C’est moi, encore. ek is still resting from two weeks of boycotting NBC, so I am attempting to take his place. My version of the Afternoon Edition may not be as colorful but, hopefully, at least as informative.

The search for news about Haiti in the media is getting scarcer except for the rare analysis and comparison to the earthquake that occurred in Chile. Some of the analysis is thoughtful and well done, some of it is, well, tripe. The rains have arrived early and it has been raining everyday filling the streets with contaminated water and flooding the make shift camps that are home to over a million displaced people. The rain also adds to the difficulty of distributing food, clean water, shelter material and medical aid. If we thought it was bad in January, the early rains have compounded the misery.

There were floods on Saturday in Les Cayes, in southwestern Haiti. It rained in Port-au-Prince on Thursday, and again on Saturday and Sunday night, long enough to slick the streets and make a slurry of the dirt and concrete dust. Long enough, too, to give a sense of what will happen across the country in a few weeks, when the real storms start.

Mud will wash down the mountains, and rain will overflow gutters choked with rubble and waste, turning streets into filthy rivers. Life will get even more difficult for more than a million people.

New misery and sickness will drench the displaced survivors of the Jan. 12 earthquake – like the 16,000 or so whose tents and flimsy shacks fill every available inch of the Champ de Mars, the plaza in Port-au-Prince by the cracked and crumbled National Palace, or the 70,000 who have made a city of the Petionville Club, a nine-hole golf course on a mountainside above the capital.

The rainy season is the hard deadline against which Haiti’s government and relief agencies in Port-au-Prince are racing as they try to solve a paralyzing riddle: how to shelter more than a million displaced people in a densely crowded country that has no good place to put them.

This is an Open Thread.

Welcome to this week’s Health and Fitness. This is an Open Thread.

Many staff members of most NGO’s that work in foreign countries are citizens if those countries. Such is the case with Haiti, where over 85% of MSF’s staff, medical and non-medical, are Haitian. They did so despite the losses they and their families suffered. Geraldine Augustin is one of those who is caring for her fellow Haitians.

Like thousands of Haitians, Geraldine Augustin started helping people just after the disaster. She is a young, passionate and energetic medical student who has just joined MSF. She belongs to the almost 1,500 Haitian staff employed by MSF in the country and who make our medical activities possible. She works in an MSF post-operative structure set in what used to be a girls school. She tells us about her life and work after the earthquake:

“I am Geraldine Augustin and I am finishing my medical studies. On the 12th January I was headed to university for a class. Suddenly the earth started to shake and the next second all the houses were under the earth, there were dead and injured people everywhere. I was lucky enough not to get hurt, but my mother was killed.”

As is now custom, I’ll try to include the more interesting and pertinent articles that will help the community awareness of their health and bodies. This essay will not be posted anywhere else due to constraints on my time. Please feel free to make suggestions for improvement and ask questions, I’ll answer as best I can.  

ek is busy plotting his next take over of the internet, so I am your substitute host of the Afternoon Edition. This is also an Open Thread

Since the television coverage by NBC is so abominable and there is lack of live coverage of the most popular events, like Alpine Skiing, I give you the NYT’s coverage as an alternative that you can customize to your favorite event and/or country. The Multimedia has a very nice Tracker that is interactive that includes information about when a medal event is scheduled and who has won already. There is a blog, interviews and videos of athletes, as well as analysis and “fluff”. The best part is, that unlike watching NBC and Bob “isn’t my hair nice” Costas, you can pick and choose what you want to know.

They even cover Curling in depth, even explaining some of the colorful terms used for those of us who are unfamiliar. Both the Men’s and Women’s Canadian teams are unbeaten and face off today with the Swiss and USA, respectively.

The only way the Olympics would not be watched in this house is for a major power blackout and, even in that event, we would still have power adequate to turn on a TV, damn solar panels.

Welcome to this week’s Health and Fitness. This is an Open Thread.

I am back in NYC, sleeping in my own bed and trying to get back to “normal” which will take a few days, especially the cold. It was cool in New Orleans but not like NYC and, ugh, snow. I stopped in at my local Duncan Donuts yesterday and was warmly welcomed home. My daughter had told the staff where I was, so there were lots of hugs and free donuts for Dr. TMC who is addicted to the chocolate ones.

I’ll be making the Greek Zucchini Fritters tonight with Blackened Cat Fish and a Sauvgnon Blanc. Thank you all again for your support of the Haitian people. Please do not forget them, this is far from over.

Dr. Marie-Pierre Allié, president of Médecins Sans Frontières-France, who recently returned from a field visit to Haiti, analyses the situation there one month after the disaster. At present, areas of concern include the vacuum caused by the withdrawal of some of the international medical teams who rushed to scene after the earthquake, the ongoing lack of shelter, and the slow pace of aid distribution.

One month after the earthquake, what is the situation in Haiti?

(emphasis mine)