By Bev­erly Bell, Huff­in­g­ton Post

Colette Lespinasse is direc­tor of the Sup­port Group for the Repa­tri­ated and Refugees (GARR, by its French acronym) in Port-au-Prince. Here are her thoughts on solu­tions to the cri­sis in which 1.9 mil­lion home­less peo­ple are still liv­ing in pre­car­i­ous tents and other makeshift struc­tures, six months after the earth­quake and almost two months into hur­ri­cane sea­son. Colette talks both about the need for the gov­ern­ment to guar­an­tee the human right to hous­ing, and how grass­roots orga­ni­za­tions can cre­ate homes in liv­able communities.

We hear that in the camps there are groups who have started orga­niz­ing them­selves to assert their demands around hous­ing as a right. They’re think­ing about alter­na­tives and start­ing to put pres­sure on the gov­ern­ment to respect those rights.

The first thing to do is some edu­ca­tion so more peo­ple under­stand that hous­ing is a right. Sec­ond is to help peo­ple orga­nize to demand these rights from the state. We need a pop­u­lar move­ment to mobi­lize around the ques­tion of hous­ing. I think the work that lies before us in the next year is to orga­nize these dif­fer­ent groups into a larger move­ment in Haiti. Because the gov­ern­ment isn’t talk­ing about it at all. But a great mobi­liza­tion of peo­ple would make the gov­ern­ment pri­or­i­tize this.

I don’t think there’s a coun­try in this world that can lift itself up if the peo­ple them­selves don’t mobi­lize first. We saw this after the earth­quake: the group who did the most, who responded and mobi­lized, was the Hait­ian peo­ple. And they did it with­out any lead­ers. Today the lead­ers of the state haven’t yet called upon the Hait­ian peo­ple, either within the coun­try or in the dias­pora. And that’s the great­est resource we have. That’s where the lead­ers could find solu­tions for many prob­lems that exist today.

There have been a bunch of [inter­na­tional donor] con­fer­ences — at least four — that have been held about Haiti, but the real con­fer­ence needs to hap­pen here with the peo­ple, with all the grass­roots sec­tors: peas­ant farm­ers, peo­ple from the shan­ty­towns, etc. The gov­ern­ment could say, “Look at these prob­lems we have, we can do this, we can’t do this.” And the peo­ple could say, “This is what we can do.” This would let us have con­sen­sus amongst ourselves.

Peo­ple need some­where to live to stay out of the rain, so they don’t get sick, so they don’t get wet, so they can sleep at night. That’s their right. It’s the same as hav­ing the right to eat; peo­ple need to eat or they’ll die.

This right was already vio­lated in Haiti before the earth­quake. When you look at the [pre­car­i­ous] kinds of houses we had, that’s why so many peo­ple died dur­ing the earth­quake. But that right has been even more vio­lated since the earth­quake. The sit­u­a­tion dis­placed peo­ple are liv­ing in, espe­cially in Port-au-Prince and other cities that were touched by the earth­quake, is unac­cept­able. These are not con­di­tions in which any­one should live, like liv­ing in the mud after it rains, on top of each other, under a bunch of tents where air doesn’t cir­cu­late. There are peo­ple in camps right near us who’ve died; they’ve had a heart attack in the night where they couldn’t breathe. Also, the police have been kick­ing peo­ple out from under tents in order to make them go live under [a new set of] tents.

Right now, there’s no social pro­tec­tion for peo­ple who’ve lost all their means, who don’t have pur­chas­ing power any­more, nor for those peo­ple who have become more vul­ner­a­ble, such as chil­dren — there are a lot of chil­dren who have lost their par­ents — nor for peo­ple who’ve become hand­i­capped. There are a lot of peo­ple who can’t work any­more, who’ve lost a limb, and they’re rely­ing on oth­ers now.

Hunger is a big prob­lem, too, since they cut off all the food dis­tri­b­u­tion after March 31. As far as potable water goes, too, there has been a bit of an effort, so peo­ple can find a lit­tle water to drink — even though they’ve announced they’re going to cut that off, too, that peo­ple will have to buy water from now on.

We can also tell you that we’ve recorded many cases of vio­lence, espe­cially vio­lence against women, like men beat­ing their wives and cases of sex­ual abuse in the camps.

There are camps that have 60,000 peo­ple, 70,000 peo­ple. That’s a town. The police have to orga­nize them­selves some­how to watch over these com­mu­ni­ties, but they’re nowhere vis­i­ble. Peo­ple are com­plain­ing that they never see the state author­i­ties vis­it­ing the camps.

We need a spe­cial pro­gram of pro­tec­tion so that those peo­ple can live. The gov­ern­ment bears pri­mary respon­si­bil­ity because the Hait­ian peo­ple depend on them, and they need to safe­guard the rights of their peo­ple. The oth­ers — the U.N., other inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tions — they can come give sup­port, but they can’t take the place of the state. Some­times we won­der if the gov­ern­ment really exists. You don’t see it, you don’t hear its voice, you don’t see it in action.

At the inter­na­tional level, there are funds that would allow peo­ple to find hous­ing with­out spend­ing a lot of money on inter­est. For all the money the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity claims they have for Haiti, for all those promises of funds, they ought to invest it in housing.

We in GARR are look­ing for part­ners from other coun­tries, like com­mu­nity orga­ni­za­tions in the Domini­can Repub­lic and other parts of Latin Amer­ica who have put pres­sure on their own lead­ers to fix these prob­lems. We’re learn­ing about the expe­ri­ences of orga­ni­za­tions in other coun­tries, the solu­tions they’ve found for housing.

For exam­ple, there’s an inter­na­tional move­ment called Desa­lo­jos Zero, Zero Evic­tions. It says that the gov­ern­ment doesn’t have the right to evict peo­ple, to throw peo­ple out of a place if they have nowhere else to live. The same move­ment pro­motes peo­ple get­ting homes because that’s their right.

[Beyond what the gov­ern­ment and inter­na­tional com­mu­nity should do,] we at GARR want to pur­sue some­thing called mutual aid hous­ing. It’s coop­er­a­tive aid, where the very poor pool their money together and pull their inter­nal resources together to resolve their own prob­lems. The Hait­ian gov­ern­ment could also get for­eign funds to put land at the dis­posal of home­less peo­ple. Fam­i­lies could con­tribute to build­ing their houses; they could find finan­cial sup­port to buy build­ing mate­ri­als so they could begin to rebuild, doing coop­er­a­tive con­struc­tion with their own labor. The state could give them means — either low-interest credit, or giv­ing peo­ple access to inter­na­tional funds.

Mutual aid hous­ing isn’t just hous­ing. It’s the cre­ation of com­mu­ni­ties, because we need houses plus the means to live. Peo­ple would have ser­vices like edu­ca­tion and health, and the means to start small busi­nesses. We’ve seen places where peo­ple have done this and every­thing is coop­er­a­tive. Peo­ple come together to cre­ate schools, kinder­gartens, etc., and you end up with a vil­lage in which peo­ple sup­port one another in order to live. That’s the idea we’d like to promote.

In Puerto Rico there’s a group that does cul­tural activ­i­ties, and they’ve already raised $30,000. With $30,000, we could build three or four houses to serve as a model. We could expand this, with the Hait­ian dias­pora and with sol­i­dar­ity orga­ni­za­tions, to show that it’s pos­si­ble to con­front the hous­ing prob­lem. That is, if there is polit­i­cal will, if there is mobi­liza­tion, if there is solidarity.

And another thing: there are peo­ple who want to make their knowl­edge avail­able to this move­ment. We’ve found a retired pro­fes­sor in Puerto Rico who goes into com­mu­ni­ties and helps peo­ple cre­ate con­struc­tion plans. Uni­ver­si­ties here could become part of this move­ment, help­ing com­mu­ni­ties with their knowl­edge so we wouldn’t have to pay a bunch of engi­neers. We could pay two or three spe­cial­ized builders, and then with the strength of the peo­ple, we could pur­chase mate­ri­als to help solve the hous­ing problem.

Also, peo­ple could put the brakes on what we don’t want, for exam­ple spec­u­la­tion around hous­ing. We hear there are a lot of big for­eign com­pa­nies who want to come build houses because Haiti has become a huge mar­ket. We pro­pose that those mutual aid houses, res­i­dents couldn’t sell them or engage in spec­u­la­tion with them.

I hope that orga­ni­za­tions that are in sol­i­dar­ity with the Hait­ian peo­ple will begin to mobi­lize more. Peo­ple in Haiti can’t take this any­more. We’re hop­ing for ongo­ing sup­port from every­one who sup­ported us just after the earth­quake. There must be a move­ment to place more pres­sure on the U.N., to ask them what they are going to do here, because they have great respon­si­bil­ity for what is going to hap­pen. Every­one, please con­tinue to fol­low what hap­pens here in Haiti, because now is when we need you most.

Bev­erly Bell has worked with Hait­ian social move­ments for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walk­ing on Fire: Hait­ian Women’s Sto­ries of Sur­vival and Resis­tance. She coor­di­nates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which pro­motes social and eco­nomic alter­na­tives. She is also asso­ciate fel­low of the Insti­tute for Pol­icy Studies.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/beverly-bell/the-right-to-housing-in-h_b_659321.html