by RAUL ZIBECHI
Brazilian anthropologist Omar Ribeiro Thomaz was in Port-au-Prince on Jan. 12. He’s spent long periods of time there as a teacher over the last ten years. Despite being white and foreign, he speaks Haitian Creole and interacts with Haitians as an equal. His vision of the country after the earthquake and of international aid challenges ideas and images propagated by the media.
“I fell in love with the dignity of these people,” says Ribeiro Thomaz in front of a cup of coffee. In recent decades he has combined his work in the Universidade de Campinas in Brazil, where he was born 44 years ago, with post-conflict anthropology in southern Mozambique and Haiti. He spends his time on the island studying how the population experiences lengthy social and political conflicts, focusing in particular on how people perceive poverty and inequality.
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