Hashing out Haiti

HAITI | As the UN makes recovery plans, Haitians struggle for the basic necessities for survival | Jamie Dean

Clinton, Ban, and Haiti President Preval (AP/Mary Altaffer)

Around a well-appointed table in a brightly lit room at UN Headquarters in New York City Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon sipped orange juice and munched fresh fruit ahead of an International Donors’ Conference on Haiti redevelopment. The pair had a hefty task—help secure $3.8 billion in pledges from some 100 countries and international development organizations for a 10-year recovery program. By noon, countries and groups had pledged $2.75 billion.

Nearly 1,500 miles south, in the sprawling tent cities of Port-au-Prince, fresh fruit and orange juice are in short supply, along with basic necessities for survival. Indeed, as government officials and donors discussed long-term redevelopment in New York, the on-the-ground reality in Haiti remained bleak: Aid experts estimate that more than 237,000 quake victims living in camps are in danger of mudslides and flooding when the rainy season starts in May. Sanitation in camps remains abysmal, and violent crimes are on the rise.

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The immediate misery begs questions from the UN conference: Can languishing Haitians grappling with short-term survival and governmental quagmires wait for a complicated start of a long-term plan? Will Ban’s sweeping call for a “wholesale national renewal” help quake victims with dire needs now?

The immediate indicators are not good: Despite aid groups raising hundreds of millions of dollars in the aftermath of the Jan. 12 earthquake, the UN estimated in mid-March that only 60 percent of homeless Haitians have tarps or tents for shelter. Hundreds of thousands are still exposed to heat and rain.

The Haitian government had promised to create and relocate thousands of Haitians to at least five large, safe and secure sites. More than two months later, only 200 people have moved to one site. UN officials have wrung their hands, waiting to relocate more, but Haitian officials said they have been unable to reach agreements with owners of large tracts of desolate land.

Issues of land ownership will make national renewal even more difficult. The UN said engineers would assess homes that are still standing, allowing now-fearful residents to return to safe structures, a plan long ago suggested by smaller engineering groups like Engineering Ministries International (see “Stress management,” Feb. 27, 2010). But plans also call for homeless Haitians to return to collapsed homes, where aid workers will help them remove rubble. The snag: Collapsed homes and crushed government buildings may make proving home ownership nearly impossible for many, and encourage fraud among many more. That means that red tape that made simply securing desolate land nearly impossible for the government may end up stretching around the entire city.

For now, red tape is the least of most Haitians’ worries. By the time many figure out how to get by today, the energy for thinking about tomorrow is gone.