Mixed news on Haiti's recovery

Mixed news on Haiti's recovery

On Saturday February 6, I returned to Port-au-Prince after an absence of 10 days. I found some things have changed, with some positive signs indicating more aid is flowing and the very first steps towards recovery are under way.

But there are far too many things which appear to have remained the same - or even gotten worse.

Food aid is getting out to more and more hungry and homeless Haitian people. The World Food Programme says 1.8 million people have received food aid, out of a total population of two million in need.

In the makeshift tent camps that have sprung up everywhere in the city there are signs of food in greater abundance - rice especially.

Women-only coupons

A new system of organising food distributions through coupons given only to women has made a difference.

There is less chaos at distribution points than in earlier days, when young men muscled their way to the front, grabbed all the food on offer, and left women, children and the elderly with little or nothing.

Saturday afternoon, in a hilly neighbourhood that was devastated by the January 12 earthquake, we saw men and women at work clearing rubble.

They have been issued wheelbarrows and shovels by the aid organisation Save the Children, which pays them 40 Haitian dollars per day - a little less than five dollars US.

It's not much - but it's better than nothing. And the dirt streets in the neighbourhood, once totally impassable, have been cleared.

For a few dollars

Elsewhere, men are working on their own, hammering lengths of steel reinforcing rods from slabs of concrete in ruined buildings. They say they can sell the scrap metal and make a few dollars.

In some camps, I saw proper, family-sized tents that have been erected, replacing the meagre shelter afforded by tarpaulins or bedsheets strung between trees.

But most of the city's 600 outdoor camps are places of squalor, danger, and disease. Most lack real tents or any kind of efficient sanitation.

Men, women and children have no options other than to eat, sleep, urinate and defecate outdoors.

There are piles of human waste and garbage, aswarm with flies, next to families preparing meals over charcoal fires.

Personal cleanliness

Most people make a real effort to preserve their dignity and personal cleanliness - you often see mothers bathing children, and remarkably few people in ragged or soiled clothing.

But in a camp in the suburb of Petionville, Nicaraguan military doctors handing out antibiotics and disinfectants told us they were seeing more and more cases of respiratory infections, diarrhea, and skin diseases - all directly attributable to the poor sanitation and close quarters in which people live.

The Nicaraguans said they were preparing for a major outbreak of communicable disease.

There are increasing reports of violence, including a fatal shooting that occurred during a store robbery. Now, most journalists covering the Haitian catastrophe have actually been surprised at how little crime and violence they've seen.

Convoys attacked

There has been ransacking of relief convoys and some food stores.

But there has been nothing that in any way approaches the wholesale, destructive looting that followed the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, or the city-wide looting in the New York blackouts of 1977 and 2003.

Nevertheless, there are disturbing reports of increased rapes and other assaults on women, and many women tell stories of men snatching their ration coupons away from them, sometimes at knife-point.

Nearly one month after the earth trembled and destroyed much of Haiti, too much remains the same, and too little has changed.