Writer and wannabe farmer Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is living in New Orleans for a while, partly because she’d intended to spend most of 2010 traveling in Haiti to start research on her second book. With that project postponed but her mind and heart very much on Haiti, Sharifa is organizing fundraisers for two grassroots organizations working to support agriculture & ecology as a pillar of rebuilding Haiti. The event will feature a French-English bilingual reading of Martinican Negritude poet Aimé Césaire’s epic poem “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal” (“Notebook of a Return to My Native Land”).

NEW ORLEANS

when: Saturday, July 10, 7pm

where: GRIS GRIS LAB, 2245 Brainard Street, Central City

NEW YORK

when: Thursday, July 15, 7pm

where: THE SHRINE, 2271 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd, Harlem

Suggested donation $10-$25. No one will be turned away.

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The beneficiary organizations are:

SOIL Haiti ( www.oursoil.org ) focuses on ecological sanitation,

working alongside communities to create composting toilets that remove

dangerous pathogens from the water supply and provide nutrient rich

compost to farmers. Since the earthquake, SOIL Haiti has been working

in Port-au-Prince along with OXFAM and the Haitian government to

implement environmentally sound sanitation strategies urgently needed

to serve the 1 million+ people living in tent cities since the

disaster.

Seeds for Haiti ( www.seedsforhaiti.org ) works in concert with

Mouvman Peyizan Papay (Peasant Movement of Papay), to support farmers

in Haiti’s Central Plateau in achieving social justice and

asserting food sovereignty. With the reverse migration from the city

back to the countryside since the earthquake, their work is even more

urgent. Recently farmers of MPP made headlines when they promised to

burn anyseeds donated by Monsanto, a gift-horse of seeds that will not

reproduce and are laced with pesticides, thus subjecting farmers

already facing a state of emergency to the vicious cycle of industrial

agriculture.

Come raise voices, spirits and funds at this liberatory literary gathering!