The last few days I was both ill and then desperately busy, and had little time to update this blog: I did however keep a record in my notebook, and these are a summary of my comments & musings in that time.
Petionville -- Mud invades every inch of the saggy handmade tent Mimose Pierre-Louis now calls home. It spatters the pink bedsheet that serves as her wall, crawls up the acacia branch that plays the role of wobbly tent pole and it forms the floor she lies on. At one end of the tent a steep slope leads several hundred yards up to the Petionville Club, where the Haitian elite once played tennis and drank cocktails by the pool. Immediately at the other, the earth drops 15 feet into a stinking open sewer. This is Port au Prince’s largest encampment, home to 70,000 people jumbled amongst trees and rocks on barren slopes. Now they all live in fear as the ferocious storms Haiti's April-May rainy season approach. To save people from this challenge of destructive rains and floods, NGOs here have launched an ambitious logistical operation aimed at protecting the Mimose’s of this wrecked city. They plan to carve new drainage channels in the most vulnerable of the hundreds of camps in this city by mid-April and to relocate people living in the most precariously perched tents. The consequences of failure would be devastating, Haitian and international officials estimate: another catastrophe – potentially as many as 37,000 dead in floods and mudslides -- in a country still reeling from more than 200,000 earthquake deaths.
So in the next weeks leading up to 15th April when storms are expected to start, relief crews will dredge the sewage & drainage channels and build retaining walls. They will also attempt to find new refuge for the thousands of people whose tents are so imperiled by flash floods that they cannot be saved by the engineering work.
But that's just the beginning. Over the next few months we need to relocate at least 150,000 people living in unacceptably muddy camps wedged into ravines and on steep hillsides that could become breeding grounds for disease. Several hundred thousand more are expected to find shelter on their own outside the camps, in the homes of friends and relatives or in semi-permanent structures near their homes.
Even calculating how many people in the camps legitimately need to be relocated has become a complex exercise. Thousands have set up tents in camps to collect food and water during the day, even though their homes are habitable. And some quake victims have set up multiple tents - a husband in one, a wife in another, and their children in a third - in order to collect more supplies: we’ve seen it and so have other agencies.
Hillsides made bald by years of deforestation in Port-au-Prince and other parts of the country act as giant sluices, funneling torrents of water in even the smallest storms. On the steep hillsides yesterday's mud becomes today's hard-packed claylike surface, perfect to channel water next time it tains.
In post-earthquake Port-au-Prince, rainstorms - including several brief ones over the past week - lift refuse from the ordered piles workers have carefully brought together to await collection and spread it across streets and camps. With this ooze -- an awful melange of rotting fruit, rotting animal flesh and human waste -- comes a smell that brings to mind spoiled milk and gangrenous wounds. Yesterday a child slipped and drowned in this mire, one more victim of the January 12th earthquake.
On Tuesday we got a preview of what's to come when a short downpour collapsed a school tent, streets became rivers with floating garbage islands, and water rose to knee-level in many camps. Mimose managed to save her tent, but the coursing water swept away everything else: her charcoal stove, 12 spoons, two pots, a couple of buckets and a bag of clothes. She sank to her knees and "asked God to change my life."
Before the quake Mimose earned the equivalent of $1.50 a day making shirts but is jobless now: but she has come emotional comfort despite the grim conditions. Her friend Carline Calipso - whose 2-year-old daughter died in the quake - occupies the next tent, and two tents along lives another friend from her Delmas home district, Louidie Desauguste along with his his wife and 10 children.
The three friends reflect the conflicting emotions of the moment. Desauguste would move if offered a safe place, he said, but "I survived the earthquake; I'm not going to some new place to die." Calipso dreams of escaping the camp before the water "takes me away," but worries that she would struggle to restart her street market business in a place where she doesn't know anyone. In one breath, Mimose said she wants to leave, and soon; in the next, she said she doesn't want to leave her family and friends.
And therein lies the problem: The main new settlement being built is several miles from the city centre in a neighborhood called Tabarre.
Many of the camps are situated on private land - tolerated for now by the owners - or on symbolically important public spaces. Haitian officials want to clear a camp in front of the prime minister's office and another in the city centre along the Champ de Mars, a teeming avenue across from the once-graceful National Palace, which collapsed during the quake. Now semi-permanent structures crafted from scavenged wood line the street, and their owners show little inclination to move. NGO workers are less concerned about this camp because it sits on paved ground, and the U.N. troops have said "no one will be forced out at the point of a gun." But Haitians have begun to issue veiled threats.
"We abide by the law," Charles Clermont, head of the Haitian presidential relocation task force, said in a radio interview. "We know the concept is, you can't force someone to go somewhere. But you can force someone to leave a place." If people refuse to leave the Champ de Mars, Clermont envisions Haitian government officials eventually going in and announcing: "Ladies and gentlemen, in three days we are going to stop providing for you."
In the rush to save lives, it will be almost impossible to achieve international standards of 36 square metres per person for the first group of people targeted for relocation. There is ongoing & furious debate between NGO officials and Haitian government workers. Some advocate building at least one large solid structure of wood or metal in each of the new settlements, where people could cluster if their tents are ripped apart by winds and rain – almost like a medieval fortress. Earth movers now parade across the tract of land on the city's edge where one such edifice will be erected. Two inhabitants were injured there recently during a shootout after someone opened fire at work crews, underlying the tensions associated with almost any major initiative here.
Amongst such chaos there is a real fear that the temporary settlements will become permanent slums and that, in solving one crisis, others will be created. It calls to mind a Haitian saying: "Don't escape from the river and fall into the bottom of the sea."
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