Wrapped in a pearly white faux-satin sheet, Key­lyne Zephir, 25, hauls the belong­ings of her two small chil­dren through the mud. Care­fully try­ing not to dirty their Sun­day best, she and her kids trek through the rain-drenched trails of a tent city that was once the Pétionville golf and coun­try club. They are hur­ry­ing to catch a bus to Corail — and per­haps a bet­ter life than the one they have led since the earthquake.

About 12 miles north of the cap­i­tal Port-au-Prince, Corail is the first tem­po­rary set­tle­ment where aid agen­cies have set up shel­ters, water-distribution points, san­i­ta­tion, a clinic and a pri­mary school. The new camp is set up to shel­ter the home­less and pro­tect them from the flash floods and mud­slides that often afflict Haiti dur­ing the rainy season.

The tents of Corail are set up in a clear open space sur­rounded by moun­tains. There is no sign of the con­ges­tion of the cap­i­tal, just the sound of U.N. heavy machin­ery prepar­ing the adja­cent ter­ri­tory. The ground is cov­ered in riverbed rock to pre­vent flood­ing dur­ing the rainy sea­son and the hur­ri­cane sea­son, which begins June 1. On a tour of the camp, Pres­i­dent René Pré­val popped his head into one of the pod­like tents and called it a tente de luxe. “The camp has a min­i­mum dura­tion of three to five years,” says Claude Nadon, pro­gram man­ager for shel­ters at the United Nations Office for Project Ser­vices, which plans to make Corail a model for future set­tle­ments to help house the esti­mated 1 mil­lion made home­less by the quake. The tem­po­rary shel­ters will also become more per­ma­nent struc­tures. Pré­val adds that there are plans to develop the area fur­ther. “We are going to have big fac­to­ries nearby. It will cre­ate 30,000 jobs,” says Préval.

The news that Corail is tak­ing res­i­dents passes from tent to tent at the old coun­try club like an elec­tric cur­rent. Some Haitians are ecsta­tic to make the move, some skep­ti­cal, and some like Zephir say they have no other option. “We have no choice because we’re liv­ing in a place that doesn’t belong to us,” says Zephir, whose house col­lapsed dur­ing the 7.2-magnitude earth­quake. “If you don’t leave here, they are going to kick you out.” 

Catholic Relief Ser­vices (CRS) has already reg­is­tered about 1,000 fam­i­lies who intend to live in Corail, and in the com­ing week and a half, four buses an hour will be tak­ing camp dwellers to the new set­tle­ment. LeAnn Hager, 40, Camp Coor­di­na­tor for CRS in Corail, says that no one is being forcibly moved. “There is no one being pushed to make a par­tic­u­lar deci­sion,” she says. Bolina Clervil, 33, has already reg­is­tered her two sons and elderly mother. Sleep­ing on the dirt ground of their box­like makeshift tent in the golf club, she says, is unbear­able, par­tic­u­larly when it rains. “When the rain comes, it gives us prob­lems. This land will kill peo­ple. This is our oppor­tu­nity to leave,” says Clervil.

There are those who are still wait­ing to hear more details. Astorvel Jean Ray­mond says he has nine chil­dren to sup­port and can’t be left in the mid­dle of nowhere. “If I’m hun­gry, where am I going to eat? If I need to work, where can I find work? I have my peo­ple here, and I won’t find my peo­ple there,” says Jean Ray­mond, 40, not com­forted with the promise of fac­tory jobs to come. That too both­ered Jumelia Aris­tide, 46, when she arrived in Corail. But now she says the dis­tance doesn’t bother her, and she has already mapped out in her mind how to make the jour­ney back to the city to find work.