Saturday, January 8, 2011

ARTICLE - SLOW RECONSTRUCTION RAISES QUESTIONS

SLOW RECONSTRUCTION RAISES AID QUESTION
(Vancouver Sun) - By Rene Bruemmer

Are the many NGOs operating in the country helping or are they slowing things down?

There are an estimated 12,000 aid groups working in Haiti, ranging from international behemoths such as the Red Cross to church-sponsored charities that support one orphanage.

It's the largest concentration of aid groups per capita on the planet, yet Haiti remains one of the most miserable places in the world. It can give the impression all those aid efforts are doing little.

Were it not for the aid groups, however, tens of thousands likely would have died following last year's earthquake, tens of thousands more if emergency crews were not there to deal with the cholera epidemic that broke out in October, hospitalizing 63,000 and killing more than 2,500 to date. Without foreign and local aid distributed over the last half-century, many would not have had access to health care, education, employment or hope.

Here is a look at how a selection of groups, international and Haitian, is delivering help, and the organizations' efforts to do it better so Haiti can finally take care of itself.

What happened to the money?

Ask Canadian Red Cross spokeswoman Sophie Chavanel what happened to all the money Canadians donated and why it seems little has changed one year after the earthquake struck Haiti, killing an estimated quarter-million people, and she doesn't quite roll her eyes, but you can tell she'd like to.

"Everybody asks me that," she said while giving a tour of a new community of 360 transitional homes being built on a former runway near Port-au-Prince's international airport. "Even my 12-year-old sister back in Montreal asks me that."

It's a valid question, especially for Canadians, who donated $189 million to the Red Cross for earthquake relief -- the largest donation per capita of any country. Yet one year later, most of the 1.5 million rendered homeless are still homeless, and while this new community of 18-square-metre homes -- built of plywood, two-by-fours and tin, and scheduled to be completed this month -- will help, it still only represents housing for 1,800 people.

"Of course, we'd like to have every family in a home right now," Chavanel said. "But it's not that simple. Think how long it will take Quebec to rebuild the Turcot Interchange (near Montreal) -- years. And that's in a rich country with access to supplies."

The earthquake was followed by the largest rescue mission in Red Cross history: 250,000 dead, 1.5 million without homes or access to water and food, rubble-clogged roads and an already fragile government virtually paralyzed. Large aid groups had to feed these people, get them water, find them housing. Without detracting from the work of smaller NGOs that build a school and leave, the Red Cross deals with larger logistical issues -- it is still delivering 2.5 million litres of clean water a day to the hundreds of tent camps, Chavanel noted. The Red Cross continues to work on housing, health care, security and sanitation.

Shifting priorities
The Red Cross is shifting priorities to longer-term projects, such as the transitional community we were standing in, in an area known as La Piste (the Runway). Close to 300 Haitians making $10 a day are building the shelters, measuring, hammering and sawing under the blazing sun.

One man was cutting a sheet of plywood with a saw missing its wooden handle, gripping the blade with a rag wrapped around his hand. The houses are separated by wide alleys so people can cook and congregate in front, as is the custom here. ( "We call them 'transitional,' but you know in Haiti a house like this may last a long time," Chavanel said.)

While residents will not be charged for the small wood shelters, each one costs $4,000 to build, which seems like a lot, since materials are minimal and wages low. Much of the expense is due to shipping costs, Chavanel said. The materials -- wood and tin -- don't exist in Haiti. Only the paint, in joyful pastel hues, is available locally.

When the work is finished, there will be a school, community centre and a playing field. People will have clean water, toilets, showers and a neighbourhood.

Building communities
"It's not just about building a structure -- it's about building a community and doing it right and seeing it through in the long term," Chavanel said.

The Red Cross and similar organizations are criticized for bureaucracies that are seen as cumbersome, costly and slow. But building a community in the middle of a city is not a simple process, Chavanel said.

There are land issues -- who owns it, can it be purchased at a reasonable price, can the rubble be removed. There are discussions with community organizations to decide who should live there.

In keeping with the Red Cross's mandate to help the most vulnerable, almost half of the homes at La Piste will go to deaf individuals, often ostracized in Haiti and unable to find work. Many have been hired to build the homes.

All of this takes time -- conducting surveys of the populations, speaking with community leaders, dealing with the Haitian government and Haitian Red Cross. The Red Cross, in turn, is dealing with the United Nations, which has organized 1,200 of the estimated 12,000 aid organizations in Haiti into "clusters" that work with health, water or housing, to identify priority areas and to avoid overlap. The Red Cross is among 70 organizations in the "shelter cluster," which will build 125,000 shelters housing 750,000 people. The International Red Cross will construct 30,000 of them.

Not in it for the money
"The system is working," Chavanel said. Contrary to the perception of some, hardly anyone gets into aid work for the money, added Chavanel, who used to earn much more as a CBC journalist.

Haitian Montrealer Luck Mervil, a popular singer who has been working on aid for Haiti for five years, disagrees.

"Aid," he said, "is a business, with donors making money."

Haiti has received aid for 50 years, and nothing has changed because so-called aid groups, including the Red Cross, are either doing it wrong or perpetuating the situation for their own good, he said.

"Name me one country that has lifted itself out of poverty by relying on aid," he said. "There are none."

More than 98 per cent of U.S. contracts for reconstructing Haiti have gone to American companies, he said, citing an Associated Press report. On top of that, Mervil added, aid organizations don't work together, making them less efficient. For aid to work, it must focus on rebuilding Haiti's infrastructure so the country can run itself.

"Look at Brazil. It focused on its core problems -- education, health care, jobs for its poor people -- and it is burgeoning."

Mervil's project, Vilaj Vilaj, which aims to create a community of 5,000 living in renovated shipping containers and requires funding of $25 million, will be completely run by Haitians, he said.

Little coordination
The hodgepodge of 12,000 relief organizations, working with little coordination and often in a territorial fashion, is widely recognized as part of the problem. Some don't bother consulting with the local community, resulting in projects such as a school that was built in a rural region, on the other side of a dry riverbed from the village. During the rainy season, the river fills and the children can't get to school. Now the community has to build a bridge.

Aid organizations and Haitian and international governments say steps are being made to change all that.

"Our group is working on a cartographical survey of all the thousands of NGOs so the government can know exactly what is being done where," said Rene Hubert, a Montreal urban planner who has lived in Haiti for 15 years, working on development projects with the IBI Group. "So, if someone wants to donate $5 million toward a women's health project, for instance, we will be able to direct that funding to the right spot."

The most important aid work, he said, is to build up Haiti's government so it can take care of all these details itself. His group (which helped the government draft its post-earthquake recovery plan, released last March) and others are working to develop Haitian government ministries so they can create the infrastructure -- roads, airports, health care, education, finance -- needed for self-sustainment. Create that and the rest will follow, Hubert said, as it has in places such as Quebec, which has a "huge and expensive civil service -- but it works."

Haiti's government is hampered by a perception of widespread corruption that has led donors to give their funds to non-governmental organizations, restraining the government's ability to create long-term change. The creation of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission -- a form of parallel government composed of local and international officials, including former U.S. president Bill Clinton, that will manage funds -- will help Haiti build a better future, Hubert said.

Change will be a 10-to 20-year process, he added. But it will come.

"I'm positive and I believe," he said.

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