Haiti

B ILL GLAAB, 29, and Courtney Apple, 27, a married couple living in Washington Square West, founded Hand in Hand Soap in 2011 in Fishtown. The company's bar soap is sold in 225 stores in North America and Europe, the biggest retailer being Anthropologie. To date, Hand in Hand says, 65,000 bars of soap have been donated to children in Haiti. Apple, an Ardmore native, oversees marketing; Jersey native Glaab handles finances. I spoke with Apple. Q: How did you come up with the idea for Hand in Hand?

The Philadelphia region can be proud of local efforts to aid survivors of the earthquake in Haiti, work that will go on for months. Cooper University Hospital in Camden, for example, sent a team of 18 doctors, nurses, and technicians who treated victims there for nearly two weeks. The hospital and the Norcross Foundation paid for transportation, medical supplies, and personnel. Within days of its arrival, the team, led by Anthony Mazzarelli, an emergency-room physician, had transformed an orphanage into a makeshift hospital with five operating rooms.

Those who don't remember the past may be condemned to repeat it. But those who draw strained analogies to past events may be condemned to make new and different mistakes. The army-backed thugs who wouldn't allow U.S. and Canadian troops to land in Haiti earlier this week apparently think they can take advantage of horror and concern over the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Somalia by getting Americans to equate the two situations. They may be right. The armed toughs who harassed American officials and kept the USS Harlan County from landing shouted they would do the same to Americans as Somali rebels did. Those were the magic words, apparently.

I FOUND Cheryl Gilbert's letter on aid to Haiti to be reprehensible. Shame on anyone who doesn't feel enough compassion for her fellow human beings to not want to help people hit by an epic disaster. Children by the thousands were left orphaned, bodies are being dumped into mass graves, thousands are starving while waiting for help. As an African-American, I view Hurricane Katrina and Haiti as a single event that happened to my people, and as a man of modest means, I still gave to both causes.

THANK goodness 90 percent of the population does not have the cold, cold heart of letter-writer Cheryl Gilbert. The U.S. has the greatest resources in the world and has always come to the aid of the unfortunate. When devastation strikes, like the earthquake that hit Haiti, it's our moral obligation to help. When you have a loaf of bread and someone hasn't eaten in a week, can't you just let them have just a slice or two? Ms. Gilbert says she won't give to the relief effort of Haiti.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Fourteen-day-old Alexandro Joseph has never been seen by a doctor and 7-month-old Lovemika Belzi has suffered from diarrhea since the day she was born. In the sprawling camps that continue to dot this broken capital after last year's devastating earthquake, health and human-rights officials warn of another crisis: a population explosion of tent babies. "The camps are not an appropriate place for delivery and not for a newborn," said Olivia Gayraud, health and nutrition manager for Save the Children's Port-au-Prince field office, which works with pregnant women in five camps.

Russian President Boris Yeltsin's visit to the United States to address the United Nations and confer with President Clinton has been almost totally lost amid official Washington's preoccupation with Haiti. Given his predilection to hold center stage, Yeltsin might be expected to feel less than happy by this turn of events. But from a Russian point of view, the timing of his visit could not be better. However unintended, the U.S. intervention in Haiti lends considerable support to Russia's insistence on preeminence in the region of the former Soviet Union.

LA VISITE NATIONAL PARK, Haiti - The police officers and other officials showed up in the mountain clearing on a cool morning armed with shotguns, pistols, sledgehammers, and orders for hundreds of squatters to vacate the homes and farms they had carved out of one of Haiti's few national parks. The people living there had known they could be removed at any time because they were on a rare piece of protected woodland in one of the most deforested countries on earth. But they were resolved to put up a fight.

Roger Allan Moore, with a sizable delegation, was dispatched by the State Department to Haiti with the mandate to report back to the government whether the election on Sunday had been fair. This is a fairly recent tradition: the political version of what in arms control lingo we call "verification. " An example was the delegation sent to Saigon in 1971 to depose that the election of President Thieu had been fair. Memory is vague about the exact report of that commission, but not about the report of one of its members, a Harvard professor.

Soon after dawn on Feb. 7, Todd Scott knew he was going to get more experience than he had bargained for in taking a six-week hotel-management internship in Haiti. Scott and Jerry Perry, a fellow cadet at the Valley Forge Military Academy, dressed quickly and ventured into the streets of Petionville, a suburb of the capital of Port-au-Prince. Word was spreading that President Jean-Claude Duvalier had fled the country. In the four days that followed, Scott, 20, of Pottstown, and Perry, 21, who is from Haiti, said they had seen people celebrate freedom and commit murder.

B ILL GLAAB, 29, and Courtney Apple, 27, a married couple living in Washington Square West, founded Hand in Hand Soap in 2011 in Fishtown. The company's bar soap is sold in 225 stores in North America and Europe, the biggest retailer being Anthropologie. To date, Hand in Hand says, 65,000 bars of soap have been donated to children in Haiti. Apple, an Ardmore native, oversees marketing; Jersey native Glaab handles finances. I spoke with Apple. Q: How did you come up with the idea for Hand in Hand?

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - A new report on American aid to Haiti in the wake of that country's devastating earthquake finds much of the money went to U.S.-based companies and organizations. The Center for Economic and Policy Research analyzed the $1.15 billion pledged after the January 2010 quake and found that the "vast majority" of the money it could follow went straight to U.S. companies or organizations, more than half in the Washington area alone. Just 1 percent went directly to Haitian companies.

ACTRESS MARIA BELLO is pulling double-duty when she's in town this week. The Norristown-born actress, whom you can see next playing a much-hotter wife to Kevin James ' "hey-didja-know-this-guy-is-fat?" character in "Grown Ups 2," will speak Thursday at the fourth-annual 95.7 WBEN-FM Woman of the Week Luncheon. The event - hosted by Marilyn Russell , who interviews powerful ladies about town (including me!) - is part of the station's series, broadcasting Sundays at 7:30 a.m. Check it out in podcast form at ilikebenfm.com.

The Big Truck That Went By How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster By Jonathan M. Katz Palgrave Macmillan. 320 pp. $26   After 2 1/2 years in Haiti, Jonathan Katz was preparing to leave the impoverished but endlessly intriguing nation in January 2010. His next reporting assignment: Afghanistan. Then a massive earthquake that sounded like a big truck roaring by ripped apart his house, his plans, and the lives of Haitians all around him. So Katz, then an Associated Press reporter and the only full-time American correspondent in Haiti, wound up staying to chronicle the quake's aftermath.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - President Michel Martelly urged Haitians to recall the tens of thousands of people who lost their lives in a devastating earthquake three years ago, marking the disaster's anniversary Saturday with a simple ceremony. Martelly also thanked other countries and international organizations for their help after the Jan. 12, 2010, disaster. "Haitian people, hand in hand, we remember what has gone," Martelly said as a gigantic Haitian flag flew at half-staff before him on the front lawn of the former National Palace, a pile of tangled steel reinforcement bars nearby.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI - The sharp tang of varnish hangs in the air as a dozen women and a few men cut and scrape logs into bowls destined for U.S. department stores. In other Haitian workshops, vases sparkle with sequins of pink, green and blue, and dragonflies leap from picture frames cut from recycled steel drums. Three years after a devastating earthquake, there's still not much economic traction in this long impoverished Caribbean country, but one small niche has taken off: arts and crafts.

LEOGANE, Haiti - Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter on Monday urged donors to honor the billion-dollar pledges they made to help Haiti rebuild after its devastating 2010 earthquake. Carter's call for greater humanitarian aid to Haiti came on the first day of a weeklong effort to build 100 homes with about 600 volunteers from Habitat for Humanity. It was the second time in the past year that Carter, 88, and his wife, Rosalynn, have come to help house people displaced at the epicenter of the disaster.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - The rain has tapered off and floodwaters no longer claw at houses, but the situation across much of Haiti remained grim Tuesday following an autumn of punishing rains that have killed scores of people and threaten to cause even more hunger across the impoverished nation. Heavy rains began falling in southern Haiti even before Hurricane Sandy passed just west of the country's southern peninsula the night of Oct. 24, dropping more than 20 inches of rain within 24 hours.

3 die in violence in Myanmar YANGON, Myanmar - At least three people were killed and hundreds of houses burned in a fresh wave of violence pitting Buddhists against Muslims in western Myanmar, news agencies reported Tuesday. The latest clashes started late Sunday night in villages in Rakhine state's Min Bya township and spread north to another neighboring remote community only accessible on foot, the Associated Press reported, quoting state Attorney General Hla Thein. Officials said the riots killed one ethnic Rakhine Buddhist man and two Muslim women and destroyed more than 340 homes in related arson attacks that spilled over into Monday.

CARACOL, Haiti - Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton encouraged foreigners to invest in Haiti as she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, led a star-studded delegation gathered Monday to inaugurate a new industrial park at the center of U.S. efforts to help the country rebuild after the 2010 earthquake. Actors Sean Penn and Ben Stiller, fashion designer Donna Karan, and British business magnate Richard Branson were among the luminaries at the opening of the new Caracol Industrial Park, projected to create thousands of jobs more than 100 miles from the quake-ravaged capital of Port-au-Prince.