Effects Of 2010 Earthquake Still Mar Haiti
National Public Radio (U.S), January 12, 2013
Listen to the three minute broadcast at the link, or read the transcript below.
Three years ago, a massive earthquake destroyed much of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. Roughly 200,000 people were killed and more than 1 million left homeless. Now, most of the earthquake debris has been removed, but many of the grand plans to rebuild never materialized. Host Scott Simon speaks with NPR's Jason Beaubien in Haiti.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Three years ago today, a massive earthquake destroyed much of Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti. About 200,000 people were killed. More than a million were left homeless. Governments and aid agencies from around the world pledged billions of dollars to help Haiti recover and rebuild from the quake. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was just one of many leaders who vowed that the international community would stand by Haiti for the long process of reconstruction.
SECRETARY HILLARY CLINTON: We will also be conveying very directly and personally to the Haitian people our long-term, unwavering support, solidarity and sympathies, to reinforce President Obama's message yesterday that they are not facing this crisis alone.
SIMON: But three years later, many of the grand plans to build back better in Haiti have apparently fizzled. NPR's Jason Beaubien covered the quake in 2010. He's been back numerous times. He joins us now from Port-au-Prince. Jason, thanks for being with us.
JASON BEAUBIEN: It's good to be with you.
SIMON: Help us understand what has happened over the last three years.
BEAUBIEN: What has happened is that basically people have been kept alive. People moved into camps. Humanitarian aid agencies came in; they provided water, they've provided tarps. There've been a lot of plans for new housing construction, for new apartment buildings, for all kinds of things but most of those have not happen.
Only about 5000 units of permanent new housing have been built. There are still hundreds of thousands of people living in tents. Many of the temporary shelters that were built by aid agencies, made out of just plywood with a roof, those basically have become permanent. So, the lot of the grand plans just have not worked out.
SIMON: For all the effort there must be some major accomplishments.
BEAUBIEN: You know, one of the big accomplishments is that most of the rubble has gotten removed; is you don't see huge piles of rubble around Port-au-Prince anymore. It's something that the humanitarian agencies talked about. Just also the fact that people were kept alive is something that they tout as a major accomplishment.
But just last night, President Martelly was complaining that for the billions of dollars that were pledged that came in here, that were spent by aid agencies, he's not seeing results. And he says he's not satisfied with the way this process has gone.
SIMON: Jason, how does Port-au-Prince look three years afterwards?
BEAUBIEN: What's sort of interesting, having been here before the earthquake, is that in many ways it looks very similar to before the quake. They are just people going about their daily lives, doing business out on the streets, selling things along the roadways. The traffic is actually much worse now because a lot of people have moved further out, and so people are moving farther each day. So there's even more of a grind for the traffic.
But it is bustling, still very poor. What strikes me the most however is that it looks very much like it did before the quake.
SIMON: NPR's Jason Beaubien speaking with us from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Thanks so much, Jason.
BEAUBIEN: You're welcome.
Despite Billions In Aid, Many Haitians Still Live In Squalid Camps
By Jason Beaubien, NPR News, January 11, 2013
(Go to the web link to see an accompanying photo gallery.)
Saturday marks the third anniversary of the powerful earthquake that destroyed much of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. The quake killed roughly 200,000 people and left 1.5 million Haitians homeless.
Despite billions of dollars in international aid and pledges to help Haiti rebuild from the disaster, very little new, permanent housing has been built. And about 350,000 Haitians are still living in squalid, makeshift camps — where they face an array of health challenges.
There's been an epidemic of sexual assaults on women living in the camps. And residents complain that unsanitary conditions and numerous cooking fires in the cramped quarters have caused respiratory problems among the children. Jacqueline Syra has been living in the La Piste camp for three years. She says she has no idea when she will be able to leave. Enlarge image
Fears, however, that cholera would spread rapidly through the overcrowded settlements never materialized. Aid workers say this was probably because of the treated water distributed in the camps.
When the earthquake struck in January 2010, Jacqueline Syra was nine months pregnant with her third child. Her house near the sprawling slum of Cite Soleil collapsed, she says, killing her husband.
Syra, along with tens of thousands of other people, moved on to an abandoned military airport known as La Piste. She never expected that three years later, she'd still be living on the runway. "We are not living well in the tents," she says. "Sometimes men get in here and attack me or rob my things."
Her shack is a patchwork of fraying tarps that are tied together with blankets and strung over a skeleton of mismatched sticks. Two motorcycle tires on the roof keep the cloth from flapping in the wind. She uses the front of an old portable toilet as the door to her shelter. There's no electricity, and she cooks on the dirt floor.
Syra shares this shelter with her three children. "I don't sleep well, I don't eat well," says the rail-thin, 49-year-old mother. "I was a fat woman, and look at me now. I lost a lot of weight because I cannot sleep or eat well here."
At its peak in 2010, this camp held roughly 50,000 residents, according to humanitarian officials. La Piste is less crowded now, but there are still tens of thousands of people here. Women bathe naked with buckets at the public water taps. Kids scurry along trash-filled ditches. "I don't know when I'll leave," Syra says. "I don't know how long I'm going to be here."
After the quake, international aid agencies were busy keeping people alive, says United Nations spokesman George Ngwa. They provided Haitians with basic tarps for shelter, removed most of the rubble, paved roads and, yes, even built some housing. "I do understand those who think that there isn't much to show for all that has happened since 2010, but there is a lot that has happened," he says.
But Ngwa, who works at the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Haiti, does admit that some mistakes were made in the rush. For example, "new houses were built in areas that had no sustainability in terms of jobs for the people who were supposed to move there," he explains. "So some of them abandoned the new houses, and they're back in the camps."
Immediately after the quake, billions of dollars were pledged by international donors to help Haitians recover. Despite this, only about 5,000 units of permanent housing have been built.
The grand plans to "build back better" have evaporated. Instead, President Michel Martelly launched a program aimed at getting people to leave the camps. The government offered them a rental subsidy of $500 and $150 in cash to anyone willing to vacate several public parks; 100 percent of the residents in all of the targeted camps agreed to the deal and moved out.
"The overall budget for this program was $78 million," Clement Belizaire, who directs the relocation and rehabilitation in the government's reconstruction program, tells Shots. He says his office initially focused on trying to repair the damaged houses of camp residents. But this only affected about 10 percent of the camp population, he says, and only temporarily.
"So after a while, that 10 percent is replaced, the camp fills back up. So we came [up] with a rental subsidy," he explains. "That's only when we started to see camps that were cleared completely." Rose Lermonis spent months living in what she calls an "awful" camp in Petionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince. A rental subsidy program helped her to move out temporarily. Enlarge image
His program is also involved in building several dozen new houses and rehabilitating destroyed public infrastructure — roads, electricity lines and sewers — in neighborhoods that are receiving thousands of the former camp residents.
Rose Lermonis, who moved with her family into a tarp-covered shack in a public park after the earthquake, should be one of the success stories of Belizaire's resettlement program. The 52-year-old mother spent more than a year in what she says were terrible and terrifying conditions in the camp. Then in November 2011, she got a subsidy to rent a small cinder block hut. But once that money was gone, she could no longer pay the rent and had to move with her children to a room owned by her sister.
"You see, all the people who used to be in the tents are still living in misery, because they don't have jobs," she says. "If they don't have a child or someone to support them, they have nothing."
Before the earthquake, Haiti was the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. As it moves on from the disaster, the nation is still burdened with all the problems it had before its capital was destroyed.
After Bringing Cholera To Haiti, U.N. Plans To Get Rid Of It
By Richard Knox, NPR News, January 12, 2013
Not quite 10 months after Haiti's devastating 2010 earthquake, a more insidious disaster struck: cholera. Haiti hadn't seen cholera for at least a century. Then suddenly, the first cases appeared in the central highlands near a camp for United Nations peacekeeping forces.
Since then the disease has struck 1 out of every 16 Haitians — nearly 640,000 people. It has killed 8,000.
The disease struck with explosive force. Within two days of the first cases, a hospital 60 miles away was admitting a new cholera patient every 3 1/2 minutes.
"Part of the reason we think the outbreak grew so quickly was the Haitian population had no immunity to cholera," says Daniele Lantagne, an environmental engineer at Tufts University. "Something like when the Europeans brought smallpox to the Americas, and it burned through the native populations."
Lantagne says comparison of the Haitian cholera strain with one circulating in Nepal around the same time shows the two differed in only 1 out of 4 million genetic elements. "That's considered an exact match, that they're the same strain of cholera," she tells Shots.
Most scientists now think Nepalese soldiers unwittingly brought cholera to Haiti when they joined a U.N. peacekeeping force there in 2010. The outbreak started just downstream from their camp. Sewage from the camp spilled into a nearby river.
Lantagne was one of four scientists appointed by the U.N. to look into the matter. Their report, issued in May 2011, implicated the U.N. camp as a likely origin, but it concluded that the outbreak was caused by "a confluence of circumstances." She tells Shots that the report would come out different today.
"If we had had the additional scientific evidence that's available now, we definitely would have written the report in 2011 differently, to state the most likely source of introduction was someone associated with the peacekeeping camp," Lantagne says. That's important because the U.N. insists that whatever way cholera got to Haiti, terrible sanitary conditions and lack of clean water were responsible for its remarkably fast spread.
But lawyer Brian Concannon doesn't buy that. "It's like lighting a fire in a dry field on a windy day and then blaming the wind or the drought for the fire," says Concannon, who directs a Boston-based group called the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. More than a year ago, the group filed a legal claim against the U.N. demanding that it accept responsibility.
Concannon says the U.N. is supposed to set up a formal mechanism within the Status of Forces Agreements that govern every peacekeeping operation to deal with claims of harm — from traffic accidents and alleged rapes involving peacekeeping soldiers to larger allegations — but it has never done so.
Since the U.N. has not responded to its claim, Concannon's group is pondering whether to sue the agency in a court in the United States, Europe or Haiti.
For its part, the U.N. hasn't admitted anything. But in December, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced a plan to rid Haiti and the neighboring Dominican Republic of cholera.
Concannon says that's ambitious — but feasible. "Cholera can certainly be eliminated from Haiti," he tells Shots. "It's been eliminated from the United States, from England, from many countries in South America," he says. "This is basically 19th century technology that needs to be installed in Haiti."
The Haitian government is expected to release a detailed blueprint for the first two years of the effort sometime this month. The entire project is expected to cost $2.2 billion and take at least 10 years.
But so far, the U.N. has identified only 10 percent of the money, most of it redeployed from earlier pledges. Concannon worries the rest may never be found.
Haiti Then And Now: 3 Years After The Earthquake
David Gilkey and NPR Global Health correspondent Jason Beaubien speak with Morning Edition's Renee Montagne from Port-au-Prince about the progress they're seeing on the ground in Haiti. Hear that foru-minute conversation at the audio link above.