Linda, I just read thru the 11 posts on this blog. I'm Jacques...

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Linda, I just read thru the 11 posts on this blog. I'm Jacques Laurent living in Georgia.

I don't know who Reginald Jean-Jacques is.

Which brings me to the point: You have lots of time to criticize without facts.

Just because you saw Jacques in both our names you concluded that we were one.

In the same way, because Preval is President and elected, you believe that he has become this wizard with wand to fix things in Haiti.

There are many forces working to undermine Haiti: The OLD elite, The US, France, Investors that would profit from our demise, Racists that would rather see us rot, and ignorants that don't know any better.

To lay all this at Preval's feet is simplifying the problem.

Preval stayed in his hometown for 1 MONTH after being elected because he refused to be a puppet President.

The US had not given him the necessary controls over the country.

France wants to maintain some of its monopoly which is keeping us from progressing (i.e Teleco.

Thank God for Digicel!).

Many of the elites fund the unrest became it serves them when they control the black market.

American Airlines drops its ticket prices to undercut any challengers that want to establish commercial flight to Haiti to run them out of business.

Solutions: 1. We need to realize that Preval is just one man against many forces.

Good or bad, the challenges are real. We must support him in EVERY way possible.

2. We must travel to Haiti as OFTEN as we can. That ticket + whatever you spend IS the Haitian economy.

1 Billion of Haiti's 1.6B economy comes from us spending and sending money to families, etc...

3. We have to look at alternatives to waiting on the government.

Everytime we do, we end up being disappointed.

The truth is that the country is not stable yet. A friend told me that his wife is 1st cousin to Preval and he REFUSED to give her a job in the government to avoid impropriety.

Yet, in that same period, another friend who's in the banking industry both in Haiti and Canada told me how she brought a contact from Canada to invest a couple of million dollars in Haiti and the minister he spoke to demanded $10,000 US just so he can present him and his project to the President.

The man was so insulted that he had to pay the man to help him that he walked away. In contrast, I know of some investors planning on building resorts OUTSIDE of PAP and finding ways to take the tourists STRAIGHT to province without having to go thru the ugliness.

It's exactly what I saw when I went to Jamaica.

They're no better than us, but they always got tourists and positive media image.

Conclusion: There's no easy answer.

But sitting on the blog criticizing thoat that put themselves on the line is not going to solve it. It starts with you and me doing whatever we can, whether it's traveling, sending money, opening a business, participating in the political dialogue, etc...

to get us there.

For one, my organization is holding a reception in Georgia next month to sit with the Minister of Haitians Abroad and discuss with him what we want to see in country for the Billion dollar that we the DIaspora invest every year there.

One of them is Dual Citizenship so we can vote and have a say in our country's directions so crooks and shortsighted people won't continue to lead us in the wrong path.

Jacques Laurent, November 8 2007, 3:14 PM

Topic: pourquoi tous ces partis

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