ARTICLE - SQUALID, DANGEROUS CAMPS

SQUALID, DANGEROUS CAMPS STILL HOME TO A MILLION HAITIANS A YEAR AFTER QUAKE
(Winninpeg Free Press) - By Andy Blatchford, The Canadian Press

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - With all the cash left to her name stuffed into her bra, a trembling Vedette Guillaume hides under her cardboard mattress and prays the bullets will miss.

A year after an earthquake pummelled Haiti, more than a million people still live amid the squalor and violence of the country's sprawling tent cities.

Money raised through celebrity telethons, bake sales and international donors poured in, yet Guillaume still spends sleepless nights on the floor of her blue tent —cowering from occasional gunfire.

The mother of 10 often isn't alone down there.

"Rats . . . lots of rats," Guillaume shouts in Creole, as she peels back plastic sheeting on the mud floor to show where the vermin frequently gnaw their way into her home.

The earthquake last Jan. 12 hammered Haitian homes and displaced about 1.5 million people.

Around the camps, signs of the quake's damage still mark the landscape.

Crumpled buildings, including Haiti's national palace, still line the country's roads. Heaps of rubble have been pushed off the streets, but most of it has yet to be cleared away.

Haiti has faced even more challenges in recent months, as an ongoing cholera epidemic has killed more than 2,000 people and an election crisis has ignited deadly riots.

But the UN insists that not all is lost, and that much has been accomplished since the quake, which killed more than 200,000 people and injured 300,000.

The UN says the humanitarian effort has made a difference by building thousands of transitional shelters, by ensuring most students are back in school and by drawing up plans to improve or build dozens of health-care centres.

But many frustrated Haitians who still live in the camps say they feel like they've been forgotten.

Guillaume, 51, shudders when asked if she's bracing for the long haul.

"Look at how I live . . . I don't want to stay here," says Guillaume, whose savings amount to less than 100 Haitian gourdes — or about $2.

Like many of her neighbours, Guillaume fled to this camp near the national palace in the days after the temblor.

By day, camp dwellers deal with sweltering tents and shortages of food and potable water. At night, their focus shifts to keeping out the thieves and rapists.

"It's getting worse every day."

His little girl and her mother have since moved to the city's poor district of Carrefour, where he says they will be better shielded from storms, fires and bullets.

"The country is truly in a chaos that has never been seen before," says Emile, who lives at the base of a statue of Alexandre Petion, a former president and founder of Haiti who was also known as Papa Bon-Coeur (or Good-Hearted Daddy).

A psychologist based in Port-au-Prince for Medecins du Monde Canada blames the increase in violence on the tight confines of the camps.

Patrick Lechasseur, who leads a mobile medical unit into post-quake tent cities in the capital's Cite Soleil slum, says he's also seen a rise in teenage pregnancies.

"Parents don't want to keep them at home, so they go from one relationship (to another) and they bounce around," says the Cornwall, Ont., resident, as he watches camp residents crowd around a giant water reservoir.

"A lot of times these relationships are abusive."

Mildrede Beliard of CARE once saw a man pull a woman by the hair though one of the tent cities.
"She screamed, she shouted (and) he brought her under a tent that read: '$5 for 30 minutes,' " says Beliard, who worked for the Haitian government until shortly after the quake.

"And people were laughing, nobody did anything. It had become a normal practice."

The situation has improved in recent months, she says.

Beliard credits the greater police presence in some camps, the new enclosed bathing areas and the fact that many women and children have moved out.

Still, Beliard wonders what the future holds for Haitian women. Three of Haiti's most prominent women's rights leaders were killed in the quake: Myriam Merlet, Anne-Marie Coriolan and feminist hero Magalie Marcelin, who was godmother to the daughter of Michaelle Jean, Canada's former governor general.

But the biggest hurdle to Haiti's overall recovery remains its political uncertainty, says the head of a Canadian think-tank dedicated to the region.

The quake wiped out state buildings and killed many government workers, further paralyzing the country.

Carlo Dade, executive director of the Canadian Foundation for the Americas, blames the power struggle within Haiti's political class for the country's slow reconstruction.

"It's a bigger mess than I thought before I got down there," says Dade, who recently returned from a fact-finding visit.

"I don't see much to be optimistic about."

Dade recalls how observers predicted the quake would bring Haitians together and spur its politicians to bury grievances to work for the greater national good.

"They've adopted some of that language, but the language doesn't match the reality of what they're doing," he says.

"There was some talk about this being Haiti's 9-11 moment, but that didn't happen."

The UN chief for the humanitarian effort in Haiti argues, however, that the recovery effort to date has been fairly successful.

Nigel Fisher says while the initial response got off to a shaky start, he was encouraged by the relatively quick work to provide shelters, water, food, latrines and access to medical care.

Fisher, a Canadian citizen, insists further progress has since been made in several areas, including:

— 25,000 transitional shelters for 120,000 people have been built.

— 330,000 quake-damaged dwellings have been assessed by the UN and local agencies to determine if they're livable.

— 10 to 20 per cent of the rubble has been removed.

— 700,000 short-term jobs have been created.

— 40 health-care centres and hospitals are either planned or being improved.

— More than 90 per cent of children who were in school before the quake are now back in school.

Still, Fisher admits that nothing comes easy in what he describes as an "almost failed state," where he admits reliable figures are difficult to nail down.

"Could things have gone faster? Yes. Is it true to say that nothing's happened? No, I disagree with that.

"It is a place where on all fronts you think you're at Square 1, but there's a couple of squares behind you."

He says that people shouldn't assume Haiti's precarious situation is a direct result of the earthquake.

Fisher points out that prior to Jan. 12 Haiti had widespread unemployment, about 85 per cent of the population lived in poverty and only half of its kids were in school.

"What happened on the 12th was a catastrophic natural disaster that happened in a country, which on most structural indicators was also a disaster," he says.

"You can't turn that around overnight."

Fisher says some Haitians have been moving into the camps because the conditions where they lived were even worse.

He says they're lured to the tent cities, where there's access to clean water, sanitation and rent-free homes.

"So, you have some people who actually see it as a conscious choice to stay," according to the B.C. resident.

Still, many of the people who live in the camps that clog Haiti's public squares and sports fields say they're waiting to see signs of change.

"The government has left us on our own," says Moise Brian Guito, one of Guillaume's neighbours in Champ de Mars.

"It's very hard right now. Life isn't good here."