The Minister for Overseas Development was visibly stunned by what he saw on his visit, writes LARA MARLOWEin Port-au-Prince
MINISTER FOR Overseas Development Peter Power completed his two-day crash course in the Haitian catastrophe yesterday with a visit to a project run by the Irish charity Goal and a 45-minute chat with the Haitian prime minister.
On Monday, Concern taught the Minister the difference between orderly, planned camps for displaced Haitians – of which there are two in the country, including one run by Concern at Tabarre Issa, on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince – and “spontaneous” camps. The latter, of which there are 1,300, are the country’s most pressing problem.
Mr Power was visibly stunned by what he saw at the Place de la Paix, Haiti’s second largest “spontaneous” camp, where Concern provides showers, latrines and water points for 20,000 people. In the worst section of the camp, a football pitch that is home to 6,000 people, Haitians live cheek by jowl in squalid cardboard and tin shacks, with sewage flowing in the ditches between them.
“You really wouldn’t put a dog in there,” Mr Power said. “I’ve seen a lot of poverty during my two and a half years as Minister . . . [but] there is simply no human dignity. It’s a huge obligation for us to act.”
There was, the Minister added, “no road map” to how or where the 20,000 people on the Place de la Paix would be accommodated. “Unless the land issue is sorted out, nothing will be sorted out. There simply has to be government action.”
Brendan Rogers, the director general of Irish Aid who accompanied the Minister, suggested Haiti could establish a land commission as Ireland did in the 1930s, to stop poor people paying rent to absentee landlords.
Mr Power said he intended to bring the issue up with prime minister Jean-Max Bellerive. As he left Mr Bellerive’s office yesterday, the Minister said Mr Bellerive was “adamant that he has the appropriate powers to acquire the appropriate land” but insisted that NGOs and agencies work through the government plan.
The former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who lives in exile in South Africa, was seen as the champion of Haiti’s poor. The government headed by Mr Bellerive, a Swiss-trained economist, is more friendly to business interests. Mr Bellerive told Mr Power of his desire “to rebuild the private sector”.
An economy run by the private sector has not served Haitians well in the past. Goal’s operation at Canapé Vert, a poor, destroyed sector of the capital, is a case in point. “The costs here are astronomical,” said Simon Brown, a Goal logistician who arrived 12 days after the earthquake.
“There’s such a high demand for tipper trucks and diggers that the owners can charge whatever they want,” Brown explained.
In the event, the going rate is $400 a day for a truck and $800 for a digger. Yes, it’s exploitation, Darren Hanniffy, Goal’s country director admitted. “But it’s a fact of an emergency. The law of supply and demand.”
Goal had to abandon one project in the Carrefour Feuille neighbourhood because gangs wanted to dictate who they hired. The government and aid groups have set a standard labour wage of $5 per day. Goal’s policy is to hire the most vulnerable people, and 48 per cent of their beneficiaries are women. The gangs in Carrefour Feuille threatened to make it impossible for the Irish aid group to work anywhere in Port-au-Prince.
The Haitians who have been accepted for Goal’s cash for work programme break up rubble with pick-axes, shovel it into wheelbarrows or carry it in buckets to large mounds that are then trucked to dumps outside the city. The amounts of rubble are vast.
The slum is cramped, and on a steep incline, so everything has to be done by hand. It’s a bit like digging a tunnel with a spoon.
At the bottom of the ravine in Canapé Vert stands a mountain of rubble the size of a city block.
Mr Power stopped to talk to Carelle Petitpapa (44), a Goal cash-for-work beneficiary. Wrinkled and shrivelled beyond her years, Ms Petitpapa lost her house and a son in the quake.
She uses her meagre income to buy charcoal and mangoes, which she resells. The aid agencies “are doing God’s work,” she told me.
“It’s very clear to me that the challenges in this country are absolutely staggering, and it’s going to take many, many, many years,” Mr Power concluded.