ARTICLE - DISABLED REPRIEVE TO END

RARE REPRIEVE FOR HAITI'S DISABLED SLATED TO END
(AP)

PORT-AU-PRINCE — When doctors amputated her right arm that was crushed by jagged rubble during Haiti's 2010 earthquake, Marjorie Benoit joined the ranks of Haiti's outcasts: the blind, the deaf and those missing limbs.

But then something unexpected happened for the 33-year-old mother of four as she faced personal and economic devastation. She found a welcoming home.

While the 1.3 million people displaced by the quake ended up in post-apocalyptic-like tent cities, a sliver of the homeless disabled population, including Benoit, landed in the closest thing to a model community. They moved into neat plywood shelters along tidy gravel lanes in a settlement designed to house them. They formed a close-knit colony of sorts with ramps for their wheelchairs made out of discarded pool furniture and solar-powered lights to help the deaf communicate with sign language.

The rare respite for the estimated 500-plus people living here, however, will soon end as the government moves to reclaim the land, and, like Haiti's piecemeal reconstruction effort, there isn't much of a plan to house them once they leave - maybe some money for rent and a little extra cash. An alternative site for some of the settlement's deaf residents is not yet completed.

"The government will give them a little money but isn't interested in where they are going," said Reyneld Sanon, executive director of a Haitian advocacy group called Force for Reflection and Action on Housing. "They'll just leave (Port-au-Prince) and you'll see more shanties" grow in the mountains outside the capital.

Benoit, who is still learning how to use her left hand so she can resume work as a street merchant, says that living with other disabled people gives her strength. "I want everyone to move together wherever we go."

Life has never been easy for the disabled in one of the world's poorest countries. The blind and deaf and amputated often shoulder a social stigma, their disabilities dismissed as the product of a hex, and few have access to physical therapy or social services. Haiti's disabled make up the poorest part of its population.

Inside the settlement's enclosing chain-linked fence, the residents say they no longer endure the long stares for losing their vision, hearing or a limb.

Claudius Joseph, a blind 25-year-old student, says his teachers believe he can't learn because he can't see. Children, he says, are afraid to touch him.

"I feel normal here because there are other people who are handicapped just like me," Joseph said one evening as his cane tapped the gravel in front of him.

The camp, near Port-au-Prince's international airport, is called "La Piste" because of an abandoned military airstrip across the street. It was set up by the International Federation for the Red Cross, which built 368 shelters for the hearing and speech impaired and others with disabilities. The first families moved in Jan. 7, 2011, days before the anniversary of the earthquake, and each received $150 to help settle in.