By Andrew Gully (AFP)

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/DNEO-83LDLZ?OpenDocument

PORT-AU-PRINCE — Two months after arguably the worst nat­ural dis­as­ter of mod­ern times, Haiti faces fur­ther calamity as more than 200,000 quake sur­vivors camp in putrid tent cities at risk of major flooding.

The full num­ber made home­less by the Jan­u­ary 12 earth­quake is far higher, some 1.3 mil­lion, but as the rainy sea­son approaches the United Nations regards 218,000 peo­ple in 21 Port-au-Prince camps as those most at risk.

“The prob­lem with the rainy sea­son is it is a very indef­i­nite dead­line,” Kris­ten Knut­son, a spokes­woman for the UN’s Office for the Coor­di­na­tion of Human­i­tar­ian Affairs (OCHA), told AFP.

The gov­ern­ment is strug­gling to buy land to set up emer­gency camps out­side the cap­i­tal, but these fields would take up to six weeks to turn into viable sites and Knut­son said mov­ing peo­ple out­side the cap­i­tal was a “last resort.”

“Relo­ca­tion is what peo­ple focus on because it’s very visual, you can see the site, and because of all the dynam­ics of iden­ti­fy­ing the land, buy­ing the land,” the UN spokes­woman said.

“It’s dra­matic. But there are other choices that are avail­able for peo­ple and if they are bet­ter for peo­ple and they are avail­able we want them to take them. We want peo­ple to be where they want to be.”

Those with houses still stand­ing are being encour­aged to return home, but many are still trau­ma­tized by what hap­pened and engi­neers and archi­tects have to painstak­ingly assess which build­ings are struc­turally sound.

Oth­ers are being advised to move back home and camp if a safe plot can be found, while some 600,000 peo­ple have already opted to move in with host families.

Only when those pos­si­bil­i­ties have been exhausted and no closer site can be found are those at risk in Port-au-Prince flood plains being rec­om­mended to relo­cate out­side the capital.

Santo 17, a first planned site with an ini­tial capac­ity of 1,400 opened Sat­ur­day at Croix-des-Bouquets, a town eight miles (13 kilo­me­ters) north­east of the capital.

Heavy rains poured fresh mis­ery on Port-au-Prince early Mon­day and mother-of-six Berta Romelus told AFP she spent a mis­er­able night sleep­ing on her feet as the rain gushed under her tent.

Even if rain had turned the camp of more than 4,000 home­less in a for­mer foot­ball sta­dium in the sub­urb of Petionville into a giant latrine, Romelus scoffed at the idea of moving.

“They can­not decide for us, we want to see first where they want to move us. We don’t want to go to Croix-des-Bouquets, it is too far. We want to live close to here. We are going to stay here what­ever happens.”

Behind Romelus were the only tents capa­ble of resist­ing the rains, but these were reserved for chil­dren and babies — one was born overnight dur­ing some of the heav­i­est rains since the quake, which killed more than 220,000 people.

Here, anger and dis­con­tent­ment appeared to be grow­ing against the aid work­ers who the Haitians said paid few vis­its and asked many ques­tions with­out pro­vid­ing solutions.

Back at the UN logis­tics base, though, coor­di­na­tors were pos­i­tive they could stave off a sec­ond dis­as­ter and said they were very con­fi­dent they would meet a self-imposed May 1 dead­line to pro­vide tarps and tents to all in need.

“In terms of shel­ter we are right on tar­get with the dis­tri­b­u­tion to date,” said OCHA spokes­woman France Hur­tubise. “We have cov­ered 63 per­cent of the peo­ple affected, 163,000 house­holds have received tarps or tents for a total of 814,620 people.”

As teams from the Inter­na­tional Orga­ni­za­tion for Migra­tion labo­ri­ously trawled the camps to reg­is­ter the par­tic­u­lars of each fam­ily, emer­gency plans were being final­ized for flood and hur­ri­cane prevention.

But Knut­son admit­ted that all they could really do was pro­vide alter­na­tives and that it would be largely up to the Haitians them­selves when the del­uges come.

“When the rain starts the pop­u­la­tion will start mak­ing their own deci­sions about where they want to take them­selves. Indi­vid­ual fam­i­lies will make their own choices about where they want to go.

“You have to give them options and try to help the largest amount of people.

“We have time. We don’t have much, but we have some time to pre­pare bet­ter and inform peo­ple of what their choices are.”