Two-time Academy Award-winning actor and director Sean Penn was honored by the Haitian government on Monday at a ceremony marking the six-month anniversary of the earthquake that killed 300,000 people and left more than 1.5 million homeless. Penn first came to Haiti after the earthquake struck to help with immediate relief efforts. he decided to stay to finish what he started. he co-founded the J/P Haitian Relief Organization and is managing a tent camp on the Pétionville golf course that now shelters some 55,000 people. On Sunday night, we went to visit Sean Penn’s camp. We walked in and asked to speak to him. We were ushered into a large tent and ended up sitting down with the Hollywood star for more than an hour talking about Haiti, recovery efforts and the lack of them, his life and what inspired him to do what he is doing.[includes rush transcript]
Sean Penn, two-time Academy Award-winning actor and director. he is co-founder of the J/P Haitian Relief Organization
AMY GOODMAN: Six months after the earthquake in Haiti, not much has changed and yet Haiti will never be the same. Up to 300,000 were killed in the disaster and more than 1.5 million were made homeless. Now, half a year later, many Haitians say they have seen little in terms of recovery efforts.
The teeming city of Port-au-Prince looks like a war zone. Rubble and debris is everywhere and has become a part of the landscape. there is little food, clean water or sanitation. Only two percent of promised reconstruction aid has been delivered. more than 1,350 tent camps fill the streets, with makeshift tarps and sheets providing little shelter. Other tent camps set up by the Haitian government are in remote areas, far from the capital and set up on barren landscape. in Corail, the government’s primary relocation camp some 15 miles from Port au Prince, a storm on Monday collapsed at least 94 tents and sent hundreds of residents fleeing to find shelter.
Meanwhile, in Port au Prince, Haitian President Rene Preval hosted a medal ceremony at the crushed national palace to defend the government’s response to the quake. Bulldozers, dump trucks and other heavy equipment that are usually nowhere to be seen in the capital were lined up on the palace grounds for the occasion. just across the street, in the massive Champ de Mars camp, thousands of homeless sat baking in the summer heat.
Among those at the ceremony were former President Bill Clinton, now co-chair of the Interim Commission for Haiti’s Reconstruction. CNN’s Anderson Cooper and two-time Academy Award-winning actor and director, Sean Penn were honored and presented with medals. Sean Penn first came to Haiti after the earthquake struck to help with immediate relief efforts. he decided to stay to finish what he started. he co-founded the J/P Haitian Relief Organization and is managing a tent camp on the Petionville golf-course that now shelters some 55,000 people. On Sunday night, we went to visit Sean Penn’s camp. We walked in and asked to speak to him. We were ushered into a large tent and ended up sitting down with the Hollywood star for more than an hour talking about Haiti, recovery efforts and the lack of them, his life and what inspired him to do what he is doing.
Well Sean Penn, welcome to Democracy Now!, what are you doing here in Haiti?
SEAN PENN: Well, currently we’re functioning as camp management for the Petionville club camp, what they call [inaudible]. We have 55,000 IDP population in the camp, its about 100 meters from here. and our job is to be principal coordinator of the other NGO actors in the camp, and to advocate for the camp, where we also function as a medical NGO and we also have a Class 3 Hospital on site. and now, we are currently beginning a project, we had done the first primary relocation, but I am careful to talk about that because there’s approximately 1.8 million displaced people, and to date there has been a total of 7,000 people relocated citywide. By relocations we’re talking about getting people out of spontaneous camps and into planned camps, that have better security, better services, and they’re out of flood zones and that sort of thing. But long-term, the idea is to get people either to return to neighborhoods, making those neighborhoods functional, giving them services. or for those camps on the outside, to become instead of considered planned camps, really be a model communities. and for hopefully businesses manufacturing, jobs to come into those areas. to go from tents into temporary shelters and utimately into housing, and hopefully into land ownership.
AMY GOODMAN: what brought you down here to begin with?
SEAN PENN: Well it was a series of events and a certain amount of timing, but the earthquake hit the news, and I had had a personal experience with one of my children having a surgery in that year and seeing just how important pain medications can be during surgery and hearing of the kind of Civil War-style medicine that was happening here. Because, you know, it was a poverty earthquake. so, you have the devastation on top of devastation. and part of that was an already crippled health care system. and so, when amputations were taking place with children and elderly and everybody in between, they were doing it with a Motrin. and so I was able to through a relationship with the president of Venezuela, have a—get a supply of morphine, and ketamine, and by the time in the embassy here, I had networked with Dr. Paul Farmer and others to find out what clinics and hospitals would use them the most productively, were most in need of them, that were doing those types of surgeries. and so we began as a 24/7 delivery crew and pickup trucks while the 7 doctors that we brought in were farmed out to existing infrastructures and bit by bit we got our legs as an NGO, and then soon after, we took over camp management here in Petionville.
AMY GOODMAN: so you come down after the earthquake because you want the people to feel a little less pain, right, but you stayed.
SEAN PENN: Yeah, Haiti kind of gets a hold of you. Also, we felt that—every good NGO is a gap filler of what another NGO is not intending to do or can’t do—. in a situation like this, there are unnecessary gaps but there are also inevitable gaps. It’s a brand new circumstance — an earthquake on a level as devastating as this, in a zone as impoverished as this. and so, there becomes a very clear human obligation. As we got our legs and felt our ability to do that — and one of the things that now as we are starting to broaden out — we just started a rubble removal aspect to this, because that’s the next thing. We don’t want to create a comfort zone of a camp to the degree that it becomes a dependency zone. At the same time, I think that our philosophy, at JP-HRO, is that the kind of clichéd idea of empowering the people is not to demand it prematurely. But that in the case of Haiti, in particular, these are the most pre-empowered people on the planet and that without the tools, there can’t be an expectation of the kind of self-empowerment that one might have in Chile after an earthquake. So-–.
AMY GOODMAN: Many hundreds of times more powerful earthquake, yet hundreds of times fewer people who died. there was 300 or less, here it is 300,000.
SEAN PENN: I was in an earthquake the size of the one here in Haiti when I was a kid in Los Angeles, I think a total of 20 people died. and here between 250 and 300,000 immediate deaths and God knows how many— most of the bodies are still under the rubble today six months later. That’s part of what our job will be: It’s rubble removal, it’s body removal, and it’s reestablishing neighborhoods.
AMY GOODMAN: We were here after the earthquake. We saw an amputation put on the table in front of us, because there were Denver doctors from Denver Children’s Hospital–they had actually brought out anesthesia, so that made it unusual — but it’s a nation of amputees, rubble everywhere. We come back six months later, and we see the same thing. and the same camp, for example, in front of the ruined palace with – I don’t know 10,000, 20,000, people in the Champs de Mars. so what has changed?
SEAN PENN: That’s a question—someone asks and we ask ourselves every day. whenever we’re talking about anything other than the Haitian people, we know there’s a problem. and we’re talking about things other than the Haitian people all the time in Haiti. what are the bottlenecks? why are the bottlenecks? Bottlenecks in rubble removal, bottlenecks in assistance packages, work stoppages at planned campsites, lack of temporary shelters being installed in areas that are having rubble removal.
And what is that I’d like to think that the parallel courses of rebuilding Haiti and emergency disaster relief are finally on the verge of potentially finding a marriage six months later. Some of that, from my point of view, is understandable. Some of it is criminal, that it’s taken this long. and by criminal I am talking not about individual corruptions as much as systemic ones, and a basic lack of a coordination strategy that is largely based on exercises in transferring strategies from other regions and other kinds of disasters. And—this is a very particular problem to Haiti. and the kind of alchemy of that has to be addressed very individually.
AMY GOODMAN: $11 billion promised. Where is it?
SEAN PENN: I don’t think about $11 billion. I don’t believe in $11 billion. I think that pledge money is smoke and mirrors that evaporates as the years go on. the way it’s going to happen, is if bold organizations come in here, create manufacturing— I’d like to see them start as co-ops with philanthropic commitment to that for a period of time with a kind of sunset and then they can participate in the profit.
But right now, the donor’s conference, I think, was completely misconceived. and the way that it should have been done is somebody should have raised their hand and said, “I’m gonna rebuild every school in Haiti.” somebody else should have raised their hand and said, “I’m gonna rebuild the hospitals and we’re gonna do it right now.”
—and instead, what happened was one after another, in Port-au-Prince — the biggest city in the biggest natural disaster in human history —systematically hospitals closed following the earthquake because money was not available and not coming in to those hospitals. the money exists and existed.
I think the culture of aid is so paranoid about the siphoning of aid and the history related to other administrations and other times and places, that while those kinds of concerns are responsible considerations, they have, I think, largely crippled a lot of the motion here.
AMY GOODMAN: Two-time Osacar winning actor Sean Penn. he now manages a tent camp that houses 55,000 Haitians displaced by the earthquake. he manages it on the Pétionville golf course in Port-au-Prince, in Pétionville a suburb of Port-au-Prince. when we come back, I ask Sean Penn why he turned to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez over President Obama, and we talk about other issues. this is our exclusive hour with Sean Penn.
AMY GOODMAN: As we return to the interview with the two-time Academy Award winning actor and director Sean Penn sitting in his tent, as he now manages a tent camp in Petionville in Haiti that has more than 55,000 Haitian refugees.
Very good people who all over the United States said what can we do, at least we can give money, where has that money gone?
SEAN PENN: Well this is a very interesting dynamic. in talking about other NGOs, particularly major NGOs like the American Red Cross, I’ve spoken to the leadership of the American Red Cross on many many occasions, I’ve had conflict with them, I’ve had partnership with them. They’re moving a big mountain in the Red Cross. I think the initial problem, and I’ve spoken to them about it, is what we call here 'animation-need', communication to their donors, has left out something. the American Red Cross has not been in the medical business for 50 years. and that’s not what they do. so for example you have an organization which is a kind of, I don’t think its defamatory to say, a historically parasitic organization, like the WFP which had started as an underling organization, to another that-–.
AMY GOODMAN:—WFP- World Food Program.
SEAN PENN:—World Food Program. one sense, I think, in the public consciousness, is that they still fund. Well, nobody can say that the American Red Cross didn’t act swiftly. they funded $111 million of all of all that first food that came in on the C-140s. that was necessary at that time, and in that way. But while that was happening, those dollars were being spent, and the imaginations of their donors largely, there were doctors going around camps taking care of people and bringing in the primary medicines necessary for that, and than offering, you know to come in and feel good, for organizations that do do that, to come in and feel good about doing a big dramatic surgery, and to not following through on the follow-up care is not to do the surgery, its just to extend the torture, to create the infections we then, in this clinic deal with down the line. and that’s something that’s not so much to be blamed on anything but communication. which is that the donors need to know that this job is not done, the organizations I believe are very strongly getting on their feet here. It’s been a complicated problem,—I have been and I will continue to be a finger pointer when it’s absolutely necessary, but right now, there is so much possibility for forward motion here, that when I look at for example the American Red Cross, I know from my personal experience that their direct action has accelerated enormously in the last month alone. and so I will come back to you if that doesn’t come to fruition. But we have had a very good partner in them.
AMY GOODMAN: We, last night, at this time, we were at Corail, a camp where thousands of people came, from here. Many of them are not very happy. Here they are in this land near Titanyen, where bodies were dropped in previous times like during the coup period. its very flat, when the sun comes down, it bakes them on these white stones. the beds are like a quarter inch padding, and the stones rip their backs. they don’t have electricity, they don’t have flashlights. what happened there?
SEAN PENN: Well there’s two answers to that. Because I, as much as anybody, am responsible for having moved the 1,200 families or 5,000 persons from this location to Corail. We were designated as the most dangerous topographic camp in the city, for flood and mudslides, which was the first designation for emergency relocations. so what we did is, we were given a clear assistance package not to encourage per say, but to offer. and what I’ll say to this day, as that as a father of two—and it is not for me as an American father to make this determination mother or father, but I can say that this comes, the perspective I’ll offer comes from this, today if I had the choice of living here or Corail, there’s no question, that they’d be living in Corail. I can take one match, and light one tent on fire, on this camp here and the whole thing goes. there all connected tents, its over-compressed, disease spreads, its going to spread tent to tent, they share walls, its in the middle of the city prone to potential social uprising. It’s only increasing that we’re able to build security corridors in this camp here. its a spontaneous camp, its an ad hoc camp, its a dangerous place. and this is now one of the least dangerous places among the dangerous places. and we haven’t had quite the level of gang problems, we haven’t had-–we have rapes every week, we haven’t had the level of rapes that are in so many of the camps. But there’s a couple of things, where they have a legitimate, legitimate gripe, beyond the pre-existing one of poverty. and no opportunity, no matter what will one has, to rise above it, because of a lack of education provided. the promises made included a tent as a transition, so they are in those tents in transition. and they would then be moved into temporary shelters into another sector in the same camp. those were also the promises that we are still pushing to have go forward, and its something that I want the media to look at everyday. Because these people were promised temporary shelters, and they should get them. Now as far as the—flat, gravely, hot sun—I have been there many times, I was there in the sun and in the rain. Because we do want to extend a kind of follow-up consideration to those IDPs that we participated in the relocation of. those things were told to them in advance, and this was made very clearly as an emergency transitional camp, including the transitional shelters, with plans that had been pre-existing before the earthquake for an industrial park for manufacturing, and all those things we were strongly going to advocate for. they are in a bad place, and a better bad place then this one. and this one is a better bad place than so many of the camps in this city. one of the advantages that we have is we have neighborhoods with the Ministry of Public Works and Transportation, along with UNOPS sent out on a 2,000 structure-a-day inspection period, to go through red yellow and green houses. Red being–irrevocably damaged by the earthquake, yellow those that can be put back together, and green being not necessarily earthquake safe, but being undamaged by this earthquake. and so in the communications to camp residents, as assistance packages build, as rubble removal in those neighborhoods that makes life miserable in the first places, and inaccessible in many cases, so many of these neighborhoods are catacomb-like, and buildings that you walk through alleys like this, above broken buildings, semi-broken buildings. and so, what happens in all of these things is, the responsibility of any international relief organizations that are participating in relocations or returns, is to very clearly and honestly communicate what the options are at all-times. Because the standing, dangerous and vulnerable option is to stay in these spontaneous camps.
AMY GOODMAN: why did you have to turn to the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, over your own president Barack Obama?
SEAN PENN: Well, I don’t know Barack Obama, I don’t have his phone number.and frankly, it would not have been something I considered that I would be, as a private citizen, without a very and especially in the very superpower world that the United States is, there is a lot of regulation, and it’s not likely that within a few days I would have been granted access to a large amount of IV pain medications. and so, Hugo Chavez, he’s someone that knows me, I know him, he knows what my efforts would be here. and also it was, even in the case of what they donated, and to an organization like ours, it was a kind of, I believe, moral leap of faith, considering the circumstances and I was able to describe to him the networking that we would be able do and had done so that we’d be able to make responsible and immediate use of those things and that’s not something for better and worse is part of a spontaneous disaster relief in the United States, and access to narcotics.
AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned the factories that would be set up because Haitians want jobs. there is concern that they could be setting up maquilladoras. yes they’re desperate for jobs, but at any price? how do you guard against that?
SEAN PENN: Not at any price. I think that-–you’re being here, and anytime there’s media and responsible media here is its virtually more important than any aid organizations presence at all. with that alone, the people in the United States would get to know Haitian people and send the money right into their hands. They’d adopt neighborhoods, they’d adopt schools. so, in terms of what the future is going to be, if we are just going to continue a culture of people making $1- $2 the day, spending 45% of their annual income for their children’s education, because they care that much. to have there children educated but with only access to substandard education. if that doesn’t change, it’s only a pipe dream. People are going to have a life, they are going to have to share in the international language of what a real free life is. and we can’t maintain a "We’re grateful for a penny" aspect simply—in what becomes the kind of systemic punishment for people’s strength. and that’s what happens in a place like Haiti where comfort has never been felt on any real level. There’s no expectation or feeling for a right to it. But it isn’t the luxury, it’s the human way.
AMY GOODMAN: so here you are, a mega star in Hollywood. how have you brought your talents, what is it about what your experience has been that you can run a camp like this?
SEAN PENN: It’s an awful lot like film production, its just the stakes are a lot higher. so the choices you make with fluidity in film, that you would responsibly call adjustments. Here are without whimsy, and are very clearly adjustments to the daily needs that occur here. As an organization, one of the founding principles that I started with, despite the deficit it would put me in, that we wouldn’t take designated money. what we do is maintain maximum transparency. so that if tomorrow the best thing for our organization to do is to recognize that we degenerated tarps from the original distribution, and to put another 8,000 tarps in our camp for a big rain, if suddenly there’s a social unrest situation we might want to take our funds and put it into security for the IDPs here. so, we wanted to maintain that kind of flexibility, and that’s so much about what film-making is. and then I think just being, learning and dealing with these kind of organizations-–it’s very competitive between NGOs for example, as it is between studios, for example. there is a lot of [inadubile], there’s a lot of high school nonsense that we laugh about, we criticize in Hollywood, and here, its murder. its a kind of passive murder. and so, simply being willing to be able to talk very straight about what we see and hear, our best bet proposals, and put them on the table, and not be shy about them, and then count on that like minds will coordinate, where coordination in general doesn’t exist.
AMY GOODMAN: when you talk about that competition being dangerous—not only dangerous lethal here—can you be specific?
SEAN PENN: Yeah, I can be extremely specific. I don’t have to name any of the organizations, I think people know who they are. that we expect a culture in America, for example, in Haiti, you have this incredible earthquake, and the disaster it reeks. We see the agony and death everywhere on the news immediately. We all say, what are we going to do? Well, we’ve got this organization, and we’ve got that organization, and we’ve got the other one, and we’ve got the other one. Who would have thought, that four months later, we would get a patient, in our clinic, our hospital here, a fifteen year old boy, that became the first diagnosed case of diphtheria. We, when we come here as Americans are inoculated for five things, one of them is diphtheria. so here’s this case, and diphtheria is endemic here. and none of the organizations, from international to national, to American, no one had notified any of the hospitals. and none of the hostels had asked, "Where do we get the immune globulin if we get a case of diphtheria?" so the patient came in, we started looking for hospitals that would accept him. Nobody was prepared to accept him. We got kicked out of four hospitals and we traveled with this boy in the back of an SUV for hours, from hospital to hospital, being kicked away. during that time, we had a phone campaign going, "By the way, where do we get the immune globulin?" We had had been involved with every major hospital and clinic in the city. Nobody knew. We called the U.S. military, whose job it isn’t to do that. and who in fact among all the organizations had been the most directly decisive-–to date. And—this was about a 15-hour process. and I have a pretty good Rolodex, no one knew where to get it. and then based on the kind of memory of somebody that was involved in one of these major organizations—we made a phone call, we got in touch with somebody from the CDC while they were in a restaurant in Petionville. and they happen to be sitting across from the person who ran the Promess warehouse. and this is the name of your guy who has to be sent through cold chain, and this was another thing that was exposed four months in, no cold chains had been set up.
AMY GOODMAN: what is a cold chain?
SEAN PENN: Cold chain—if you want to send tetanus diphtheria from the United States, to here, its going to have to stay cold all the way until injection. so its not centralized in one warehouse. and you would think that, four months in, that they would have established cold chains, that organizations would have donated the fuel and the generators necessary to keep the refrigeration there. in the primary hospital in all of Port-au-Prince-–general hospital? No. No where except in the Promess warehouse. which was all the hell—way out of town. and we raced with the father in the back of the pickup truck late in the night, after we’d finally gotten general hospital where Doctor Megan Coffey had accepted him. and she was running the infectious disease wing there, primarily TB I think. so they accepted him and we went off and got this stuff, and it was just too late. and about 10, 12 hours later, he was dead. so, that’s a basic lack of coordination—you know, its neglect on level of at least manslaughter.
AMY GOODMAN: Sean Penn, the Two-time Academy Award-winning actor and director, now manages a tent camp for 55,000 displaced Haitians in Petionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince. By the yesterday, we said the American Red Cross received one billion dollars in donations for Haiti. they called us to say that was inaccurate. According to the American Red Cross it collected $468 million dollars. they say so far they have spent $148.5 million. I do have to say one of the complaints that we heard over and over again in Haiti is where has the money gone? Not just the American Red Cross but all of the money donated to NGOs, the aid organizations, the countries. People on the ground say they have seen very little in terms of recovery efforts. We’ll have more with Sean Penn after break. [Music Break]
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the war and peace report. I’m Amy Goodman. As we return to my interview with Sean Penn. We sat with him in his tent as he ran a Haitian refugee camp of over 55,000 people in Petionville, in Port Au Prince.
I’ve heard over and over, I’ve heard from aid workers whose trips here were canceled. there just wasn’t the money, that even the promise money then dries up when the attention is elsewhere, say BP or the Gulf of Mexico.
SEAN PENN: If the money is dried up because of BP, then BP they should pay for it. BP should come here with some of their money and put some in. one of the things that people have to understand and I know there’s been so much discussion on your show from the beginning—you in particular, who I think are a heroic person in the American media and therefore in the world media. about all of the things that led up to war, the wars that we are still in now. We had all of this argument between parties on the left and right about this idea of supporting the troops, the idea of what being a patriot is. so much so, that we forgot about the Constitution and made it up ourselves. so, let’s just go back to supporting the troops. I was here and I saw the 82nd Airborne. this was the most significantly noble mission that the United States military has participated in to World War II. they did it with so much courage and grace. there was no soldier that didn’t know clearly, if somebody desperate cursed them, that that person just lost twenty people in their family. unlike the United Nations troops largely, that still to this day, sadly, look like a storm troopers. they sling a rifle over their shoulder because that’s what they do in the US military, they didn’t wear their helmets there. they were open and talked to people and they personally cared. they had a very clear, decisive mandate and they did it. one of the soldiers, from right here at this camp, is never going to walk or talk again because of cerebral malaria because they didn’t have time for some of the inoculations that those of us who had a few days to respond, did. they came in. so, they had hard deployments in those wars that we, as a country, support—our president supports now. Whether you like that war or you don’t like it, that’s their job. they went there.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you feel about that?
SEAN PENN: I think Afghanistan is a ludicrous exercise. one of the reasons is because there is a “For America” productive exercise right here. Imagine Haiti this way. First of all, if all their investment was and all our investment was because—we have to pay the Department of Defense back for what they did here. Don’t think because we funded the Department of Defense that we don’t have to pay them back again because that’s the way it works. so, now, you have a war here. You got a surge coming with storms but no face to hate, no county to rile at, no natural resources and the faces here are black. That’s why there’s other things. There’s natural resources that are in balance over there. there is all of that stuff and that’s not some lefty conspiracy theory. That’s just bottom line fact. Both sides that play in the money know it. everybody gets manipulated and it’s really simple. so then here, what is really simple, is that if an American buys an energy-saving light bulb and turns it on, they’re frustrated at how long it takes to heat up. most of these people have never had electricity. You give them an energy saving light bulb and going to invite their friends and neighbors over with glee to watch it go. in a country like that, you bring that manufacturing here and you build that technology here, in 10 years, you’ll have a showplace that will turn the American companies and green technologies into the silicon valley of the eighties and nineties. You’ll have an economic boom like we’ve never seen in the United States, begin to repair our environment and save this country that at our doorstep. for the first time, make an investment that is complete and successful—where people are black, which we still haven’t done in new Orleans. and we can be really proud. if we don’t do it, then you might as well say that we’re spitting on the American military because you’re going to let everything that they did here: the drainage mitigations, the National Guard are still doing in Gonaive, which is likely to get hit by a hurricane this year and kill an enormous amount of these people who are already in danger and now they’re in spontaneous camps, directly in riverbeds. so there’s a chance for America, not only to be very proud but very rich and to have a real friend in a country with a character that has been strengthened by the absence of comfort for so long.
AMY GOODMAN: What’s going to make that happen? the US is committed in Afghanistan. the US is sending more troops there.
SEAN PENN: Well, here are some people in our system, there’s Senator Landrieu, people like Paul Velez who are here. There’s the Haitian government and I think, that if there’s enough public support in the United States, which is going to take some real public awareness. Haiti is at the beginning of its own reconstruction with the help, hopefully, from this donor money. those of us doing the work that we’re doing are going to be the ones, if we’re lucky and we get the funds, to preserve the population that will inhabit that reconstructed Haiti. this place could—My God, God forbid, which has not been here in twenty-five years, but if cholera came in on a boat, you would lose three thousand a day and it would be over. if social unrest is allowed occur, all of these aid organizations are going to shut down.
AMY GOODMAN: How long in this six months, have you spent here in Haiti?
SEAN PENN: I’ve spent, probably five months of it here, and a kind of broken up a month out of the country during that time.
AMY GOODMAN: How has this changed your life?
SEAN PENN: A lot of times people will go back, I’ll hear from them by e-mail and things. Typically, you’ll hear, “Oh, gosh. the material in the United States is so offensive to me now” and this and than that. You know, it was unpleasant for me for forty-nine years, that’s not news to me – including my own. There’s a lot to be said for a life well lived as a thing to aspire to but to spend this kind of time, is to feel a different balance. I think I always made an effort to know it’s there. You can start to build some muscles of understanding why you have an obligation to know it’s there and understand that the ways in which the weakest link in the chain affects us.
AMY GOODMAN: What do your kids say?
SEAN PENN: My kids are here. They’re working here right now.
AMY GOODMAN: How long do you plan to be here?
SEAN PENN: Well, as an organization, we don’t plan to go. We plan to adapt, to adjust. I think our next major new push for us will be rubble removal and working with partners to get people returned into neighborhoods and to again work with partners. Take Camp management into a community management and advocacy but more and more but not in extremely short term—demanding independence. Be empowered, they’re few and far between. Neglectful parents, there’s a kid that you’re neglecting if you say, “Well if you’re not going to stand up for yourself, I’m not going to stand up for you”. Well, somebody’s shorter there also. right now, we’ve got to establish, at least some kind of relative ability for the culture, at large, which is so strong, which is so committed to their families, which is so willing to work hard. make it possible before you back off of those efforts. then whether you’re focusing to help trying to fund a teaching hospital, whatever it is that the future brings here for this organization. for me, personally, there is a time at which you are not productive as you once were and I saw that time coming. that does not mean that you go away forever, but it means you take a break. I have found somebody who will do my job better than I will, has the experience, but with the experience, doesn’t have the typical NGO thing, "Well, when I was in Darfur, we did it this way” and you kind of say, "Yeah, and look how good Darfur is doing”. this is an NGO that was born in Haiti and in some ways we have an advantage that way. We’ve had a big learning curve. a lot of that learning has come from the experience of other NGOs, but I’ve found somebody, Alistair Lamb, who has become our director, who I feel very confidant is going to take this thing and move it dynamically forward. so, it’s time for me to become a bit of a fund-raiser. if they’ve got an emergency and need me to introduce them someone I know that might be helpful here, then I’ll do that part.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you say to Hollywood? What’s your message to Hollywood and then to the American people?
SEAN PENN: I think the American people are Hollywood and Hollywood is, well, you know. I don’t have anything specific to say to anybody other than, how we talk about the need for education. Educate yourself on the places that you put your money; what they do, what they don’t do. Don’t think that the work is done in Haiti.
AMY GOODMAN: You mean, don’t think it is completed, that it’s finished.
SEAN PENN: Yes. there are some things that governments alone can’t do and there will be abuses by governments of the private sector. the government should do more. I was in a pal, with Rod Shaw the other day and he said it. he talking about all the great things that the United States has done with the private and public sector but it’s not enough. That’s the truth; it’s not enough for every individual citizen right now. that does not negate what we have in our own country; it doesn’t negate the whole in the ground that a corporation is poisoning the ocean with.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you stop the problems of disaster capitalism? that people will promise billions, countries will and it goes into the pockets of a few?
SEAN PENN: How do I do it? I think the National Security Council adopts a resolution that applies not only to that but also to the exploitation of funds from organizations here, or from individuals or corporations here or governments here and you make it a crime against humanity or whatever you what to call it. You take them to an international court if they violate in a time of disaster.
AMY GOODMAN: Who is it that inspires you? what gives you the strength to go to Iraq when your government is waging war with a country? going to Iran when it’s almost waging war. Dealing with new Orleans after Katrina. Now being here in Haiti, not coming down for a photo-op, but living here for month after month and running this camp?
SEAN PENN: Well, the place that rings out to me, I went to Cuba to do an interview with Raul Castro for The Nation and when I came back it was my second trip. I had gone as a journalist. I was facing an investigation, which I had faced for violating the embargo in Iraq, as well. It is a very costly thing. I thought to myself, I am an American. I am curious about something. I want to know the truth about something. I want to smell the smells of something. I want to read a book. Nobody deserves to burn that book. My father was a guy, a Bombardier and a tail gunner in World War II doing low altitude bombings over major cities in Germany, basically Berlin. they had a seven mission life expectancy and is unit broke a record with 37 missions. he came back with a chest full of well-deserved medals and within five years was told by his country that he was a communist and could not have a job in the United States. he was never bitter. he saw it as a phase. he always believed in the United States. he was a very gentle man. in my aspiration to be a gentle man, that fails me every year, I have an additional obligation in honoring him, to at least proactively make the attempt for gentle things to happen.
AMY GOODMAN: What was it that your father did when he came back?
SEAN PENN: He had been an actor. he was gaining some success. he had a contract and was doing leads in smaller movies and had great success on the Broadway stage. within a couple of months, of the height of that, he was working in a plastics factory for five years. then when he came back to acting, he couldn’t pick up the pace of what was happening and he ended up going into television directing and providing as a great father.
AMY GOODMAN: How did he feel about your success?
SEAN PENN: They were very supportive. I grew up in a family where my mother’s an actress and a writer and a painter. Where being in the arts was a good thing, a noble thing and all of that so there was a lot of support.
AMY GOODMAN: Any other words you’d like to share?
SEAN PENN: Thanks for coming.
AMY GOODMAN: Actor Sean Penn speaking to us in Haiti. the two-time Oscar award winning actor, now is a camp manager, at a tent camp he manages in Petionville, in Port Au Prince. the tent camp has 55,000 Haitians made homeless by the earthquake. His organization is JP Haitian Relief Organization, jphro.org.
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