News and Features
Local charities report on life in Haiti six months after the earthquake
By Judy Benson
The Day
Published 07/19/2010
Six months after the earthquake that left hundreds of thousands of Haitians dead and much of the country's capital city in ruins, thousands still live in tent cities, little rebuilding or clearing of rubble has occurred, and no clear plan seems to have emerged yet for the rebuilding of Haiti.
But the leaders of local charities that work in the country, after several return trips to the devastated island nation, say that while signs of real progress are scarce, their resolve to continue doing as much as they can is unchanged.
"The crisis in Haiti didn't start Jan. 12, it started long before that," said Jessica Patti of New London, nurse and one of the founders of the medical volunteer organization Raising Haiti, referring to the date of the earthquake.
Patti was last in Haiti 3½ weeks ago to bring home Lina Supris, a Haitian woman with advanced cervical cancer who received chemotherapy and radiation treatments in this country. Supris is now receiving palliative care in her home country through the Materials Management Relief Corps, a U.S.-based patient transportation and medical supply delivery charity formed since the earthquake that Patti and her group have begun working with.
In September, she and at least five other Raising Haiti volunteers will go back to Haiti to run a free primary care clinic, tapping the services of the relief corps to take patients who need more complex care to hospitals. They plan to run the clinics every other month.
"We'll do wellness checks, check for STDs, give out condoms and toys and feed them," Patti said. Her group is looking for someone to donate a pickup truck, ideally four-wheel drive, that would be outfitted to transport patients and supplies when the relief corps isn't available or when the need for hospital care is especially urgent, she said. Donations of multivitamins with iron, rehydration salts, tarps and tents would also be welcome, as well as cash contributions.
Kyn Tolson, development director for Haitian Ministries for the Diocese of Norwich, returned less than two weeks ago from her group's third trip to Haiti since the earthquake.
"Visually, it doesn't look that much different than it did in March," she said Friday. Tent cities, she said, "are everywhere" around Port au Prince, some haphazard and some laid out in well-organized grids.
"Everybody wishes the clearing of the rubble would start, because at least that would give people a visual affirmation, but there is stuff going on that we can't see" that involves the government and nonprofit aid organizations trying to set up a structure to rebuild, Tolson said.
During her recent visit, two French and one French-speaking Canadian volunteer art therapists accompanied Haitian Ministries staff in sessions to help Haitian children deal with their trauma.
"I was amazed at the need for their help," Tolson said. "A lot of the trauma is just starting to come out among a lot of the kids. We'll keep doing the art therapy."
Her organization has given more than $250,000 in direct relief since the earthquake to the parishes it works with, and to two orphanages now serving many more children than before. A new building for one is being completed for an August move-in date. Madam Samson, a Haitian woman who ran a soup kitchen for poor children funded by Haitian Ministries, is now serving up to twice as many meals a day as before Jan. 12, and is open seven days a week versus five, Tolson said.
Haitian Ministries has also expanded its scholarship program that pays for tuition and books for schoolchildren. Before the earthquake, 135 children were enrolled, seven of whom were killed by the quake. Now, all of the siblings of those surviving children are enrolled, too, and each of their families is receiving financial aid.
Lanitte Belledente, a cook for the organization who lost part of her leg in the earthquake, is being fitted for a prosthesis. All her medical bills are being paid by the ministry.
"She's doing pretty well," Tolson said.
All five other staff in Haiti are still with the organization, but American Jillian Thorpe of Old Saybrook, who was pulled from the rubble in a dramatic rescue hours after the earthquake, has left Haitian Ministries to work with another aid organization in the country, Tolson said. Thorpe had been acting director of the mission house. Charles Dietsch , the retired American businessman working for the ministry who was rescued along with her, will be returning in the next few months to resume his role as an organizational adviser.
Tolson described the overall mood in the country as "beyond resilience."
"I try not to get discouraged, and I don't think I am," she said. "We're hoping to grow and magnify the programs we have. The Haitian people don't act desperate or cloying in any way. They have such dignity about them. I'm optimistic that something better will come out of this, but there is a lot of need."
But the rebuilding will likely take years. Donations to small, locally based organizations may be the best way for Americans to help, Tolson said. The aid goes much more quickly and directly to those who need it, instead of getting trapped in the bottleneck of a large bureaucracy as seems the case with much of the funds raised thus far.
"We're a direct conduit," she said.
U.S.-sponsored conference pledged billions, but little paid out
By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 19, 2010
Three months after donors at a U.S.-sponsored conference pledged more than $5.3 billion to rebuild Haiti, only a fraction of the money has been disbursed, and a special reconstruction and a special reconstruction commission has barely started to function, according to U.N. and aid officials.
U.S. lawmakers and international aid officials have expressed mounting concern about the slow recovery of the hemisphere's poorest country, where about 230,000 people died and about 2 million were displaced in January's earthquake. Despite ambitious plans to "build back better," as U.N. and U.S. officials promised, the reconstruction has been hobbled by a lack of coordination and cash and by a virtually incapacitated Haitian government, officials and experts say.
The United States has not disbursed the roughly $900 million it pledged for reconstruction this year, according to the U.N. Web site http://haitispecialenvoy.org. Although the U.S. government has spent hundreds of millions on short-term emergency aid, the rest of the funds are in a supplemental budget bill that has been held up in Congress by an unrelated dispute over state aid.
"There are worrisome signs that the rebuilding process in Haiti has stalled," said a recent report issued by Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Indeed, about 180 million square feet of rubble is still piled where it sat after the Jan. 12 quake, according to U.N. estimates; only 5,000 of the 125,000 temporary shelters promised by the international community have been built.
To be sure, there have been some successes: the provision of thousands of tents, as well as clean water, food and medical care for more than 1 million people. There have been no widespread outbreaks of disease.
U.S. officials point out that a successful reconstruction after a disaster can take years. They said that it took about eight months to set up an international reconstruction commission in the Indonesian region of Aceh after the 2004 tsunami. But Indonesia's government had far more money and expertise, and its capital wasn't destroyed, experts say.
"The Haitian government is not really capable of providing the kind of leadership that is required here, unlike the Indonesian government," said Robert Perito, a Haiti specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace.
The Haitian government, already weak before the quake, lost 30 percent of its public employees in the disaster, as well as many of its buildings and sources of tax revenue, officials say.
The March 31 donors' conference at the United Nations was supposed to launch Haiti on the path to recovery. Its president, René Préval, unveiled a plan to rebuild infrastructure, decentralize jobs and establish homes away from the overcrowded capital.
A centerpiece of the plan was to be the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, known as the IHRC, which would coordinate donor aid with the Haitian government's plans and monitor for fraud. U.S. officials saw the commission, which was to be co-chaired by former president Bill Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive and staffed with technical experts, as a sort of stand-in for the shattered government.
But Préval was slow to warm to the commission, U.S. officials say, and it took weeks to get Haitian government approval and assemble a staff. The commission's board has held only one meeting, on June 17, at which it approved $31 million in projects.
It still hasn't named a full-time executive director to run it on a day-to-day basis. Angel Urena, a spokesman for Clinton, said it took time to sort through hundreds of candidates. The director should be named at the board's next session on Aug. 17, he said.
Leslie Voltaire, the Haitian special envoy to the United Nations, said the commission's slow start was contributing to the delay in receiving aid money.
"It's like Catch-22. I think the donors are waiting for the IHRC to show its capacity. To have capacity, it has to have resources," he said.
Clinton and Bellerive said in an op-ed in the New York Times last week that only 10 percent of the $5.3 billion pledged at the U.N. conference had been disbursed in Haiti. That figure, however, is expected to increase in the coming days as donor countries update their data. It also doesn't account for about $900 million in debt relief.
Development officials said it was difficult to plan projects without knowing when funding would arrive.
"I don't sense a reluctance" by donor nations, said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be frank. "It's really a lack of urgency, which to me is a little bit shocking. . . . The situation in Haiti is quite dire."
Some nations say they are still waiting for the Haitian government to develop a more detailed reconstruction plan to ensure their money is well spent.
"We have millions of plans, like many other agencies," said Jurg Bohnenblust of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. But it took time getting them approved by Haiti's government, he said -- especially with presidential elections looming there. He said Switzerland had committed about half its $11 million pledge to reconstruction projects.