This Month at Lakou

A note on counting. From this issue on, Pulse publishes the window it covers and counts the registry one way: listings that are active, not closed, and not duplicates — the same set you see when you browse. July's issue was counted before that definition was settled, so the two figures are not directly comparable. August is the baseline the next issue will be measured against.

Four verifications we did not report

Four businesses completed owner verification during July, and our first issue reported none of them. Lekòl Ai was verified on 6 July, The AGRICOLA Company on 19 July, Therapy With a Purpose on 25 July, and Bèl Manje Kitchen & Catering on 28 July.

Owner verification is the point of a registry like this one — it is the moment a listing stops being something we researched and becomes something its owner stands behind. Those four should have led the July issue. They didn't, and we're recording them here.

Making Lakou more useful

Most of August went into the parts of Lakou you only notice when they're wrong.

Event flyers now show whole. Event cards used to crop flyers to fit, cutting off the very details — times, venues, lineups — that people needed. Flyers now display complete, and cards with flyer-only listings carry a text description for anyone using a screen reader.

Business pages show more than one photo. Listings with photo galleries now display them properly instead of stopping at the cover image. Komite Ayiti's page carries photos from its Patterson Park festival.

Dead links came out. A sweep across every listing found websites that had expired, gone to placeholder pages, or been taken over by unrelated sites. Those links were removed rather than left to send people somewhere that no longer exists.

Browse shows current information. A caching problem meant the browse page could serve a stale version of the directory. Fixed.

And 210 listings were researched and deepened — a steady month of adding hours, phone numbers, services, and descriptions, each checked against the business's own website.

The Tariff Was Never the Problem

Lakou has begun publishing original research. The first investigation asks a question that sounds technical and turns out not to be: what do the United Kingdom's trade preferences actually offer Haiti, and what do they not?

The article route went live on 27 August. On 30 August — just after this issue's window closed — the research index and the per-language editions followed, so the investigation is now published in English, Kreyòl, and French.

Publishing in three languages is not translation. A careful qualification in English can become a much stronger claim in French or Kreyòl if it is translated loosely, so each edition is held to the same standard: the evidence has to say the same thing in every language.

A registry of the Haitian world that publishes only in English is telling part of that world it is the audience and the rest that it is the subject. Three editions is the beginning of fixing that.

Read the investigation → English · Kreyòl · Français

Each of these listings was researched and deepened during the reporting window.

July's issue made four promises. Here is how they finished.

✅ Opening subscriptions to Pulse. Done. `/pulse/subscribe` is live, with a confirmation email before anything is sent.

❓ Deepening the 20 thinnest listings that already have real websites. We can't grade this honestly. The original list of twenty was never written down, so there is no cohort to measure the result against. Reporting a number now would mean choosing which twenty listings we meant after seeing which ones improved. We're recording it as unverifiable rather than doing that — and this month's version of the commitment names its cohort in advance.

❓ Welcoming more organizations to the registry. As written, this was a direction rather than a commitment — true if a single organization joined. One did. We're not claiming that as an achievement, and we won't write commitments this way again.

✗ Recognizing more of the people who've quietly served the community for years. Not done. The recognition messages were drafted and never sent. This is the honest miss in this issue, and it carries forward below with a number attached.