HAITIANS WHO WANT TO HELP IN LIMBO
(Montreal Gazette) - By Sue Montgomery
A few months after the earthquake in Haiti, Luigi Labarrière quit his job at a Rosemont school and signed up for a heavy machinery training program, hoping to learn a skill that would be useful in rebuilding his native country.
For the next six months, he and 29 other Haitian Quebecers, decked out in brand new hard hats and work boots, arrived at the former Francon quarry in St. Michel at 7 a.m. They learned to drive bulldozers, loaders, back hoes and graders, practising to help clear the tons of rubble that covered Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince in the aftermath of the January, 2010 earthquake.
Yet more than a year since receiving their heavy equipment licences, they still haven’t left for the Caribbean country so desperate to get back on its feet.
“At the beginning, they said we were going, then they said we’ll try to go, and then it was ‘we’re not going,’” Labarrière said in an interview during a conference about NGO waste in Haiti.
“I was a bit stunned.”
Labarrière attended the conference Friday, hoping to make some contacts to put his new skills to use in Haiti. But what he heard was a damning analysis of the work of some non-governmental organizations in the country that lost about 250,000 people in the devastating earthquake that left another million people homeless.
Despite billions of dollars in pledges from dozens of countries, hundreds of thousands of people still live in squalid camps set up immediately after the quake struck. Part of the problem is due to the difficulty in establishing a government, and other countries have been reluctant to release funds until some stability is apparent.
But speakers at Friday’s conference, many of them Haitian, also said that with so many NGOs in the country, Haiti has been nicknamed the Republic of NGOs.
They are accused of not co-ordinating with others, wasting donor money, driving up local prices, and not working closely with Haitians in their projects.
“We aren’t here to put NGOs on trial,” said Nancy Roc, organizer of the conference. “But to initiate a new dialogue, a new direction.”
Labarrière’s experience is indicative of projects that started out with gusto, but then fizzled out.
At a news conference held in December, 2010, three months into the training, Sylvain Tremblay, head of the Pierre-Neveu School Commission in Mont-Laurier in the Laurentians and sponsor of the project, sang its praises.
“We hope that this project, this mission of hope, will help to raise the spirits of the Haitian people,” he said. “Our students are being sent to the rescue and are a symbol of strength in action.”
The mayor of Mont-Laurier, Michel Adrien, who is of Haitian origin, also supported the project.
“What spoke to me the most from the beginning was that it’s a mission of hope, yet an equally attainable, concrete, and short-term plan that would give Quebecers of Haitian origin a chance to acquire the necessary skills to contribute to the reconstruction of their motherland,” he said. “It would also ensure a viable career for their lives right here at home.”
This winter – a year after completion of the course – Labarrière called Tremblay to find out if and when they’d be going to Haiti.
“He said it didn’t develop the way it was supposed to,” Labarrière recalled.
“He said ‘maybe we could get you a job at Plan Nord.’”
But Labarrière said the whole idea of the project was to go to Haiti, where there was a great need, not help develop Quebec’s north.
Neither Tremblay nor Adrien returned calls from The Gazette.
The City of Montreal and the borough of Villeray-Saint-Michel-Parc-Extension were also involved, but it’s unclear who footed the bill for all the rented equipment and the salaries of five instructors.
Labarrière said he paid $200 for the course, but received a receipt for close to $2,000.
“Other people (in the course) gave up their jobs or worked nights so they could do this because they saw it as an opportunity to go back to Haiti with some credentials,” he said. By press time, no one from the Quebec Department of Education was able to track down information about the project or why it failed.
Showing posts with label Articles - Rebuilding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Articles - Rebuilding. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Sunday, June 17, 2012
ARTICLE - MARTELLY VISITS JALOUZI
VISIT OF MARTELLY TO JALOUZI (PETIONVILLE)
(Haiti Libre) -
On Friday, President Martelly visited Jalouzi (Petion ville) accompanied by engineer Jacques Gabriel, the Minister of Public Works; engineer Philippe Cinéas, State Secretary of Public Works; Me Gregory Mayard Paul, Legal Advisor to the President; Delegate Louis Gonzaga Day and Ms. Claire Lydie, the Mayor of Petion-Ville, to inquire about the progress of work in this area.
Speaking to the population President Martelly declared "[...] I came here to see the progress of the stairs [leading to Jalouzi], and I want to commend the Public Works who did the work: 71 steps, six levels where people can relax, 14 meters high! We had the time to identify this morning, at the bottom left of the stairs, we will build a covered area where people can play; to the right we will build a big wall, and we will make a basketball court for the Youth [...] I would like to give you more than that, what you deserve [...]; but you know, there is much to do.... this is why that in two, three neighborhoods, there are two or three things that are made. [...]
While we're here, we'll visit the Centre Professionnel Municipal of Petion-Ville. They told me also that the kidergarden has problems and will close this year. I visited it and I will do the necessary work to include it in my program, so that it does not close, and that all children continue to attend school [...]
We will also try to make a basketball court at the top, and a cyber cafe. As I have said, things are not easy, there are problems of water, electricity, schooling, jobs, roads, [...] and something may happen, as we are working on many projects in many places, that it may happen at some point, where we will not have funds to continue to give what you need; you'll have to wait [...] for example, I was in Las Cahobas and electricity is almost finished being installed, and every place we can do something, we will do so [...]
We want to bring change to the population. 4 weeks ago I offered to 400 people, a card to go to hospital for free [...] we are in a study phase [...] after the study I will give you the card, but it will not be free, it could cost between 50 and 100 gourdes per month [...] I'm working on that for you [...] and the day you have it, you'll be able to take care of your body. It is a state like that we want to build [...] a state that cares for you, giving you the means to access health, giving you free education [...] you know that I'm trying to put electricity in all the country, create jobs, so that we can continue to work, and I want to say thank you when you made the choice of Tet Kalé, I will not forget [...] it is for you that I work [...] we are working on the most important things, education, health and employment [...] we continue to work on the rest, but these 3 points are the objectives of my government. You can continue to believe, your vote is not lost, and we continue to work for you Tet Kalé..."
(Haiti Libre) -
On Friday, President Martelly visited Jalouzi (Petion ville) accompanied by engineer Jacques Gabriel, the Minister of Public Works; engineer Philippe Cinéas, State Secretary of Public Works; Me Gregory Mayard Paul, Legal Advisor to the President; Delegate Louis Gonzaga Day and Ms. Claire Lydie, the Mayor of Petion-Ville, to inquire about the progress of work in this area.
Speaking to the population President Martelly declared "[...] I came here to see the progress of the stairs [leading to Jalouzi], and I want to commend the Public Works who did the work: 71 steps, six levels where people can relax, 14 meters high! We had the time to identify this morning, at the bottom left of the stairs, we will build a covered area where people can play; to the right we will build a big wall, and we will make a basketball court for the Youth [...] I would like to give you more than that, what you deserve [...]; but you know, there is much to do.... this is why that in two, three neighborhoods, there are two or three things that are made. [...]
While we're here, we'll visit the Centre Professionnel Municipal of Petion-Ville. They told me also that the kidergarden has problems and will close this year. I visited it and I will do the necessary work to include it in my program, so that it does not close, and that all children continue to attend school [...]
We will also try to make a basketball court at the top, and a cyber cafe. As I have said, things are not easy, there are problems of water, electricity, schooling, jobs, roads, [...] and something may happen, as we are working on many projects in many places, that it may happen at some point, where we will not have funds to continue to give what you need; you'll have to wait [...] for example, I was in Las Cahobas and electricity is almost finished being installed, and every place we can do something, we will do so [...]
We want to bring change to the population. 4 weeks ago I offered to 400 people, a card to go to hospital for free [...] we are in a study phase [...] after the study I will give you the card, but it will not be free, it could cost between 50 and 100 gourdes per month [...] I'm working on that for you [...] and the day you have it, you'll be able to take care of your body. It is a state like that we want to build [...] a state that cares for you, giving you the means to access health, giving you free education [...] you know that I'm trying to put electricity in all the country, create jobs, so that we can continue to work, and I want to say thank you when you made the choice of Tet Kalé, I will not forget [...] it is for you that I work [...] we are working on the most important things, education, health and employment [...] we continue to work on the rest, but these 3 points are the objectives of my government. You can continue to believe, your vote is not lost, and we continue to work for you Tet Kalé..."
Saturday, June 16, 2012
ARTICLE - MARTELLY VISITS AIRPORT RECONST.
PRESIDENT MARTELLY IS SATISFIED OF WORKS AT THE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
(Haiti Libre) -
On Thursday, June 14, President Michel Martelly, made a visit to the Toussaint Louverture International Airport, to assess the progress of the second phase of renovation and rehabilitation works of the building.
During this visit he was accompanied by engineers of Panexus, the firm responsible for the renovation work, the Director General of the National Airport Authority, Mr. Pierre André Laguerre, engineer Jean-Daniel Descollines of the Ministry of Public Works, and engineer Philippe Cinéas, State Secretary of Public Works and Transportation...
The Head of State expressed his satisfaction with the quality of work, and congratulated the workers for their dedication while reminding them of the importance of this work. "The airport is the country's image. This is the first place that welcomes tourists. It must be worthy of the promotion that we do to sell the image of the country," adding that he plans to release areas of the airport for the construction of hotels and parking for visitors.
The Head of State announced that the inauguration of the second phase of the work at the Toussaint Louverture International Airport will take place in July, and will coincide with the "Carnival of Flowers." The President desires that the airport already announces to the visitors this great cultural event, held to clarify, in response to several criticisms that "the Carnival of Flowers, is not an event where the state wants to waste money, but rather attract tourists and send a clear signal to the whole world, to make known that Haiti definitely wants reborn."
The visit was also an opportunity for President Martelly, to honor a promise made six months ago, to the Association of Red-Caps [which brings together baggage handlers of the airport], by giving them officially the key to a bus worth 92,000 U.S. dollars for the employees, who are also among the first owners of the pink card for health insurance, "Kat woz konbit solidarite".
Employees expressed their satisfaction not only for having received a bus and a health card, but also for the place that the head of state is creating for them within a society that marginalizes them.
We are born poor, but we are not obliged to die poor, declared the Head of State, who believes that in sending another country's image abroad, it is necessary first to offer a wellness to disadvantaged people. This will contribute, according to him, to establish a stable security environment in the country, and encourage undoubtedly, visitors and investors to come to Haiti.
(Haiti Libre) -
On Thursday, June 14, President Michel Martelly, made a visit to the Toussaint Louverture International Airport, to assess the progress of the second phase of renovation and rehabilitation works of the building.
During this visit he was accompanied by engineers of Panexus, the firm responsible for the renovation work, the Director General of the National Airport Authority, Mr. Pierre André Laguerre, engineer Jean-Daniel Descollines of the Ministry of Public Works, and engineer Philippe Cinéas, State Secretary of Public Works and Transportation...
The Head of State expressed his satisfaction with the quality of work, and congratulated the workers for their dedication while reminding them of the importance of this work. "The airport is the country's image. This is the first place that welcomes tourists. It must be worthy of the promotion that we do to sell the image of the country," adding that he plans to release areas of the airport for the construction of hotels and parking for visitors.
The Head of State announced that the inauguration of the second phase of the work at the Toussaint Louverture International Airport will take place in July, and will coincide with the "Carnival of Flowers." The President desires that the airport already announces to the visitors this great cultural event, held to clarify, in response to several criticisms that "the Carnival of Flowers, is not an event where the state wants to waste money, but rather attract tourists and send a clear signal to the whole world, to make known that Haiti definitely wants reborn."
The visit was also an opportunity for President Martelly, to honor a promise made six months ago, to the Association of Red-Caps [which brings together baggage handlers of the airport], by giving them officially the key to a bus worth 92,000 U.S. dollars for the employees, who are also among the first owners of the pink card for health insurance, "Kat woz konbit solidarite".
Employees expressed their satisfaction not only for having received a bus and a health card, but also for the place that the head of state is creating for them within a society that marginalizes them.
We are born poor, but we are not obliged to die poor, declared the Head of State, who believes that in sending another country's image abroad, it is necessary first to offer a wellness to disadvantaged people. This will contribute, according to him, to establish a stable security environment in the country, and encourage undoubtedly, visitors and investors to come to Haiti.
Sunday, June 10, 2012
ARTICLE - MAYOR ANNOUNCES WORK PROJECTS
THE MAYOR OF PORT-AU-PRINCE ANNOUNCES SEVERAL ACTIONS IN THE CAPITAL!
(Haiti Libre) -
Tuesday, at a press conference, Gabrielle Hyacinthe, the mayor of Port-au-Prince, has indicated that demolitions would begin, that the Communal Asylum and the Town Hall would be relocated, and that a large clean-up operation of the capital will start next month.
"...we have begun to identify a series of homes that are damaged, and which are a danger [...] There are houses that were already coded [red], we listed them, and we will publish them in the newspaper. We will make reference to the address and owners. We give 11 days for the Town Hall with other partners to begin to demolish these houses.
We also work at the Communal Asylum which has many problems. We are looking at how we can move the elderly. We found funds that will allow us to relocate the Communal asylum and the City hall of Port-au-Prince...
[...] We will clean up the city; it is very important. We will set up a project where people will work in every neighborhood, in the 35 neighborhoods [...] we think we can have between 10 to 40 people in each neighborhood, who will be deployed to clean [... ] payment will be made via the Town Hall. This will give work to more people over a period of 6 months [...] we will start by next month..."
(Haiti Libre) -
Tuesday, at a press conference, Gabrielle Hyacinthe, the mayor of Port-au-Prince, has indicated that demolitions would begin, that the Communal Asylum and the Town Hall would be relocated, and that a large clean-up operation of the capital will start next month.
"...we have begun to identify a series of homes that are damaged, and which are a danger [...] There are houses that were already coded [red], we listed them, and we will publish them in the newspaper. We will make reference to the address and owners. We give 11 days for the Town Hall with other partners to begin to demolish these houses.
We also work at the Communal Asylum which has many problems. We are looking at how we can move the elderly. We found funds that will allow us to relocate the Communal asylum and the City hall of Port-au-Prince...
[...] We will clean up the city; it is very important. We will set up a project where people will work in every neighborhood, in the 35 neighborhoods [...] we think we can have between 10 to 40 people in each neighborhood, who will be deployed to clean [... ] payment will be made via the Town Hall. This will give work to more people over a period of 6 months [...] we will start by next month..."
ARTICLE - NEIGHBORHOOD REBUILDING
PCI AND PARTNERS DEMONSTRATE INNOVATIVE APPROACHES TO DISASTER RESPONSE WITH SUCCESSFUL NEIGHBORHOOD REBUILD PROECT IN HAITI
(PRWeb) - PCI
Integrated Neighborhood Approach Hailed as Model for Disaster Response and Recovery
PCI, (http://www.pciglobal.org/americas/haiti) in partnership with CHF, concludes two years of rebuilding the Port-Au-Prince neighborhood of Ravine Pintade, greatly damaged by the 2010 earthquake. With technical input and funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development's Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (USAID/OFDA), CHF and PCI supported local residents in designing and rebuilding a healthier, safer, and more nurturing community. Teams cleared rubble, rebuilt homes and roads, constructed sanitation infrastructure, and increased access to health care, while redesigning public spaces for better safety, access, and resiliency against future disasters. "The completion of this project marks a new beginning for the people of Ravine Pintade," said U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Kenneth H. Merten. "The KATYE project was much more than removing tons of rubble, repairing or building shelters, and providing clean water and other basic infrastructure. Working alongside the people who live in the community, we rebuilt a neighborhood."
An innovative approach to urban disaster response, KATYE, which means “neighborhood” in the Haitian Creole language, combined emergency assistance with collaborative and in-depth long-term planning in an effort to not only meet immediate needs, but to address underlying trends associated with vulnerability and lay a foundation for long-term stability and economic growth. Over the course of the project, the Ravine Pintade area was transformed from an informal neighborhood to a more formal entity, with committees for self-governance linked with municipal authorities, to ensure provision of services and maintenance of infrastructure. PCI and its partners worked with the local community to create pragmatic solutions to land tenure problems, improve urban planning, improve primary health care, and mobilize community members to create safer, more nurturing environments for children and youth. Over 170 Ravine Pintade residents redrew their private land boundaries to allow for public spaces and access paths for improved safety and stability. This comprehensive neighborhood approach required complex coordination of residents’ knowledge and needs, while building trust and consensus among all stakeholders.
“As the U.S. government's long-term commitment to helping the people of Haiti build a better future continues, other neighborhood rehabilitation and reconstruction projects in Port-au-Prince can look to the KATYE project as a model for rebuilding communities on a sounder footing, “ excerpted from the USAID summary report, May 15, 2012.
Other key KATYE results include:
- Removed 35,000 cubic meters of rubble
- Repaired or constructed shelters for 620 households
- Enabled the return of nearly 1,930 displaced persons through the provision of shelter
- Provided an economic stimulus of $537,467 dollars and livelihood support to 2,311 individuals in the community
- Laid the foundation for the reconstruction of a more formalized community; every resident is enumerated/mapped, every household has a signed contract documenting their rights to the property, and every shelter and pathway is mapped
- Improved water quality, reducing the percent of households reliant on contaminated water from 37% to 1% - Reduced the cost families pay for water by nearly 50% through a community-managed water system
- Introduced large scale use of household rain water harvesting systems
- Improved hygiene practices, delivering extensive community and household hygiene and sanitation education to nearly all households (96.0%)
- Reintegrated children into the school system, with school enrollment rates increasing from 46% to 87%
The KATYE program was made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The contents of this press release are the responsibility of PCI and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government.
Celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2011, PCI (Project Concern International) is an international health, development and humanitarian assistance organization, operating in 16 countries worldwide. PCI is dedicated to saving lives and building healthy communities around the globe, benefitting over 6.7 million people annually in Asia, Africa and the Americas. Funded by federal grants and private support, PCI’s current annual budget is nearly $50 million and the organization has 600 employees worldwide. PCI’s headquarters are located in San Diego, CA and also has an office in Washington, DC and a Seattle, WA representative.
Integrated Neighborhood Approach Hailed as Model for Disaster Response and Recovery
PCI, (http://www.pciglobal.org/americas/haiti) in partnership with CHF, concludes two years of rebuilding the Port-Au-Prince neighborhood of Ravine Pintade, greatly damaged by the 2010 earthquake. With technical input and funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development's Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (USAID/OFDA), CHF and PCI supported local residents in designing and rebuilding a healthier, safer, and more nurturing community. Teams cleared rubble, rebuilt homes and roads, constructed sanitation infrastructure, and increased access to health care, while redesigning public spaces for better safety, access, and resiliency against future disasters. "The completion of this project marks a new beginning for the people of Ravine Pintade," said U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Kenneth H. Merten. "The KATYE project was much more than removing tons of rubble, repairing or building shelters, and providing clean water and other basic infrastructure. Working alongside the people who live in the community, we rebuilt a neighborhood."
An innovative approach to urban disaster response, KATYE, which means “neighborhood” in the Haitian Creole language, combined emergency assistance with collaborative and in-depth long-term planning in an effort to not only meet immediate needs, but to address underlying trends associated with vulnerability and lay a foundation for long-term stability and economic growth. Over the course of the project, the Ravine Pintade area was transformed from an informal neighborhood to a more formal entity, with committees for self-governance linked with municipal authorities, to ensure provision of services and maintenance of infrastructure. PCI and its partners worked with the local community to create pragmatic solutions to land tenure problems, improve urban planning, improve primary health care, and mobilize community members to create safer, more nurturing environments for children and youth. Over 170 Ravine Pintade residents redrew their private land boundaries to allow for public spaces and access paths for improved safety and stability. This comprehensive neighborhood approach required complex coordination of residents’ knowledge and needs, while building trust and consensus among all stakeholders.
“As the U.S. government's long-term commitment to helping the people of Haiti build a better future continues, other neighborhood rehabilitation and reconstruction projects in Port-au-Prince can look to the KATYE project as a model for rebuilding communities on a sounder footing, “ excerpted from the USAID summary report, May 15, 2012.
Other key KATYE results include:
- Removed 35,000 cubic meters of rubble
- Repaired or constructed shelters for 620 households
- Enabled the return of nearly 1,930 displaced persons through the provision of shelter
- Provided an economic stimulus of $537,467 dollars and livelihood support to 2,311 individuals in the community
- Laid the foundation for the reconstruction of a more formalized community; every resident is enumerated/mapped, every household has a signed contract documenting their rights to the property, and every shelter and pathway is mapped
- Improved water quality, reducing the percent of households reliant on contaminated water from 37% to 1% - Reduced the cost families pay for water by nearly 50% through a community-managed water system
- Introduced large scale use of household rain water harvesting systems
- Improved hygiene practices, delivering extensive community and household hygiene and sanitation education to nearly all households (96.0%)
- Reintegrated children into the school system, with school enrollment rates increasing from 46% to 87%
The KATYE program was made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The contents of this press release are the responsibility of PCI and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government.
Celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2011, PCI (Project Concern International) is an international health, development and humanitarian assistance organization, operating in 16 countries worldwide. PCI is dedicated to saving lives and building healthy communities around the globe, benefitting over 6.7 million people annually in Asia, Africa and the Americas. Funded by federal grants and private support, PCI’s current annual budget is nearly $50 million and the organization has 600 employees worldwide. PCI’s headquarters are located in San Diego, CA and also has an office in Washington, DC and a Seattle, WA representative.
Saturday, June 2, 2012
ARTICLE - RECONSTRUCTION - AIRPORT
VISIT OF INSPECTION OF LAURENT LAMOTHE TO THE TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE AIRPORT
(Haiti Libre) -
The Prime Minister, Laurent Lamothe made Thursday, May 31, a short visit to the Toussaint Louverture International Airport. The purpose of the visit was to inquire about the progress of work, in progress for several months. The Prime Minister expressed his satisfaction with the progress made, and hoped that this airport is a source of pride for the people of Haiti.
The Prime Minister took the opportunity during his visit to announce further projects of renovation and rehabilitation of public infrastructure [Airport of Cap-Haitien for $34 million - the repair of the road of La Saline (8km) and the redevelopment of the Champ de Mars decreed as a National Park]. "These projects are part of an extensive program of tourism and economic development". He also stated that the Martelly-Lamothe government plans to proceed with the opening of major projects of public works, throughout the national territory.
(Haiti Libre) -
The Prime Minister, Laurent Lamothe made Thursday, May 31, a short visit to the Toussaint Louverture International Airport. The purpose of the visit was to inquire about the progress of work, in progress for several months. The Prime Minister expressed his satisfaction with the progress made, and hoped that this airport is a source of pride for the people of Haiti.
The Prime Minister took the opportunity during his visit to announce further projects of renovation and rehabilitation of public infrastructure [Airport of Cap-Haitien for $34 million - the repair of the road of La Saline (8km) and the redevelopment of the Champ de Mars decreed as a National Park]. "These projects are part of an extensive program of tourism and economic development". He also stated that the Martelly-Lamothe government plans to proceed with the opening of major projects of public works, throughout the national territory.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
ARTICLE - A NEW SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE
A NEW SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE IN HAITI
(Caribbean Journal) - By Ilio Durandis
In Haiti, the future looks so distant, yet it is touchable. It seems so far away, but its scents bring pleasure to the nose. The present is melancholic; the past makes us nostalgic, while the future, for most, is uncertain.
A few years ago, not many of us thought we could lose so many of our compatriots in less time than it is about to take to read this article. In fact, on the day of Haiti’s earthquake, mass casualties, colossal disappearances, inhuman burials, missing body parts and eventually becoming permanently displaced inside one’s own country were the least of our worries.
In a few blinks of an eye, the future left us with an undesirable present. We are stuck in a merry-go-round type of reconstruction process. The donors expect stability and good governance before they can make good on all their pledges, while the country needs the pledges’ money to try to create a stable and good governing society. What gives? All the while, the society is clinging to the faintest of hope as it submerges in the abyss of hopelessness.
Deservingly, most of the reconstruction planning has been around rebuilding the physical infrastructure of the country. Aside of the lives lost, the quake destroyed the vast majority of public edifices, along with countless residential buildings. Politically speaking, it makes sense to focus on the physical infrastructure in the short term, but the long term reconstruction must start on the basis of building a new social infrastructure.
This social infrastructure ought to serve as the strongest foundation ever built, if Haiti is to rise from the dust, sand, and cement left behind from the quake. Haiti’s priority, two years since Destruction-Day, must shift from physical to mental. The leaders of the nation must plunge into repairing the nation’s fragile mental state, if the hope is to build a more just, prosperous and modern nation.
A price tag of over 10 billion dollars to repair what was destroyed physically by the quake. A so-called reconstruction plan that was designed in secrecy and segregation rather than openness, transparency and inclusivity runs the risk of sinking the country deeper into a fragmented state, where the insignificant elite will continue to live an above-average standard life at the expense of the majority living in unfathomable abject poverty, and also possibly create a n unsustainable middle class depending entirely on foreign non-governmental organizations.
This cannot be the type of society that the nation’s forefathers envisioned when they sacrificed their souls, blood and flesh for the freedom of their progeny. There are ways to reverse this curse and build a nation which all citizens can be proud of.
For starters, a social compact between the government and the people must be forged on mutual and agreeable respect of the law. There can’t be any sustainable reconstruction unless the laws are respected and agreed to by the vast majority. Debate or publication of the amended constitution is a cheap way to solve a malignant social deficiency. A constitution that cannot be enforced is unconstitutional. A simplified constitution is needed.
On education, success in the 21st century will not be counted on the numbers of children attending primary or even secondary schools, but rather on the percentage of them graduating from higher institutions of learning and their overall contribution to society.
It is not sustainable to have a society that takes more from social services than it gives back.
In this new social infrastructure, visionaries and thought-leaders are needed to reform and revamp the educational model of the country. To continue to spend money on failures is equivalent to building a city on top of an active volcano. Eventually, one day, an eruption will occur and everything will be lost.
The most important material in building this new social infrastructure would probably have to be job creation. In this case, it is not a matter of creating non-livable, low-skilled opportunities, but rather jobs that can bring transferable skill sets and come with a ladder, where someone working at the very bottom, through hard work and education, can rise up to management or other leadership positions.
This is what we would consider a job that uplifts people. When people are uplifted, their social conditions, without a doubt, will positively change.
A good combination of laws, the right education and inspiring jobs can change Haiti for the better. In the process, the foundation of a strong social infrastructure will be built and ready to support, maintain and innovate any physical infrastructure.
The blueprint for moving away from poverty, instability, corruption and oppression lies in the respect for the rule of law, investment in education, and promotion of an entrepreneurial society. Those things would not require billions for a nation of 10 million people, but it would definitely call for good leadership, great thinkers and undefeated determination to succeed for the common good.
Before the buildings are rebuilt, the people must become the number one priority. Everyone’s role in society must be defined, and no one should impede on someone else’s rights to live comfortably and with dignity. If there’s anything that ought to be learned from the quake, it’s that physical infrastructure can be rebuilt anytime, but replacing human lives and human capital are almost impossible. If lost time can never be recaptured, the loss of lives is irreplaceable.
Only a fool would invest in the context of a reconstruction without a strong emphasis on building a new social infrastructure. As one closes his or her eyes to rest, the future is slowly becoming the past.
The clock is ticking and tocking, and with each passing second, the social capital in Haiti is becoming less and less. In almost every process, the yield rate is usually lower than the starting materials.
The first priority should be building a new social infrastructure for Haiti’s longevity and sustainable prosperity.
Ilio Durandis, a Caribbean Journal contributor, is the founder of Haiti 2015, a social movement for a just and prosperous Haiti. He is a columnist with The Haitian Times.
(Caribbean Journal) - By Ilio Durandis
In Haiti, the future looks so distant, yet it is touchable. It seems so far away, but its scents bring pleasure to the nose. The present is melancholic; the past makes us nostalgic, while the future, for most, is uncertain.
A few years ago, not many of us thought we could lose so many of our compatriots in less time than it is about to take to read this article. In fact, on the day of Haiti’s earthquake, mass casualties, colossal disappearances, inhuman burials, missing body parts and eventually becoming permanently displaced inside one’s own country were the least of our worries.
In a few blinks of an eye, the future left us with an undesirable present. We are stuck in a merry-go-round type of reconstruction process. The donors expect stability and good governance before they can make good on all their pledges, while the country needs the pledges’ money to try to create a stable and good governing society. What gives? All the while, the society is clinging to the faintest of hope as it submerges in the abyss of hopelessness.
Deservingly, most of the reconstruction planning has been around rebuilding the physical infrastructure of the country. Aside of the lives lost, the quake destroyed the vast majority of public edifices, along with countless residential buildings. Politically speaking, it makes sense to focus on the physical infrastructure in the short term, but the long term reconstruction must start on the basis of building a new social infrastructure.
This social infrastructure ought to serve as the strongest foundation ever built, if Haiti is to rise from the dust, sand, and cement left behind from the quake. Haiti’s priority, two years since Destruction-Day, must shift from physical to mental. The leaders of the nation must plunge into repairing the nation’s fragile mental state, if the hope is to build a more just, prosperous and modern nation.
A price tag of over 10 billion dollars to repair what was destroyed physically by the quake. A so-called reconstruction plan that was designed in secrecy and segregation rather than openness, transparency and inclusivity runs the risk of sinking the country deeper into a fragmented state, where the insignificant elite will continue to live an above-average standard life at the expense of the majority living in unfathomable abject poverty, and also possibly create a n unsustainable middle class depending entirely on foreign non-governmental organizations.
This cannot be the type of society that the nation’s forefathers envisioned when they sacrificed their souls, blood and flesh for the freedom of their progeny. There are ways to reverse this curse and build a nation which all citizens can be proud of.
For starters, a social compact between the government and the people must be forged on mutual and agreeable respect of the law. There can’t be any sustainable reconstruction unless the laws are respected and agreed to by the vast majority. Debate or publication of the amended constitution is a cheap way to solve a malignant social deficiency. A constitution that cannot be enforced is unconstitutional. A simplified constitution is needed.
On education, success in the 21st century will not be counted on the numbers of children attending primary or even secondary schools, but rather on the percentage of them graduating from higher institutions of learning and their overall contribution to society.
It is not sustainable to have a society that takes more from social services than it gives back.
In this new social infrastructure, visionaries and thought-leaders are needed to reform and revamp the educational model of the country. To continue to spend money on failures is equivalent to building a city on top of an active volcano. Eventually, one day, an eruption will occur and everything will be lost.
The most important material in building this new social infrastructure would probably have to be job creation. In this case, it is not a matter of creating non-livable, low-skilled opportunities, but rather jobs that can bring transferable skill sets and come with a ladder, where someone working at the very bottom, through hard work and education, can rise up to management or other leadership positions.
This is what we would consider a job that uplifts people. When people are uplifted, their social conditions, without a doubt, will positively change.
A good combination of laws, the right education and inspiring jobs can change Haiti for the better. In the process, the foundation of a strong social infrastructure will be built and ready to support, maintain and innovate any physical infrastructure.
The blueprint for moving away from poverty, instability, corruption and oppression lies in the respect for the rule of law, investment in education, and promotion of an entrepreneurial society. Those things would not require billions for a nation of 10 million people, but it would definitely call for good leadership, great thinkers and undefeated determination to succeed for the common good.
Before the buildings are rebuilt, the people must become the number one priority. Everyone’s role in society must be defined, and no one should impede on someone else’s rights to live comfortably and with dignity. If there’s anything that ought to be learned from the quake, it’s that physical infrastructure can be rebuilt anytime, but replacing human lives and human capital are almost impossible. If lost time can never be recaptured, the loss of lives is irreplaceable.
Only a fool would invest in the context of a reconstruction without a strong emphasis on building a new social infrastructure. As one closes his or her eyes to rest, the future is slowly becoming the past.
The clock is ticking and tocking, and with each passing second, the social capital in Haiti is becoming less and less. In almost every process, the yield rate is usually lower than the starting materials.
The first priority should be building a new social infrastructure for Haiti’s longevity and sustainable prosperity.
Ilio Durandis, a Caribbean Journal contributor, is the founder of Haiti 2015, a social movement for a just and prosperous Haiti. He is a columnist with The Haitian Times.
ARTICLE - HAITI RECOVERY = 30 YEARS
HAITIAN RECOVERY WILL TAKE 30 YEARS: U.S. ENVOY
(Montreal Gazette) - By Mike Blanchfield, CP
But Thomas Adams, the State Department’s special coordinator for Haiti, told Canadian Press that “realistic” estimate should not be seen as daunting to countries such as Canada that are heavily invested in helping the western hemisphere’s poorest country, still struggling after its devastating 2010 earthquake.
Nor should it deter investors, who are crucial to Haiti’s long-term recovery, Adams added, as long as the country builds credible democratic institutions.
“There is no reason why Haiti can’t become a middle-income country. But because they’re starting so low, it’s going be to be 25 to 30 years even if they have good economic growth,” Adams said in an exclusive interview after two days of meetings in Ottawa with various government officials.
“It’s not a quick fix. These problems in Haiti – their educational system, their health system, cholera, the infrastructure – these aren’t quick fixes,” he added.
“It’s good to be realistic. That’s not to say we’re not making progress each year ... But overall, you’re not going to see a Haiti the way you’d like it for a while.”
Forty years ago, Haiti was slightly ahead of the Dominican Republic economically, said Adams, with 20 large American corporations setting up their Caribbean headquarters there. The two countries share the Caribbean island of Hispaniola.
Adams sees economic growth for Haiti in textiles, agriculture and tourism.
“Haiti needs private investment. All the donor money, as generous as it is – and I think Canada and a lot of countries have been very generous – isn’t enough to fix Haiti.”
The U.S. and Canada, said Adams, remain in lock-step when it comes to helping Haiti recover from the devastating January 2010 earthquake that left 300,000 dead and displaced 1.5 million. Canada has pledged more than $1 billion to Haiti, making it the second largest aid recipient after Afghanistan.
That co-operation extends to co-ordinated messaging of Haiti’s political leaders, to break the political paralysis of the last year – a crisis that has raised serious questions about the country’s ability to stave off corruption and govern itself effectively.
That crisis appeared to ease earlier this month when President Michel Martelly swore in a new prime minister, Laurent Lamothe, whose predecessor resigned in February after barely four months on the job.
The turmoil rendered Haiti’s government rudderless and left billions of dollars of donor pledges in limbo.
“That’s pretty much over,” said Adams. “There’s a truce between the president and the parliament. It seems they’re willing to work together. The president has confidence in the new prime minister.”
With Lamothe confirmed, parliamentary amendments will pave the way for elections of senators and local officials, as well as paving the way for reforms of the court system, said Adams.
Throughout it all, the Canadian and U.S. governments have continued to “give co-ordinated messages on some sensitive topics.”
The underlying message can be boiled down to this: rein in the corruption and work together politically.
“That’s one of our constant messages,” Adams explained.
“We don’t say, if you’re not going to do X, Y, and Z we’re going to cut off all of your aid. But we do say, and Canada says, and everybody else says, over time businessmen and donors are going to go elsewhere if you’re not seen as making your best efforts to curb corruption to bring in the rule of the law and be democratic.
Diane Ablonczy, Canada’s junior foreign affairs for the Americas, said Haitians are “crying out for leadership” so Canada is urging its leaders to step up and provide it.
“We are really urging the new government as its formed to emphasize and really roll up its sleeves and emphasize the need to deliver results for strong institutions in Haiti.”
Adams also lauded Canada’s former Governor General, Haitian-born Michaëlle Jean, as a key player in that co-ordinated communication effort with Haiti’s leadership.
Jean, now the UNESCO Special Envoy for Haiti, travels to Haiti again this week for meetings with political leaders. She’ll also take part in events to highlight programs that help curb malnutrition and poverty.
Earlier this month, Jean laid bare her frustration with the pace of change in her native country during a recent speech in Ottawa to government officials and non-governmental organizations.
“The aid and handout system has become kind of a business model, a scheme used by some to wheel and deal as it generates opportunities for embezzlement and corruption,” Jean said in the text posted on her website.
“It can’t go on like this.”
Adams said that’s the message the U.S., Canada and other allies continue to deliver to Haiti.
“We’re on the same message too. Again, cut the chaos,” he said. “That’s all we’re saying there: come on guys, let’s keep our eye on the ball here.”
(Montreal Gazette) - By Mike Blanchfield, CP
But Thomas Adams, the State Department’s special coordinator for Haiti, told Canadian Press that “realistic” estimate should not be seen as daunting to countries such as Canada that are heavily invested in helping the western hemisphere’s poorest country, still struggling after its devastating 2010 earthquake.
Nor should it deter investors, who are crucial to Haiti’s long-term recovery, Adams added, as long as the country builds credible democratic institutions.
“There is no reason why Haiti can’t become a middle-income country. But because they’re starting so low, it’s going be to be 25 to 30 years even if they have good economic growth,” Adams said in an exclusive interview after two days of meetings in Ottawa with various government officials.
“It’s not a quick fix. These problems in Haiti – their educational system, their health system, cholera, the infrastructure – these aren’t quick fixes,” he added.
“It’s good to be realistic. That’s not to say we’re not making progress each year ... But overall, you’re not going to see a Haiti the way you’d like it for a while.”
Forty years ago, Haiti was slightly ahead of the Dominican Republic economically, said Adams, with 20 large American corporations setting up their Caribbean headquarters there. The two countries share the Caribbean island of Hispaniola.
Adams sees economic growth for Haiti in textiles, agriculture and tourism.
“Haiti needs private investment. All the donor money, as generous as it is – and I think Canada and a lot of countries have been very generous – isn’t enough to fix Haiti.”
The U.S. and Canada, said Adams, remain in lock-step when it comes to helping Haiti recover from the devastating January 2010 earthquake that left 300,000 dead and displaced 1.5 million. Canada has pledged more than $1 billion to Haiti, making it the second largest aid recipient after Afghanistan.
That co-operation extends to co-ordinated messaging of Haiti’s political leaders, to break the political paralysis of the last year – a crisis that has raised serious questions about the country’s ability to stave off corruption and govern itself effectively.
That crisis appeared to ease earlier this month when President Michel Martelly swore in a new prime minister, Laurent Lamothe, whose predecessor resigned in February after barely four months on the job.
The turmoil rendered Haiti’s government rudderless and left billions of dollars of donor pledges in limbo.
“That’s pretty much over,” said Adams. “There’s a truce between the president and the parliament. It seems they’re willing to work together. The president has confidence in the new prime minister.”
With Lamothe confirmed, parliamentary amendments will pave the way for elections of senators and local officials, as well as paving the way for reforms of the court system, said Adams.
Throughout it all, the Canadian and U.S. governments have continued to “give co-ordinated messages on some sensitive topics.”
The underlying message can be boiled down to this: rein in the corruption and work together politically.
“That’s one of our constant messages,” Adams explained.
“We don’t say, if you’re not going to do X, Y, and Z we’re going to cut off all of your aid. But we do say, and Canada says, and everybody else says, over time businessmen and donors are going to go elsewhere if you’re not seen as making your best efforts to curb corruption to bring in the rule of the law and be democratic.
Diane Ablonczy, Canada’s junior foreign affairs for the Americas, said Haitians are “crying out for leadership” so Canada is urging its leaders to step up and provide it.
“We are really urging the new government as its formed to emphasize and really roll up its sleeves and emphasize the need to deliver results for strong institutions in Haiti.”
Adams also lauded Canada’s former Governor General, Haitian-born Michaëlle Jean, as a key player in that co-ordinated communication effort with Haiti’s leadership.
Jean, now the UNESCO Special Envoy for Haiti, travels to Haiti again this week for meetings with political leaders. She’ll also take part in events to highlight programs that help curb malnutrition and poverty.
Earlier this month, Jean laid bare her frustration with the pace of change in her native country during a recent speech in Ottawa to government officials and non-governmental organizations.
“The aid and handout system has become kind of a business model, a scheme used by some to wheel and deal as it generates opportunities for embezzlement and corruption,” Jean said in the text posted on her website.
“It can’t go on like this.”
Adams said that’s the message the U.S., Canada and other allies continue to deliver to Haiti.
“We’re on the same message too. Again, cut the chaos,” he said. “That’s all we’re saying there: come on guys, let’s keep our eye on the ball here.”
Thursday, May 3, 2012
ARTICLE - USAID - ELECTRICITY RECONSTRUCTION
USAID HAITI AWARDS ELECTRICAL RECONSTRUCTION PROJECT TO PERINI MANAGEMENT SERVICES INC.
(Reuters) -
Tutor Perini Corporation (NYSE: TPC), a leading civil and building construction company, today announced that its subsidiary, Perini Management Services, Inc. (PMSI), has begun construction on a $12.7 million U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funded project for electrical reconstruction in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
The project involves the rehabilitation and upgrade of five municipal 69-kV substations at various sites in the Port-au-Prince area. Haiti’s electrical transmission and distribution systems were damaged in the 2010 earthquake, and repairs and upgrades are urgently needed to restore reliable electric power to residential and commercial customers and to support future economic growth.
PMSI has been managing the inspection and testing of the existing equipment and coordinating design issues with USAID and Electricité d’Haiti, since the project was awarded in November 2011. Prior to the start of construction in April, PMSI conducted comprehensive safety training for our Haitian subcontractor’s workforce. The initial construction work involves reconstruction of surrounding walls and fences to establish security at the work sites.
PMSI mobilized to Haiti in February 2010 to re-establish relationships with local Haitian construction firms with whom we had worked in the past. In early 2012, we opened a branch office in Port-au-Prince to pursue additional reconstruction and development projects in the country.
Robert Band, CEO of Perini Management Services said, “Tutor Perini is very pleased to provide reconstruction assistance to USAID and the people of Haiti. We have previously performed similar electrical projects throughout Iraq, and despite the challenging nature of the work, we find it rewarding to accomplish the much needed rehabilitation of infrastructure in these countries.”
About Tutor Perini Corporation:
Tutor Perini Corporation is a leading civil and building construction company offering diversified general contracting and design/build services to private clients and public agencies throughout the world. We have provided construction services since 1894 and have established a strong reputation within our markets by executing large complex projects on time and within budget while adhering to strict quality control measures.
We offer general contracting, pre-construction planning and comprehensive project management services, including the planning and scheduling of the manpower, equipment, materials and subcontractors required for a project. We also offer self-performed construction services including excavation, concrete forming and placement, steel erection, electrical and mechanical services, plumbing and HVAC. We are known for our major complex building project commitments as well as our capacity to perform large and complex transportation and heavy civil construction for government agencies and private clients throughout the world.
Tutor Perini Corporation website: http://www.tutorperini.com
(Reuters) -
Tutor Perini Corporation (NYSE: TPC), a leading civil and building construction company, today announced that its subsidiary, Perini Management Services, Inc. (PMSI), has begun construction on a $12.7 million U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funded project for electrical reconstruction in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
The project involves the rehabilitation and upgrade of five municipal 69-kV substations at various sites in the Port-au-Prince area. Haiti’s electrical transmission and distribution systems were damaged in the 2010 earthquake, and repairs and upgrades are urgently needed to restore reliable electric power to residential and commercial customers and to support future economic growth.
PMSI has been managing the inspection and testing of the existing equipment and coordinating design issues with USAID and Electricité d’Haiti, since the project was awarded in November 2011. Prior to the start of construction in April, PMSI conducted comprehensive safety training for our Haitian subcontractor’s workforce. The initial construction work involves reconstruction of surrounding walls and fences to establish security at the work sites.
PMSI mobilized to Haiti in February 2010 to re-establish relationships with local Haitian construction firms with whom we had worked in the past. In early 2012, we opened a branch office in Port-au-Prince to pursue additional reconstruction and development projects in the country.
Robert Band, CEO of Perini Management Services said, “Tutor Perini is very pleased to provide reconstruction assistance to USAID and the people of Haiti. We have previously performed similar electrical projects throughout Iraq, and despite the challenging nature of the work, we find it rewarding to accomplish the much needed rehabilitation of infrastructure in these countries.”
About Tutor Perini Corporation:
Tutor Perini Corporation is a leading civil and building construction company offering diversified general contracting and design/build services to private clients and public agencies throughout the world. We have provided construction services since 1894 and have established a strong reputation within our markets by executing large complex projects on time and within budget while adhering to strict quality control measures.
We offer general contracting, pre-construction planning and comprehensive project management services, including the planning and scheduling of the manpower, equipment, materials and subcontractors required for a project. We also offer self-performed construction services including excavation, concrete forming and placement, steel erection, electrical and mechanical services, plumbing and HVAC. We are known for our major complex building project commitments as well as our capacity to perform large and complex transportation and heavy civil construction for government agencies and private clients throughout the world.
Tutor Perini Corporation website: http://www.tutorperini.com
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
ARTICLE - TELECOMS, MOBILE & BROADBAND
HAITI - TELECOMS, MOBILE AND BROADBAND
(Research and Markets) -
A sector and country in reconstruction
BuddeComm’s Haiti - Telecoms, Mobile and Broadband profiles the fixed-line, mobile and broadband markets in Haiti.
Haiti’s economic and social indicators remain far lower than the average for Latin America and the Caribbean.
The recent years of political and economic turmoil and natural disasters have stifled most sectors of the economy, including Haiti’s telecommunications sector which remains one of the least developed in the world.
During 2010 the country was focused on reconstruction efforts following the devastating earthquake in January of that year. The privatisation of Teleco, which was due to be finalised on the eve that the earthquake struck, went ahead in 2010, with Viettel acquiring 60% of the company for approximately $60 million.
This report contains overviews, analyses and statistics of the Haitian fixed-line, mobile and internet markets.
Market highlights:
Haiti’s fixed line teledensity remained amongst the lowest in the world, at around 1%. Though progress in network development is slow, growth potential is significant.
The Vietnamese military-owned telco Viettel acquired a 60% share in Teleco, which was effectively transformed into a new entity, Natcom. The deal may invigorate the company as it struggles to deal with Haiti’s pressing infrastructure problems.
Viettel’s bid included a commitment to build a 2,000km fibre optic cable to provide internet access in particular to remote areas. During 2011 Natcom began replacing and expanding the ruined fixed line network with the aim of providing national services including DSL broadband access.
The mobile market has entered a phase of renewed competition following the entry of Natcom, which began rolling out its GSM/3G mobile network in 2011 and launched commercial mobile services at the end of 2011.
Digicel Jamaica’s extension to the existing Fibralink submarine cable, expected to be operational in mid-2012, will provide a much needed boost to capacity, particularly in the required backhaul for international mobile data.
(Research and Markets) -
A sector and country in reconstruction
BuddeComm’s Haiti - Telecoms, Mobile and Broadband profiles the fixed-line, mobile and broadband markets in Haiti.
Haiti’s economic and social indicators remain far lower than the average for Latin America and the Caribbean.
The recent years of political and economic turmoil and natural disasters have stifled most sectors of the economy, including Haiti’s telecommunications sector which remains one of the least developed in the world.
During 2010 the country was focused on reconstruction efforts following the devastating earthquake in January of that year. The privatisation of Teleco, which was due to be finalised on the eve that the earthquake struck, went ahead in 2010, with Viettel acquiring 60% of the company for approximately $60 million.
This report contains overviews, analyses and statistics of the Haitian fixed-line, mobile and internet markets.
Market highlights:
Haiti’s fixed line teledensity remained amongst the lowest in the world, at around 1%. Though progress in network development is slow, growth potential is significant.
The Vietnamese military-owned telco Viettel acquired a 60% share in Teleco, which was effectively transformed into a new entity, Natcom. The deal may invigorate the company as it struggles to deal with Haiti’s pressing infrastructure problems.
Viettel’s bid included a commitment to build a 2,000km fibre optic cable to provide internet access in particular to remote areas. During 2011 Natcom began replacing and expanding the ruined fixed line network with the aim of providing national services including DSL broadband access.
The mobile market has entered a phase of renewed competition following the entry of Natcom, which began rolling out its GSM/3G mobile network in 2011 and launched commercial mobile services at the end of 2011.
Digicel Jamaica’s extension to the existing Fibralink submarine cable, expected to be operational in mid-2012, will provide a much needed boost to capacity, particularly in the required backhaul for international mobile data.
ARTICLE - NEW HOTELS AMIDST RUINS
NEW HOTELS ARISE AMID RUINS IN HAITIAN CAPITAL
(Atlanta Journal Constitution) - By Trenton Daniel, AP
PORT-AU-PRINCE — Glimmers of hope are coming to this devastated capital and its surrounding cities, as the concrete Royal Oasis hotel rises over a metropolitan area still filled with displaced-persons camps housing hundreds of thousands. Signs of Haiti's comeback can also be seen in the 105-room Best Western hotel being built within blocks of shanty-covered hillsides.
At least seven hotels are under construction or are in the planning stage in Port-au-Prince and its surrounding areas, raising hopes that thousands of investors will soon fill their air-conditioned rooms looking to build factories and tourist infrastructure that will help Haiti bounce back from a 2010 earthquake that officials say claimed 300,000 lives. Some damaged hotels are undergoing renovations.
Together, the projects add up to well over $100 million in new investment and will generate several thousand jobs in a nation still struggling to emerge from years of natural disasters and political turmoil.
In fact, the new hotels are the first significant private-sector construction in Port-au-Prince in the two years since the quake.
"Cautious optimism and deep skepticism" is how economist Claude Beauboeuf describes Haiti's hotel boom. For people to fill the hotels, he said, it's important that President Michel Martelly address the problems facing his government, which include an illegal force of armed men openly roaming the country, a string of mysterious police killings and strife with the opposition-controlled Parliament. He also needs a prime minister to replace the outgoing one who resigned after clashing with the president over priorities.
"If he doesn't address these things, investors will withdraw," Beauboeuf said, citing Club Med and the Holiday Inn as earlier examples of franchises that left Haiti because of political instability.
The planned hotels in the capital are not aimed at tourists, who avoid gritty Port-au-Prince. Instead, developers are targeting the contractors, foreign aid workers and diplomats for whom finding a room can be a challenge. The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, led by the previous two U.S. presidents, identified new business-class hotels as key to attracting foreign investors looking for opportunities in Haiti. Similarly, President Martelly has said he wants to make Haiti less dependent on foreign aid and friendlier to outside investments.
One of the biggest foreign investments in Haiti is an industrial park under construction in the north that's scheduled to begin garment production in September. The giant $300 million Caracol industrial park will be run by South Korean manufacturer Sae-A Trading Co. Ltd. and is expected to bring an initial 20,000 jobs to the remote area. And there are smaller efforts to help Haiti improve production so farmers can better export mangoes, cacao and coffee.
The Haitian capital, which includes several overlapping cities such as Petionville, lost nearly 850 hotel rooms in the quake, according to Tourism Minister Stephanie B. Villedrouin. For more than a year after the disaster, it was often impossible to find a room without months of advance notice.
Villedrouin said all of those hotel rooms will have been replaced by the end of the year.
Several hotel projects are also under way outside the capital, including in the sleepy, picturesque fishing village of Jacmel on the southern coast, and are aimed at what Villedrouin and other government officials hope will become a growing market for tourists willing to overlook the capital and its troubles.
"Haiti is not Port-au-Prince," the tourism minister said. "Haiti is not the earthquake."
Even before the catastrophe, only a handful of hotels met international standards of comfort, including the Hotel Montana, the Hotel Villa Creole and the newer Karibe Hotel. These would often fill with journalists, international observers and others during elections or times of crisis, becoming hubs of activity in a city with little in the way of entertainment and where few foreigners venture out at night.
The quake largely destroyed the Montana, though part of it has since re-opened, and extensively damaged the Villa Creole, which remained open after the disaster and is now being renovated. The Karibe was largely unscathed.
Villedrouin said Port-au-Prince officially has a 60 percent occupancy rate but many of the hotels are too rustic for international travelers. The better rooms in the city quickly fill up, with huge demand for the relatively few places with better amenities.
"Right now there's such demand that the market can absorb several hotels," said Alejandro Acevedo, an executive for Marriott International, which is building a $45 million, 174-room hotel in partnership with mobile phone company Digicel Group.
Acevedo said even he had to share a room with his boss on a recent visit because of the dearth of hotel space.
"There's nowhere to stay," Acevedo said.
Other projects include the $15.7 million Best Western in Petionville that's due to open this summer. Also in Petionville is the Royal Oasis, a 10-story building that will include an art gallery, three restaurants, a commercial bank and high-end shops. Construction on the Royal Oasis began before the earthquake and is expected to finish by the end of the year.
The project received a $2 million equity investment from the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund along with $275,000 from the Oasis Foundation, a nonprofit group set up by the hotel, to train workers in the hotel industry. It'll be run by the Spanish firm Occidental Hotel & Resorts.
"This is going to be one of the most palpable signs of modernity emerging from the ashes of the earthquake," Jerry Tardieu, President and General Director of the Royal Oasis, said from the hotel's leafy courtyard amid the clang of construction.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies is mulling building its own hotel on land it quietly purchased for $10.5 million several months after the earthquake. The money came from donations raised by national Red Cross agencies for quake recovery, causing some to wonder if the money would be better used to house displaced people rather than aid workers.
The Red Cross has said little about the project since it was reported in recent weeks, saying only that it is under consideration.
Many people in Haiti welcome the new hotels just as they do any new investments that will bring jobs to a country where more than half the adult population is unemployed or underemployed and survive on less than $2 a day. But some say Haiti should first care for the 500,000 people still living in makeshift camps.
"It's nice to build hotels to bring tourists but first you need to think of your citizens," said Ben Etienne, a 36-year-old resident of a hilly encampment in Peguyville that fills with mud during Haiti's rainy season. "I don't have a problem if the tourists come but the money needs to come into the country for the people."
Tardieu said the new hotels will help more people get out of the camps by giving them jobs to pay for rent on homes being rehabilitated by government and nonprofit organizations.
He noted that 600 people have been employed in the Royal Oasis' construction and that another 250 to 300 full-time jobs will be created after it opens.
"There need to be Haitian women and men who dare to invest," he said, "who dare to have a vision of modernity for their country and do not cave in to the cliche that Haiti is only a country where efforts have to be geared toward short-term relief humanitarian work."
(Atlanta Journal Constitution) - By Trenton Daniel, AP
PORT-AU-PRINCE — Glimmers of hope are coming to this devastated capital and its surrounding cities, as the concrete Royal Oasis hotel rises over a metropolitan area still filled with displaced-persons camps housing hundreds of thousands. Signs of Haiti's comeback can also be seen in the 105-room Best Western hotel being built within blocks of shanty-covered hillsides.
At least seven hotels are under construction or are in the planning stage in Port-au-Prince and its surrounding areas, raising hopes that thousands of investors will soon fill their air-conditioned rooms looking to build factories and tourist infrastructure that will help Haiti bounce back from a 2010 earthquake that officials say claimed 300,000 lives. Some damaged hotels are undergoing renovations.
Together, the projects add up to well over $100 million in new investment and will generate several thousand jobs in a nation still struggling to emerge from years of natural disasters and political turmoil.
In fact, the new hotels are the first significant private-sector construction in Port-au-Prince in the two years since the quake.
"Cautious optimism and deep skepticism" is how economist Claude Beauboeuf describes Haiti's hotel boom. For people to fill the hotels, he said, it's important that President Michel Martelly address the problems facing his government, which include an illegal force of armed men openly roaming the country, a string of mysterious police killings and strife with the opposition-controlled Parliament. He also needs a prime minister to replace the outgoing one who resigned after clashing with the president over priorities.
"If he doesn't address these things, investors will withdraw," Beauboeuf said, citing Club Med and the Holiday Inn as earlier examples of franchises that left Haiti because of political instability.
The planned hotels in the capital are not aimed at tourists, who avoid gritty Port-au-Prince. Instead, developers are targeting the contractors, foreign aid workers and diplomats for whom finding a room can be a challenge. The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, led by the previous two U.S. presidents, identified new business-class hotels as key to attracting foreign investors looking for opportunities in Haiti. Similarly, President Martelly has said he wants to make Haiti less dependent on foreign aid and friendlier to outside investments.
One of the biggest foreign investments in Haiti is an industrial park under construction in the north that's scheduled to begin garment production in September. The giant $300 million Caracol industrial park will be run by South Korean manufacturer Sae-A Trading Co. Ltd. and is expected to bring an initial 20,000 jobs to the remote area. And there are smaller efforts to help Haiti improve production so farmers can better export mangoes, cacao and coffee.
The Haitian capital, which includes several overlapping cities such as Petionville, lost nearly 850 hotel rooms in the quake, according to Tourism Minister Stephanie B. Villedrouin. For more than a year after the disaster, it was often impossible to find a room without months of advance notice.
Villedrouin said all of those hotel rooms will have been replaced by the end of the year.
Several hotel projects are also under way outside the capital, including in the sleepy, picturesque fishing village of Jacmel on the southern coast, and are aimed at what Villedrouin and other government officials hope will become a growing market for tourists willing to overlook the capital and its troubles.
"Haiti is not Port-au-Prince," the tourism minister said. "Haiti is not the earthquake."
Even before the catastrophe, only a handful of hotels met international standards of comfort, including the Hotel Montana, the Hotel Villa Creole and the newer Karibe Hotel. These would often fill with journalists, international observers and others during elections or times of crisis, becoming hubs of activity in a city with little in the way of entertainment and where few foreigners venture out at night.
The quake largely destroyed the Montana, though part of it has since re-opened, and extensively damaged the Villa Creole, which remained open after the disaster and is now being renovated. The Karibe was largely unscathed.
Villedrouin said Port-au-Prince officially has a 60 percent occupancy rate but many of the hotels are too rustic for international travelers. The better rooms in the city quickly fill up, with huge demand for the relatively few places with better amenities.
"Right now there's such demand that the market can absorb several hotels," said Alejandro Acevedo, an executive for Marriott International, which is building a $45 million, 174-room hotel in partnership with mobile phone company Digicel Group.
Acevedo said even he had to share a room with his boss on a recent visit because of the dearth of hotel space.
"There's nowhere to stay," Acevedo said.
Other projects include the $15.7 million Best Western in Petionville that's due to open this summer. Also in Petionville is the Royal Oasis, a 10-story building that will include an art gallery, three restaurants, a commercial bank and high-end shops. Construction on the Royal Oasis began before the earthquake and is expected to finish by the end of the year.
The project received a $2 million equity investment from the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund along with $275,000 from the Oasis Foundation, a nonprofit group set up by the hotel, to train workers in the hotel industry. It'll be run by the Spanish firm Occidental Hotel & Resorts.
"This is going to be one of the most palpable signs of modernity emerging from the ashes of the earthquake," Jerry Tardieu, President and General Director of the Royal Oasis, said from the hotel's leafy courtyard amid the clang of construction.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies is mulling building its own hotel on land it quietly purchased for $10.5 million several months after the earthquake. The money came from donations raised by national Red Cross agencies for quake recovery, causing some to wonder if the money would be better used to house displaced people rather than aid workers.
The Red Cross has said little about the project since it was reported in recent weeks, saying only that it is under consideration.
Many people in Haiti welcome the new hotels just as they do any new investments that will bring jobs to a country where more than half the adult population is unemployed or underemployed and survive on less than $2 a day. But some say Haiti should first care for the 500,000 people still living in makeshift camps.
"It's nice to build hotels to bring tourists but first you need to think of your citizens," said Ben Etienne, a 36-year-old resident of a hilly encampment in Peguyville that fills with mud during Haiti's rainy season. "I don't have a problem if the tourists come but the money needs to come into the country for the people."
Tardieu said the new hotels will help more people get out of the camps by giving them jobs to pay for rent on homes being rehabilitated by government and nonprofit organizations.
He noted that 600 people have been employed in the Royal Oasis' construction and that another 250 to 300 full-time jobs will be created after it opens.
"There need to be Haitian women and men who dare to invest," he said, "who dare to have a vision of modernity for their country and do not cave in to the cliche that Haiti is only a country where efforts have to be geared toward short-term relief humanitarian work."
Sunday, April 29, 2012
ARTICLE - ELECTRICITY IN TERRIER-ROUGE
ELECTRIFICATION OF THE CITY OF TERRIER-ROUGE
(Haiti Libre) -
Mr. Thierry Mayard Paul, Minister of the Interior and Local Authorities took swift action to achieve the electrification of the town of Terrier Rouge. During a visit to this city, Friday, April 20, the Minister announced the start of work for Thursday, April 26, 2012. This displacement of the Minister of the Interior, follows a tense situation recorded in the department of the Northeast where residents of Terrier-Rouge had barricaded the road linking the city of Cap-Haitien to Fort-Liberté, to ask local authorities for electricity in the town.
Mr. Mayard Paul immediately addressed the requests to the Secretary of State for Energy, René Jean Jumeau, and to the Secretary of State for Public Works, Philippe Cinéas. The signing of an agreement with the company Elmecen, responsible for carrying out the work in the city, was made effective the same day. An amount of three million gourdes has already been released for the start of this project.
Accompanied by the Departmental Delegate, Hugo Charles, the Mayor of the city, David Jean-Louis, and the Director of Police, Abner Vilmé, Minister Mayard Paul listened to the inhabitants of the city, and informed them of the steps taken, and results achieved. The population expressed its satisfaction for the quick solution provided by the Minister.
(Haiti Libre) -
Mr. Thierry Mayard Paul, Minister of the Interior and Local Authorities took swift action to achieve the electrification of the town of Terrier Rouge. During a visit to this city, Friday, April 20, the Minister announced the start of work for Thursday, April 26, 2012. This displacement of the Minister of the Interior, follows a tense situation recorded in the department of the Northeast where residents of Terrier-Rouge had barricaded the road linking the city of Cap-Haitien to Fort-Liberté, to ask local authorities for electricity in the town.
Mr. Mayard Paul immediately addressed the requests to the Secretary of State for Energy, René Jean Jumeau, and to the Secretary of State for Public Works, Philippe Cinéas. The signing of an agreement with the company Elmecen, responsible for carrying out the work in the city, was made effective the same day. An amount of three million gourdes has already been released for the start of this project.
Accompanied by the Departmental Delegate, Hugo Charles, the Mayor of the city, David Jean-Louis, and the Director of Police, Abner Vilmé, Minister Mayard Paul listened to the inhabitants of the city, and informed them of the steps taken, and results achieved. The population expressed its satisfaction for the quick solution provided by the Minister.
ARTICLE - ALSTOM - 2 HYDRO CONTRACTS
ALSTOM SIGNS TWO HYDRO CONTRACTS IN HAITI AND ECUADOR
(Alstom) -
Alstom has secured two separate hydro contracts in Latin America, representing a total amount of almost €60 million, for the refurbishment of a hydroelectric dam in Haiti and the development of a new power station in Ecuador.
In Haiti, the €35 million contract signed with the federal electricity supplier EDH includes the entire overhaul of the three units (18MW each) of the Péligre hydroelectric dam, with a rated output of 54 MW. Péligre is currently operating at less than a third of its full capacity, with two units out of service and one in partial operation. Once refurbished, the units will have enhanced efficiency and reliability, and will be compliant with the instabilities of Haiti's electricity grid.
Alstom will fully restore the electromechanical and hydromechanical equipment of the plant, including a new hydraulic design for each turbine with an overhaul of existing embedded parts, new cooling and drainage systems and the refurbishment of the dam's gates. A new Smartcontrol SX system will ensure the automation of the plant. Work on the project includes the balance of the plant and some civil works. It is expected to start within one month, with the last of the upgraded units scheduled to be commissioned in 2015.
Located on the Artibonite River, 70 km from the capital Port-au-Prince, Péligre is the country's main electricity source while providing irrigation and flood protection for local agriculture. For this reason the rehabilitation will be performed without draining the dam’s reservoir.
“Energy is a key necessity to rebuild the country and improve living conditions. Alstom is proud to work in partnership with EDH on a project with such positive implications for Haiti’s population and industry,” commented Jérôme Pécresse, President of Alstom Renewable Power.
In Ecuador, Alstom as part of a consortium will supply 2 Kaplan turbines of 30 MW each, generators and the control system to Manduriacu HPP, in Guayllabamba river. Alstom’s share represents around €25 million. The consortium will also be responsible for hydromechanical equipment and balance of plant.
The commercial operation of the first unit will start at the end of 2014. The plant will have two units and the equipment will be produced at Taubaté (Brazil), one of Alstom’s largest Hydro manufacturing plants in the world.
These contracts were booked in the 4th quarter of fiscal year 2011-2012.
Alstom’s market share in the area of energy production in Ecuador amounts to approximately 20%. The company has manufactured equipment of other important hydro project in the country such as Molino (1075 MW), Pucara (70 MW), San Francisco (240 MW), Mazar (2 x 85 MW) and Ocana (2 x 13 MW – to be commissioned). Alstom’s other main references in the country are Esmeraldas (130 MW) and Trinitaria (130 MW) oil fired power plants.
“Latin America is a major opportunity for growth. Alstom is investing in the region to secure more business and thus contribute to the development of the infrastructure”, says Marcos Costa, Vice President of Alstom Renewable Power and Thermal Power in Latin America.
(Alstom) -
Alstom has secured two separate hydro contracts in Latin America, representing a total amount of almost €60 million, for the refurbishment of a hydroelectric dam in Haiti and the development of a new power station in Ecuador.
In Haiti, the €35 million contract signed with the federal electricity supplier EDH includes the entire overhaul of the three units (18MW each) of the Péligre hydroelectric dam, with a rated output of 54 MW. Péligre is currently operating at less than a third of its full capacity, with two units out of service and one in partial operation. Once refurbished, the units will have enhanced efficiency and reliability, and will be compliant with the instabilities of Haiti's electricity grid.
Alstom will fully restore the electromechanical and hydromechanical equipment of the plant, including a new hydraulic design for each turbine with an overhaul of existing embedded parts, new cooling and drainage systems and the refurbishment of the dam's gates. A new Smartcontrol SX system will ensure the automation of the plant. Work on the project includes the balance of the plant and some civil works. It is expected to start within one month, with the last of the upgraded units scheduled to be commissioned in 2015.
Located on the Artibonite River, 70 km from the capital Port-au-Prince, Péligre is the country's main electricity source while providing irrigation and flood protection for local agriculture. For this reason the rehabilitation will be performed without draining the dam’s reservoir.
“Energy is a key necessity to rebuild the country and improve living conditions. Alstom is proud to work in partnership with EDH on a project with such positive implications for Haiti’s population and industry,” commented Jérôme Pécresse, President of Alstom Renewable Power.
In Ecuador, Alstom as part of a consortium will supply 2 Kaplan turbines of 30 MW each, generators and the control system to Manduriacu HPP, in Guayllabamba river. Alstom’s share represents around €25 million. The consortium will also be responsible for hydromechanical equipment and balance of plant.
The commercial operation of the first unit will start at the end of 2014. The plant will have two units and the equipment will be produced at Taubaté (Brazil), one of Alstom’s largest Hydro manufacturing plants in the world.
These contracts were booked in the 4th quarter of fiscal year 2011-2012.
Alstom’s market share in the area of energy production in Ecuador amounts to approximately 20%. The company has manufactured equipment of other important hydro project in the country such as Molino (1075 MW), Pucara (70 MW), San Francisco (240 MW), Mazar (2 x 85 MW) and Ocana (2 x 13 MW – to be commissioned). Alstom’s other main references in the country are Esmeraldas (130 MW) and Trinitaria (130 MW) oil fired power plants.
“Latin America is a major opportunity for growth. Alstom is investing in the region to secure more business and thus contribute to the development of the infrastructure”, says Marcos Costa, Vice President of Alstom Renewable Power and Thermal Power in Latin America.
ARTICLE - 2 CONTRACTS - 900 HOUSING
2 CONTRACTS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF 900 HOUSING
(Haiti Libre) -
On Thursday, April 26, 2012, the United States Government, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), signed contracts with two firms, including one that is a consortium, with a Haitian construction company, for the development and construction of 750 units, of earthquake and hurricane resistant housing, on the Caracol-Ekam site in Haiti’s Northern Development Corridor, and 156 units in the community of Cabaret to the north of the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area.
These two housing projects are consistent with the Government of Haiti’s reconstruction plan, including its focus on decentralization, and went through 18 months of consultations with stakeholders at all levels, including community members, local mayors, and President Martelly.
Throughout the consultation process and design, the U.S. worked with the Haitian government and local mayors to improve the plan so that it best reflects the views of stakeholders in communities. This required to ensure a bedroom, causing it to build the house on a total area of 34 square meters - in accordance with the housing units being built by the Haitian Government and the InterAmerican Development Bank, in Port-au-Prince. In addition, each home will have access to water and electricity, and will be located near areas with job opportunities and health services already existing, and in development.
U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Merten served as the U.S. signatory to the two contracts: one with Thor Construction for construction in Caracol and one with CEMEX for construction in Cabaret. The combined investment on the part of the United States in these two new housing communities, including site preparation and drainage, roads and sidewalks, streetlights and potable water distribution systems, exceeds $25 million.
Ambassador Merten said, "After months of studies and consultations, and with the support not only of President Martelly, but also local officials, the formalization of these contracts marks another milestone in the United States’ work with the people of Haiti, as we fulfill our commitment to help this great country realize a better, more prosperous future."
Representative of the support of their populations, Mayor Thomas Joseph Wills of Cabaret was a witness to the signing ceremony, and Mayor Landry Colas of Caracol visited the embassy later. They both expressed their satisfaction at the close cooperation and incorporation of local input in the design and planning of the houses.
Following requests from members of Parliament of the North and Northeast, the housing settlement at Caracol will be set back from Route National 6, providing a buffer of 120 meters for vegetation. There will also be a 59-meter buffer to the highway at Trou Du Nord on the other side of the settlement. This will accommodate long-term development plans for a four-lane highway and necessary buffer zones on both sides of the settlement to allow for the future growth of the Northern Development Corridor.
(Haiti Libre) -
On Thursday, April 26, 2012, the United States Government, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), signed contracts with two firms, including one that is a consortium, with a Haitian construction company, for the development and construction of 750 units, of earthquake and hurricane resistant housing, on the Caracol-Ekam site in Haiti’s Northern Development Corridor, and 156 units in the community of Cabaret to the north of the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area.
These two housing projects are consistent with the Government of Haiti’s reconstruction plan, including its focus on decentralization, and went through 18 months of consultations with stakeholders at all levels, including community members, local mayors, and President Martelly.
Throughout the consultation process and design, the U.S. worked with the Haitian government and local mayors to improve the plan so that it best reflects the views of stakeholders in communities. This required to ensure a bedroom, causing it to build the house on a total area of 34 square meters - in accordance with the housing units being built by the Haitian Government and the InterAmerican Development Bank, in Port-au-Prince. In addition, each home will have access to water and electricity, and will be located near areas with job opportunities and health services already existing, and in development.
U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Merten served as the U.S. signatory to the two contracts: one with Thor Construction for construction in Caracol and one with CEMEX for construction in Cabaret. The combined investment on the part of the United States in these two new housing communities, including site preparation and drainage, roads and sidewalks, streetlights and potable water distribution systems, exceeds $25 million.
Ambassador Merten said, "After months of studies and consultations, and with the support not only of President Martelly, but also local officials, the formalization of these contracts marks another milestone in the United States’ work with the people of Haiti, as we fulfill our commitment to help this great country realize a better, more prosperous future."
Representative of the support of their populations, Mayor Thomas Joseph Wills of Cabaret was a witness to the signing ceremony, and Mayor Landry Colas of Caracol visited the embassy later. They both expressed their satisfaction at the close cooperation and incorporation of local input in the design and planning of the houses.
Following requests from members of Parliament of the North and Northeast, the housing settlement at Caracol will be set back from Route National 6, providing a buffer of 120 meters for vegetation. There will also be a 59-meter buffer to the highway at Trou Du Nord on the other side of the settlement. This will accommodate long-term development plans for a four-lane highway and necessary buffer zones on both sides of the settlement to allow for the future growth of the Northern Development Corridor.
ARTICLE - CAP HAITIEN AIRPORT
THE CAP HAITIEN AIRPORT REQUIRES EXPROPRIATIONS
(Haiti Libre) -
Friday, Laurent Lamothe, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and also the Prime Minister-designate, was onsite for the inauguration of the Fundamental School of Application - Pedagogical Support Center (EFACAP) of Cap Haitien; taking advantage of the event to provide an update on the work of the Cap Haitien Airport, and the projected doubling of the electrical capacity for the city.
"The airport expansion, at a cost of $33 million, is a donation from the Venezuelan government. This will be done by the firm ALBA-Bolivariana, which has promised to give us the airport in February 2013 [...] There are expropriations to be made, to ensure that American Airlines can fly directly to Cap Haitien, and if my information is correct, the Secretary of State, Philippe Cinéas, will come on Monday to the city of Cap, to work on these expropriations, so that the airport can move forward [...]
Concerning the electricity of the city, we have negotiated with the Government of Venezuela for it double the current capacity of 13.6 MW. They will send specialized firms to increase the electrical capacity of the city..."
(Haiti Libre) -
Friday, Laurent Lamothe, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and also the Prime Minister-designate, was onsite for the inauguration of the Fundamental School of Application - Pedagogical Support Center (EFACAP) of Cap Haitien; taking advantage of the event to provide an update on the work of the Cap Haitien Airport, and the projected doubling of the electrical capacity for the city.
"The airport expansion, at a cost of $33 million, is a donation from the Venezuelan government. This will be done by the firm ALBA-Bolivariana, which has promised to give us the airport in February 2013 [...] There are expropriations to be made, to ensure that American Airlines can fly directly to Cap Haitien, and if my information is correct, the Secretary of State, Philippe Cinéas, will come on Monday to the city of Cap, to work on these expropriations, so that the airport can move forward [...]
Concerning the electricity of the city, we have negotiated with the Government of Venezuela for it double the current capacity of 13.6 MW. They will send specialized firms to increase the electrical capacity of the city..."
Monday, April 9, 2012
ARTICLES - SHELTERS DON'T SHELTER NEEDY
SHELTERS DON'T SHELTER HAITI'S NEEDY
(IPS) -
Almost half of the emergency shelters distributed by the British organisation Tearfund in the mountains above Léogâne remain uninhabited six months after they were built.
A two-month investigation by the Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) investigative journalism partnership in the hamlets of Fonds d'Oies and Cormiers, the tenth and twelfth sections of Léogâne, found that 34 of the 84 families who received temporary houses didn't live in them, and that 11 families got two houses from two different humanitarian organisations.
If these 34 houses – built for $3,000 dollars each, according to Tearfund – are sitting empty or, worse, are up for rent, that means at least $102,000 dollars was wasted while tens of neighbouring families are still living in tents or makeshift huts.
"The emergency shelters distributed around here weren't passed out fairly," Rosemie Durandisse seethed.
The 50-year-old farmer, her husband and six children used to live in a four-room concrete home that was destroyed during the earthquake, whose epicentre lies about 25 kilometres away. Now she and her family cram into a shack made of wood, cloth and plastic.
"Life is not too rosy for me… I need to find a home because (when it rains), the torrents make our lives miserable," she added.
The Christian organisation Tearfund (The Evangelical Alliance Relief Fund), which works in about 50 countries around the world, arrived in these mountain hamlets between Léogâne and Jacmel after the earthquake. In addition to other work, Tearfund built 249 "Transitional Shelters" or "T-Shelters".
"The houses respect the norms (established for post-disaster housing)," Kristie van de Wetering, Tearfund's earthquake programme director, told HGW. "And one of the things we did was to look for extra money so that we could implicate the beneficiaries and the community in the project."
The 18-square-metre, two-room houses are built of plywood and two-by- fours on a cement base, with a tin roof. The price per home is about 3,000 dollars, according to the organisation.
In total, over the past two years, humanitarian organisations have built about 110,000 T-Shelters in the earthquake-struck zones, for a total cost of about 500 million dollars.
The total number of families in need of housing following the quake topped 300,000. To get a T-Shelter, a family had to have proof it owned land or had a long-term lease. Over two-thirds of the post-quake refugee families – some 200,000 families – were renters, meaning they were not eligible for the structures.
The focus on T-Shelters as a solution was not without controversy.
Gift for rent
At the Tombe Gâteau marketplace along the Jacmel road, two houses sit in the same yard, just a few steps from the Bangladeshi organisation BRAC, who built the one of concrete. The wooden one came from Tearfund.
Everyone in the neighbourhood says both houses belong to the same person, Cevemoir Charles.
A "For Lease" sign sits on top of the BRAC house.
When asked, Charles lashes out and moves away quickly, grumbling as he goes: "These houses don't belong to me. They belong to my wife."
Charles's case is not unique. Ask Résilia Pierre, a mother of three children who lives with her husband and two other people in one of the two houses she received, the one from BRAC. She is also seeking a tenant.
"I live in this shelter and the other one is empty," she admitted, as if it were perfectly normal. "Once in a while I sweep it out and do a little cleaning."
Tearfund's local liaison officer swears there are no duplicates.
"We take into account if someone has already received a shelter from another NGO (non-governmental organisation)", Booz Serhum said. "That is one of the criteria we want to respect everywhere, because that assures a fair distribution."
His supervisor, van de Wetering, seconded Serhum, adding, "One of the fundamental elements of our programme is coordination with other organisations."
But what kind of coordination? In the two communal sections sampled, the coordination was, at the very least, inefficient. It didn't prevent over 10 duplications in the same region, or the fact that many others got shelters without needing them since they live somewhere else or are renting them out.
Blame game
What explains the empty T-Shelters just down the road from families still living in tents or damaged homes? Journalists found apparent lack of coordination, weaknesses in the method used to pick beneficiaries, as well as lies and errors.
Local officials were the first to recognise the disastrous situation.
"Victims complain that people who don't need shelters got shelters, while others who were more vulnerable and more in need, didn't get anything," said Laurore Joseph Jorés, a member of the Cormiers Communal Section Administrative Council (Conseil d'administration de la section communale or CASEC).
"A lot of people who lost their homes thought the CASECs could help them get a shelter," he added.
Innocent Adam, coordinator for the Fond d'Oies CASEC, agreed with his colleague but noted that local authorities are powerless.
"We can't do anything. We are not responsible," he said. "Our task was to simply oversee issues related to land-ownership and land titles."
If local officials didn't choose the beneficiaries, who did? Tearfund says the community committees set up with Tearfund's assistance after the earthquake had final say, but the committees said Tearfund decided everything.
Who really chose? What both sides agree on is that Tearfund conducted a field study to identify the victims who were truly "vulnerable".
"We focused on the person's revenue, their living conditions, the number of children for whom they were responsible, their health situation, etc.," Serhum said, explaining that community committees seconded the work.
While the committees admit to having worked with Tearfund, committee members deny that they had the final word.
"The committee's job was to inform the beneficiaries chosen by Tearfund," Févry Gérésol, a member of the Cormier committee, explained. "We didn't have the power to choose the beneficiaries."
"The committee's job was to look at the list," van der Wetering countered. "They knew the quantity of shelters available for their community. The committee chose beneficiaries from the list."
But according to Sanon Dumas, member of the Fond d'Oies committee, the group was only responsible for assuring that the construction was carried out correctly, and then reporting to Tearfund.
However, he admitted: "If we did make a few choices, it was to help Tearfund pick from the list of those who had already been registered and were in the computer database."
Dumas's mother got a T-Shelter.
As of early March, it was still empty.
Tricks, liars and questions
Some feel that Tearfund was tricked on many occasions.
"The initial field study was done by people who didn't know anything about the local context," committee member Gérésol noted. "There were people who got a shelter by shady methods or by lying."
Gérésol himself has two T-Shelters from two different organisations: Tearfund and the Swiss Red Cross.
Not knowing the region, the researchers were fooled by people who pretended that abandoned, destroyed homes belonged to them. Tearfund – which also built 27 temporary schools, a dozen wells, and carried out other programmes in the region – doesn't reject the possibility.
"It's quite possible that some people were not honest, and they said that had no home, or that this or that home belonged to them or to their family. That probably happened," Serhum said.
"Someone might tell you that their home was destroyed, but later you learn that what they showed you was their kitchen (often a separate hut or semi-walled building), not their home."
Nepotism and favouritism also appear to have played a role in the distribution of at least some of the shelters.
HGW journalists noted that in the sample communal sections, most of the families who got shelters had some kind of link to the committee members. For example, about 10 families living near Sanon Dumas have shelters, while potential beneficiaries only a few kilometres away still live in damaged houses.
Berline Cérival, from Grand Bois, well understands the advantages of a friendship.
"I wasn't counted by the researchers, so I went to see Partisan (a committee member)," she said. "He contacted an engineer at Tearfund to organise the shelter for me, and here I am today!"
Editor's Note: The interview with Tearfund took place before the fieldwork for this story. The HGW team tried many times to do a follow-up interview with Tearfund.
*Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations and students from the State University's Faculty of Human Sciences.
This report made possible with the support of the Fund for Investigative Journalism in Haiti.
Bigger Questions Begged
How many other Cérivals or Gérésols are there across Haiti?
Are people in the Léogâne area, and indeed, are Haitians in general somehow predisposed to nepotism, to lying, and to tricking people and organisations who are attempting to assist them?
According to sociologist and economist Camille Chalmers, the presence of hundreds, if not thousands, of organisations and agencies doing humanitarian work, sometimes with methodology that is inappropriate – or worse – is not without its negative consequences.
They are having the tendency of "creating a vicious circle of humanitarianism and of assistance, where people have the mentality of being dependent on hand-outs. This can be very, very negative… in the medium and the long run," Chalmers told HGW in an interview in October 2010.
In addition to those negative effects, the Tearfund T-Shelter investigation raises other questions:
If the sample studied by the AKJ journalists offers even a hint at the eventual errors and corruption at other sites, what does that mean about the 110,000 emergency shelters sprinkled across the country?
Should one assume that over 44,000 of them have been given to people who don’t really need them, when more than 450,000 of their compatriots still live in tents?
Was building T-Shelters, as opposed to repairing homes, or other possible solutions, the best way to spend 500 million dollars?
(IPS) -
Almost half of the emergency shelters distributed by the British organisation Tearfund in the mountains above Léogâne remain uninhabited six months after they were built.
A two-month investigation by the Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) investigative journalism partnership in the hamlets of Fonds d'Oies and Cormiers, the tenth and twelfth sections of Léogâne, found that 34 of the 84 families who received temporary houses didn't live in them, and that 11 families got two houses from two different humanitarian organisations.
If these 34 houses – built for $3,000 dollars each, according to Tearfund – are sitting empty or, worse, are up for rent, that means at least $102,000 dollars was wasted while tens of neighbouring families are still living in tents or makeshift huts.
"The emergency shelters distributed around here weren't passed out fairly," Rosemie Durandisse seethed.
The 50-year-old farmer, her husband and six children used to live in a four-room concrete home that was destroyed during the earthquake, whose epicentre lies about 25 kilometres away. Now she and her family cram into a shack made of wood, cloth and plastic.
"Life is not too rosy for me… I need to find a home because (when it rains), the torrents make our lives miserable," she added.
The Christian organisation Tearfund (The Evangelical Alliance Relief Fund), which works in about 50 countries around the world, arrived in these mountain hamlets between Léogâne and Jacmel after the earthquake. In addition to other work, Tearfund built 249 "Transitional Shelters" or "T-Shelters".
"The houses respect the norms (established for post-disaster housing)," Kristie van de Wetering, Tearfund's earthquake programme director, told HGW. "And one of the things we did was to look for extra money so that we could implicate the beneficiaries and the community in the project."
The 18-square-metre, two-room houses are built of plywood and two-by- fours on a cement base, with a tin roof. The price per home is about 3,000 dollars, according to the organisation.
In total, over the past two years, humanitarian organisations have built about 110,000 T-Shelters in the earthquake-struck zones, for a total cost of about 500 million dollars.
The total number of families in need of housing following the quake topped 300,000. To get a T-Shelter, a family had to have proof it owned land or had a long-term lease. Over two-thirds of the post-quake refugee families – some 200,000 families – were renters, meaning they were not eligible for the structures.
The focus on T-Shelters as a solution was not without controversy.
Gift for rent
At the Tombe Gâteau marketplace along the Jacmel road, two houses sit in the same yard, just a few steps from the Bangladeshi organisation BRAC, who built the one of concrete. The wooden one came from Tearfund.
Everyone in the neighbourhood says both houses belong to the same person, Cevemoir Charles.
A "For Lease" sign sits on top of the BRAC house.
When asked, Charles lashes out and moves away quickly, grumbling as he goes: "These houses don't belong to me. They belong to my wife."
Charles's case is not unique. Ask Résilia Pierre, a mother of three children who lives with her husband and two other people in one of the two houses she received, the one from BRAC. She is also seeking a tenant.
"I live in this shelter and the other one is empty," she admitted, as if it were perfectly normal. "Once in a while I sweep it out and do a little cleaning."
Tearfund's local liaison officer swears there are no duplicates.
"We take into account if someone has already received a shelter from another NGO (non-governmental organisation)", Booz Serhum said. "That is one of the criteria we want to respect everywhere, because that assures a fair distribution."
His supervisor, van de Wetering, seconded Serhum, adding, "One of the fundamental elements of our programme is coordination with other organisations."
But what kind of coordination? In the two communal sections sampled, the coordination was, at the very least, inefficient. It didn't prevent over 10 duplications in the same region, or the fact that many others got shelters without needing them since they live somewhere else or are renting them out.
Blame game
What explains the empty T-Shelters just down the road from families still living in tents or damaged homes? Journalists found apparent lack of coordination, weaknesses in the method used to pick beneficiaries, as well as lies and errors.
Local officials were the first to recognise the disastrous situation.
"Victims complain that people who don't need shelters got shelters, while others who were more vulnerable and more in need, didn't get anything," said Laurore Joseph Jorés, a member of the Cormiers Communal Section Administrative Council (Conseil d'administration de la section communale or CASEC).
"A lot of people who lost their homes thought the CASECs could help them get a shelter," he added.
Innocent Adam, coordinator for the Fond d'Oies CASEC, agreed with his colleague but noted that local authorities are powerless.
"We can't do anything. We are not responsible," he said. "Our task was to simply oversee issues related to land-ownership and land titles."
If local officials didn't choose the beneficiaries, who did? Tearfund says the community committees set up with Tearfund's assistance after the earthquake had final say, but the committees said Tearfund decided everything.
Who really chose? What both sides agree on is that Tearfund conducted a field study to identify the victims who were truly "vulnerable".
"We focused on the person's revenue, their living conditions, the number of children for whom they were responsible, their health situation, etc.," Serhum said, explaining that community committees seconded the work.
While the committees admit to having worked with Tearfund, committee members deny that they had the final word.
"The committee's job was to inform the beneficiaries chosen by Tearfund," Févry Gérésol, a member of the Cormier committee, explained. "We didn't have the power to choose the beneficiaries."
"The committee's job was to look at the list," van der Wetering countered. "They knew the quantity of shelters available for their community. The committee chose beneficiaries from the list."
But according to Sanon Dumas, member of the Fond d'Oies committee, the group was only responsible for assuring that the construction was carried out correctly, and then reporting to Tearfund.
However, he admitted: "If we did make a few choices, it was to help Tearfund pick from the list of those who had already been registered and were in the computer database."
Dumas's mother got a T-Shelter.
As of early March, it was still empty.
Tricks, liars and questions
Some feel that Tearfund was tricked on many occasions.
"The initial field study was done by people who didn't know anything about the local context," committee member Gérésol noted. "There were people who got a shelter by shady methods or by lying."
Gérésol himself has two T-Shelters from two different organisations: Tearfund and the Swiss Red Cross.
Not knowing the region, the researchers were fooled by people who pretended that abandoned, destroyed homes belonged to them. Tearfund – which also built 27 temporary schools, a dozen wells, and carried out other programmes in the region – doesn't reject the possibility.
"It's quite possible that some people were not honest, and they said that had no home, or that this or that home belonged to them or to their family. That probably happened," Serhum said.
"Someone might tell you that their home was destroyed, but later you learn that what they showed you was their kitchen (often a separate hut or semi-walled building), not their home."
Nepotism and favouritism also appear to have played a role in the distribution of at least some of the shelters.
HGW journalists noted that in the sample communal sections, most of the families who got shelters had some kind of link to the committee members. For example, about 10 families living near Sanon Dumas have shelters, while potential beneficiaries only a few kilometres away still live in damaged houses.
Berline Cérival, from Grand Bois, well understands the advantages of a friendship.
"I wasn't counted by the researchers, so I went to see Partisan (a committee member)," she said. "He contacted an engineer at Tearfund to organise the shelter for me, and here I am today!"
Editor's Note: The interview with Tearfund took place before the fieldwork for this story. The HGW team tried many times to do a follow-up interview with Tearfund.
*Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations and students from the State University's Faculty of Human Sciences.
This report made possible with the support of the Fund for Investigative Journalism in Haiti.
Bigger Questions Begged
How many other Cérivals or Gérésols are there across Haiti?
Are people in the Léogâne area, and indeed, are Haitians in general somehow predisposed to nepotism, to lying, and to tricking people and organisations who are attempting to assist them?
According to sociologist and economist Camille Chalmers, the presence of hundreds, if not thousands, of organisations and agencies doing humanitarian work, sometimes with methodology that is inappropriate – or worse – is not without its negative consequences.
They are having the tendency of "creating a vicious circle of humanitarianism and of assistance, where people have the mentality of being dependent on hand-outs. This can be very, very negative… in the medium and the long run," Chalmers told HGW in an interview in October 2010.
In addition to those negative effects, the Tearfund T-Shelter investigation raises other questions:
If the sample studied by the AKJ journalists offers even a hint at the eventual errors and corruption at other sites, what does that mean about the 110,000 emergency shelters sprinkled across the country?
Should one assume that over 44,000 of them have been given to people who don’t really need them, when more than 450,000 of their compatriots still live in tents?
Was building T-Shelters, as opposed to repairing homes, or other possible solutions, the best way to spend 500 million dollars?
Sunday, December 11, 2011
ARTICLE - 2 PROBLEMS - GOV'T AND INT'L
THERE ARE TWO PROBLEMS IN HAITI: THE GOVERNMENT AND THE INTERNATIONAL AGENCIES
(Haiti Libre) -
Father Brice Jean Robert Simbert, pastor of Grand-Goâve who was in visit in Quebec last week spoke to the press of the situation in Haiti, saying that in Haiti there are two problems: the government and the international agencies.
"There are two problems in Haiti right now. The first is that the government can not finance the reconstruction, and the second is that the international agencies do not take into account the reality of Haiti".
Regarding the international agencies, he explained that the latter offer the Haitians to build houses that are not adapted to the Haitian reality. Some absolutely want that the houses are built with wood, while the wood retains heat. He stressed the fact that on $100 invested in a project, only 40 to 50% of the funds are used in the project, .... the rest is used to house, feed... the cooperant.
"One day, the Haitian people is likely to rise up. And when it is angry, things can go wrong. It is necessary to seek the advice of the people of Haiti for the reconstruction," stressed Father Simbert.
The pastor of Grand-Goâve explained that "Some still have their house and use it to sleep. But they still conserve a tent or still live under a tent because they want to receive food. And the problem is that some take the opportunity to sell this food."
(Haiti Libre) -
Father Brice Jean Robert Simbert, pastor of Grand-Goâve who was in visit in Quebec last week spoke to the press of the situation in Haiti, saying that in Haiti there are two problems: the government and the international agencies.
"There are two problems in Haiti right now. The first is that the government can not finance the reconstruction, and the second is that the international agencies do not take into account the reality of Haiti".
Regarding the international agencies, he explained that the latter offer the Haitians to build houses that are not adapted to the Haitian reality. Some absolutely want that the houses are built with wood, while the wood retains heat. He stressed the fact that on $100 invested in a project, only 40 to 50% of the funds are used in the project, .... the rest is used to house, feed... the cooperant.
"One day, the Haitian people is likely to rise up. And when it is angry, things can go wrong. It is necessary to seek the advice of the people of Haiti for the reconstruction," stressed Father Simbert.
The pastor of Grand-Goâve explained that "Some still have their house and use it to sleep. But they still conserve a tent or still live under a tent because they want to receive food. And the problem is that some take the opportunity to sell this food."
Monday, November 29, 2010
ARTICLE - 5 LESSONS
5 LESSONS FROM HAITI'S DISASTER
(Foreign Policy) - By Paul Farmer
What the earthquake taught us about foreign aid.
1. Jobs are everything.
All humans need money -- they need it to buy food and water every day. And no matter how hard the government or the aid industry tries, people will want for all three things until they are employed.
The world pledged some $10.2 billion in recovery aid to Haiti after Jan. 12's devastating earthquake. Imagine how many people that money could employ, putting them to work on tasks like removing rubble (only 2 percent of which has been cleared to date), rebuilding key government buildings, and planting trees in a country that is almost entirely deforested. And yet so far, just 116,000 people have been employed in this way. Haiti has 9.8 million people, and at least half were unemployed even before the earthquake. If we focused our efforts on the singular task of getting them jobs -- even if we did nothing else -- Haiti's reconstruction could be a success.
2. Don't starve the government.
The international community doesn't know best. Local people do. NGOs like the one that I am lucky to work with cannot replace the state -- nor can the United Nations or anyone else. We don't have the expertise, and we won't stay forever. We don't have the same stake in building a community that the locals themselves have. And if aid is to work, it can't fall apart when the expats leave.
On this, almost everyone agrees. But the opposite approach has characterized Haiti relief. The dollar figures tell the real story: A mere 0.3 percent of the more than $2 billion in humanitarian aid pledged by major donors has ended up with local authorities. That money will hardly compensate for the 20 percent of civil servants who died in the quake.
Some donors argue that the Haitian government is rife with corruption and mismanagement -- and that infusing it with money will only make matters worse. But we need to strengthen the public sector, not weaken it. And that will take a working budget. It's impossible to be transparent and track your budgets when you lack computers, electricity, and even the personnel to do so. Until the government has the resources it needs, Haiti will remain the republic of NGOs.
3. Give them something to go home to.
Today, some 1.3 million Haitians live in tent camps amid often squalid conditions -- yet no one has been able to convince them to resettle. Why don't they want to leave? Because there is nothing to draw them back. Many of these displaced men and women didn't own the houses that collapsed around then; they rented them -- often under very unfavorable conditions. They were in debt to bad landlords. They had no schools or clinics.
Enticing them to return home will mean providing exactly what they lacked before: housing, education, and health care. Ironically, Haitians are getting some of those things now in the camps. They have shelter in the 69,700 tents distributed by donors; they have the food and hygiene kits that NGOs offer. The tent camps may well become semipermanent homes if those services don't also exist in the cities, villages, and towns.
4. Waste not, want not.
At least half of aid money probably never reaches its recipients, eaten up by overhead; often it's even more. I know of no other business or enterprise in which this would be an acceptable operational strategy. Equally frustrating, sometimes the money doesn't show up at all. Of the donor dollars promised for 2010, Haiti has so far received a mere 38 percent, or $732.5 million, excluding debt relief. Nine months after the disaster, not a cent of the U.S. donation for Haiti's reconstruction has been disbursed; it's tied up in appropriations. Imagine trying to re-engineer a devastated country when your budget is at the mercy of political whims in foreign lands.
5. Relief is the easy part.
Disaster relief is not reconstruction. We haven't rebuilt Haiti despite giving 1.1 million people access to drinking water; we didn't remake the country with the 11,000 latrines that have been installed. "Building Haiti back better" means sustaining those temporary gains and adding education, health care, services, and good governance.
What's most important in getting started? Economic growth. Yet it is a challenge hardly mentioned in aid documents or strategies -- coming up only twice in the United Nations' most recent 44-page report. Poverty of the kind that was so acutely revealed this January can't be defeated until there is a brighter economic future for the millions of Haitians who are ready to seize it.
**Paul Farmer is a medical anthropologist at Harvard University.
(Foreign Policy) - By Paul Farmer
What the earthquake taught us about foreign aid.
1. Jobs are everything.
All humans need money -- they need it to buy food and water every day. And no matter how hard the government or the aid industry tries, people will want for all three things until they are employed.
The world pledged some $10.2 billion in recovery aid to Haiti after Jan. 12's devastating earthquake. Imagine how many people that money could employ, putting them to work on tasks like removing rubble (only 2 percent of which has been cleared to date), rebuilding key government buildings, and planting trees in a country that is almost entirely deforested. And yet so far, just 116,000 people have been employed in this way. Haiti has 9.8 million people, and at least half were unemployed even before the earthquake. If we focused our efforts on the singular task of getting them jobs -- even if we did nothing else -- Haiti's reconstruction could be a success.
2. Don't starve the government.
The international community doesn't know best. Local people do. NGOs like the one that I am lucky to work with cannot replace the state -- nor can the United Nations or anyone else. We don't have the expertise, and we won't stay forever. We don't have the same stake in building a community that the locals themselves have. And if aid is to work, it can't fall apart when the expats leave.
On this, almost everyone agrees. But the opposite approach has characterized Haiti relief. The dollar figures tell the real story: A mere 0.3 percent of the more than $2 billion in humanitarian aid pledged by major donors has ended up with local authorities. That money will hardly compensate for the 20 percent of civil servants who died in the quake.
Some donors argue that the Haitian government is rife with corruption and mismanagement -- and that infusing it with money will only make matters worse. But we need to strengthen the public sector, not weaken it. And that will take a working budget. It's impossible to be transparent and track your budgets when you lack computers, electricity, and even the personnel to do so. Until the government has the resources it needs, Haiti will remain the republic of NGOs.
3. Give them something to go home to.
Today, some 1.3 million Haitians live in tent camps amid often squalid conditions -- yet no one has been able to convince them to resettle. Why don't they want to leave? Because there is nothing to draw them back. Many of these displaced men and women didn't own the houses that collapsed around then; they rented them -- often under very unfavorable conditions. They were in debt to bad landlords. They had no schools or clinics.
Enticing them to return home will mean providing exactly what they lacked before: housing, education, and health care. Ironically, Haitians are getting some of those things now in the camps. They have shelter in the 69,700 tents distributed by donors; they have the food and hygiene kits that NGOs offer. The tent camps may well become semipermanent homes if those services don't also exist in the cities, villages, and towns.
4. Waste not, want not.
At least half of aid money probably never reaches its recipients, eaten up by overhead; often it's even more. I know of no other business or enterprise in which this would be an acceptable operational strategy. Equally frustrating, sometimes the money doesn't show up at all. Of the donor dollars promised for 2010, Haiti has so far received a mere 38 percent, or $732.5 million, excluding debt relief. Nine months after the disaster, not a cent of the U.S. donation for Haiti's reconstruction has been disbursed; it's tied up in appropriations. Imagine trying to re-engineer a devastated country when your budget is at the mercy of political whims in foreign lands.
5. Relief is the easy part.
Disaster relief is not reconstruction. We haven't rebuilt Haiti despite giving 1.1 million people access to drinking water; we didn't remake the country with the 11,000 latrines that have been installed. "Building Haiti back better" means sustaining those temporary gains and adding education, health care, services, and good governance.
What's most important in getting started? Economic growth. Yet it is a challenge hardly mentioned in aid documents or strategies -- coming up only twice in the United Nations' most recent 44-page report. Poverty of the kind that was so acutely revealed this January can't be defeated until there is a brighter economic future for the millions of Haitians who are ready to seize it.
**Paul Farmer is a medical anthropologist at Harvard University.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
ARTICLE - 6 MONTHS AFTER QUAKE
HAITI RECOVERY BOGGED DOWN 6 MONTHS AFTER QUAKE
(AP) - By Jonathan M. Katz
CORAIL-CESSELESSE, Haiti — The sun was beating down on the rocky cactus plain when men with machetes came for Menmen Villase, nine months pregnant, shoved her onto her bulging stomach and sliced up the plastic tarp that sheltered her and her four children.
The family was one of thousands of earthquake homeless who had come to this Manhattan-sized stretch of disused sugarcane land between the sea and barren mountains north of Port-au-Prince, seeking refuge from overflowing camps in the city.
But this real estate is earmarked for building a new Haiti. Villase had walked into one of the fights over land, rooted in Haiti's history of slavery, occupation and upheaval, that have bedeviled recovery in the six months since the earthquake leveled much of the capital and killed as many as 300,000 people.
The government, already weak before the magnitude-7 quake and still hobbled by its aftermath, is trying to build anew in places like Corail-Cesselesse, a nearly empty swath of land that begins about 15 kilometers (9 miles) north of the capital. But the effort is paralyzed by disorganization, bitter rivalries and private deals being struck behind its back.
Multiple families claim title to almost every scrap of real estate. Already one reconstruction official has been forced to step down for steering a public project to his company's private land at Corail-Cesselesse. Wealthy landowners vow the "new Haiti" will become yet another vast slum unless the government rebuilds on their terms.
Caught in the middle are the homeless, looking to grab a patch of ground from the thugs hired to keep them away. Even facing machetes, Villase had to be dragged from the tarp that was home for her and four children.
"I didn't want them to take the tent away," she recalled. "They said, 'We don't care. We can rip it up while you're inside.'"
In the moments after the disaster all Port-au-Prince began pouring into twilit streets. Homes, still collapsing, had in a moment become death traps. Camps rose on public and private spaces, squares, parks and golf courses.
Bodies were everywhere, laid out under sheets, cardboard or nothing. Dump trucks and front-loaders cleared most in the following weeks. Others were burned. Some are still being found.
The bodies have been cleared, but not the estimated 20 million cubic meters (yards) of rubble. Mounds of it make most of the capital impassable. Even with 300 trucks working daily, only two percent has been cleared.
The number of people in relief camps has nearly doubled to 1.6 million, while the amount of transitional housing built is minuscule.
Most of the $3.1 billion pledged for humanitarian aid has paid for field hospitals, plastic tarps, bandages, and food, plus salaries, transportation and upkeep of relief workers. About $1.3 billion went through U.S. relief groups.
Hundreds of millions have yet to be spent, with agencies such as the American Red Cross saying they want to avoid dumping money into half-baked projects.
Aid workers say the money already spent helped prevent epidemics, floods and political violence, while distributing food and other essentials. Food markets are back to normal, and the foreign doctors and equipment that flowed in have left medical care — while deeply flawed — better than it was before the quake.
Most Haitians didn't have running water and electricity before the quake, and still don't.
Police and U.N. peacekeepers are back on patrol. Crime is more prevalent since the quake, with attacks in camps terrorizing thousands, especially women and girls. However, violence is nowhere near the levels faced when the U.N. troops arrived six years ago.
But besides meeting people's most basic needs, little else has happened.
President Rene Preval works beside the caved-in hulk of the national palace. Homes and stores lie in heaps.
More than 665,700 plastic tarps and 97,000 tents were handed out, but most are now falling apart. Officials planned to put up 125,000 transitional shelters — not nearly enough for everyone. Only 3,722 have been built. Nearly four times as many still await assembly, shelter officials say.
When materials finally get through customs, there's no land to put them on.
Reconstruction is still mostly a concept.
It took more than three months to hold a donors' conference at the U.N. The 26-member international Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission, headed by Bill Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, didn't convene until last month.
That committee is set to oversee the first installments of the $9.9 billion pledged for international reconstruction — money separate than the total spent on humanitarian aid. But less than 2 percent of it has been delivered. The rest is mired in bureaucracy and politics of more than 60 countries and organizations that pledged to help.
Everyone bemoans the lack of progress, but Bellerive says past experience dictates caution, lest reconstruction simply replicate the pre-quake slums.
In "the last 30 years there was no planning with any action ... no code," he said. "What we didn't want to do is launch any demogogic, visible action (just to) prove we are working."
A few miles from Haiti's biggest ports and safely past its northernmost slums, Corail-Cesselesse is a blank canvas. On this vast stretch abutting one of the Caribbean's largest cities, in a country more densely populated than Japan, will rise garment factories, homes, stores and restaurants in one of the country's first planned communities, the planners say.
Just before a March visit by former U.S. Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, Preval said the government was taking over more than 7,300 hectares (18,500 acres) of that land to accommodate thousands of families at risk from the coming floods and hurricanes.
A few hundred acres were picked out for the city's first, long-awaited relocation camp. The U.N. and U.S. military construction teams flattened and graded the land for a camp of deluxe "ShelterBox" tents. About 5,000 residents of the Petionville Club golf-course camp, run by actor Sean Penn, were bused in.
Thousands of squatters who could not get access to the "good" camp followed, staking their tarps and poles on its outskirts.
Aid groups did not know it, but this was a first salvo in a long-desired plan to develop this broad expanse.
Other big plans for Port-au-Prince are on the drawing board: Rebuild the downtown; spend $100 million to restore the destroyed government center of the Champ de Mars; bring back the cruise ships; hold a design competition for new ministerial buildings, to be "a museum of 21st Century architecture" in the words of government planner Leslie Voltaire.
But if you really want to see the future, Voltaire said, look north.
In Corail-Cesselesse, houses would be built for 300,000 people — transitional shelters at first, but each with a permanent facade and capable of expanding to six rooms. There will be jobs and services that most of the rest of the city now lacks.
This northern expansion will help transform Port-au-Prince into a "Zen city," engineered to be balanced and serene, he said. It will be the key industrial city of the Caribbean.
"The idea is to pick up all that imagination and wealth and put it in that mountain," Voltaire said with a smile. "It's minutes to the port. It's going to be a hit."
But with a barely functioning government, Corail-Cesselesse may be built according to backroom deals, not planners' blueprints.
The government had appointed Gerard-Emile "Aby" Brun, president of Nabatec Development, a consortium owned by some of Haiti's most powerful families, to be in charge of relocating the squatter camps in Port-au-Prince.
For that first relocation camp for 5,000 people, with clinics, food on premises and some electricity, he chose a piece of Corail-Cesselesse land owned by Nabatec, confirmed Voltaire and Bellerive, the prime minister. The company now stands first in line to gain part of $7 million the government will spend compensating landowners.
That's just a small part of the potential payoff.
Nabatec is also a lead negotiator with South Korean garment firms to build factories that Haitian officials say will likely go into Corail-Cesselesse, and the camp he set up is a potential source of workers for those factories, which can take advantage of generous U.S. import laws for Haitian-assembled textiles.
Foreign aid workers complained that the camp was too far from the city and went up without basic amenities. "We weren't very happy about the choice of site and how it was selected, and how it was isolated," said Oxfam spokeswoman Julie Schindall.
Bellerive said he told Brun to quit his government position because of the apparent conflict of interest. But the deal Brun negotiated for his company stands.
Rumors of the coming factories and jobs have already spread in the camp. Jonathas Metelus, a 31-year-old father of two, says he'll take a job there if offered.
"I need the work," he said.
Meanwhile, the squatters continue to pour into Corail-Cesselesse.
You don't see them until you come up the road. First just one. Then a hundred. Then fields of them. Sweating through their secondhand T-shirts, clutching wooden poles, plastic sheets and tools, 10,000 or more have set up tents.
Maxo Jean-Charles, 26, lost both his children, 4-year-old Claudia and 3-year-old Marco, in the quake. He lost his home in the densely packed Delmas 32 district of Port-au-Prince. He's desperate for a place to start over.
His cousins and uncles pound a stake into the ground while a woman rests in the dirt. Each family is claiming their square of land, they explain.
"This is where they're sending everyone to live. That's why we're building our tent here," he said.
Who "sent" them? No one can say. But the landowners suspect the government is populating the land with squatters, so it can be taken for the "new Haiti" at a minimum price — or for nothing.
Land ownership has been a sensitive issue since Haiti's 1804 slave revolt, when it was wrested from French planters and distributed among the people, only to fall back under the ownership of a few powerful families — the "grands-hommes" (big men) in Haitian parlance.
The land registry hasn't been updated for decades, and many of the records that did exist were lost in the earthquake.
People who claim to be the landowners say it's worth $50,000 a hectare ($20,000 an acre).
"My fair price is a negotiation between the market price and the price the owner declared to the income tax," Voltaire said. "And it's always very low."
Bellerive said landowners will be compensated, but that housing the homeless takes priority.
"If we take the time to resolve it one by one, the people are going to stay on the streets," he said.
He could have a strong ally — Clinton, who has said he'll plunge into the bargaining himself, if necessary.
"I'm not above doing that," Clinton told The Associated Press on a a recent visit. "I've been known to make a deal or two in my life."
The landowners say if they're not compensated, the "new Haiti" in Corail-Cesselesse will end up making the violent slums of pre-quake Port-au-Prince look tame. They say if anyone builds there without their consent, they will sue to get the land back. Landowner Jean-Claude Theodore calls the squatters invaders who are attacking private property.
Voltaire has his own response to threats of lawsuits or worse — a government backed by U.N. peacekeepers, the international community and his blueprint.
"What do I say to them?" he said with a smile. "I say, 'Checkmate.'"
Every squatter seems to have had an encounter with gangsters they believe are sent by landowners.
Sadrak Abane, 60, said they beat him with a rifle. He refused to go.
"Any time we pick a spot to build a place there's always the 'grands-hommes' claiming the land is theirs," said Wisner Jerome, 37.
But they believe they have government behind them.
"Don't forget! Don't forget! Don't forget!" said Daniel Paul, a 35-year-old member of a squatters' committee. "The state has declared it is public land. Nobody can go above the state."
It didn't work that way for Menmen Villase. Stripped of tarp and land, she and the children fled to a crumbling concrete cabin in a remote corner of Corail.
Farther from the aid available in the deluxe camp, with no easy way to get to markets, she struggles to find food.
"I'd love to live under a plastic sheet," she said. "but I can't afford it."
A few days after being driven from her makeshift home, she lay alone on the cabin floor and gave birth to her fifth child.
(AP) - By Jonathan M. Katz
CORAIL-CESSELESSE, Haiti — The sun was beating down on the rocky cactus plain when men with machetes came for Menmen Villase, nine months pregnant, shoved her onto her bulging stomach and sliced up the plastic tarp that sheltered her and her four children.
The family was one of thousands of earthquake homeless who had come to this Manhattan-sized stretch of disused sugarcane land between the sea and barren mountains north of Port-au-Prince, seeking refuge from overflowing camps in the city.
But this real estate is earmarked for building a new Haiti. Villase had walked into one of the fights over land, rooted in Haiti's history of slavery, occupation and upheaval, that have bedeviled recovery in the six months since the earthquake leveled much of the capital and killed as many as 300,000 people.
The government, already weak before the magnitude-7 quake and still hobbled by its aftermath, is trying to build anew in places like Corail-Cesselesse, a nearly empty swath of land that begins about 15 kilometers (9 miles) north of the capital. But the effort is paralyzed by disorganization, bitter rivalries and private deals being struck behind its back.
Multiple families claim title to almost every scrap of real estate. Already one reconstruction official has been forced to step down for steering a public project to his company's private land at Corail-Cesselesse. Wealthy landowners vow the "new Haiti" will become yet another vast slum unless the government rebuilds on their terms.
Caught in the middle are the homeless, looking to grab a patch of ground from the thugs hired to keep them away. Even facing machetes, Villase had to be dragged from the tarp that was home for her and four children.
"I didn't want them to take the tent away," she recalled. "They said, 'We don't care. We can rip it up while you're inside.'"
In the moments after the disaster all Port-au-Prince began pouring into twilit streets. Homes, still collapsing, had in a moment become death traps. Camps rose on public and private spaces, squares, parks and golf courses.
Bodies were everywhere, laid out under sheets, cardboard or nothing. Dump trucks and front-loaders cleared most in the following weeks. Others were burned. Some are still being found.
The bodies have been cleared, but not the estimated 20 million cubic meters (yards) of rubble. Mounds of it make most of the capital impassable. Even with 300 trucks working daily, only two percent has been cleared.
The number of people in relief camps has nearly doubled to 1.6 million, while the amount of transitional housing built is minuscule.
Most of the $3.1 billion pledged for humanitarian aid has paid for field hospitals, plastic tarps, bandages, and food, plus salaries, transportation and upkeep of relief workers. About $1.3 billion went through U.S. relief groups.
Hundreds of millions have yet to be spent, with agencies such as the American Red Cross saying they want to avoid dumping money into half-baked projects.
Aid workers say the money already spent helped prevent epidemics, floods and political violence, while distributing food and other essentials. Food markets are back to normal, and the foreign doctors and equipment that flowed in have left medical care — while deeply flawed — better than it was before the quake.
Most Haitians didn't have running water and electricity before the quake, and still don't.
Police and U.N. peacekeepers are back on patrol. Crime is more prevalent since the quake, with attacks in camps terrorizing thousands, especially women and girls. However, violence is nowhere near the levels faced when the U.N. troops arrived six years ago.
But besides meeting people's most basic needs, little else has happened.
President Rene Preval works beside the caved-in hulk of the national palace. Homes and stores lie in heaps.
More than 665,700 plastic tarps and 97,000 tents were handed out, but most are now falling apart. Officials planned to put up 125,000 transitional shelters — not nearly enough for everyone. Only 3,722 have been built. Nearly four times as many still await assembly, shelter officials say.
When materials finally get through customs, there's no land to put them on.
Reconstruction is still mostly a concept.
It took more than three months to hold a donors' conference at the U.N. The 26-member international Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission, headed by Bill Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, didn't convene until last month.
That committee is set to oversee the first installments of the $9.9 billion pledged for international reconstruction — money separate than the total spent on humanitarian aid. But less than 2 percent of it has been delivered. The rest is mired in bureaucracy and politics of more than 60 countries and organizations that pledged to help.
Everyone bemoans the lack of progress, but Bellerive says past experience dictates caution, lest reconstruction simply replicate the pre-quake slums.
In "the last 30 years there was no planning with any action ... no code," he said. "What we didn't want to do is launch any demogogic, visible action (just to) prove we are working."
A few miles from Haiti's biggest ports and safely past its northernmost slums, Corail-Cesselesse is a blank canvas. On this vast stretch abutting one of the Caribbean's largest cities, in a country more densely populated than Japan, will rise garment factories, homes, stores and restaurants in one of the country's first planned communities, the planners say.
Just before a March visit by former U.S. Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, Preval said the government was taking over more than 7,300 hectares (18,500 acres) of that land to accommodate thousands of families at risk from the coming floods and hurricanes.
A few hundred acres were picked out for the city's first, long-awaited relocation camp. The U.N. and U.S. military construction teams flattened and graded the land for a camp of deluxe "ShelterBox" tents. About 5,000 residents of the Petionville Club golf-course camp, run by actor Sean Penn, were bused in.
Thousands of squatters who could not get access to the "good" camp followed, staking their tarps and poles on its outskirts.
Aid groups did not know it, but this was a first salvo in a long-desired plan to develop this broad expanse.
Other big plans for Port-au-Prince are on the drawing board: Rebuild the downtown; spend $100 million to restore the destroyed government center of the Champ de Mars; bring back the cruise ships; hold a design competition for new ministerial buildings, to be "a museum of 21st Century architecture" in the words of government planner Leslie Voltaire.
But if you really want to see the future, Voltaire said, look north.
In Corail-Cesselesse, houses would be built for 300,000 people — transitional shelters at first, but each with a permanent facade and capable of expanding to six rooms. There will be jobs and services that most of the rest of the city now lacks.
This northern expansion will help transform Port-au-Prince into a "Zen city," engineered to be balanced and serene, he said. It will be the key industrial city of the Caribbean.
"The idea is to pick up all that imagination and wealth and put it in that mountain," Voltaire said with a smile. "It's minutes to the port. It's going to be a hit."
But with a barely functioning government, Corail-Cesselesse may be built according to backroom deals, not planners' blueprints.
The government had appointed Gerard-Emile "Aby" Brun, president of Nabatec Development, a consortium owned by some of Haiti's most powerful families, to be in charge of relocating the squatter camps in Port-au-Prince.
For that first relocation camp for 5,000 people, with clinics, food on premises and some electricity, he chose a piece of Corail-Cesselesse land owned by Nabatec, confirmed Voltaire and Bellerive, the prime minister. The company now stands first in line to gain part of $7 million the government will spend compensating landowners.
That's just a small part of the potential payoff.
Nabatec is also a lead negotiator with South Korean garment firms to build factories that Haitian officials say will likely go into Corail-Cesselesse, and the camp he set up is a potential source of workers for those factories, which can take advantage of generous U.S. import laws for Haitian-assembled textiles.
Foreign aid workers complained that the camp was too far from the city and went up without basic amenities. "We weren't very happy about the choice of site and how it was selected, and how it was isolated," said Oxfam spokeswoman Julie Schindall.
Bellerive said he told Brun to quit his government position because of the apparent conflict of interest. But the deal Brun negotiated for his company stands.
Rumors of the coming factories and jobs have already spread in the camp. Jonathas Metelus, a 31-year-old father of two, says he'll take a job there if offered.
"I need the work," he said.
Meanwhile, the squatters continue to pour into Corail-Cesselesse.
You don't see them until you come up the road. First just one. Then a hundred. Then fields of them. Sweating through their secondhand T-shirts, clutching wooden poles, plastic sheets and tools, 10,000 or more have set up tents.
Maxo Jean-Charles, 26, lost both his children, 4-year-old Claudia and 3-year-old Marco, in the quake. He lost his home in the densely packed Delmas 32 district of Port-au-Prince. He's desperate for a place to start over.
His cousins and uncles pound a stake into the ground while a woman rests in the dirt. Each family is claiming their square of land, they explain.
"This is where they're sending everyone to live. That's why we're building our tent here," he said.
Who "sent" them? No one can say. But the landowners suspect the government is populating the land with squatters, so it can be taken for the "new Haiti" at a minimum price — or for nothing.
Land ownership has been a sensitive issue since Haiti's 1804 slave revolt, when it was wrested from French planters and distributed among the people, only to fall back under the ownership of a few powerful families — the "grands-hommes" (big men) in Haitian parlance.
The land registry hasn't been updated for decades, and many of the records that did exist were lost in the earthquake.
People who claim to be the landowners say it's worth $50,000 a hectare ($20,000 an acre).
"My fair price is a negotiation between the market price and the price the owner declared to the income tax," Voltaire said. "And it's always very low."
Bellerive said landowners will be compensated, but that housing the homeless takes priority.
"If we take the time to resolve it one by one, the people are going to stay on the streets," he said.
He could have a strong ally — Clinton, who has said he'll plunge into the bargaining himself, if necessary.
"I'm not above doing that," Clinton told The Associated Press on a a recent visit. "I've been known to make a deal or two in my life."
The landowners say if they're not compensated, the "new Haiti" in Corail-Cesselesse will end up making the violent slums of pre-quake Port-au-Prince look tame. They say if anyone builds there without their consent, they will sue to get the land back. Landowner Jean-Claude Theodore calls the squatters invaders who are attacking private property.
Voltaire has his own response to threats of lawsuits or worse — a government backed by U.N. peacekeepers, the international community and his blueprint.
"What do I say to them?" he said with a smile. "I say, 'Checkmate.'"
Every squatter seems to have had an encounter with gangsters they believe are sent by landowners.
Sadrak Abane, 60, said they beat him with a rifle. He refused to go.
"Any time we pick a spot to build a place there's always the 'grands-hommes' claiming the land is theirs," said Wisner Jerome, 37.
But they believe they have government behind them.
"Don't forget! Don't forget! Don't forget!" said Daniel Paul, a 35-year-old member of a squatters' committee. "The state has declared it is public land. Nobody can go above the state."
It didn't work that way for Menmen Villase. Stripped of tarp and land, she and the children fled to a crumbling concrete cabin in a remote corner of Corail.
Farther from the aid available in the deluxe camp, with no easy way to get to markets, she struggles to find food.
"I'd love to live under a plastic sheet," she said. "but I can't afford it."
A few days after being driven from her makeshift home, she lay alone on the cabin floor and gave birth to her fifth child.
Monday, March 29, 2010
ARTICLE - CONSTRUCTION
POOR CONSTRUCTION IS KEY TO DISASTER
(Washington Post) By William Booth
As Haitians deal with the psychological aftershocks of the devastating earthquake, city dwellers here -- prominent and poor alike -- confess they continue to harbor deep anxieties about entering buildings constructed of concrete.
Their fears, as it turns out, are entirely rational.
International engineers inspecting buildings in the rubble-strewn capital have found that houses and offices in Haiti suffered catastrophic damage mainly because they were poorly constructed -- made with a weak cement and lacking proper steel reinforcements, in a country where the government never enforced building codes.
Haitian President René Préval has said he is scared to sleep inside. The National Palace collapsed in spectacular fashion, and his own private home lies in ruins. Préval is staying with friends until he can move to an earthquake-resistant structure."Like you, I am nervous," he told reporters.
Later he explained, "Port-au-Prince was not well built."
Many people continue to sleep outdoors, fearful even of homes with only cracked walls. Their anxiety poses a challenge for aid workers and government officials who want Haitians to return to structurally sound, though damaged, homes.
Haitians are especially wary of entering large concrete structures. Since the Jan. 12 quake, which killed an estimated 200,000 people, many parents have balked at sending their children back to schools built of concrete. Some patients ask to see doctors in hospital courtyards because they don't trust the buildings.
Eduardo Marques Almeida, head of the Haitian office of the Inter-American Development Bank, remembers being in the bank's hilltop headquarters when the earthquake struck. The damaged building is now abandoned. He conducts his meetings under a mango tree because many of his staff members refuse to enter the bank's other, still sound offices, for fear they could collapse in an aftershock."We're going to tear them all down and rebuild, or else nobody will work inside," Almeida said.
In a confidential memo circulated among its employees in Haiti, the United Nations mission recommended that they stay out of concrete structures and offered suggestions on how to politely decline to attend meetings in buildings they deemed dubious.
For only the second time since the earthquake, Hiclair Siclait, 70, opened the door to his concrete home recently and entered hesitantly. "When the earthquake happened, I saw the roof going up and down." He rocked back and forth to simulate the motion.
Ever since, Siclait has lived in the streets under a tarp with his wife, four sons and two daughters. "I am afraid to sleep inside. If I find a tent, I will sleep on the roof," he said. "I think after a few months I might come back. With time, I might be less afraid. You never know."
There is a saying among engineers that earthquakes do not kill people -- buildings kill people, said Dennis Smith, a structural engineer with the U.S. Naval Facilities Engineering Command. "And the buildings here were badly constructed. They failed for a reason."
Escorted by a platoon of U.S. Army airborne, Smith and a team of Haitian engineers went house by house in Port-au-Prince's Turgeau neighborhood, an eclectic mix of old French Caribbean wooden dwellings and newer concrete-block construction. The concrete buildings fared worse.
Haitian and U.S. engineers inspecting the 225,000 dwellings and 20,000 offices that the Haitian government estimates were damaged or destroyed say that much of the catastrophic damage could have been averted if concrete masonry had been reinforced-- one of the most basic rules of engineering.
"Simple things caused collapse," said Soon-Min Kwon, a project manager with the earthquake engineering firm Miyamoto, which is based in California. Kwon said columns, for example, were not properly wrapped with steel rods, or the rods were too thin, or the columns were not properly connected to the floors they were supposed to support.
"If there is a building code, we haven't been able to find it," said Vince Sobash, an engineer who works for the U.S. Navy, who was training a group of Haitian engineers how to rate houses for earthquake damage. 'We need rules'
In Haiti, the poorest country in the hemisphere, most homeowners cobbled their houses together themselves block by block or paid a small-time contractor, who might have relied on tradition more than engineering.
For example, thinking they were making houses stronger, many homeowners made their concrete floors thicker, and thereby heavier, and did not properly use reinforcing steel bars, known as rebar. As they made more money, owners often added floors, and many of those two- and three-story buildings pancaked.
"I also think that a lot of the landlords were cheap with cement and did not build the houses strong because it costs them a little more money," said Oreste Joseph, a Haitian who once taught math and civics in Boston and was running a computer literacy school in his house. He pointed across the street to a collapsed four-story house that had been a warren of rented rooms. Joseph said 50 people had died inside. "We need rules and people need to follow them," he said."
There was no government oversight of construction, of the materials or the engineering," said Philippe Jourdain, a local architect. "Yes, you had to get a permit. Yes, somebody from the government came by your house. But not to inspect. To get paid something. It was a greedy adventure."
In planning meetings here, engineers envision a two-tiered system: one with strict international standards, with seismic protections for larger structures, and a simple but enforceable code for houses -- a five-page illustrated booklet that at least shows the proper way to use reinforcing steel bars to support columns and floors.
Many builders here skimped on cement in the concrete mix and block fabrication, producing concrete that crumbled and exposed steel rebar to the elements. The cement itself was also especially poor.
Haiti's government has now banned the commonly used sand quarried from the hillsides and recommended that builders use riverbed sand, though it is impossible to know whether this will be enforced."Poor people deserve decent engineering, too," said Leslie Voltaire, an architect and planner here.
(Washington Post) By William Booth
As Haitians deal with the psychological aftershocks of the devastating earthquake, city dwellers here -- prominent and poor alike -- confess they continue to harbor deep anxieties about entering buildings constructed of concrete.
Their fears, as it turns out, are entirely rational.
International engineers inspecting buildings in the rubble-strewn capital have found that houses and offices in Haiti suffered catastrophic damage mainly because they were poorly constructed -- made with a weak cement and lacking proper steel reinforcements, in a country where the government never enforced building codes.
Haitian President René Préval has said he is scared to sleep inside. The National Palace collapsed in spectacular fashion, and his own private home lies in ruins. Préval is staying with friends until he can move to an earthquake-resistant structure."Like you, I am nervous," he told reporters.
Later he explained, "Port-au-Prince was not well built."
Many people continue to sleep outdoors, fearful even of homes with only cracked walls. Their anxiety poses a challenge for aid workers and government officials who want Haitians to return to structurally sound, though damaged, homes.
Haitians are especially wary of entering large concrete structures. Since the Jan. 12 quake, which killed an estimated 200,000 people, many parents have balked at sending their children back to schools built of concrete. Some patients ask to see doctors in hospital courtyards because they don't trust the buildings.
Eduardo Marques Almeida, head of the Haitian office of the Inter-American Development Bank, remembers being in the bank's hilltop headquarters when the earthquake struck. The damaged building is now abandoned. He conducts his meetings under a mango tree because many of his staff members refuse to enter the bank's other, still sound offices, for fear they could collapse in an aftershock."We're going to tear them all down and rebuild, or else nobody will work inside," Almeida said.
In a confidential memo circulated among its employees in Haiti, the United Nations mission recommended that they stay out of concrete structures and offered suggestions on how to politely decline to attend meetings in buildings they deemed dubious.
For only the second time since the earthquake, Hiclair Siclait, 70, opened the door to his concrete home recently and entered hesitantly. "When the earthquake happened, I saw the roof going up and down." He rocked back and forth to simulate the motion.
Ever since, Siclait has lived in the streets under a tarp with his wife, four sons and two daughters. "I am afraid to sleep inside. If I find a tent, I will sleep on the roof," he said. "I think after a few months I might come back. With time, I might be less afraid. You never know."
There is a saying among engineers that earthquakes do not kill people -- buildings kill people, said Dennis Smith, a structural engineer with the U.S. Naval Facilities Engineering Command. "And the buildings here were badly constructed. They failed for a reason."
Escorted by a platoon of U.S. Army airborne, Smith and a team of Haitian engineers went house by house in Port-au-Prince's Turgeau neighborhood, an eclectic mix of old French Caribbean wooden dwellings and newer concrete-block construction. The concrete buildings fared worse.
Haitian and U.S. engineers inspecting the 225,000 dwellings and 20,000 offices that the Haitian government estimates were damaged or destroyed say that much of the catastrophic damage could have been averted if concrete masonry had been reinforced-- one of the most basic rules of engineering.
"Simple things caused collapse," said Soon-Min Kwon, a project manager with the earthquake engineering firm Miyamoto, which is based in California. Kwon said columns, for example, were not properly wrapped with steel rods, or the rods were too thin, or the columns were not properly connected to the floors they were supposed to support.
"If there is a building code, we haven't been able to find it," said Vince Sobash, an engineer who works for the U.S. Navy, who was training a group of Haitian engineers how to rate houses for earthquake damage. 'We need rules'
In Haiti, the poorest country in the hemisphere, most homeowners cobbled their houses together themselves block by block or paid a small-time contractor, who might have relied on tradition more than engineering.
For example, thinking they were making houses stronger, many homeowners made their concrete floors thicker, and thereby heavier, and did not properly use reinforcing steel bars, known as rebar. As they made more money, owners often added floors, and many of those two- and three-story buildings pancaked.
"I also think that a lot of the landlords were cheap with cement and did not build the houses strong because it costs them a little more money," said Oreste Joseph, a Haitian who once taught math and civics in Boston and was running a computer literacy school in his house. He pointed across the street to a collapsed four-story house that had been a warren of rented rooms. Joseph said 50 people had died inside. "We need rules and people need to follow them," he said."
There was no government oversight of construction, of the materials or the engineering," said Philippe Jourdain, a local architect. "Yes, you had to get a permit. Yes, somebody from the government came by your house. But not to inspect. To get paid something. It was a greedy adventure."
In planning meetings here, engineers envision a two-tiered system: one with strict international standards, with seismic protections for larger structures, and a simple but enforceable code for houses -- a five-page illustrated booklet that at least shows the proper way to use reinforcing steel bars to support columns and floors.
Many builders here skimped on cement in the concrete mix and block fabrication, producing concrete that crumbled and exposed steel rebar to the elements. The cement itself was also especially poor.
Haiti's government has now banned the commonly used sand quarried from the hillsides and recommended that builders use riverbed sand, though it is impossible to know whether this will be enforced."Poor people deserve decent engineering, too," said Leslie Voltaire, an architect and planner here.
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