thebigp

Jan. 12, 2010 earth... by Miami Herald on Scribd
Haitian government spokesman Eddy Jackson Alexis did not respond to a Miami Herald request to meet with Clément Bélizaire, executive director of the Housing and Public Buildings Construction Unit, which has been working with the U.N. to build roads and other infrastructure in Canaan and is overseeing the reconstruction of public buildings.
While Canaan is the most vivid example of Haitians finding their own solution without government help, it is not the only one where Haitians have taken it upon themselves to try to set permanent roots.
Toto’s Land
Teren Toto, Toto’s Land, sits on a hill along Avenue Albert Jode not far from the U.S. Embassy on the border of the cities of Tabarre and Delmas in the capital’s metropolitan area.
“Everybody is fighting to take care of themselves,” said Jean-Canel Clessidor, 37, who says he moved to Toto after the earthquake. “If you are going to wait around for the government to do for you, then you will never find a leader who will help you.”
Goats wander along a makeshift dirt road that passes by the Teren Toto camp on the border of the cities of Tabarre and Delmas in Haiti. José A. Iglesias jiglesias@elnuevoherald.com
Clessidor said he thought his stay in Toto would be temporary. But after three months of watching the wave of charities offering food, tarps and temporary shelters made of plywood but no permanent housing, he gave up.
“Now, we don’t have any hope of anything changing,” he said.
Many in the camps say their hope for change is not with the leaders who have time and again failed them and use them as political pawns, but with God.
“Nobody sees us,” Sadrack Charles, 32, said with desperation in his voice. “Imagine I am a young man, a young man who can work, and with all you have to offer, you’re not working. Every day you wake up and sit here, not serving a purpose. Every year that passes is a year lost.”
Charles, whose house is sturdier than most, said he built it sheet by sheet, sometimes sacrificing a meal to use the money for the zinc.
“When you are looking at the situation of the country, everyone has suffered. Foreigners are afraid to come invest,” he said. “We don’t live well. ... The country is finished.”
Behind Charles’ shack is a small canal. “When it rains, it’s miserable for us. It’s nothing but,” he said.
Manette Francois, 58, says that before the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake she had an easier life than today. She lives in a tent city, Teren Toto, in Delmas, in a tin shack that doubles as living quarters and neighborhood grocery store. José A. Iglesias jiglesias@elnuevoherald.com
Manette Francois, 58, said that before the earthquake her life “was beautiful.” Sure, it was tough with nine children, she said, but she had a job as a maid.
She lost her job as well as her home in the earthquake.
“If you see where I am living now, when it rains, I have to take a basin to collect the water,” she said.
Perched at the top of the hill, where residents have laid sandbags to stop mudslides and help them climb the hillside, Francois’ tin shack doubles as living quarters and neighborhood grocery store. In a back room, a blue bucket is nestled up in the tarp-covered ceiling to catch rainwater.
The brewing humanitarian crisis, skyrocketing inflation now hovering at 20 percent annually, and the drastic fall of the domestic currency, the gourde, have meant that her customers can’t even afford to purchase a candle, much less a bag of rice.
Francois said she would like to get out of the camp, but she doesn’t see how she would even sustain herself if she were to move back into a regular neighborhood.
Women carrying produce and other goods walk by some of the tin shacks that make up the Teren Toto camp in Haiti’s capital. José A. Iglesias jiglesias@elnuevoherald.com
Junior Alexis, one of Teren Toto’s two leaders, called the camp “a tiny country within another country,” referring to the lack of government and services and to residents’ inhumane existence.
“The Haitian government does not respect people’s rights,” he said. “There are people here who want to live as human beings.”
The camp is densely packed with shacks, separated by narrow dirt paths that are one hurricane away from being washed away. While many Haitians are still living in tin shacks, others have managed to build sturdier homes from concrete blocks.
Located off the main road and up a winding hill, Teren Toto is the largest of six makeshift settlements that make up Village Caradeux. According to 2017 camp estimates from the International Organization for Migration, there were 10,162 displaced individuals living in Caradeux, and of them, 4,759 lived in Toto.
Junior Alexis, 32, is one of the leaders inside the Teren Toto camp. Alexis said the camp’s residents want to be treated as human beings and need “durable, good housing” after being displaced by the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake. Jose A. Iglesias jiglesias@elnuevoherald.com
In any other country that had experienced a disaster like Haiti’s, Alexis said, the population would have recovered already. But not in Haiti.
“The people did not anticipate this,” he said. “The people thought they were going to get out of the first phase they were in.”
Alexis, 32, earns his living as a motorcycle taxi driver. He’s among the rare few in the camp with steady employment.
A few years ago, IOM tried to clear the camp. Aid workers showed up accompanied by Haitian National Police officers. Residents, who served as their own security watch, fought back, using trees and rocks to prevent the police and workers from entering.
IOM Project Officer Marguerite Jean said it is true Caradeux was targeted for relocation purposes, but the registration required to relocate people and the necessary funding “at some point was no longer available.”
A Haitian government official, who asked to remain anonymous, confirmed the relocation attempt but said it was called off by a powerful lawmaker who warned that the people in the camps were his constituents and were not to be touched.
“Every five years they come here and mislead us,” Alexis said about Haiti’s politicians. President Michel “Martelly sat here and misled us. After Martelly, Jovenel Moïse came to a school we have over here. ... He said, ‘There are a bunch of guys who are playing dominoes. I am going to teach you, I am going to take you out of playing dominoes,’ ” Alexis recalled.
“Where are they today? Every house has dominoes ... because they do not have anything else to do.”
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-
Reconstruction takes time
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-

elledee

i thought the clinton foundation took care of that