by admin | February 26th, 2010
With rains becoming more frequent, most displaced earthquake survivors in Haiti don’t have adequate shelter more than six weeks after the quake.
Story by BY PATRICIA MAZZEI – Miami Herald Staff Report
BOUTILIER, Haiti — The thick gray tarpaulins could not come soon enough to this little mountain neighborhood high in the mountains above Port-au-Prince where the earth is brick red and the unpaved roads are littered with dusty gray rubble and rocks.
More than six weeks after the Jan. 12 earthquake that wrecked the capital and its environs, Nepalese soldiers from the United Nations distributed tarps in Boutilier to quake survivors grateful to finally get something to put over their heads.
“I was sleeping on the ground under the rain,” said Micheline Michelle, 43, who picked up a couple of the folded tarps in boxes and water in a plastic, military green container labeled ‘‘Property of the U.S. Government.”
Her wait for materials to build a shelter brings into sharp focus the monumental task of bringing aid to people in all corners of the greater Port-au- Prince area where tens of thousands of quake survivors are living outdoors by their crumbled homes and in spontaneous camps under sheets, towels and pieces of fabric that have been soaked and muddied by rain at least twice in the past two weeks.
The Haitian government and international relief agencies have made providing shelter a priority for the estimated 1.2 million people left homeless by the quake. Emergency shelter materials had reached 330,000 people — about 30 percent — as of Monday, according to the United Nations.
Distributing plastic sheeting and other materials to make sturdier shelters has been slow as relief work focused on immediate life-saving and medical needs. And government and relief officials have debated over whether to prioritize providing tents, which have a defined shape and size, or tarps, which people can fashion into their own shelter.
Both are considered short- term solutions while Haiti rebuilds. Relief agencies say tents — which residents here clamor for as a stronger type of shelter — usually last no more than six months to a year and are not always waterproof. Tarps are less expensive, more versatile and easier to install and repair.As of Monday, relief agencies had delivered around 104,000 tarps and 19,000 family- size tents to survivors, the U.N. reported. Another 232,000 tarps and 22,000 tents are in the pipeline and expected to arrive by the end of March.
Tents are visible in some of the estimated 400 camps, sometimes arranged in neat rows of white plastic domes. But most of the half-million people living in camps are doing without them, including a majority of the 2,500 dwellers of a camp in Cité Soleil, said Simone Sarcia, an Italian camp field coordinator.
“It’s a major, major prob lem,” said Sarcia, 28, who works for AVSI, the Association of Volunteers in International Service. The agency has slowly upgraded survivors to “provisional shelters,” generally small, triangle or dome-shaped tents held up by a wooden frame that can stand more water and wind than sheets and thin plastic sheeting but are not long-term solutions while Haiti rebuilds.
“We’re facing a really hard situation, because if it rains we have no tents,” said Joseph Frimance, 38. “We need tents. It’s the most important thing.”
The few large, sturdy navy blue tents from Italian National Civil Protection at the camp — the kind military personnel often use — were being used to house pregnant and nursing women, a makeshift clinic, temporary schools. One of the tents can fit two families.
“It’s very hard,” said Sarcia, who on a recent visit was surrounded by young men asking when they would get tarps for their families. “Every day there’s more and more people.”
Relief agencies have not been able to move more survivors into tents in part because there is not enough space to do so, according to the International Federation of Red Cross. For tents to be spaced far enough apart for people to be safe from fire hazards, a significant number of camp dwellers would have to be moved elsewhere.
In a camp in the neighborhood of Peguyville, in Pétionville, survivors have upgraded their sheets with blue and white plastic sheeting and jagged pieces of corrugated metal. Haitian government officials have said they fear those homemade shelters could become permanent.
In Carrefour, where some dirt streets were still partly flooded two days after rain fell, hundreds of women stood in a line guarded by U.S. soldiers to receive bags of milled rice from U.S. Agency for International Development. But no tarps or tents.
Dwellers of a nearby camp with more than 3,000 people have propped the sticks holding their wobbly shelters together up on cement blocks and large rocks to raise them from the water.
“We need tents because it’s going to be hurricane season,” said Marcelin Franck, 41. “But there have been no answers . . . You have no choice but to resist.”
In Boutilier, 43-year-old Marie-Josee Pierre waited four hours last week for the tarps to protect her and her nine children, weeks after the quake destroyed her home and killed her husband.
“It’s not enough, but I didn’t have anything,” Pierre said. ‘‘We couldn’t sleep. We had to stand up all night because of the mud, because of the water. There’s a lot of mud up there.”
Added Michelle: “Even if it’s not good, we’ll live with it. I’m content.”
Article, Video and Courtesy of The Miami Herald
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/02/25/v-fullstory/1498908/as-the-rains-come-haitians-wait.html
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