It’s been more than six months since Haiti faced the destructive force of a 7.0 earthquake near the town of Léogâne, a mere 16 miles away from the capital city of Port-au-Prince. “An estimated three million people were affected by the quake; the Haitian Government reported that an estimated 230,000 people had died, 300,000 had been injured and 1,000,000 made homeless. They also estimated that 250,000 residences and 30,000 commercial buildings had collapsed or were severely damaged.” Wikipedia. So how’s life in this poorest of nations in the Western Hemisphere, the wrong half of the island of Hispaniola? Especially as tropical storms, including hurricanes, are leaving their calling cards in this saddest of venues?
Simply put, this tiny island nation is light years away from a return to normalcy; a large portion of the population is still living in substandard “temporary housing,” much of which offers little or no real protection from any serious storm system, much less a major hurricane. The Los Angeles Times (August 1st) offers this less-than-pleasant assessment of the housing shortage: “With forecasts for a potentially severe hurricane season, the most worrisome short-term problem is where to house the displaced scattered among scruffy, sunbaked tent villages, converted schoolyards and thousands of scrap-wood shacks that look like the sprouts of tomorrow's shantytowns… Planned transfers to mo re weather-resistant transitional shelters are running up against a shortage of available land…. For starters, much of Port-au-Prince is off limits because it is covered with mountains of rubble. But in a country where only about 5% of land ownership is properly registered, it is difficult to find property not already claimed by one or more owners.
“‘Land rights are at the bottom of all the problems we are facing,’ said Timo Luege, spokesman for the 70-plus agencies working jointly on the shelter issue… Relief workers plan to build 125,000 shelters by the summer of 2011. But they have erected only about 7,000, enough to house about 34,000. Some aid groups say the Haitian government, feeble before the quake and overwhelmed by the demands since, hasn't spelled out a clear resettlement strategy and shows little willingness to seize private land by eminent domain.” Severe tropic storms and hurricane winds have decimated flimsy shelters, adding flooding and mudflows to the obstacles of life… and the hurricane season is just beginning.
Where official canvas shelters are in short supply, corrugated metal with scraps of plywood form hastily built structures, which any storm of sufficient power would render into rubble in minutes. Food shortages mix with medical issues, often sweeping through densely packed refugees. And the lack of real employment makes the desperation and interminable “temporary” lifestyle seem that much more difficult to take. While the rest of the world has pledged $9.9 billion to the recovery over the next three years, the barriers to deploy that capital are monumental; the government just doesn’t work.
With elections coming up, the incumbent President has already read the writing on the wall: he won’t be running: “Today, spray-painted graffiti calling for the ouster of President Rene Preval have multiplied as impatience grows. National elections are scheduled in November and the earthquake response stands to be a central issue, at least in the capital.” The Times. With economic chaos all around us, the wars raging in the Islamic world, it’s easy to forget that the devastation of this impoverished nation has a long way to go just to find some semblance of the meager lifestyle this Port-au-Princes residents once knew… they had no way of knowing how much worse their lot in life would become. They know now, and we really can’t forget.
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