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This project was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Haiti Earthquake: A Decade of Aftershocks
On Jan. 12, 2010, Haiti was struck by a massive earthquake. The disaster claimed 316,000 lives, left 1.5 million homeless and another 1.5 million injured. As the anniversary approaches, the Miami Herald, in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, will look at questions around aid and rebuilding over the past decade in the series Haiti Earthquake: A Decade of Aftershocks. We invite our readers to share with us how the Haiti earthquake impacted their lives. Your comments may be used in future stories.
PORT-AU-PRINCE
For nearly three years after the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake, Haiti’s main public square was a densely crowded tent city packed with makeshift huts made from cardboard, plywood and bedsheets in the shadow of a ruined p**********l palace.
Walk through the Champ de Mars today and the displaced survivors of the quake who once called it home are long gone — replaced by ice cream vendors, novice student drivers and a new government administrative corridor in the center of the city.
The razed palace still hasn’t been rebuilt, but several of the 44 public buildings that crumbled in less than a minute, including the Supreme Court, have been reconstructed, while a new $89 million Parliament complex is under way even as lawmakers flee downtown Port-au-Prince for the hills due to rising violence.
As a disaster-prone Haiti prepares to commemorate the 10th anniversary of an unimaginable catastrophe, Haitians and the international community that pledged to help the country rebuild can point to a few signs of progress.
But a decade of political and economic aftershocks and billions of dollars in mismanaged and unaccounted-for aid have left the country struggling with its recovery, and no more ready today to withstand another massive tremor than it was the day the 7.0 magnitude quake struck.
“What has been done is cosmetic,” said Leslie Voltaire, an architect and urban planner who was involved in reconstruction planning in the early days of the recovery. “When I am going through the city and looking, the masons have the same habits. They are building the same way they used to. There is no control, no supervision by public works or by the municipality to see if they are doing it right.
“I am afraid another big earthquake will produce the same results. We have not even had drills in the schools or in the public administration to know what to do, how to react when you have an earthquake,” he added. “So we have not learned, really.”
The earthquake, which lasted 35 seconds and was followed by several aftershocks, left an estimated 316,000 dead and 1.5 million injured. More than 1.5 million Haitians were left homeless after more than 400,000 houses crumbled into broken slabs of concrete and twisted steel. In the aftermath, donors and the Haitian government promised better construction, free public housing and a revitalization of Haiti’s devastated economy.
None of it has materialized as envisioned.
Ten years later, the Parliament has not v**ed on a new quake-resistant building code. Some of the expensive and ambitious projects promised, like a new and still unfinished $100 million general hospital and the $300 million Caracol Industrial Park, have yet to realize their potential, and the economy, which saw some growth after an estimated $7.61 billion in humanitarian and reconstruction aid was pumped in during the first two years after the earthquake, is in ruins.
Ten years after the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake in Haiti, most of the makeshift huts and tents that once housed desperate, displaced earthquake survivors in plain view are gone. But hidden tent cities like this one in the city of Delmas in the capital’s metropolitan area still remain. José A. Iglesias jiglesias@elnuevoherald.com
“The hope for a new day in Haiti was something people really believed in and really engaged in,” said Luis Alberto Moreno, the president of the Inter-American Development Bank, which pledged $2 billion in aid at the International Donors Conference at the United Nations in New York in late March 2010.
“Unfortunately what I find today is that the energy of the donor community [compared with] right after the earthquake and today, has truly changed,” Moreno said in an interview. “The enthusiasm to see change in Haiti has waned over time.”
The earthquake decimated the southern portion of Haiti, leveling more than 100,000 buildings in metropolitan Port-au-Prince and the cities of Jacmel and Léogâne, where the epicenter was. A post-disaster assessment by the U.N. estimated the destruction at $7.9 billion.
At the 2010 donors’ conference in New York, 58 governments and organizations pledged $8.33 billion to reconstruct Haiti over 10 years. Of that amount, the donors committed to spending $5.37 billion during 2010-12. Outside of the U.N conference, the donors pledged an additional $5 billion for the first two years after the quake.
Questions about what happened to the money dominate many discussions, and an effort was recently launched by Dr. Paul Farmer, the former special adviser to the U.N. Secretary-General, to get up-to-date information on the disbursements of the two pots of money. The exercise has proven difficult, with billions of dollars in pledges still unaccounted for.
Six of the top 10 donors did not respond to Farmer’s request, making it impossible to draw conclusions about the disbursement trend, Farmer’s U.N. office said. Only Spain, France, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank responded. The six that didn’t respond: Venezuela, Canada, the European Community, the U.S. Agency for International Development, Brazil and the International Monetary Fund.
An analysis of the $10.37 billion pledged for 2010-12 did show that more than half, $6.43 billion, of the pledges committed for humanitarian and recovery assistance was disbursed. This includes direct budget support from a few countries to the Haitian government. But less than 10 percent of the $6.43 billion went directly to the Haitian government, and even less, 0.6 percent, went to Haitian businesses and organizations, Farmer’s office noted.
Farmer’s office did not factor in the more than $800 million in debt forgiveness Venezuela, the Inter-American Development Bank and other international financial institutions provided to Haiti after the quake.
“Though the post-earthquake narrative was that the $10.7 billion that donors had pledged would put Haiti on the path to a better future, it did not cover much more than the cost of the economic and physical damage incurred,” Farmer’s office said in an analysis titled Lessons from Haiti.
The camps
Nowhere are the broken promises of reconstruction more apparent than in the squalid camps that continue to exist today, and where on Jan. 12 some Haitians will mark 10 years of living under a tarp or behind pieces of rusty tin, with no running water, no latrines, no electricity and no security.
The makeshift settlements are no longer in plain sight on the Champ de Mars or the public soccer fields. Today, they are mostly invisible throughout the capital as residents scrape out a living in traffic-clogged Port-au-Prince.
Yet the “cities” have outlasted torrential rain, heavy winds, a deadly cholera epidemic that k**led at least 10,000 people, and the seven governments and four presidents that have failed them.
Cami Etienne, far right, talks about the situation in Haiti in the company of some of the children who live in a makeshift camp located off a dirt road in the interior of Delmas. José A. Iglesias jiglesias@elnuevoherald.com
“Nothing has changed. On the contrary, it’s gotten worse,” said Cami Etienne, 56, a father of four who lives in a hilltop tent city in the Fragneauville neighborhood at the end of a dirt road in the city of Delmas. “With each passing day, we cannot buy anything, even the basic amenities that we need in order to live. We can’t even afford water.”
Etienne said he never imagined his life would come to this after he was forced to run out into the streets with one of his children as his home shook violently and then collapsed during the quake.
“It’s an awful life when you can’t give your children a house to live in,” he said, standing at the camp’s entrance where clothes hung on lines in the open air.
Stopping mid-sentence, he turned around and pointed out his tent: pieces of raggedy tarp fastened together. “This is not me.”
The camp has no name, but the vestiges of early relief efforts by some of the non-governmental organizations that rushed to Haiti are still visible.
There are weathered but still sturdy benches in a common sitting area painted in pink with artistic accents. There is also a play area for the many children, who on this particular day are more interested in their game of hide-and-seek than the pink plastic tunnel on the ground.
Many of the decaying tin shacks are painted in a variety of colors. There is little concrete-block construction.
Christian Mervilus, 41, said he moved to the area a year ago from another encampment in Faustin to escape the recurrent rapes and k*****gs.
“I was living in a tent and I came here and I am still in a tent,” he said. “If we had money, we would not be here.”
Mervilus said that after 10 years, he hasn’t seen any serious efforts to help Haitians like himself.
Most of the 1.5 million people displaced by the earthquake are back in neighborhoods, a feat that the International Organization for Migration says should be recognized.
The U.N. agency, which has been in charge of tracking the number of internally displaced people and relocating them back into neighborhoods, says there are 32,788 people today in 22 camps. The Delmas camp where Mervilus and Etienne live is not among the official sites.
Also not to be found on that official tally: the 300,000-plus people living in the biggest post-quake informal settlement, Canaan. The decision to exclude Canaan, which derives its name from the biblical promised land, was made in 2013 by IOM at the request of the Haitian government’s Housing and Public Buildings Construction Unit.
A sprawling area once deemed unacceptable for an industrial park, Canaan is located 10 miles north of the capital. It was settled after the U.S. government, actor Sean Penn and U.N. aid organizations pressured then-President René Préval to expropriate land for the state to use for quake survivors living in areas considered to be at high risk for flooding and landslides.
The area was promised as a place where quake survivors would be able to rebuild their lives with permanent homes as part of a newly developed community offering running water, electricity and nearby factory jobs. However, as soon as Haitians learned the government had expropriated the land, they moved in. Some were quake survivors who were relocated by aid agencies. Others were squatters who bought illegally sold plots.
The permanent housing never got built, so residents started to build their own, constructing permanent concrete homes throughout the area.
Today it includes more than a dozen communities — some controlled by gangs — and is bordered by two national roads.
“We have created the biggest slum in the Caribbean,” said Voltaire, who has done consultant work in Canaan for the government.
SOURCES- José A. Iglesias --By Jacqueline Charles-Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.alberto, luis-farmer, paul. Dr,-ALEXIS, JUNIOR-JEAN, MARGUERITE-MARTELLY, MICHEL-LOPRETE, GIUSEPPE-MUNEVAR, FELIPE-

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