My best-laid plan to blog reliably once a week on Tuesdays in 2010 is on hold until further notice, since the earthquake in Haiti. I’m in the middle of a very encouraging, and deeply moving, four-day visit to Michigan as I write this, which I’ll write about in more detail in another post, hopefully this coming week.

In the meantime I want to recommend two articles for you to read. One is by Orange County Register columnist Yvette Cabrera. It’s headlined “Pakistani Americans in OC helping Haiti,” and here’s an excerpt:

When the Haitian quake struck last week, Naqvi said he and fellow board members of the quirkily named Sustainable Healthcare Initiatives Now Empowering, a.k.a. SHINE Pakistan, (they’re the locals who help finance Shea’s work in Pakistan), rallied behind Shea’s decision to fly to Haiti, though none of them is Haitian. They also backed his plan to set up 10 urgent care facilities around the periphery of the capital, to help those fleeing Port-au-Prince.

The tragic images out of Haiti remind Naqvi of Pakistan – and that, in turn, reminds Naqvi that suffering knows no nationality.

“We can feel it… We’ve gone through it over there (in Pakistan),” says Naqvi, who wanted to get on a plane to Haiti last week, but has been delayed because he recently became an American citizen and has not yet received his passport from the government.

Please click on the link, read the article, and share it with others. The more widely read this article is, the more supportive Yvette’s editors will be of her efforts to continue covering Pakistani Americans and their work, including possibly traveling to Haiti with Dr. Salman Naqvi and others from Orange County.

The other article is a good New York Times op-ed by Mark Danner, who has written about Haiti before:

HAITI is everybody’s cherished tragedy. Long before the great earthquake struck the country like a vengeful god, the outside world, and Americans especially, described, defined, marked Haiti most of all by its suffering. Epithets of misery clatter after its name like a ball and chain: Poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. One of the poorest on earth. For decades Haiti’s formidable immiseration has made it among outsiders an object of fascination, wonder and awe. Sometimes the pity that is attached to the land — and we see this increasingly in the news coverage this past week — attains a tone almost sacred, as if Haiti has taken its place as a kind of sacrificial victim among nations, nailed in its bloody suffering to the cross of unending destitution.

And yet there is nothing mystical in Haiti’s pain, no inescapable curse that haunts the land. From independence and before, Haiti’s harms have been caused by men, not demons. …