Haitian Creole Team Updates
The wonderful translators on our Haitian Creole team worked on several projects in June 2022. Here are some highlights.
The HC team provided oral interpretation services for Las Americas in partnership with VICE News for a piece where they interviewed Haitian asylum seekers. (Publication TBA). They also provided 3 hrs of simultaneous interpretation on another occasion for a panel on anti-Black racism in Title 42 for them.
The team collaborated with NYU Law’s Global Justice Clinic on a a number of projects.
Natacha and Christelle, the HC team’s wonderful simultaneous translator duo, provided their services for 3 hours for a webinar with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s oldest and largest general science organization. The topic was the baseline right to water study.
On June 20, 2022 NYU’s Global Justice Clinic and seven Haitian organizations made a submission to the UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, demonstrating how racism shapes Haitians’ experience of the global climate crisis. GJC works with social movements and community partners to prevent, challenge, and redress human rights violations stemming from contemporary structures of global injustice. GJC has worked on human rights issues in Haiti since its founding, including on the extractives industry, environmental and climate justice, and migration.
Our HC team worked on translating a series of questionnaires on climate change in Haiti collected by New York University’s Global Justice Clinic team as well as the final submission to the United Nations. A whopping total of 12,362 words!
The HC team continues to collaborate with the Texas Civil Rights Project doing updates on what is currently going on at the border with their, “Know Your Rights” efforts. Since the laws continue to change, they update their material every 15 days to provide the most accurate information and usually request that we translate slides and do audio transcripts for them with very little turnaround time.
They provided audio services for Asylum Access Mexico for 15 audio files for a Guide for Access to Rights and Integration of Haitian Refugee Women in Mexico about the services they provide as well as educational materials for asylum seekers and refugees and also did some proofreading on the written documentation.
The Haitian Creole team worked with Refugees International on a series of assignments. The first project was the translation of a report on “Mexico’s Reception of Haitian Migrants” based on interviews with 25 Haitian men and women between December 2021 and March of 2022, as well as 15 interviews, both in person and by phone, with representatives of non-profit organizations and shelters working with Haitians in Mexico. (10,627 words) See here. The second assignment was the translation of the transcript of a panel discussion hosted by Refugees International last May where they discussed the “Experiences of Haitian Migrants in the Americas”. (5,897 words)
The team has an ongoing assignment with Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity who is currently accompanying a Haitian family whose story has been captured in the SF Chronicle a few times in Alameda for the next five months.
One of the team’s biggest projects to date continues to be with Al Otro Lado, the Huisha Project for whom our translators have done intakes for a total of 495 recorded hrs in May and 278.5 hrs in June. AOL is currently working on a special Humanitarian Parole project called Huisha, an exemption to Title 42, which did not end last May. It's an incredible amount of work because they are going through data from over a year ago with some 30 thousand applicants and finding the most vulnerable cases to prioritize.
Since May 4, there have been 2,494 total people who have crossed, of which 1242 are Haitian so more Haitian clients have crossed than any other nationality, 2nd being Mexicans. The team was told it would only last a month, but people have been scheduled through mid August. We are hopeful that many more families will get to cross.
The Haitian Creole team have also provided interpretation and/or translation services for the following organizations:
ABA ProBAR (2,381 words)
Immigrant Justice Project (IJP) (1079 words)
PAIR
The Jewish Family Service of San Diego (JFS)
ImmSchools (15 hrs)
Boston University (10 hrs)