By Fred Grimm, McClatchy News

Signs of per­ma­nence are tak­ing hold in impromptu camps

An uniden­ti­fied man walks past a row of tents at the Corail-Cesselesse camp in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Six months after an earth­quake killed an esti­mated 230,000 peo­ple, many Haitians are strug­gling to rebuild their lives. (Bren­dan Hoff­man / Getty Images)

Port-Au-Prince, Haiti — The con­cept of tem­po­rary, amid Haiti’s teem­ing refugee camps, has mor­phed into a dis­mal vari­a­tion of forever.

A del­uge of earth­quake vic­tims, shocked and ter­ri­fied, spilled out of the city’s ruins after the dis­as­ter and found refuge in parks, school yards, soc­cer pitches, gar­den patches, almost any pri­vate or pub­lic space they could find in their tum­bled down city.

Their flimsy tents, fab­ri­cated from bed sheets, tat­tered plas­tic, sticks and strings, rein­forced the assump­tion that these impromptu set­tle­ments, 1,300 of them, would surely van­ish before the sum­mer rains could wash them away.

Six months later, the dis­pos­sessed remain, in tran­si­tion to nowhere, with nowhere to go. With a mil­lion or so (no one really knows) still occu­py­ing what had been the city’s open spaces, a return to nor­malcy has become unimaginable.

In the Champs de Mars, a once-compelling 42-acre net­work of parks and plazas with shaded lawns, a band­shell and amphithe­ater by the National Palace, the sprawl of bed sheet tents erected just after the Jan. 12 earth­quake has evolved into a dense shanty set­tle­ment of crude but markedly more sub­stan­tial dwellings. Thou­sands of quake sur­vivors have fab­ri­cated lit­tle one-room shacks fash­ioned from lum­ber and cor­ru­gated metal sal­vaged from wrecked build­ings with roofs of gray plas­tic tarps imprinted with “From the Amer­i­can people.”

Lately, shanty dwellers have begun adding cement and rock foot­ings around the base of their no-longer-so-temporary homes. And doors with locks.

Nel­son Pierre, a one-time physics teacher, built his cottage-tent hybrid near the styl­ized statue of Hait­ian rev­o­lu­tion­ary hero Tou­s­saint L’ouverture, with a glass win­dow and a gable of wooden slats for ven­ti­la­tion. A poster fea­tur­ing the peri­odic tables of chem­i­cal ele­ments, recall­ing his life before the earth­quake, share the wall with pic­tures of Jesus and fash­ion mod­els. His home defies the notion of temporary.

Nar­row pas­sage­ways wind through the Champs de Mars’ spon­ta­neous ghetto, a place that has devel­oped its own com­merce, pol­i­tics and vice along with shanties. At the wider places along these hap­haz­ard paths, cooks toil over char­coal fires, laun­dry dries on clothes lines, ven­dors hawk their wares. In one lit­tle open­ing, on a piece of ply­wood barely 6 feet long, Guilaine Pierre sold zuc­chini, car­rots, corn meal, beans, egg­plants, pep­pers, plan­tains, cook­ing oil, dried fish, flour, salami and Madam Gougousse brown rice.

Other ven­dors claimed the bet­ter loca­tions along the street curbs, sell­ing sun­dries and rice, flour and corn meal that had first come into camp as relief sup­plies from inter­na­tional human­i­tar­ian orga­ni­za­tions. Fre­des Batus, 46, com­plained that the self-appointed boss of his plaza con­trolled dis­tri­b­u­tion of relief sup­plies, a means to build him­self a polit­i­cal power base.

“He’s steal­ing 70 per­cent of it,” Batus said bitterly.

On a park wall, graf­fiti summed up the seething mood of Haiti’s dis­pos­sessed in absur­dist terms: “Wel­come back JC Duva­lier” for the long-exiled, famously bru­tal dic­ta­tor, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier.

Car­los Jean Charles, 29, in a T-shirt embla­zoned with an Amer­i­can flag and the face of coun­try singer George Strait, spoke darkly of other com­merce that has taken hold. Charles, who sleeps with his wife and three chil­dren in a 7-foot-long cor­ru­gated metal and scrap wood hovel barely wide enough for a sin­gle twin-bed mat­tress, said some fam­i­lies were so des­per­ate that they offered up their chil­dren, some as young as 10, as prostitutes.

The Hait­ian gov­ern­ment has been talk­ing for months about relo­cat­ing the peo­ple of Champs de Mars in planned relo­ca­tion camps out­side of town. No one I talked to inside the camp pro­fessed any faith that an over­whelmed and irres­olute bureau­cracy could accom­plish such a logis­ti­cal feat.

“We could be here next year, the year after that, the year after that,” said Jour­dain Ernso, 18. “This should be a pub­lic place but we have no place else to go.”

http://www.detnews.com/article/20100726/NATION/7260321/1020/In-Haiti-s-tent-cities–return-to-normalcy-is-unimaginable#ixzz0uvLUj4SV