By Sue Mont­gomery, Mon­treal Gazetter

Six months after the earth­quake, life in Haiti’s 1,300 camps is crowded, unsan­i­tary and increas­ingly dan­ger­ous. Sue Mont­gomery goes back to Port-au-Prince and finds elec­tric­ity, water and schools, but lit­tle real shel­ter in the makeshift set­tle­ments. And for most peo­ple, proper hous­ing is years away.

A lineup for papers needed to get food rations forms at a new camp on the out­skirts of Port-au-Prince. The camp has no shade and is a bus ride away from schools and mar­kets. Pho­to­graph by: CARL HENRYJEAN-BAPTISTE FREELANCE, The Gazette

Port-au-Prince– A rau­cous crowd surges from between two rows of tightly packed tents in Camp Dadadou, and from the mid­dle of it, a young woman stum­bles, strug­gling to regain her bal­ance and escape the chant­ing mob.

Haitians of all ages jeer and push, some laugh­ing, as the mass of sweat­ing bod­ies moves along the perime­ter of the camp. Unable to escape her cap­tors, the young woman falls to the ground, and, after either being hit on the head with a wooden bat or slam­ming her skull against the con­crete, her eyes roll back in her head and she falls uncon­scious, her thin, soaked body con­vuls­ing until it forms just a stiff board.

A few declare her dead. Sev­eral cheer the rumour, announc­ing that jus­tice is served.

Most head back to their tents, the day’s excite­ment over in what has become a mis­er­able, bor­ing exis­tence. Only one –an 11-year-old orphaned boy who looks as if he might cry –asks whether she will survive.

After six months of liv­ing first under bed­sheets and tow­els, and now inside torn, swel­ter­ing and soaked tents suit­able at best for week­end camp­ing, the stress in Haiti’s crowded and unsan­i­tary camps is begin­ning to grow. Nor­mally patient Haitians, already trau­ma­tized by the mas­sive loss of life in January’s unprece­dented earth­quake, are start­ing to lose it.

“I have to leave Haiti,” says Genevieve Jou­bert, a nurse liv­ing with about 10,500 oth­ers on the for­mer soc­cer pitch now known as camp Dadadou. “But there’s nowhere to go.”

Jou­bert has deliv­ered 126 babies in her camp alone, and is try­ing to find care for 24 orphans whose par­ents could very well be liv­ing in another camp, unaware that their chil­dren are still alive.

Around Port-au-Prince, which, six months after the Jan. 12 quake, still looks like a war zone, and in nearby Jacmel and Legane, about 1,300 camps erected by hun­dreds of thou­sands of Haitians in the hours after their lives were shat­tered, are becom­ing per­ma­nent slums.

Late after­noon tor­ren­tial rains soak belong­ings and leave lake-size pud­dles in which mos­qui­toes breed, then spread malaria. Deep, raspy coughs can be heard every­where. Sca­bies and other infec­tions trans­form children’s soft skin into irri­tat­ing red bumpy rashes. Bel­lies are swelling and hair turn­ing orange from mal­nu­tri­tion. Vom­it­ing and diar­rhea are as com­mon as flies.

While injuries from the quake have healed into scars, there are count­less acci­dents from the chaotic liv­ing con­di­tions –tod­dlers falling into vats of boil­ing rice or beans, peo­ple break­ing limbs on chunks of con­crete and wire, entire fam­i­lies poi­soned by car­bon monox­ide as they cook in their tents.

Around the city, the stench of rot­ting bod­ies has been replaced by the stench of rot­ting piles of garbage. Many of the destroyed build­ings, as well as those on the verge of col­lapse, are spray-painted with frus­tra­tion: “Down with Preval,” one reads. “No more used U.S. shit.” Demon­stra­tions are becom­ing more com­mon as elec­tions, slated for Novem­ber, draw closer.

“Vic­tims left their tents and tarps to find them­selves in new tents in iso­lated areas where basic ser­vices are hard, if not impos­si­ble, to get.” National Human Rights Defence Network

The good­will that was pal­pa­ble in the first weeks fol­low­ing the quake, with strangers help­ing strangers, has been replaced by argu­ments over hand­outs from the myr­iad NGOs here, and crime is on the rise.

In the first three months after the quake, police arrested 2,250 peo­ple, a quar­ter of them for vio­lent sex­ual crimes, accord­ing to one human-rights NGO. There have been three deaths from ston­ing, 133 from bul­lets and five police offi­cers have been killed. This week, the National Human Rights Defence Net­work reported that crimes like rape, mur­ders, armed rob­beries, car theft and kid­nap­pings con­tinue to increase. In June alone, there were at least 27 mur­ders, the Hait­ian NGO said.

“There was a sense of sol­i­dar­ity after the quake, but now peo­ple are going back to look­ing out for them­selves,” said Alfred Gibbs, of the Hait­ian NGO. “Food is no longer being dis­trib­uted to many, so those who don’t have work or money are going back to crime.”

The World Cup brought a wel­come diver­sion, with Brazil­ian and Argen­tine flags propped on tents and rub­ble. Oth­er­wise, peo­ple spend their days play­ing domi­noes, wash­ing cloth­ing, cook­ing and dry­ing things out. Worse, their liv­ing space is unlikely to change much before next sum­mer, and even then, it still won’t be per­ma­nent housing.

Imo­gen Wall, from the UN’s office for the Coor­di­na­tion of Human­i­tar­ian Affairs, said it’s impos­si­ble to say how long the tent camps will be in place.

“In Aceh after the tsunami, it took over two years, but in Haiti, the chal­lenges are, if any­thing, even more complex.

“The best esti­mates at present sug­gest that it will take years just to clear the rub­ble from the city, let alone start large-scale reconstruction.”

Approx­i­mately 19 mil­lion cubic metres of debris, or enough to fill the Rogers Cen­tre in Toronto nearly 12 times, must be removed. Accord­ing to the Cana­dian Red Cross, it took two years to clear the debris from the World Trade Cen­tre, and that was with mod­ern equip­ment. In Haiti, most of it is being cleared with small shov­els and wheelbarrows.

“It’s going to be much harder (than in Aceh),” said Jean-Philipe Tizi, who was the Cana­dian Red Cross’s direc­tor of oper­a­tions after the tsunami and is its direc­tor of pro­grams in Haiti. “There is a lack of local resources, it’s an urban set­ting and it’s much less developed.”

While the level of aid is uneven, most of the camps seem to have the basics: elec­tric­ity (albeit spotty), water, chem­i­cal toi­lets, med­ical clin­ics and schools, thanks to non­govern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tions like Oxfam, Medecins Sans Fron­tieres, Part­ners in Health and UNICEF. As well, UNICEF has reg­is­tered 1,667 kids who were sep­a­rated from their par­ents. Of those, 225 have been reunited thanks to a hotline.

The main, and seem­ingly insur­mount­able, chal­lenge, remains ade­quate shelter.

Instead of wait­ing for what most believe will never come, many Haitians, with char­ac­ter­is­tic resource­ful­ness and out of sheer need, are mak­ing the best of the intol­er­a­ble sit­u­a­tion. Some have begun build­ing more solid shel­ters, using wooden poles and tarps, while oth­ers are rebuild­ing in the fash­ion that con­tributed to this dis­as­ter in the first place –bricks and mor­tar, which tend to per­form badly in earthquakes.

In the teem­ing camp that sprang up on the Pietionville golf course — some esti­mates set the pop­u­la­tion at 60,000 –Anne-Suze Den­es­tant, 24, is get­ting on with life.

She pours water over the soapy head of a woman crouched over a plas­tic basin and runs a hand through the tan­gled mass. Her other arm is gone at the shoulder.

“At least I’m alive,” shrugs Den­es­tant with a smile, when asked how she’s get­ting along with the miss­ing limb. “The other peo­ple I was trapped with under the rub­ble are dead.”

Behind her, posters of buff soc­cer play­ers hang on the walls of the tent that has been trans­formed into a beauty salon, offer­ing hair care, pedi­cures and manicures.

Johanne Joseph, who’s also 24, set up the salon just weeks after the quake hit and claims to be mak­ing more now than before the dis­as­ter. “No one’s help­ing us with food, water or tents,” she said.

Up the sandbag-lined path, a hand­ful of peo­ple crouch on the ground, shoo­ing a dark swarm of flies from the raw fish and chicken dis­played for sale. Char­coal ven­dors, their hands black­ened from their wares, stack the mea­gre bricks into buck­ets. Corn roasts over coals next to piles of rice and beans.

“We need houses,” said Jean Lau­rent Nel­son, hold­ing his 2-year-old and with his 12-year-old clutch­ing his leg.

“The NGOs all come here and take pic­tures, but noth­ing happens.”

The sit­u­a­tion is rem­i­nis­cent of post-tsunami Indonesia.

By Feb­ru­ary 2007, three years after that dis­as­ter, the Cana­dian Red Cross had not built a sin­gle house, despite a bud­get of $300 mil­lion U.S. to do so, accord­ing to a report pub­lished by Uplink Banda Aceh, a local NGO that sup­ported com­mu­nity orga­ni­za­tions in 23 vil­lages as they tried to rebuild. Uplink, on the other hand, had con­structed over 3,300 houses.

Tizi said by 2009, they’d built 6,000, after hav­ing done thor­ough eval­u­a­tions to make sure the land and struc­tures would with­stand future earthquakes.

Luci­enne Lussier opens the flap on her tent to show the ditch

she dug in the earth to keep the heavy rain­wa­ter from gath­er­ing in what has been her home for months. She says she is 58, but looks about 80. One of her two daugh­ters squats, stir­ring a steam­ing pot that wob­bles on a stand over a few embers.

“The future doesn’t look good,” Lussier says sadly, after explain­ing her hus­band was killed in the quake. “We would like to leave here, but …” and she shrugs before turn­ing away.

Recently, about 1,300 fam­i­lies were moved to another camp in the out­skirts of Port-au-Prince on a des­o­late piece of land offered by the gov­ern­ment, devoid of trees or any form of shade, and a bus ride away from school, church and mar­kets. Instead of houses, they were once again put in tents, pitched on rocks and peb­bles. They felt they’d been duped.

“We thought mov­ing would be bet­ter, but it’s not at all,” said Marcelin Coupere as he stood in the boil­ing hot sun, sweat bead­ing on his fore­head and neck.

“There’s a lot of money that came in from the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity so we should get the min­i­mum,” he says, as a grow­ing crowd gath­ers around him, nod­ding in agreement.

“I under­stand there are prob­lems, but there’s no polit­i­cal will. To speak of a gov­ern­ment here is absurd.”

Another camp of tents, also with­out trees or elec­tric­ity, has sat empty for three months, after Haitians refused to move there from the squalid camp in front of the ruined pres­i­den­tial palace.

A report by the National Human Rights Defence Net­work is crit­i­cal of such relocations.

“This has changed noth­ing for the vic­tims’ sit­u­a­tion, and if any­thing, wors­ened it,” it reads. “Vic­tims left their tents and tarps to find them­selves in new tents in iso­lated areas where basic ser­vices are hard, if not impos­si­ble, to get.”

Up a hill in the golf course camp, 21-year-old June Laguerre straight­ens the rain­bow of nail pol­ish bot­tles neatly lined up on a wooden board propped between two poles.

“Imag­ine liv­ing in a tent,” she says. “It’s hot and now they want to move us to another tent.

“There are no bod­ies on the street any­more, but it’s as if there are.”

So far, only 2,071 tran­si­tional shel­ters –a step up from tents but not yet per­ma­nent hous­ing –have been built to house 10,355 peo­ple, mostly out­side the cap­i­tal. By next sum­mer, it’s hoped there will be 125,000 such shel­ters for 625,000 peo­ple –not even half the num­ber left homeless.

“If you want to build shel­ters, you need the per­mis­sion of the landowner and in a lot of cases, it’s not clear who the owner is, or the owner can’t be found because, for exam­ple, he died,” said Timo Luege, of the shel­ter clus­ter, which is com­prised of some 70 agen­cies work­ing on the issue. There are 12 such groups, each one try­ing to deal with a spe­cific aspect of the disaster.

The min­istry of pub­lic works is in the process of mark­ing about a mil­lion build­ings with either green, yel­low or red spray paint, inform­ing the own­ers or ten­ants that the build­ing is either safe to move back into, needs repairs or has to come down completely.

It’s hoped that many of the home­less will either move back into their homes, or into the houses of neigh­bours and friends, less­en­ing the num­ber of tran­si­tional houses needed.

But as the large orga­ni­za­tions hold their meet­ings and write

their reports, smaller ones have hooked up with pri­vate firms and are forg­ing ahead, plan or no plan.

Eric Klein, founder of Cal­i­for­ni­abased NGO Can-Do, grew impa­tient with the large NGOs and instead hooked up with a small Ari­zona con­struc­tion com­pany. Within three days, with the help of locals, they would build a hurricane-and earthquake-proof women’s clinic in the golf course camp.

“We would love to sit down with other NGOS, but it just seems there are so many meet­ings and a lot of talk, but nobody’s pulling the trig­ger,” he said, sweat drench­ing the neck­line of his torn T-shirt. “The tran­si­tional homes they’re mak­ing with the wood aren’t a solu­tion. It’s a Band-Aid.

“Two years from now, what are they going to do, sit around and have more meet­ings? It’s a waste of our money.”

Klein, who was also involved in the after­maths of the tsunami and Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina, is fed up with the bureau­cracy of larger organizations.

“I have come to believe there is too much money chang­ing hands among these char­i­ties, and that the full sum donated as our ini­tial act of com­pas­sion, is not the same amount being used to pro­vide aid to the needy,” he says on his web­site. “I have dis­cov­ered that these NGOs are part of a highly unreg­u­lated busi­ness sec­tor, and in my opin­ion, we need to start mak­ing non-profit orga­ni­za­tions account­able for their actions, or more impor­tantly, lack of them.”

Behind him, a cement mixer churned the grey sub­stance while an army of Hait­ian men slapped it on the Sty­ro­foam walls –a design that would pro­vide the clinic with insu­la­tion against the swel­ter­ing heat.

Fran­cis Meram’s Cre­ative Com­pos­ite Solu­tions com­pany donated the mate­ri­als for the clinic and he says houses –either in a tem­po­rary or per­ma­nent loca­tion –could be built the same way, and would last 1,500 years.

“We hear talk of tran­si­tional shel­ters, but those are basi­cally glo­ri­fied tents that they want these peo­ple to live in for the next two to three years,” he said. “So it’s really upset­ting to see that noth­ing has been done with all the money that’s been here, and these NGOs and other orga­ni­za­tions aren’t doing more.”

The larger inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tions are used to the crit­i­cism that they aren’t doing enough, fast enough. But Oxfam, like oth­ers, says it’s dif­fi­cult to move for­ward until the gov­ern­ment puts peo­ple in charge of the recon­struc­tion plan drawn up at a donor’s con­fer­ence in New York in March.

“We know an end­less pot of money doesn’t cre­ate a solu­tion,” said Oxfam’s Julie Schin­dall, admit­ting to wide­spread frus­tra­tion among the thou­sands of NGOs in the coun­try. “No amount of dol­lars is going to find a solu­tion for 1.5 mil­lion home­less peo­ple. Plan­ning is going to do that.”

The mil­lions of dol­lars raised in the first weeks after the quake

is stag­ger­ing, but so is the amount needed.

In the six months since the earth­quake, Oxfam has spent a third of the $90 mil­lion it raised for earth­quake relief and has stopped col­lect­ing specif­i­cally for Haiti. MSF raised $13 mil­lion in Canada for Haiti, which was absorbed into the $93 mil­lion the global orga­ni­za­tion expects to spend this year. To date, they’ve spent an esti­mated $15 mil­lion. Red Cross raised $196 mil­lion in Canada alone, with $54 mil­lion of that com­ing from the fed­eral gov­ern­ment. They spent just over $43 mil­lion in the first three months.

World Vision raised $36 mil­lion in Canada, includ­ing an $8.3-million grant from Ottawa. As of the end of May, it has spent about $66.4 mil­lion U.S. in Haiti — approx­i­mately 35 per cent of the total it raised worldwide.

Many Haitians crit­i­cize them for spend­ing the money on large, air-conditioned SUVs, restau­rants, high-priced for­eign con­sul­tants and engi­neers, as well as nice liv­ing quar­ters. NGOs have also pro­vided plenty of employ­ment, hir­ing locals as dri­vers, trans­la­tors, and office work­ers. Many are also offer­ing cash for work, and small teams of Haitians, dressed in iden­ti­cal T-shirts and hats sport­ing the name of an NGO, can be seen around town shov­el­ling rub­ble in to wheelbarrows.

But while the pro­gram injects about $175,000 into the local econ­omy daily, the National Human Rights Defence Net­work says women are being forced to per­form sex acts in exchange for get­ting hired on the pro­gram or to have their con­tracts renewed.

“What’s more, the jobs have no impact on the envi­ron­ment or on the econ­omy,” the report says. “Streets are still dirty, sew­ers still clogged, rub­ble strewn along the roads, obstruct­ing traf­fic and annoy­ing passersby.”

The same effect was felt in Aceh where, accord­ing to the report by Uplink, orga­ni­za­tions flooded local com­mu­ni­ties with cash and under­mined their abil­ity to ” deter­mine their own out­comes and develop them­selves independently.

“This sense of pow­er­less­ness also encour­aged com­mu­ni­ties to take all that they could and to see exter­nally pro­vided funds/aid as their right.”

And just like after the tsunami, jobs in cleanup or con­struc­tion are short-lived, mak­ing peo­ple won­der what they will do once the NGOs inevitably move on, and there is no long-term devel­op­ment in indus­try or agriculture.

Win­zor Mon­uma got a six-month con­tract with Part­ners in Health to help out in one of the camps’ med­ical clin­ics and has no idea what he’ll do when it’s up.

“It’s hot, it’s rain­ing and we have no shel­ter,” he said, some­how man­ag­ing to smile despite the mis­ery around him.

Six months after quake, Haitians still wait in swel­ter­ing tents Ade­quate shel­ter is the main chal­lenge for Haiti. To view a photo gallery by Carl Henry Jean-Baptiste of life in the Port-au-Prince camps, go to mon­tre­al­gazette. com

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