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Reconstruction takes time awaits finish in Haiti
Jan 27, 2020 22:08:48   #
thebigp
 
IOM Director Giuseppe Loprete says he understands the frustrations of those still in the camps, but there is no template for dealing with a disaster of the magnitude of Haiti’s.
“It’s not just Haiti. Reconstruction, rebuilding a country takes years, decades, we can say,” said Loprete. “We can compare some places around the world. ... Five years after the tsunami [in Indonesia] we were creating housing for people still displaced.”
He acknowledges that more progress could have been achieved in Haiti if it were not for the political instability and “if the environment was more functional, if there were more political decisions taken in due time ... with better use of resources.”
“We feel like we’re going backwards to early 2004,” he said, referring to the period when a bloody r*******n forced the president’s ouster and the U.N. had to send in a peacekeeping mission. “Instead of 10 years later, there are people here thinking we are living the situation of instability like five, six years before [the quake] in terms of violence, criminality, everything.”
IOM has had its own difficulties attracting funding to shut down camps. Its most recent donation was $300,000 from the South Korean government, which it has used to clear camps in Léogâne, where a previously unknown fault line led to the earthquake.
“No one now is interested in funding these activities,” Loprete said.
The inside of Telfort Innocent’s shack at the biggest camp in Village Caradeux in Delmas turns into a river whenever it rains. Ten years after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, he and his children are among thousands who call the camp home. José A. Iglesias jiglesias@elnuevoherald.com
That wasn’t always the case. In 2011, IOM partnered with the Haitian government’s housing unit to launch a pilot relocation program to return thousands of quake survivors residing in six camps back to the 16 neighborhoods they came from.
After relocating more than 35,000 homeless families, Canada’s Foreign Affairs office stepped in and donated $18 million to help more people voluntarily return. Under the relocation program, camp residents received a voucher, equivalent to about $500 at the time, to rent a place for a year.
Felipe Munevar, director and representative for the U.N. Office for Project Services Haiti, said the government’s camp relocation program “was a success.” But he also noted one reality.
“There was never going to be enough money to really address, you know, all of the potential beneficiaries that needed help,” said Munevar, whose agency helped quake survivors return home by repairing more than 1,200 damaged houses and by building 600 new housing units for those with titles.
Munevar said while the U.N. agency would have liked to build more houses, it was not easy when there were so many legal questions surrounding ownership of property that had been damaged or destroyed.
Some of the officials involved in the reconstruction say it was unreasonable for organizations, including aid agencies, to expect the government to build housing for people who did not have their own houses to begin with and were renters when the quake happened.
In a few instances, houses were built, the homes weren’t necessarily free and construction was problematic. In one government project, Lumane Casimir, where the 344-square-foot houses are the size of a hotel room, some apartments stayed empty because the construction was poorly done and it was located far away from schools, markets and churches. In recent years, some recipients have even decided to stop paying rent.
Lost promise
Still, residents in Teren Toto insist that the best thing the Haitian government can do for them is build them houses — right where they currently are.
They are not interested, they said, in the camp relocation program. They note that the money IOM provided to help them rent a place a few years ago was roughly the equivalent of $500 U.S., which is even less in today’s battered economy.
“And after that, when the house’s lease is due?” Alexis said. “Those people will be in the streets.”
The solution, he said, “is good, durable housing. What they can do for us inside Village Caradeux is good construction.”
Most of the makeshift huts and homeless tents that once housed desperate, displaced earthquake survivors in Haiti are gone. But there are still thousands who remain homeless in hidden tent cities. José A. Iglesias jiglesias@elnuevoherald.com
Moreno, the IDB president, said donors really wanted to address the housing issue in Haiti but in the face of weak institutions and the country’s unwillingness to address its land titling problem, it was difficult for some donors to make the investments..
”There was an earthquake, but there wasn’t an earthquake in the kind of institutional change that you need in Haiti to materialize a lot of this help, so that made it very difficult to deploy aid,” Moreno said. “We find ourselves now with literally a handful of the key donors.”
Reflecting on the past decade, Moreno said, there were two very different periods. The first was marked by the immediate response, and he and others saw that then-President Préval, who died in 2017, was “very committed.” The second came with Martelly and his hand-picked successor, Haiti’s current President Moïse, with his f**gship “Caravan of Change” initiative to build roads in far-flung communities.
“Martelly came with a lot of energy and as I see it, was a lost promise in the end,” Moreno said. “This president had a lot of energy looking at the whole idea of the Caravan, which sounded like something I had never seen in Haiti before, which is put all of the resources the government has to go after the poorest communities.
“But somehow there are always all these big efforts that do not have staying power, either for political reasons or execution reasons,” Moreno said. “This is the frustrating thing.”
An earlier version of this story stated that 58 governments and organizations pledged $10.7 billion to reconstruct Haiti over 10 years, plus another $10.37 billion in recovery and humanitarian assistance for the first two years after the 2010 earthquake. The actual total figure pledged by the donor governments and organizations was $13.3 billion over 10 years.
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-

Reply
Jan 27, 2020 22:44:02   #
Sicilianthing
 
thebigp wrote:
IOM Director Giuseppe Loprete says he understands the frustrations of those still in the camps, but there is no template for dealing with a disaster of the magnitude of Haiti’s.
“It’s not just Haiti. Reconstruction, rebuilding a country takes years, decades, we can say,” said Loprete. “We can compare some places around the world. ... Five years after the tsunami [in Indonesia] we were creating housing for people still displaced.”
He acknowledges that more progress could have been achieved in Haiti if it were not for the political instability and “if the environment was more functional, if there were more political decisions taken in due time ... with better use of resources.”
“We feel like we’re going backwards to early 2004,” he said, referring to the period when a bloody r*******n forced the president’s ouster and the U.N. had to send in a peacekeeping mission. “Instead of 10 years later, there are people here thinking we are living the situation of instability like five, six years before [the quake] in terms of violence, criminality, everything.”
IOM has had its own difficulties attracting funding to shut down camps. Its most recent donation was $300,000 from the South Korean government, which it has used to clear camps in Léogâne, where a previously unknown fault line led to the earthquake.
“No one now is interested in funding these activities,” Loprete said.
The inside of Telfort Innocent’s shack at the biggest camp in Village Caradeux in Delmas turns into a river whenever it rains. Ten years after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, he and his children are among thousands who call the camp home. José A. Iglesias jiglesias@elnuevoherald.com
That wasn’t always the case. In 2011, IOM partnered with the Haitian government’s housing unit to launch a pilot relocation program to return thousands of quake survivors residing in six camps back to the 16 neighborhoods they came from.
After relocating more than 35,000 homeless families, Canada’s Foreign Affairs office stepped in and donated $18 million to help more people voluntarily return. Under the relocation program, camp residents received a voucher, equivalent to about $500 at the time, to rent a place for a year.
Felipe Munevar, director and representative for the U.N. Office for Project Services Haiti, said the government’s camp relocation program “was a success.” But he also noted one reality.
“There was never going to be enough money to really address, you know, all of the potential beneficiaries that needed help,” said Munevar, whose agency helped quake survivors return home by repairing more than 1,200 damaged houses and by building 600 new housing units for those with titles.
Munevar said while the U.N. agency would have liked to build more houses, it was not easy when there were so many legal questions surrounding ownership of property that had been damaged or destroyed.
Some of the officials involved in the reconstruction say it was unreasonable for organizations, including aid agencies, to expect the government to build housing for people who did not have their own houses to begin with and were renters when the quake happened.
In a few instances, houses were built, the homes weren’t necessarily free and construction was problematic. In one government project, Lumane Casimir, where the 344-square-foot houses are the size of a hotel room, some apartments stayed empty because the construction was poorly done and it was located far away from schools, markets and churches. In recent years, some recipients have even decided to stop paying rent.
Lost promise
Still, residents in Teren Toto insist that the best thing the Haitian government can do for them is build them houses — right where they currently are.
They are not interested, they said, in the camp relocation program. They note that the money IOM provided to help them rent a place a few years ago was roughly the equivalent of $500 U.S., which is even less in today’s battered economy.
“And after that, when the house’s lease is due?” Alexis said. “Those people will be in the streets.”
The solution, he said, “is good, durable housing. What they can do for us inside Village Caradeux is good construction.”
Most of the makeshift huts and homeless tents that once housed desperate, displaced earthquake survivors in Haiti are gone. But there are still thousands who remain homeless in hidden tent cities. José A. Iglesias jiglesias@elnuevoherald.com
Moreno, the IDB president, said donors really wanted to address the housing issue in Haiti but in the face of weak institutions and the country’s unwillingness to address its land titling problem, it was difficult for some donors to make the investments..
”There was an earthquake, but there wasn’t an earthquake in the kind of institutional change that you need in Haiti to materialize a lot of this help, so that made it very difficult to deploy aid,” Moreno said. “We find ourselves now with literally a handful of the key donors.”
Reflecting on the past decade, Moreno said, there were two very different periods. The first was marked by the immediate response, and he and others saw that then-President Préval, who died in 2017, was “very committed.” The second came with Martelly and his hand-picked successor, Haiti’s current President Moïse, with his f**gship “Caravan of Change” initiative to build roads in far-flung communities.
“Martelly came with a lot of energy and as I see it, was a lost promise in the end,” Moreno said. “This president had a lot of energy looking at the whole idea of the Caravan, which sounded like something I had never seen in Haiti before, which is put all of the resources the government has to go after the poorest communities.
“But somehow there are always all these big efforts that do not have staying power, either for political reasons or execution reasons,” Moreno said. “This is the frustrating thing.”
An earlier version of this story stated that 58 governments and organizations pledged $10.7 billion to reconstruct Haiti over 10 years, plus another $10.37 billion in recovery and humanitarian assistance for the first two years after the 2010 earthquake. The actual total figure pledged by the donor governments and organizations was $13.3 billion over 10 years.
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-
IOM Director Giuseppe Loprete says he understands ... (show quote)


>>>

I don’t give a rats azz about Haiti or any other place outside my borders bro!

Do you realize we’re at war here and abroad?

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