mobilizing kindness

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Erica: I’ve been in the Ninth Ward all my life. When I first started out in the streets, I wanted to see what life was all about. At the age of seventeen I got shot in the stomach with a thirty-eight hollow point. At the age of twenty-five I got shot in the mouth. 

BW: Why did you get shot?

Erica: I was out here trickin’ on drugs and I learned the hard way. This Ninth Ward is a jungle. It’s been a jungle ever since I was sixteen. They killin’ they own people down here and it’s sad. This is the hidden south,  C.T.C, Cutthroat city. We don’t do it to others, we do it to ourselves. It hurts because the Ninth Ward isn’t getting better. Everywhere else has a corner store or a sweet shop or a gas station. We don’t have nothin’.

We were the worst place that got hit. I was on the roof for three days back there on Florida Avenue.  

BW: What would make it better?

Erica: A nice park for the families, fix the houses up. They always sayin’, “We help the Ninth Ward.” How? Look at the streets! The streets are so bad that you can damage your car just driving down the streets. 

Doctors Without Borders says it is under “the clear presumption that a war crime has been committed” after a U.S.-led NATO coalition bombed its hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan.

The aid organization, referred to internationally in French as Medecins Sans Frontières (MSF), asserted that it “condemn[s] this attack, which constitutes a grave violation of International Humanitarian Law.”

The U.S. military’s version of the story behind the bombing is full of holes, and constantly changing. After launching airstrikes on Kunduz, which has recently seen an insurgency by the Taliban, on Saturday morning, NATO said its bombing “may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility.”

At least 23 people people were killed in the airstrikes, including 13 staff members and 10 patients, three of whom were children. A minimum of 37 more were wounded. A hospital nurse said there “are no words for how terrible it was,” noting “patients were burning in their beds.”

Uncertainty dominated Washington’s earliest account of the attack. The media echoed this ambiguity, but MSF insisted all “indications currently point to the bombing being carried out by international Coalition forces” led by the U.S. The humanitarian organization stressed that it had “communicated the precise locations of its facilities to all parties on multiple occasions over the past months” and yet, despite this, the NATO bombing of the hospital continued for over 30 minutes, even after MSF “frantically phoned” Washington.

Subsequently, the U.S. and Afghan governments moved away from describing the attack as an accident, a tragic instance of “collateral damage,” and proceeded to imply the bombing was intentional. Afghan officials claimed the hospital was being used as a “base” for the Taliban. “The hospital has a vast garden, and the Taliban were there,” insisted Kunduz acting Governor Hamdullah Danishi.

MSF was not buying it. The aid organization called the “Taliban base” claims “spurious” and said it is “disgusted by the recent statements coming from some Afghanistan government authorities justifying the attack.”

The organization flatly denied that the Taliban was ever fighting from its hospital. “Not a single member of our staff reported any fighting inside the MSF hospital compound prior to the U.S. airstrike,” MSF recalled.

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