By FRANK BAJAK, Asso­ci­ated Press

PAPETTE, Haiti — Unlike the vast major­ity of earth­quake vic­tims still crowded into squalid camps, the sim­ple farm­ers of this hard-hit vil­lage have rea­son to hope as hur­ri­cane sea­son looms.

Tran­si­tional hous­ing now rises on the foun­da­tions of cin­derblock homes pul­ver­ized by the Jan. 12 quake, framed in pressure-treated yel­low pine, roofed in rust­proof paint-coated gal­va­nized steel and anchored in newly poured concrete.

The Dutch relief group, Cor­daid, expects to fin­ish 150 of the dwellings with sturdy tar­pau­lin walls by next week in this vil­lage over­look­ing a mango-lined lagoon. They are among the first of more than 130,000 semi-permanent shel­ters that inter­na­tional relief groups hope to put up in the earth­quake zone in com­ing months.

But con­struc­tion of the shel­ters — more than a tent but less than a house — has been excru­ci­at­ingly slow, with barely 400 or so completed.

Two major fac­tors impede the roll­out: the crawl­ing pace of rub­ble removal in Port-au-Prince, where a third of the city is still buried in quake debris, and Haiti’s vex­ing land issues.

Relief agen­cies can’t build shel­ters in the jammed tent camps that sprung up after the quake on every avail­able inch of pub­lic land in Port-au-Prince, as well as on the pri­vate prop­erty of schools and businesses.

Nor can they build on most plots where the home­less pre­vi­ously resided because about 80 per­cent of them were renters, and the agen­cies fear the intended recip­i­ents would only be evicted by landowners.

Papette farmer Andre Sen­voy, 57, the rare Hait­ian who holds title to the tract where he has been liv­ing, grins as appren­tice car­pen­ters ham­mer together his new shel­ter next to the makeshift cor­ru­gated steel shel­ter he fash­ioned from the remains of his quake-shattered home.

“The peo­ple in Port-au-Prince need to pray more so they can also get lucky,” Sen­voy remarks, a straw hat shad­ing his gray-stubbled face from a blis­ter­ing mid­day sun.

Because of land own­er­ship issues, only a few dozen tran­si­tional homes have gone up in the cap­i­tal, where more than half of the 1.3 mil­lion home­less still live in tents and flimsy struc­tures fash­ioned mostly of tarps and bed sheets.

For now, the place where the most tran­si­tional shel­ters are slated to go up is a dusty relo­ca­tion camp 45 min­utes north of the cap­i­tal at Corail Ces­se­lesse on land that Haiti’s gov­ern­ment appro­pri­ated March 19.

Relief orga­ni­za­tions don’t like rel­e­gat­ing the dis­placed to relo­ca­tion camps far removed from friends, fam­i­lies and jobs. But agen­cies have scoured the cap­i­tal and its sub­urbs for avail­able land with pal­try results.

The Inter­na­tional Fed­er­a­tion of the Red Cross and Red Cres­cent Soci­eties, which leads the shel­ter coor­di­na­tion, has yet to build a sin­gle tran­si­tional dwelling.

“I’m very sorry to say that after weeks and weeks and weeks of try­ing, we still don’t have any­where to build,” Red Cross spokesman Alex Wyn­ter said. “We have a pipeline, some kits in our base camp. But we still don’t have any­where to put shelters.”

Instead of build­ing, relief engi­neers are work­ing full time try­ing to iden­tify how to put shel­ters up in quake-ravaged neigh­bor­hoods with­out exac­er­bat­ing land disputes.

“If you don’t do this cor­rectly you can cre­ate riots,” said Alex Cois­sac of the Inter­na­tional Orga­ni­za­tion for Migration.

Land­lords have good rea­son to fear the worst. The shel­ters — though mod­estly sized, rang­ing from 12 to 18 square meters (120 to 180 square feet), and with­out plumb­ing or san­i­ta­tion — can be made into per­ma­nent abodes with­out much work.

They amount to palaces for many here in the West­ern Hemisphere’s poor­est coun­try, where squat­ter set­tle­ments were already strewn across the cap­i­tal before the quake, and the frag­ile legal sys­tem was bur­dened by mul­ti­ple claims for the same parcels of land.

Cor­daid lead archi­tect Henk Mei­jerink expects many Haitians to line the out­side his $1,500 shel­ters with chicken wire and plas­ter, obtain­ing greater dura­bil­ity and insu­la­tion against the trop­i­cal heat.

“We have found that upward of 65 per­cent of tran­si­tional shel­ters get improved into per­ma­nent shel­ter,” said Chuck Setchell, an urban plan­ner and shel­ter expert at the U.S. Agency for Inter­na­tional Devel­op­ment who has worked on other disasters.

Con­struc­tion has not yet begun at the Corail Ces­se­lesse relo­ca­tion camp. It will take about a month to fin­ish the first 500 shel­ters because the land must first be lev­eled and grav­eled, Cois­sac said.

Even in Papette, not every­one who lost a home is get­ting a new one.

Joanne Deldeis­erser, 27, sits for­lornly on a bunched up blan­ket at the foot of a nearly fin­ished Cor­daid shel­ter, shar­ing gruel with three filthy tod­dlers naked from the waist down.

It belongs to a friend in whose quake-cracked home Deldeis­erser and her chil­dren are living.

“I asked them to make me a house like this,” she says, gaz­ing up at the fresh-smelling pine skele­ton. “(But) my name was not on the list.”

That’s because she and her hus­band, a farmer killed in the quake, were liv­ing on rented land.

“I’m sit­ting here at the mercy of God, hop­ing he’ll do some­thing,” she moans.

Asso­ci­ated Press Writer Evens Sanon con­tributed to this report from Port-au-Prince.

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