Slow reconstruction raises aid questions
Are the many NGOs operating in the country helping or are they slowing things down?
By Rene Bruemmer, Postmedia News, January 8, 2011 (Montreal Gazette, Vancouver Sun)
There are an estimated 12,000 aid groups working in Haiti, ranging from international behemoths such as the Red Cross to church-sponsored charities that support one orphanage. It's the largest concentration of aid groups per capita on the planet, yet Haiti remains one of the most miserable places in the world. It can give the impression all those aid efforts are doing little.
Were it not for the aid groups, however, tens of thousands likely would have died following last year's earthquake, tens of thousands more if emergency crews were not there to deal with the cholera epidemic that broke out in October, hospitalizing 63,000 and killing more than 2,500 to date. Without foreign and local aid distributed over the last half-century, many would not have had access to health care, education, employment or hope.
Here is a look at how a selection of groups, international and Haitian, is delivering help, and the organizations' efforts to do it better so Haiti can finally take care of itself.
What happened to the money?
Ask Canadian Red Cross spokeswoman Sophie Chavanel what happened to all the money Canadians donated and why it seems little has changed one year after the earthquake struck Haiti, killing an estimated quarter-million people, and she doesn't quite roll her eyes, but you can tell she'd like to.
"Everybody asks me that," she said while giving a tour of a new community of 360 transitional homes being built on a former runway near Port-au-Prince's international airport. "Even my 12-year-old sister back in Montreal asks me that."
It's a valid question, especially for Canadians, who donated $189 million to the Red Cross for earthquake relief -- the largest donation per capita of any country. Yet one year later, most of the 1.5 million rendered homeless are still homeless, and while this new community of 18-square-metre homes -- built of plywood, two-by-fours and tin, and scheduled to be completed this month -- will help, it still only represents housing for 1,800 people.
"Of course, we'd like to have every family in a home right now," Chavanel said. "But it's not that simple. Think how long it will take Quebec to rebuild the Turcot Interchange (near Montreal) -- years. And that's in a rich country with access to supplies."
The earthquake was followed by the largest rescue mission in Red Cross history: 250,000 dead, 1.5 million without homes or access to water and food, rubble-clogged roads and an already fragile government virtually paralyzed. Large aid groups had to feed these people, get them water, find them housing. Without detracting from the work of smaller NGOs that build a school and leave, the Red Cross deals with larger logistical issues -- it is still delivering 2.5 million litres of clean water a day to the hundreds of tent camps, Chavanel noted. The Red Cross continues to work on housing, health care, security and sanitation.
Shifting priorities
The Red Cross is shifting priorities to longer-term projects, such as the transitional community we were standing in, in an area known as La Piste (the Runway). Close to 300 Haitians making $10 a day are building the shelters, measuring, hammering and sawing under the blazing sun. One man was cutting a sheet of plywood with a saw missing its wooden handle, gripping the blade with a rag wrapped around his hand. The houses are separated by wide alleys so people can cook and congregate in front, as is the custom here. ( "We call them 'transitional,' but you know in Haiti a house like this may last a long time," Chavanel said.)
While residents will not be charged for the small wood shelters, each one costs $4,000 to build, which seems like a lot, since materials are minimal and wages low. Much of the expense is due to shipping costs, Chavanel said. The materials -- wood and tin -- don't exist in Haiti. Only the paint, in joyful pastel hues, is available locally.
When the work is finished, there will be a school, community centre and a playing field. People will have clean water, toilets, showers and a neighbourhood.
Building communities
"It's not just about building a structure -- it's about building a community and doing it right and seeing it through in the long term," Chavanel said.
The Red Cross and similar organizations are criticized for bureaucracies that are seen as cumbersome, costly and slow. But building a community in the middle of a city is not a simple process, Chavanel said.
There are land issues -- who owns it, can it be purchased at a reasonable price, can the rubble be removed. There are discussions with community organizations to decide who should live there. In keeping with the Red Cross's mandate to help the most vulnerable, almost half of the homes at La Piste will go to deaf individuals, often ostracized in Haiti and unable to find work. Many have been hired to build the homes.
All of this takes time -- conducting surveys of the populations, speaking with community leaders, dealing with the Haitian government and Haitian Red Cross. The Red Cross, in turn, is dealing with the United Nations, which has organized 1,200 of the estimated 12,000 aid organizations in Haiti into "clusters" that work with health, water or housing, to identify priority areas and to avoid overlap. The Red Cross is among 70 organizations in the "shelter cluster," which will build 125,000 shelters housing 750,000 people. The International Red Cross will construct 30,000 of them.
Not in it for the money
"The system is working," Chavanel said. Contrary to the perception of some, hardly anyone gets into aid work for the money, added Chavanel, who used to earn much more as a CBC journalist.
Haitian Montrealer Luck Mervil, a popular singer who has been working on aid for Haiti for five years, disagrees. "Aid," he said, "is a business, with donors making money."
Haiti has received aid for 50 years, and nothing has changed because so-called aid groups, including the Red Cross, are either doing it wrong or perpetuating the situation for their own good, he said.
"Name me one country that has lifted itself out of poverty by relying on aid," he said. "There are none."
More than 98 per cent of U.S. contracts for reconstructing Haiti have gone to American companies, he said, citing an Associated Press report. On top of that, Mervil added, aid organizations don't work together, making them less efficient. For aid to work, it must focus on rebuilding Haiti's infrastructure so the country can run itself.
"Look at Brazil. It focused on its core problems -- education, health care, jobs for its poor people -- and it is burgeoning."
Mervil's project, Vilaj Vilaj, which aims to create a community of 5,000 living in renovated shipping containers and requires funding of $25 million, will be completely run by Haitians, he said.
Little coordination
The hodgepodge of 12,000 relief organizations, working with little coordination and often in a territorial fashion, is widely recognized as part of the problem. Some don't bother consulting with the local community, resulting in projects such as a school that was built in a rural region, on the other side of a dry riverbed from the village. During the rainy season, the river fills and the children can't get to school. Now the community has to build a bridge.
Aid organizations and Haitian and international governments say steps are being made to change all that.
"Our group is working on a cartographical survey of all the thousands of NGOs so the government can know exactly what is being done where," said Rene Hubert, a Montreal urban planner who has lived in Haiti for 15 years, working on development projects with the IBI Group. "So, if someone wants to donate $5 million toward a women's health project, for instance, we will be able to direct that funding to the right spot."
The most important aid work, he said, is to build up Haiti's government so it can take care of all these details itself. His group (which helped the government draft its post-earthquake recovery plan, released last March) and others are working to develop Haitian government ministries so they can create the infrastructure -- roads, airports, health care, education, finance -- needed for self-sustainment. Create that and the rest will follow, Hubert said, as it has in places such as Quebec, which has a "huge and expensive civil service -- but it works."
Haiti's government is hampered by a perception of widespread corruption that has led donors to give their funds to non-governmental organizations, restraining the government's ability to create long-term change. The creation of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission -- a form of parallel government composed of local and international officials, including former U.S. president Bill Clinton, that will manage funds -- will help Haiti build a better future, Hubert said.
Change will be a 10-to 20-year process, he added. But it will come. "I'm positive and I believe," he said.
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Rebuilding in Haiti at a standstill, Oxfam says
One million still living in tents. International donors' broken promises, government turmoil add to 'dysfunction'
By AMY MINSKY, Postmedia NewsJanuary 6, 2011 (Montreal Gazette)
Relief and recovery in Haiti are at a standstill, according to an Oxfam report released yesterday, which says the core of problem is two-fold: inaction from the government of the devastated country and indecision on the part of wealthier donor countries.
An estimated 250,000 people were killed, and hundreds of thousands more injured or left homeless, after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit Haiti on Jan. 12, 2010.
Nine months later, the country was struck by a cholera outbreak that affected more than 122,000 people and left at least 2,600 dead.
Today, nearly one million people continue to live in tents and tarpaulins, unable to resettle or to return home.
But rebuilding Haiti will take sustained effort and long-term commitment, a spokesman for the Canadian International Development Agency said yesterday.
"It's not simply a matter of rebuilding the country's infrastructure," said Scott Cantin, "Haiti's key institutions and systems need significant rebuilding, with Haitians at the helm, supported by the international community."
And while it's understandable that recovery shouldn't be expected to happen overnight, Robert Fox, executive director with Oxfam Canada, said Haitians should expect visible progress a year later.
Volatile and disputed elections have left the Haitian government without a clear mandate for recovery -but the responsibility doesn't lie solely there.
Successful reconstruction depends on the successful communication between the people of Haiti, their government and international governments and organizations, Fox said. "The dysfunction has been aided unabated by the way the international community has organized itself, where pledges have been made and they haven't followed through," Fox said. "Where they come to the table with their own agendas and own priorities."
One of the largest hurdles standing between the homeless and their potential homes, he added, is the amount of rubble remaining on the streets. Too often, Fox said, donors from richer nations are looking for signature initiatives they can put a sign on. To date, only about two to four per cent of the rubble has been cleared, according to the report.
"But in many instances, that means it was off some-one's property onto the road in front of the property," Fox said. "The international community doesn't want to spend their money on rubble removal.
"Rubble removal isn't sexy, but it needs to be done."
In the minds of the million people who have been living in tents for a year, it's easy to understand why recovery seems slow, said Richard Clair, the representative for the Canadian Red Cross in Haiti, who hasn't read the Oxfam report.
"We're doing the best we can with the resources we have," he said from Port-au-Prince.
"Even the richest country in the world, after the devastation of (Hurricane) Katrina, (parts of the New Orleans) are still rebuilding many years later."
(To read the OXFAM report, go to the "Human Rights Reports" page on the CHIP website.)
Squalid, dangerous camps still home to a million Haitians a year after quake
By Andy Blatchford
Canadian Press wire story, January 07, 2011, http://news.guelphmercury.com/News/article/742689
PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI — With all the cash left to her name stuffed into her bra, a trembling Vedette Guillaume hides under her cardboard mattress and prays the bullets will miss. A year after an earthquake pummelled Haiti, more than a million people still live amid the squalor and violence of the country’s sprawling tent cities.
Money raised through celebrity telethons, bake sales and international donors poured in, yet Guillaume still spends sleepless nights on the floor of her blue tent — cowering from occasional gunfire.
The mother of 10 often isn’t alone down there. “Rats . . . lots of rats,” Guillaume shouts in Creole, as she peels back plastic sheeting on the mud floor to show where the vermin frequently gnaw their way into her home.
The earthquake last Jan. 12 hammered Haitian homes and displaced about 1.5 million people. Around the camps, signs of the quake’s damage still mark the landscape. Crumpled buildings, including Haiti’s national palace, still line the country’s roads. Heaps of rubble have been pushed off the streets, but most of it has yet to be cleared away.
Haiti has faced even more challenges in recent months, as an ongoing cholera epidemic has killed more than 2,000 people and an election crisis has ignited deadly riots.
But the UN insists that not all is lost, and that much has been accomplished since the quake, which killed more than 200,000 people and injured 300,000. It says the humanitarian effort has made a difference by building thousands of transitional shelters, by ensuring most students are back in school and by drawing up plans to improve or build dozens of health-care centres.
But many frustrated Haitians who still live in the camps say they feel like they’ve been forgotten. Guillaume, 51, shudders when asked if she’s bracing for the long haul. “Look at how I live . . . I don’t want to stay here,” says Guillaume, whose savings amount to less than 100 Haitian gourdes — or about $2.
Like many of her neighbours, Guillaume fled to this camp near the national palace in the days after the temblor. By day, camp dwellers deal with sweltering tents and shortages of food and potable water. At night, their focus shifts to keeping out the thieves and rapists.
Two reports released Thursday found that sexual violence has increased in Haiti since the quake. Reports by the UN and Amnesty International found a jump in sexual violence. The Amnesty report listed accounts of 250 rapes in 15 camps in the first five months after the quake.
In Port-au-Prince’s Champ de Mars, volunteers scan the area after dark for prowlers trying to get past the metal fence that encircles the camp.
“It’s getting worse every day.”
His little girl and her mother have since moved to the city’s poor district of Carrefour, where he says they will be better shielded from storms, fires and bullets.
“The country is truly in a chaos that has never been seen before,” says Emile, who lives at the base of a statue of Alexandre Petion, a former president and founder of Haiti who was also known as Papa Bon-Coeur (or Good-Hearted Daddy).
A psychologist based in Port-au-Prince for Medecins du Monde Canada blames the increase in violence on the tight confines of the camps. Patrick Lechasseur, who leads a mobile medical unit into post-quake tent cities in the capital’s Cite Soleil slum, says he’s also seen a rise in teenage pregnancies.
“Parents don’t want to keep them at home, so they go from one relationship (to another) and they bounce around,” says the Cornwall, Ont., resident, as he watches camp residents crowd around a giant water reservoir.
“A lot of times these relationships are abusive.”
Mildrede Beliard of CARE once saw a man pull a woman by the hair though one of the tent cities. “She screamed, she shouted (and) he brought her under a tent that read: ‘$5 for 30 minutes,’” says Beliard, who worked for the Haitian government until shortly after the quake. “And people were laughing, nobody did anything. It had become a normal practice.”
The situation has improved in recent months, she says. Beliard credits the greater police presence in some camps, the new enclosed bathing areas and the fact that many women and children have moved out.
Still, Beliard wonders what the future holds for Haitian women. Three of Haiti’s most prominent women’s rights leaders were killed in the quake: Myriam Merlet, Anne-Marie Coriolan and feminist hero Magalie Marcelin, who was godmother to the daughter of Michaelle Jean, Canada’s former governor general.
But the biggest hurdle to Haiti’s overall recovery remains its political uncertainty, says the head of a Canadian think-tank dedicated to the region. The quake wiped out state buildings and killed many government workers, further paralyzing the country. Carlo Dade, executive director of the Canadian Foundation for the Americas, blames the power struggle within Haiti’s political class for the country’s slow reconstruction.
“It’s a bigger mess than I thought before I got down there,” says Dade, who recently returned from a fact-finding visit. “I don’t see much to be optimistic about.”
Dade recalls how observers predicted the quake would bring Haitians together and spur its politicians to bury grievances to work for the greater national good.
“They’ve adopted some of that language, but the language doesn’t match the reality of what they’re doing,” he says.
“There was some talk about this being Haiti’s 9/11 moment, but that didn’t happen.”
The UN chief for the humanitarian effort in Haiti argues, however, that the recovery effort to date has been fairly successful. Nigel Fisher says while the initial response got off to a shaky start, he was encouraged by the relatively quick work to provide shelters, water, food, latrines and access to medical care. Fisher, a Canadian citizen, insists further progress has since been made in several areas, including:
•25,000 transitional shelters for 120,000 people have been built.
•330,000 quake-damaged dwellings have been assessed by the UN and local agencies to determine if they’re livable.
•10 to 20 per cent of the rubble has been removed.
•700,000 short-term jobs have been created.
•40 health-care centres and hospitals are either planned or being improved.
•More than 90 per cent of children who were in school before the quake are now back in school.
Still, Fisher admits that nothing comes easy in what he describes as an “almost failed state,” where he admits reliable figures are difficult to nail down.
“Could things have gone faster? Yes. Is it true to say that nothing’s happened? No, I disagree with that. “It is a place where on all fronts you think you’re at Square 1, but there’s a couple of squares behind you.”
He says that people shouldn’t assume Haiti’s precarious situation is a direct result of the earthquake. Fisher points out that prior to Jan. 12, Haiti had widespread unemployment, about 85 per cent of the population lived in poverty and only half of its kids were in school.
“What happened on the 12th was a catastrophic natural disaster that happened in a country, which on most structural indicators was also a disaster,” he says. “You can’t turn that around overnight.”
Fisher says some Haitians have been moving into the camps because the conditions where they lived were even worse. He says they’re lured to the tent cities, where there’s access to clean water, sanitation and rent-free homes.
“So, you have some people who actually see it as a conscious choice to stay,” according to the B.C. resident.
Still, many of the people who live in the camps that clog Haiti’s public squares and sports fields say they’re waiting to see signs of change. “The government has left us on our own,” says Moise Brian Guito, one of Guillaume’s neighbours in Champ de Mars.
“It’s very hard right now. Life isn’t good here.”