Planning for the future: starting small

I met 62-year-old Rosemarie Joseph at the Lycée Jean-Marie Vincent, a spontaneous camp for displaced families on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital. Rosemarie resettled on the high school grounds with 80 other earthquake affected families with the six youngest of her eight children on January 25. Now they're living in a tiny tent made of a collection of personal and borrowed bed linens, because her house was severely damaged in the January earthquake.

Like many others, Rosemarie lost all her possessions in the quake, but she’s just happy she and her family survived. Her oldest son is 36 and her youngest only nine years old. Her husband died a long time ago — she cannot quite recollect the year.

“We were never wealthy people," Rosemarie comments. "Before the quake, I used to run a small petty trading business selling bread, charcoal and little things that people would need. And with that, we could to get by, even if we didn’t always manage to eat more than one good meal a day. But now, we go hungry for days running. When we’re lucky enough to find something to eat, we have to borrow cooking utensils from another family in the camp, because we’ve lost everything.”

It only takes one glance around to see the level of destitution that is now Rosemarie’s everyday reality. As we sit together in what the place she must now call home, there are only torn pieces of cardboard for them to sleep on. There is one pillow, a small desk and a few empty plastic water bottles. The “tent” is exposed to the heavy sunshine and the rain. With rainy season on its way, it’s easy to imagine how much worse things will get.

Unlike others, Rosemarie has no family abroad who can send remittances to help her. The camp at Lycée Jean-Marie Vincent wasn’t mapped out by the United Nations (it was an unofficial camp) and so no humanitarian aid reached the families settled here at first. Luckily, a Mercy Corps team spotted the camp and we’ve now started two programs: water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and cash-for-work programmes, which work hand in hand. So, in addition to cash-for-work, we are already providing access to clean water and latrines, because the original facilities are now massively overstretched with the displaced population.

One of Rosemarie’s sons was selected to take part in the cash-for-work programme, which is aimed at supporting the immediate needs of earthquake-affected populations through community work such as rubble clearing and digging of drainage canals. Participants are enlisted in the program for 20 days and paid at the UN-endorsed daily rate of 180 Haitian Gourdes — about US $4.50 — for six hours of work.

Rosemarie and her family urgently need food and improved shelter but, when asked what her household would do with their first cash-for-work payment, Rosemarie immediately replied, “We'll start back my old trading business. We need to get back on our feet you know!”