Shakira visits Sean Penn, launches effort to help rebuild Haiti
Pop star Shakira came to Haiti on Sunday to look for land suitable to start a school for poor children. She's the latest celebrity to lend her star power to help rebuild Haiti.
Colombian singer Shakira looks at a newborn child during a visit at the Petionville Golf Club makeshift camp in Port-au-Prince, Sunday. Shakira's "Pies Descalzos" foundation will finance the construction of a new school in Port-au-Prince.
Ramon Espinosa/AP
Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Haiti’s Petionville Club used to be frequented by the elite of the elite. But after the Jan. 12 earthquake the crowded capital’s greenest spot has been transformed into a rainbow of multicolored tents, tarps, bed sheets, and cardboard used in efforts to rebuild Haiti.
It's now a refugee camp for tens of thousands of the more than 1 million Haitians made homeless by the quake.
The grass of the former golf course is virtually unrecognizable with trucks transporting food, water, hygiene kits and building material leaving tracks four inches deep in the mud that now blankets the area.
IN PICTURES: Celebrities giving to Haiti
And an influential group of another nature has replaced the elite, who are long gone. Celebrities.
Just after the quake, movie star-activist Sean Penn set up camp within the camp, and has been working side by side with hundreds of volunteers ever since. Pop star Shakira stopped by the camp briefly Sunday while in the country looking for suitable land for her charity, Barefoot, to build a school for poor children.
Penn is all business
In clothes virtually indistinguishable from all the other members of the Jenkins Penn Haiti Relief Organization that are helping organize the camp, Mr.Penn is all business.
