which no one else is paying attention.

Potable water is pretty much the third world issue. Lack of it is responsible for most of the deaths of all kinds, including in refugee camps and in genocides of attrition. Depriving people of potable water is a low-tech way to kill them.

I discover that the Haitians have never had potable water. It came in dead last in a survey of world water poverty eight years ago. The situation now is unimaginably bad, with unrecovered dead contributing cholera and other toxins to waters already fatally polluted with sewage (there is no sewer system in Haiti). The survivors, in a word, are going to die if they don't have cleaner water.

http://purejuice.livejournal.com/1539735.html

Please donate what you can.
http://www.watermissions.org/give

The Caribbean, as you might understand, is very close to my heart. Mami wata too.