A6 Rebuilding Haiti
Haitians puzzled by slow recovery
haiti from A1
surge in theft and rape, but also in self-help and solidarity. None of the camps is as em-
blematic of the enduring crisis as the Champ de Mars. Flanked by ministries, barracks and the icon- ic eggshell-white palace, the site was Haiti’s equivalent of the Mall. But since the earth shook, the pal- ace droops in evocative ruins with no sign of repairs as the months tick by. The fountains have turned into sickly green pools, still clogged with plastic bottles that no one seems able to haul off. The once-proud historical monu- ments look down on a tight patch- work of rickety shelters and, in- side, an increasingly resentful mass of idle people with nowhere to go. “All that money, we have felt nothing from it,” complained Jean-Michel Olophene, a civil en- gineer who has been a Champ de Mars resident since the quake and recently was hired by the gov- ernment as a liaison.
Conscious of the symbolism,
President René Préval has made it a personal mission to get the homeless off the Champ de Mars. According to aides, he meets sev- eral times a week with a group as- signed to find a solution. But ev- ery time they propose something, according to a participant, he re- sponds that he does not have the money to make it work. As a result, the Champ de Mars has become another symbol: that of the Haitian government’s in- ability to muster the leadership to inspire hope and promote recov- ery. Despite his commitment to moving people off the Champ de Mars, for instance, and even though he works in refurbished offices on the National Palace grounds 200 yards away, Préval has yet to walk over and talk with the homeless residents, Olophene said. “President Préval’s actions do
not suggest a departure from the self-destructive political behavior that has kept Haiti the poorest country in the Western Hemi- sphere,” Sen. Richard G. Lugar (Ind.), the Senate Foreign Rela- tions Committee’s senior Repub- lican, complained in a letter last month accompanying a commit- tee report that found a disturbing lag in recovery work. The leading Haitian news-
paper, Le Nouvelliste, agreed. “Nothing is easy, granted,” it said in a front-page editorial this week. “But things could be mov- ing faster. Everybody agrees with that. Everybody.”
Slow shift from relief
Officials from the estimated 800 foreign aid organizations here point with pride at the relief effort they mounted after the magnitude-7 tremor. Even though more than 200,000 people were killed, 1.5 million were left home- less and government institutions were reduced to rubble, they note, there was no starvation, no water- borne disease and no rioting. Some officials say the influx of
doctors, nurses and medicine from international aid organiza- tions was so great that Haitians have better access to health care now than before the earthquake. The American Red Cross alone provides health care to nearly half a million people. If disease has been avoided, it is in large part because Oxfam supplies clean water and latrines. Money from the U.S. Agency for Interna- tional Development gives 20,000 people a day the wherewithal to feed their families. But the shift from relief to re- construction has seemed painful-
A continuing struggle
Officials from foreign aid organizations say that although the pace of recovery in Haiti has seemed slow, the government and aid officials are tasked with rebuilding a country that was impoverished and struggling before the magnitude-7 earthquake. More than a million Haitians are still living in tents or under tarps. Satellite images depict the transformation of a Petionville golf course: Sept. 2008
Jan. 16: Four days aſter earthquake May 11 Anael Jean Pierre, left, and her sister Emmanuella Jean Pierre pass time at the camp.
ly slow, they acknowledge. In part, they suggest, this may be be- cause outsiders underestimate how long rebuilding takes, or be- cause they do not realize how poor and undeveloped Haiti was before the earthquake. Even as it lags, they maintain, reconstruc- tion in Haiti is moving at approxi- mately the same pace as that of Asian countries hit by a tsunami in 2004.
But mostly the pace seems slow because the challenge is im- mense. One relief expert called the destruction in Port-au-Prince, the capital where 3 million of Hai- ti’s 8 million people live, the greatest urban disaster of modern times.
“Because we had an earth-
quake with a huge international relief response does not mean we are going to be able to rebuild Haiti in six months; that’s just not going to happen,” said Julie Schindall, an Oxfam spokeswom- an.
One reason Préval’s govern- ment has been unable to move people out of the tent cities, for instance, is the country’s mud- dled land ownership, with com- peting deeds and contradictory surveys left by Haiti’s history of dictatorships, coups and political instability. Moreover, Haiti’s trucks and
earthmovers have proved insuffi- cient to clear away rubble to allow people to return to their neigh- borhoods. One million of an esti- mated 25 million cubic meters have been cleared; the operation is expected to take years. Teen- agers in the Fort National neigh- borhood, paid by an international cash-for-work program, struggle
to haul away debris in gardening wheelbarrows, two dozen chunks at a time.
Another obstacle is a tradition of corruption. One reconstruction official already has been fired for trying to steer aid money to his company. The World Bank two weeks ago granted the govern- ment $30 million, to be accompa- nied by $25 million from other donations, to finance anti-corrup- tion controls in its handling of nearly $10 billion in reconstruc- tion money pledged at a confer- ence in March at the United Na- tions. To manage the money and po- lice its use, the conference estab- lished the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, headed by Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive and former president Bill Clinton. Af- ter long delays, the commission held its second meeting Tuesday, approving $1.6 billion in recovery projects, $904 million of which have financing from the interna- tional donations, designed to em- phasize rubble clearing and shel- ter building. Clinton and Haitian leaders
have described the recovery plans as an opportunity to defeat Haiti’s poverty at last, giving the country the schools, roads and electricity network it has always lacked. Les- lie Voltaire, a U.S.-educated urban planner and a candidate in No- vember’s presidential election, has drawn up blueprints to re- fashion Port-au-Prince into a shiny, less crowded city that he envisions as a commercial capital of the Caribbean. But longtime observers recall similar dreams of new beginnings —when the Duvalier dictatorship
fell in 1986, for instance, or when the populist Jean-Bertrand Aris- tide came to power in 1990, or when he was restored to the pres- idency four years later in a U.S. military intervention ordered by Clinton. Each time, the hopes went unfulfilled, leaving disap- pointment among the people and increasing cynicism toward the government. “Maybe the government
doesn’t have the possibility to help us get out of here, or maybe it doesn’t have the will,” said Lyn- cee Jean Hency, Pierre’s neighbor in the Champ de Mars. “Myself, I think it’s a question of will. Presi- dent Préval has never even taken the trouble to show up here for a visit.”
Rains but no houses Corail-Cesselesse, a rock-
strewn flatland 10 miles north of Port-au-Prince, was supposed to be one of the solutions. But so far, it has been a frustrating example of how difficult Préval’s govern- ment finds it to get anything done. Thousands of homeless fami- lies camping on a hillside golf course in the well-to-do suburb of Petionville were bused to a tent city in Corail-Cesselesse in April. The slopes in Petionville were dangerous, they were told, posing the threat of mudslides under the Caribbean’s beating summer rains. Moreover, they were prom- ised that they would soon receive what international aid groups call “transitional shelters,” water- proof prefabricated houses on a concrete foundation. Four months later, the season’s
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SUNDAY, AUGUST 22, 2010
PHOTOS BY RICKY CARIOTI/THE WASHINGTON POST Students look from the window of a bus used as a classroom at the Plas Timoun, which provides art and music therapy, as well as other services, to quake-traumatized children.
Perched on a single ladder, Haitian workers hoist buckets of sand for a retaining wall under construction in Port-au-Prince.
downpours have arrived on schedule, but not the houses. An estimated 100,000 people live in tents on the barren plain, said Jacques Saint-Louis, who helps administer the camp for the American Refugee Committee; they are fighting to stay dry, won- dering where they might find a job so far from town and relying on relatives for food. On July 12, savage winds and rain swept in, blowing down many of the care- fully aligned tents. Homeless Hai- tians put them back up again and kept on waiting. “They say the houses are com-
ing, but nothing’s been done yet,” said Fito Fortune, 45, who lives with his wife and five children in a white, sausage-shaped tent. Préval visited the camp soon af- ter it was set up, Fortune recalled, and he promised that houses would soon be made available. The months came and went, how- ever, and only a model unit has been erected, assigned to serve as
an administrative office. Across the country, aid agen-
cies say, 8,000 transitional shel- ters have been built, out of 125,000 that were scheduled to be in place by the end of the year. A European engineer with the company contracted to build houses at Corail-Cesselesse said he and his team are ready to start any time and could swiftly get 1,300 of the little structures up at a cost of $4,500 each. But govern- ment officials are dragging their feet on the contract, he added, so the company is waiting. “Things are very slow here,” he said, “a lot of red tape.” Fortune, meanwhile, recently sent three of his children to live downtown with relatives — also in tents — so they can attend school. Asked how he could afford tuition without a job, he replied: “A little here, and a little there,
a little coming, and a little going. That’s how I do it.”
codyej@washpost.com
SOURCE: Images from GeoEye
THE WASHINGTON POST
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