HAITI: Thousands are still living in tent camps nine months after a deadly earthquake

Record ID: 572782

  • Title: HAITI: Thousands are still living in tent camps nine months after a deadly earthquake
  • Date: 21st October 2010
  • Summary: VARIOUS OF CHILDREN IN TENT CAMP VARIOUS OF YOUNG GIRL IN TENT CAMP
  • Embargoed: 5th November 2010 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Haiti
  • Country: Haiti
  • Topics: Disasters / Accidents / Natural catastrophes
  • Reuters ID: LVA4XJ6N4HFCZUMV22ZLE7C26P6J
  • Story Text: Nine months since an historic earthquake destroyed much of Haiti, little has changed in the capital, Port-au-Prince.
    Rubble still litters and clogs the streets, damaged buildings lean precariously and even the once-stately presidential palace lays in ruins.
    Though Port-au-Prince residents seem to have adjusted to the rhythms of daily life based around the daily struggle for survival, the earthquake is still claiming victims - one of the latest is what was once Haiti's premier hospital.
    The walls of the CDTI du Sacre Coeur Hospital stood firm when the earth shook on Jan 12, and for three months after the quake the hospital threw open its doors, treating thousands of victims for free.
    American and French doctors, flown in by their respective governments, worked non-stop in CDTI's operating rooms, together with their Haitian counterparts seeing more than 12,000 patients and performing more than 700 major surgeries.
    Today, CDTI stands empty, its consulting and operating rooms abandoned, its beds empty, its scanners gathering dust, its two brand new ambulances sitting under tarpaulins in the yard.
    On April 1, owner Reynold Savain was forced to close CDTI because neither the Haitian nor American governments, nor the United Nations, would agree to help pay his bills.
    The echoing corridors of CDTI are a monument to the failure of the Haitian government and the international community to work with the private sector to rebuild Haiti, a reminder of the risk that billions of dollars of aid will once again fail to leave lasting legacies in the Western Hemisphere's poorest country.
    Savain said when he asked the World Health Organization to help cover his doctors' salaries, they offered to pay in food and blankets, of no use to professionals who needed cash to pay rent and school fees.
    "After January 12, we stood side by side with the population. We opened the hospital at the cost of losing everything, but this is something that we had to do. We played our part. And today, it's been nine months since January 12 and we have been left alone by both the international and the Haitian counterpart," he said.
    He said he's frustrated and befuddled by the lack of interest in saving the hospital.
    "They're talking about reconstruction, and they have that facility, that structure ready, sitting right there with all its facilities, with all its equipment. This hospital is sitting just right there and nobody comes to the rescue. That, I will never understand," he said.
    Savain also explained that a new business model was needed to reopen his hospital because he couldn't compete with non-profit organizations without getting some kind of subsidy.
    The problems strangling Savain's hospital are an example of larger problem identified by the Haitian government of well-intentioned international aid hindering long-term development in many sectors.
    Nine months after the earthquake struck, there is a strong sense that the Haitian government, foreign donors and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the domestic private sector are simply not pulling in the same direction, not even talking the same language.
    The earthquake leveled huge swathes of the crowded and chaotic capital Port-au-Prince, killing at least a quarter of a million people and rendering more than a million homeless.
    The aid that has since come in has some significant achievements to boast of, but it is not providing, and seems unable to provide, the permanent private sector jobs the country so desperately needs.
    If the earthquake literally flattened much of the private sector, some of the aid that followed has either not helped to put people back on their feet, or actively knocked them down again.
    This is nowhere more apparent than in agriculture and in private healthcare. Free foreign drugs are flooding the market, either given directly to camp dwellers or resold cheaply on the quiet, doctors have fled the area and prescriptions are down. The massive influx of free foreign food undercut local agriculture, reducing prices and was hurting farmers' incomes, Oxfam International said in a report this month, adding there was still too little emphasis on developing the island's agriculture-based economy.
    Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said that striking a balance between humanitarian aid and development was an ongoing challenge.
    "When you have the big numbers, it's a lot of money, but when you get to the reality, you have $180 dollars per Haitian per year, to make all the necessities we're just talking about - education, agriculture, health, roads, housing, everything. So it's a lot of money for humanitarian purposes, it's no money for development," he said.
    He added that the only answer as far as he's concerned, lies in private investment.
    "So the only way to find more money is to attract private money. Do business in Haiti and make it profitable," he said.
    Meanwhile, as governments and NGOs try to sort out the best move, thousands of Haitians carry on the day to day struggle in the ramshackle tent camps, frustrated and resigned at the same time.
    "It's been nine months since the earthquake and we were thinking the government was going to help us get a decent place to live. And we didn't get that at all," said tent camp resident, Louis-Marie Vella.
    Business leaders say there is still hope to get Haiti's reconstruction back on track and its private sector back on its feet.
    But with the vast bulk of the rubble still uncollected and the vast majority of survivors still living under canvas, there is little to give substance to those hopes.
    The money that has come so far seems to washed over Haiti without leaving much behind, except more dependence on aid.
  • Copyright Holder: REUTERS
  • Copyright Notice: (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2011. Open For Restrictions - http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp
  • Usage Terms/Restrictions: Footage contains identifiable children: users must ensure that they comply with local laws and regulations governing the publishing of this material.
Register