ShelterBox Head of Operations, John Leach said: ‘We are continuing to spread our net beyond Port au Prince .  A newly arrived two man team comprising of Greg Rogers (UK) and Tom Newman (UK) headed south to Jacmel.  They’ve wasted no time in assessing needs and setting up the first camps. Tom, who is on his first deployment, has been doing a great job in running logistics from Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) and now has his chance to get out in the field.’

Please visit www.shelterbox.org to find out ways you can support ShelterBox’s work around the globe.

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.

One of the new camps in Port-au-Prince is ready to be used by

needed families that lost their homes after the earthquake.

by HECTOR GABINO / EL NUEVO HERALD STAFF

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.

Feb 10, 2010 – By Mac Margolis and Lucy Conger | Newsweek Web Exclusive

Hollywood couldn’t have done it better. Late in the afternoon on Jan. 22, an armored car packed with $2 million in cash rolled out of J.P. Morgan Chase headquarters in downtown Miami, headed to the Homestead Air Force Base. Thirty-four bricks of bank notes packed into ordinary office supply boxes were loaded onto a C-17 transport plane redeployed from Langley, Va., and dispatched to Haiti, lighting up switchboards at the United Nations, the U.S. State Department, the Federal Reserve, and military rescue bases in Port-au-Prince.

Before dawn the next day, the stash was on a helicopter bound for 34 branches of microlender Fonkoze. While Port-au-Prince’s nine commercial banks were in a shambles and Western Union was paralyzed, half of Fonkoze’s 42 agencies were up and running in four days, and all but two of the rest within a week. The amounts were trifling: no more than a few dollars per client. But for tens of thousands of desperate Haitians, the nimble infusion of cash amid the chaos and ruin literally meant survival. For the legions of aid bureaucrats, charities, civic groups, and emergency organizations struggling to get a grip on the Western hemisphere’s worst natural disaster in memory, Fonkoze’s nationwide client base of 200,000 depositors (50,000 of whom are also borrowers) was a ready-made lifeline. Could microcredit be the new Red Cross?

This is not exactly what the loan angels had in mind. Since at least 2006, when Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize for his pioneering work in extending credit to the poor, microfinance has been in the spotlight. The founder of the Grameen Bank, a Bangladesh-based credit outfit, Yunus believed in the transformative power of advancing as little as $10, $20, $30 at a time to people that commercial banks wouldn’t allow through the door. Now, experts reckon there are 75 million microborrowers worldwide who hold $39 billion in loans, and enthusiasts speak of billions of the poor waiting to parlay pennies into enterprises and kickstart development in the most blighted countries.

Such ambitions have drawn flak: “I am unaware of any historical examples of nations that climbed out of poverty on the backs of small entrepreneurs financed by credit,” U.S. circuit court justice and economic historian Richard A. Posner once commented. But microcredit initiatives have since bloomed in a thousand boardrooms, winning converts in the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and even luring major commercial banks, many of which now see the future of their industry in courting the “unbanked” multitudes.

But the Haitian earthquake illustrates a more pressing role for microfinance institutions: helping societies respond to shattering tragedies. Ironically, not so long ago many development experts assumed it was the microfinance institutions (MFIs) that would need saving in times of crisis. National calamity, they noted, falls hardest on the weak, depriving the poor of jobs and capital and so, they reasoned, automatically driving them into massive default. “If people could get no money, they couldn’t repay. The whole sector was threatened,” says Don Terry, a former IDB microfinance and remittances specialist.

In fact, the opposite has been the case. “Devastation typically paralyzes the big banks,” says Terry. “Microfinance institutions are used to dealing at grassroots levels in a way that large commercial lenders cannot.” In 1998, when Hurricane Mitch ravaged Nicaragua and Honduras, shuttering banks and destroying roads and bridges, microlender Fundación León 2000 stepped into the breach, putting its experience and vast rural customer network at the service of relief agencies. “Microfinance institutions were the only ones able to communicate,” says Alberto Solano, the Grameen Foundation’s regional CEO for the Americas.

MFIs swung into action again after the Asian tsunami in late 2004. Even as they buried the 200,000 dead and cared for the injured, rescue crews were faced with tens of thousands left homeless and desolate across Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. For that, they needed not just cash but an organization structured to parse the needs at ground level and get money to scattered clients. Enter microcredit experts like Grameen, which helped raise disaster loans and channel the credit to stricken families through local microlenders.

Haiti has been the acid test. When serial hurricanes battered the country in 2008, drowning whole towns, killing nearly 800, and wiping out jobs and savings across the island, credit services were threatened with extinction. Instead of buckling, Fonkoze expanded. The bank managed cash-for-work payments during the clean-up, rescheduled outstanding loans, waived interest payments, and reached out to new clients. A year later, more than eight out of 10 of the bank’s clients had repaid their loans. This experience proved critical when the earthquake struck. With Port-au-Prince in ruins, Haiti’s banking sector went dark for nine days, choking off the vital flow of remittances ($1.87 billion a year) that Haitians receive from relatives abroad. Though badly shaken itself, Fonkoze, the island’s largest microfinancier, kept working (from a borrowed van, in one instance), giving families access to cash for immediate needs as they waited for emergency rations of food, water, clothes, and medicine.

Microfinance is not likely to replace emergency rescue efforts, where immediate humanitarian assistance is crucial. “Giving grants might send the wrong message about microfinance, encouraging people not to pay back their loans,” says Grameen’s Solano. Others argue that microfinance could play a much wider role in first response to disasters. Because they tend to the poor, microlenders move in and out of dangerous areas, such as crime-ridden slums, where button-down lenders do not or will not go. Their vast client base also “creates a network that can locate people as the population migrates out of the destroyed capital and help distribute food, water, and tents,” says Fonkoze’s director, Anne Hastings. “If the technology were in place, [we] could transmit SMS messages and locate displaced people or evacuees and reunite families.”

To the founders, microfinance means much more than donning rescue gear and mopping up after tragedies, manmade or not. But when calamity strikes, and the world’s poorest people are in the way, no mission would seem more appropriate.

© 2010   http://www.newsweek.com/id/233334

We are currently in the midst of sending over 1/2 million meals (that’s right, 500,000!), along with temporary shelter for 4,000. Please don’t get donor fatigue on us! We need your help!

Please be sure to keep up with our latest Haiti relief efforts  by reading and sharing Frank’s firsthand account: http://www.frank-mckinney.com/blog.asp?article=168 .

To donate please visit:  http://www.frank-mckinney.com/donate.aspx .

Tuesday, February 16 (10:30 am EST)  
Frank McKinney on “Live This Morning with Dave Lucas”- News 8 discussing his latest best sellers and Caring House Project Foundation earthquake relief efforts in Haiti.  To watch:  www.news87.net  (Arlington, VA)

Monday, February 22, 2010 (10:00 am EST)
Frank McKinney LIVE on “Your Carolina” TV in Greenville, SC talking about his latest best seller real estate book, “Burst This!” To watch:   www.yourcarolina.tv

Thank you for your support of the Caring House Project Foundation.  Please be sure to visit our website at  www.frank-mckinney.com  for the latest, as events are posted daily.

The house — built to resist hurricane-force winds and earthquakes — is a prototype of the “Little Haiti House Project,” brainchild of Orlando hotelier Harris Rosen in what he says is the second and more sustained phase of his relief effort for survivors of last month’s earthquake.

Rosen’s project is one of several ideas from Americans trying to help Haiti figure out how to dig out of the rubble and move forward. Others include fiberglass domes, plastic water containers made into bricks and shipping containers turned into houses.

On Wednesday, Rosen gave an Orlando Sentinel reporter a tour of the prototype of one of his Little Haiti homes.

The homes, at $5,000 each, would be sold to Haitians at 1 percent interest with flexible financing options for mortgages to be paid over 25 to 75 or even 100 years. Interest proceeds would be for microloans to Haitian entrepreneurs. His team expects to build 25 homes to start and envisions villages of about 200 homes each.

“Wouldn’t it be so beautiful? Could you imagine the pride of saying ‘This is my little house,’” Rosen said. “I mean the pride that will come with this is just unbelievable, and we are hoping it affects generations of Haitians.”

According to the International Organization for Migration, the earthquake left about 1.1 million people homeless. Settlements filled with shelters made of tarps and blankets have appeared across Port-au-Prince. Aid groups are distributing tarps, sheeting and tools.

“With hurricane season around the corner, finding a safe place for these people is a huge concern,” said Laureen Martinez, spokeswoman for the Mid- Florida region of the American Red Cross. The American Red Cross will be sending recovery specialists to the country to start planning for transitional and more permanent housing.

Pedro de Alba, a civil-engineering professor who specializes in earthquake engineering, cautioned that builders should be careful about importing expensive materials that aren’t available locally and that involve construction methods beyond the population’s expertise.

“Some people have come up with these really elaborate [ideas],” the University of New Hampshire professor said, adding that efforts might be better spent teaching people how to rebuild.

Among those with proposals for efficient, sturdy housing is Don Kubley, President of InterShelter in Alaska.

He says the solution for Haiti, and for future disasters, can be found in his high-tech fiberglass domes. The domes come in pieces stacked liked Pringles and can be assembled in hours. They have built-in solar panels and can be arranged into rooms, including kitchens and bathrooms. He said 40 of his domes can be packed into a 40-foot trailer.

Kubley, who has been working with a Longwood charity to create housing for the homeless, has already donated eight domes to Haiti relief efforts. So far, his domes there are being used for military and medical needs, but Kubley has been talking with several agencies about sending thousands more down for housing at a cost of $5,000 to $7,500 each.

A team at Clemson University in South Carolina has presented another idea: repurposing shipping cargo containers into housing by cutting large openings into the sides and attaching canopies.

The strong material can stand up to both hurricanes and earthquakes, but Assistant Professor Martha Skinner said they’re also very liveable: “They can be quite beautiful and homey,” she said, noting that reusing the containers makes them ecologically friendly.

Skinner’s team is coordinating with government and nonprofit officials and hopes to help set up homes before hurricane season begins.

Rosen’s Orlando team is still working on their concept, weighing the cost and efficiency of wind turbines and solar panels to decide which to use to offer intermittent electricity to the houses. They are also talking to suppliers about discounts on parts and waiting on the Haiti government to offer a site near Port-au-Prince and maybe help with transportation costs.

Rosen’s houses would have steel framing, rubberized membranes for roofs, zinc sheets over porches and heavy-duty drywalls capable of withstanding 120 mph winds and enduring a 6.2- to 6.5-magnitude earthquake, said Daniel Gutierrez, vice president of engineering and facilities management for Rosen Hotels and Resorts.

The project impressed Jéan E. Wilson, an Orlando attorney from Haiti who has been raising funds for long-term relief projects.

“I like the idea that he is going to create a village so that people not only have houses, but also ways to sustain themselves as a community,” Wilson said. “If all we do is fix things that the earthquake destroyed, then we are leaving the people no better off than before this happened.”

Rosen wants to sell his dream to individuals and corporations willing to put their name, and money, behind a modular home or an entire village in Haiti.

“To me this is a beginning and an opportunity to change the template and create something new,” Rosen said, “and maybe out of this horrible, horrible disaster we can create something good.”

Víctor Manuel Ramos can be reached at vramos@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-6186. Rachael Jackson can be reached at rjackson@orlandosentinel.com or 407-540-4358

BY FRANCES ROBLES AND ANDRES VIGLUCCI   frobles@MiamiHerald.com

Like Charles, the vast majority of Haitians living in tent cities that arose in the days following the quake are in desperate need of shelter. Most sleep under sheets strung from trees. The lucky ones used nails and sticks, and more and more are finding scraps of wood and tin to build with.

But the government wants them to stop.

“We are asking people not to do that,” said Haiti’s minister of communications, Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue. “The problem is, we are waiting for better tents.”

The government and the United Nations have plans to move people out of the spontaneous, post-quake settlements into planned temporary camps just outside the city.

The government now needs to clear out the improvised camps inside the city and begin demolishing buildings to make room for planned, organized and well-built neighborhoods, said Charles Clemont, special advisor to President Rene Préval.

`GO FAST’

 “I am asking my colleague in charge of demolition to go fast, but to go fast in an orderly fashion. We need to move these people within the city, not far,” Clemont said. “We need to start demolition now.”

But experts say that with so many homeless people on the streets and rain coming soon, there is no good alternative to improvised dwellings. Even as thousands of tents arrive from agencies around the world, recovery experts say those have a short life span, and there may be not be enough to shelter all those who need it.

The U.N., which has distributed 7,000 tents, says they’re only a last resort — a quick, short-term solution for a nation that faces rains starting later this month, and beyond that the summer hurricane season.

“The shelf life of a tent is six months to one year, when the reconstruction of Port-au-Prince will take five, seven or 10 years,” said Mark Turner, spokesman for the International Office of Migration, the U.N. agency that is coordinating shelter issues. “No one wants to live in a tent for a very long time.”

Turner said the agency’s push now is to provide better materials, like rope, tarp and corrugated iron, to build “transitional” housing, which can be improved over time and even disassembled.

“Ten years from now, are there going to be towns in the parks where these camps are now? Possibly,” Turner said. “What are the options? Are you going to raze the whole city? You have to help the people where they are, and this is where they are.”

The shacks people are building, he said, have several benefits: Residents can stand in them, conduct business in them, and survive a hurricane in them.

And tents, some Haitians say, will not keep out the driving rain.

`BIG SHOWER’

“When it starts to rain, everyone here will have a big shower,” said Marie Yvelen Boisdefer, who helps run the tent city at Sylvio Cator Stadium. “Showers with no soap.”

If the history of disaster recovery across the world is any guide, experts say, the government won’t be able to stand in the way of improvised rebuilding.

New shantytowns will likely arise, making the government’s dreams of a better Port-au-Prince difficult to achieve, said Lawrence Vale, professor of urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-editor of The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster. The Haitian government has talked about reducing the city’s size by resettling people outside Port-au-Prince, then building better in urban areas. But though mass disasters like the Haiti quake often generate ambitious schemes for remaking cities, the reality is they almost never pan out, Vale said.

“People are going to build informally just as they were building before the earthquake,” Vale said. “A lot of people, especially those with remittances coming in from relatives abroad, will be able to use their resources to rebuild locally even if the larger picture remains substantially devastated.”

In storm-prone countries like El Salvador, entire neighborhoods are named after the date of the hurricane that forced the residents to set up there with donated materials. In Haiti’s capital, some slums swelled with squatters who fled flooding in Gonaïves in 2008.

Some experts also warn the Haitian government must be careful that the new refugee camps it establishes outside the city don’t also become permanent settlements.

“You do not want what are commonly referred to as refugee camps, hundreds of thousands of tents, you don’t want them to become permanent,” said David Meltzer, senior vice president of international services for the American Red Cross. architect and planner Andrés Duany said residents should be provided boards and corrugated steel.

“No one ever moves off their community sites after a disaster — ever in history,” said Duany, who just returned from Port-au-Prince, where he met with Preval. “They just don’t.”

Miami Herald staff writers Lesley Clark, Kathleen McGrory and Jim Wyss contributed to this report.

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/top-stories/v-fullstory/story/1461774.html#player_id=8659f4ba0443c8ebb2025b29016dfa0d&token=1f55620514b09f4e2f30162a0fb15e61&media_id=10042907&vmix_title=Haiti%27s%20short%20term%20housing%20solutions&vmix_credit=Miami%20Herald%20Staff&vmix_descrip=Haitians%20are%20finding%20ways%20to%20live%20and%20to%20cope%20after%20the%20earthquake%2C%20including%20relocating%2C%20living%20in%20make-shift%20tents%2C%20living%20in%20new%20government%20tents%20and%20rebuilding%20their%20former%20homes.

It’s midday in Port-au-Prince and the sun is beating down from a cloudless sky.

It’s good news, another day without clouds means another day without rain.  But it won’t last.  Everybody knows the rainy season is now only a few weeks away, and a million people have no proper shelter.

A park on the edge of Port-au-Prince is sprouting what look like giant white field mushrooms.   They are actually large white tents, hundreds of them.  It’s the first proper tent encampment to be built since the earthquake. Along a high concrete wall workers are digging latrines, and building shower blocks.

In a few days from now 3,000 refugees from the centre of Port-au-Prince will start moving in here. But they will be the lucky few. 

Watch the video in this link to see what ShelterBox is doing   http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8488728.stm

‘Huge number’

Despite repeated calls from everyone – from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to Haitian President Rene Preval – only a few thousand tents have so far arrived in Haiti.

Mr Gascon says there are simply not enough tents

“The priority for flights has been given to bringing in food and medical supplies,” says Christopher Gascon from the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

He is in charge of building the mushroom tent camp. He has 40,000 more tents on their way from Panama, but by ship, not by air. And even when those do arrive, they will not be nearly enough.

It seems extraordinary, but so vast are Haiti’s needs that there are simply not enough of the right sort of tents in the world right now to house all the refugees.

“We are talking about a huge number of tents,” says Mr Gascon.  “These sort of tents are not widely available. They will have to be made, ordered from China. If you want 200,000 tents now its not going to happen, they are not there.”

‘Ghost’ camp

There is also chaos and confusion. The aftermath of every natural disaster is chaotic. But Haiti is especially so.  Every aid agency and non-governmental organisation (NGO) in the world seems to have poured in to Port-au-Prince.

In the UN compound next to the airport clean-cut young men and women strut around in T-shirts proclaiming “Scientologist Volunteers”.

Reconstruction: Haitian style

In a bar across the street a group of Belgian men are drinking beer. Outside their large white lorry has a banner draped across it with the name of their own tiny environmental NGO.

“We want to help, but the World Food Programme says they already have enough water trucks,” they tell me. But if the UN base is chaotic, it’s nothing to the Haitian government compound.

It’s housed in an old concrete police station just down the road. The car park is crammed with large four-wheel drives jostling for position and hooting loudly.

We manage to track down Charles Clermont, the Haitian official charged with building the mass tent cities that will supposedly house the hundreds of thousands of refugees from Port-au-Prince.  “We started work the day after the earthquake,” he assures me, “the first camp will be up and running within the next few days.”  Surprised, I ask him where it is.  “It is on the outskirts of the city, there is running water and there will be electricity and spaces, it will be operational within a few days,” Mr Clermont says.

Intrigued, I take down the details of the location and head out of town. The place is an empty stretch of highway that runs out to the mountains north of Port-au-Prince.  One thing is immediately clear, there is no camp. Instead on a stony hillside we come across one of the most extraordinary sites I have ever seen.  Hundreds and hundreds of people, camping in the open.

‘No help’

As soon as I get out of the car a crowd surrounds me. One young man speaks English.  I ask him where he sleeps.  “On the ground,” he answers, pointing to a patch of dirt further up the hill.  I ask him if he has had any help, any food or water.  “No,” he says, “we have nothing.”

Further on I find a young mother and her seven children squatting in a tiny shack they have fashioned out of sticks and old blankets. One of her children has a huge bandage around his hand.  “He had two fingers amputated after the quake,” the mother says.

Nearby Salnar Devoisie is lying on a makeshift bed. Her daughter is platting her mass of grey hair. There is a white bandage around the stump of her left leg. “I was trapped in the rubble of my home for three days. When the Israeli doctors got me out they said we will have to chop it off or you will die,” she says.  As we talk she rubs her hand against her chest as if in pain.  “It is gas. I haven’t eaten for four days.”

Despite the massive response from the outside world these people are still waiting for help to arrive.  And for nearly a million Haitians the coming night will be another night spent in the open.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8488728.stm

I have traveled with Angel in Haiti on prior mission trips there.

Donate Here:  Food for the Poor

Response Team member Lasse Petersen said: ‘We agreed with the local community that the initial tent allocation would be for families with pregnant women and families with newborns.

‘Port au Prince is overflowing with encampments of people sleeping out without basic shelter. The demand remains enormous, but with the help of our donors, ShelterBox has flown 5 aircraft and over 3,000 ShelterBoxes to aid those left homeless by the quake.

‘In the hospitals, orphanages and local communities we are making a difference and thousands of more boxes are en route.’

For more information please visit http://www.shelterbox.org