The Haitian authorities need to show greater strategic leadership and take decisions that reflect the priority needs of the Haitian population. They need to initiate public infrastructure projects that put people to work and build skills; support people to return home or allocate land for new houses; and invest in agriculture. The international community should do much more to support these efforts by increasing the capacity and accountability of Haitian institutions.
]]>Their mission? To build some of the 700 latrines Oxfam is helping to fund in the Petite Riviere area of the Artibonite province, where the deadly waterborne disease first broke out in October. It has now reached every province in the country, aided in its rapid spread by Haiti’s poor infrastructure: 50 percent of Haitians don’t have access to clean water, and more than 80 percent don’t have latrines.
For some of the families in this rice-growing region, that’s about to change. The latrines are part of a multi-pronged effort, including a public health education campaign, Oxfam has launched to help 125,000 people in this area stop a disease that hadn’t surfaced in Haiti since 1960. By the end of November, cholera had already sent more than 34,000 people to the hospital and killed more than 1,750 across the country.
Oxfam is also tackling the outbreak in Cap Haitien, Haiti’s second largest city, and in Port-au-Prince, the capital. There, intensive efforts to provide clean water, sanitation services, and public health education to people displaced by the January 12 earthquake has prevented any known cases of the disease from cropping up in the camps where Oxfam works.
Along with the household latrines in Petite Riviere and the construction of 50 school latrines, Oxfam is planning to drill 50 boreholes to be fitted with hand pumps and repair three water networks to provide people with greater access to clean water. But as important as those initiatives are, stopping cholera requires education—how to prevent it and how to treat it and to know to seek medical help when diarrhea and vomiting starts.
In coordination with the ministry of health, Oxfam has taken to the airwaves in Petite Riviere, broadcasting information on how to prevent cholera. It has trained government community health workers as well as peer educators on key messages and they are fanning out to spread the word. Equipped with battery-powered bullhorns, Oxfam health promoters are trekking through fields and across canals, sharing vital information with farmers as they work.
“Members of the community are very keen about what is being said,” said Mario Guerrero, the cholera program manager in Petite Riviere. “They have the feeling when they go into the trainings that there’s no way out if you get it.”
But after people have learned something about the disease and its transmission?
“They have the idea you can do something,” said Guerrero.
Doing something is what Erntz Jean and the team of volunteers were all about: With materials provided by Oxfam—wood for walls and a roof, and a slab to cover the pit—they were helping their neighbors build the first latrines many of them have ever had.
“That’s how we do things here,” said Jean, standing near the just-built wooden structure covering the latrine of Lozina Cena. “We help each other.”
The team picked up their tools and wove between the hedges and small houses to their next location: a narrow pit, six feet deep, just beyond the canopy of a giant mango. They got to work sawing two-by-fours, hammering, and preparing the frame for the housing of the latrine.
“Everybody here is very happy about this. Not only me—everyone in the area,” said Jean, who was among those who received materials to build a latrine. A carpenter by trade, he said he never had the money to build one before this.
“As a carpenter, if there was work, I’d be working and I’d have the money to do this. But there’s no activity here—no jobs,” said Jean.
Down the road, Eugene Joseph, a father of five children, had almost completed his new latrine. He spent a part of five days digging the hole—after starting in a different spot in his yard and hitting rock.
“Before, we didn’t use any latrines. We went in the bush or the street,” he said, noting the street—a rough dirt road—was about 40 meters from a canal leading to the Artibonite River from which his family pulls its drinking water.
“We were never sick,” said Joseph.
But the cholera outbreak scared him.
“We thought it would spread around our house,” said Joseph. And so with Oxfam’s help he decided to build the latrine.
“We’re proud of this,” he added.
A few houses away, Charite Estimable, echoed Joseph’s fear. But she wasn’t really worried about herself: She had been treating her water in a sand filter for most of the past year and had received some chlorine tablets from Oxfam to purify it further. It was her children—she has 11—whose health she was fretting over.
“I was afraid for my children in Port-au-Prince,” she said, noting that six of them were now living in the crowded capital.
Estimable’s neighbor, Altagrace Nicolas, also voiced confidence in her ability to keep cholera at bay.
“I’ve always been careful with myself and my children,” she said. “I’ve never been negligent. The reason it spread in some places is because people were not careful.”
To help everyone become more vigilant, Oxfam has been sending out teams for random monitoring of the water families collect and treat with the chlorine tablets the organization has been distributing.
Toting a bucket loaded with a couple of pitchers and a chlorine testing kit, George Van Vulpen and Elie Saint-Cyr, public heath engineers for Oxfam, hit the dirt roads of Akacite and Trankilite, two communities near the Artibonite River. Stopping at one house here, another there, they took a scoop of drinking water, tested it for residual levels of chlorine, and discussed the results with the householders—all with an eye toward encouraging proper use of the tablets. Had they been adding the tablets to the water? When? Were they dropping in the right number of them?
“For sure they’re using them,” said Van Vulpen, packing up the gear after the last sample of the day. “Most of them (the samples) have residual chlorine.”
That was a good sign—and so was the news he picked up along the way.
“In Akacite, they didn’t know of anyone who was sick anymore,” said Van Vulpen.
“We have a feeling that we are doing better than other parts of the country,” said Guerrero, the program manager for Petite Riviere. “Reported cases are going downward—slightly. But downward.”
]]>Dénéus works for Oxfam in the commune of Petit Rivière in the department of Artibonite in Haiti -- an area recently plagued by cholera. She sets out in the morning in a four-by-four truck, seeking out farmers in the fields who may not have heard the radio programs Oxfam has recently broadcast about proper hygiene and sanitation measures to stop the cholera, avoid infection, or the basic steps to help stricken people survive.
Spotting a crew of five men preparing a field to plant potatoes, she asks the driver to stop the truck, and she bounds out the back, moving across the road, down a well-worn path, jumping across an irrigation ditch, to the edge of the field.
It’s best for those accompanying Dénéus to stand behind her when she gets into action: she routinely uses a battery-powered megaphone to greet the farmers, and her words are loud and carry a long way. She asks them if they have already been trained on how to avoid and treat cholera and proper hygiene and sanitation practices. If they seem unsure or say no, she launches into the routine: she explains that cholera is a bacterial disease, can be passed by drinking contaminated water, and can be controlled by washing your hands before putting anything in your mouth. She encourages them to chlorinate water before drinking it, and to take early action to treat people showing symptoms of diarrhea and vomiting with an oral rehydration solution.
Some of the farmers stop, lean on their hoes, and listen, while others keep piling the moist earth into long mounds, in preparation for planting. But even the ones who keep working shout questions as they go: Where can we get soap? What about helping people who are sick? Where do we get the chemicals to treat our drinking water? Dénéus responds to all the questions: She refers people to centers where oral rehydration solution is available in their village, so they can ensure sick relatives can survive. And where to get one of the 35,000 cholera kits Oxfam is distributing, which have all the things they need to keep clean and treat their drinking water.
One topic dominates discussion in each of the 10 or so fields she sees this morning: she urges the farmers, “avoid going to the toilet right on the ground!” This is a major, longstanding problem in rural Haiti since well before the January 12th earthquake hit Port-au-Prince nearly a year ago: with no sewage system, running water, or proper latrines, many rural households must answer nature’s call in the open. Not all households have a latrine, so the farmers ask for advice: it’s simple, Dénéus says, dig a hole and bury the excrement. But Oxfam is also deploying a team of engineers to help farmers with simple materials to build their own latrines as an important step to reducing vulnerabilities to water-borne diseases like cholera. They plan to help install 700 latrines in Petite Rivière.
Dénéus is relentless, she repeats her messages with the same enthusiasm for each group she encounters toiling in the hot December sun, sweat running down the side of her face. “If you don’t think cholera can kill you, go to the hospital, go to the morgue, and see for yourself,” she tells any skeptical farmers.
Passing by a group she spoke with earlier in the morning now taking a lunch break, she stops and poses a question: “Did you wash your hands before eating?” Of course the answer is yes, but when she asks if they used soap, a few look down, but most of them make no excuses: soap is expensive and they are not accustomed to bringing it to the fields with them. Another form of behavior for Dénéus to change: With Oxfam distributing free soap, expense is not an issue in the short term, and eventually she hopes that farmers will improve their hygiene practices in the fields as well as at home.
After a productive morning tour of the fields, Dénéus stops by a few oral rehydration centers in the community of Marqès. These are simple tables stocked with clean water, mixing bowls and cups, and small packets of oral rehydration salts. These tables are staffed by trained volunteers who can teach people how to mix the life-saving solution, and ensure that anyone with a sick family member has access to this essential therapy. Cholera can kill in just a few hours by completely dehydrating a victim, so oral rehydration is essential. Dénéus checks the supplies, and coaches the volunteers on preparing solutions, how to answer frequently asked questions, and asks if there has been any activity at the centers as part of the monitoring Oxfam is doing in the community.
Dénéus has a law degree and is working for Oxfam because she says the right to life is one of the most basic. “I came here to save lives; that’s what Oxfam is doing here,” she says as she leaves the fields after a busy morning.”I’ve only been working here a month, but I’ve seen Oxfam doing good work, and it is saving lives. The rate of mortality is reduced, and the rate of people getting sick is also lower thanks to Oxfam.”
The work of Dénéus and other public health promoters is reaching out to 125,000 people in the region, using the radio and in-person visits to push key messages about good hygiene and sanitation habits. Mario Guerrerro, Oxfam’s program manager in Petite Rivière, says this effort is proving essential. “The training for people to change their habits is making the difference,” he says in his office, looking over the declining mortality figures in a report from the health ministry. “Once people understand, they do their best to treat their water.”
Toward the end of Dénéus’s rounds this one morning, she encounters nearly 40 farmers in a relatively small area she can hit in one stop. She moves through her presentation, answers a few questions, and concludes her visit with a phrase, a promise, and a wish: “Zero cholera!” she shouts, her final words to the farmers.
]]>Oxfam is deeply concerned that the disease, which has sickened more than 8,000 people and killed more than 540, has found its way into the city where countless families are still crowded into makeshift camps scattered across the hills since the January earthquake destroyed their homes. More than one million people remain homeless. The heavy rain and flooding caused by Hurricane Tomas over the weekend has likely allowed cholera to spread, especially given the poor sanitation conditions in the country.
But since the start of the epidemic in Artibonite—and even since the first days following the devastating quake--Oxfam has been preparing for the possibility of an outbreak in the capital. Providing people with clean water, sanitation and hygiene education is the only way to prevent the spread of diseases like cholera. Oxfam is reaching 315,000 people with these services in the Port-au-Prince area.
The organization is now reinforcing those programs in the camps in which it has been working since the quake. It’s chlorinating water and increasing the cleaning of sanitation facilities as well as organizing training sessions on the preparation of oral rehydration salts and homemade rehydration liquids—essential and effective treatment for patients. In addition, Oxfam has increased its training for staffers and community members on disease surveillance and it’s building latrines at the Petite Goave Hospital for a cholera treatment center.
In the Artibonite province, north of the capital, Oxfam has a team of about 25 staffers working on a water, sanitation, and hygiene program that is reaching about 100,000 people in an area called Petite Riviere. The program includes distribution of water purification tablets and powder, soap, buckets, and oral rehydration salts. Oxfam is also repairing and building wells and then purifying the water pulled from them.
But most importantly, the organization is carrying out a massive hygiene education campaign that includes broadcasting radio messages regularly as well as training community members to share information on how to stem the spread of the disease. Large-scale public education sessions in rural villages and towns are part of the program as well—and are helping to quell fears and provide better information.
“The only way to stop the spread of cholera is when each and every person is practicing good hygiene,” said Oxfam press officer Julie Schindall, who is based in Haiti. “That’s as simple as hand washing and drinking clean water.”
Those messages—along with the network of water and sanitation services aid groups have established in the camps around Port-au-Prince—have made a major difference for people: In the nearly 10 months since the quake there had not been a major outbreak of waterborne disease in the capital.
“We kept very vulnerable people safe for a long time,” said Schindall. “But now, clearly, we must throw even more resources into treating the sick and containing the spread of the disease.”
One of the central challenges in tackling problems like this—and one reason humanitarian relief operations are repeatedly launched--is the lack of basic infrastructure across the country and the government’s lack of capacity, Schindall added.
“Clearly in the long term we need to reinforce the government’s capacity to protect people,” said Schindall.
]]>The storm is expected to hit sometime early Friday morning. In the event of the damage it may cause, Oxfam will ensure that the nearly 500,000 people it is now helping will continue to have clean water and sanitation services. The organization is planning to repair latrines and other structures it has built.
But because of the recent cholera outbreak north of Haiti’s capital, humanitarian groups, including Oxfam, are finding their resources stretched and more supplies will be needed if Tomas turns destructive. Oxfam’s cholera response program is reaching about 100,000 people in the Artibonite province. According to the ministry of health, the outbreak has sent 6,742 people to hospitals and left 442 dead.
Throughout the hurricane season, which started June 1, Oxfam has been preparing for a major storm in Port-au-Prince, the camp-filled capital, and surrounding communities. More than one million people are still living under tarps and in tents since a January earthquake destroyed great swaths of the city. Oxfam has reinforced its water and sanitation facilities, by tying down water bladders, adding extra supports to shower stalls, and taking precautions to ensure that latrines don’t flood. In addition, Oxfam has been clearing canals and digging drains for months.
The organization has also continued its public health campaigns, educating people about good personal hygiene practices that will prevent the spread of waterborne disease, which is crucial if there is flooding. And Oxfam has been distributing extra hygiene supplies, like soap and jerry cans.
If the storm strikes, Oxfam will send out emergency response teams within 24 hours after to assess camps where it works and determine what repairs need to be made and ensure that people have adequate drinking water.
Despite these preparations, Oxfam remains very concerned about the impact heavy rains may have on the spread of cholera, and other diseases. If there is storm flooding and the water does not drain off, waterborne diseases can spread quickly.
In Artibonite, Oxfam’s team of 25 staffers is carrying out a massive hygiene education campaign, through radio messages, training community members to spread information about good hygiene, and large-scale public education sessions in villages and towns. The only way to stop the spread of cholera is when each and every person is practicing good hygiene. In addition to that initiative, Oxfam is also distributing water purification tablets and powder, soap, buckets, and oral rehydration salts in the area of Petite Riviere.
]]>It’s supported by PADELAN, or the Project to Assist Local Development and Agroforestry in Nippes, a collaboration between Oxfam Quebec and the Ministry of Agriculture that uses money from the Canadian International Development Agency to fund projects identified as priorities by local development committees.
And in Anse-a-Veau, this store was one of those priorities--desperately needed.
Several doors down, Mayor Telisme Dutelien sits behind his desk in a small office in the town hall. On a mid-May morning, the room is dim and sweltering. No lights shine and no fan churns: the community’s generator, which provided electricity, stopped working the month before, explains Dutelien. It’s just one of the problems that has plagued Anse-a-Veau in recent years, ever since its population began to drop in the 1980s, dragging the community’s commercial vitality with it.
The decline of Anse-a-Veau is symptomatic of what has happened across Haiti as Port-au-Prince, the capital and hub of opportunity, sucked people from the countryside for jobs, for schools, for a better life—or the promise of one. But in January, disaster struck there: an earthquake leveled great swaths of the city, killing 230,000 people and shaking the nation to its core. That calamity brought into sharp focus the drawbacks of centering so much of a country’s lifeblood in one sprawling place.
Now, the call for decentralization, long a national goal, is again sounding loud and clear. As international donors promise enormous financial resources to help Haiti rebuild, what are the steps it needs to take to answer that call? Some ideas can be found in the initiatives Oxfam had launched before the quake—programs based on the needs of communities, as voiced by the people who live in them.
They are small, but steady steps and the store in Anse-a-veau is one of them. Open since December 2009, it operates six days a week, its shelves of canned milk and crackers, matches and razor blades plugging the household needs local growers can’t fill themselves.
Nearby, in Paillant, Guerline Rubin stands at the entry to her house, carrying a stack of cardboard crates loaded with eggs. They are from the chickens clucking in a henhouse in the corner of the yard—another of PADELAN’s community projects designed to help local families find ways to boost their incomes.
The chickens belong to Rubin’s father, a participant in the egg-production project which has targeted 20 households in the area. Each of them received 60 chickens, whose value the farmers will slowly pay back—at the rate of 500 gourdes a month, or $12.40—to the local development council that provided the birds. They lay about an egg a day.
For Rubin, that means trips to the market at least twice a week to sell her family’s cache. She ports the fragile eggs via tap-tap, a small colorful bus that lurches over the dirt roads between villages. Each egg fetches about five gourdes, netting Rubin’s family about 2 gourdes, or about 5 cents.
Added up, that bit of income becomes a precious resource for farmers trying to put food on their tables, pay for medical care, and have a little cash left over to invest in a hardier variety of seeds that can promise a decent harvest—and give families a reason to stay in the countryside.
A few hills over, Marie Camel Rubin bends over her field of beans, corn, and manioc. Behind her, in the distance, a low building rises from the sea of green—it’s a new mill built with the help of PADELAN to grind corn and sorghum. Open six days a week, the mill saves local farmers the time-consuming trip via bus to another community to have their grain ground.
Rubin is one of the local farmers happy to have their own mill nearby. And while it saves her time, she still struggles to make ends meet. Weeding along with her through the rows is her son, Noel Jolins. He’s 8—and he would be in school if his mother could afford the fees. But he had to quit when she couldn’t scrape together the money to send him.
That’s one of the reasons Laventure Benad is so eager to see a small irrigation system completed in the hills of Colora in central Haiti. The father of seven children, he can afford to send only four of them to school now. But with irrigation—and the opportunity it will provide for three harvests a year instead of just one—Benad hopes he will have not only more food for his family, but enough income to pay for additional schooling.
“We’d like to go forward,” he says as a pair of young men behind him hammer at a heap of rocks, cracking them into gravel to help build the irrigation system. Channeled into a pipe, water from the mountain stream flowing by them will find its way into more than 60 acres of fields below where it will help 150 farmers.
With the help of Proyecto Binacional Artibonito, an Oxfam Quebec-supported project known as PROBINA, the irrigation could eventually bring them a measure of financial independence, say farmers. They expect that within three years they will be doing well enough to b able to buy their own seeds and fertilizer.
For Markens Louidort, a 26-year-old student in Liancourt in the Artibonite Valley, education holds the key to a better future, he says. He has enrolled in a computer-training program offered by APPEL, or Association des Parents and des Professeurs d’Ecole de Liancourt, an Oxfam partner that provides post-secondary vocational training.
“The world is going on with technology and it’s important for someone to learn computers,” says Louidort. In a country with unemployment as high as 70 percent, Louidort is hoping this new, hard-won skill will help him land a job.
Three days a week, for four hours each day, he settles in behind a computer in the stifling APPEL classroom. A series of batteries from Oxfam, recharged with the help of a generator at a nearby radio station, provide the electricity for the computers. Every seat is taken. This is the most popular class APPEL offers and some students share computers. A mood of deep concentration hangs over them.
At the head of the classroom, teacher Dieunel Prince talks the students through the next step of a program that will allow them to format certificates. Later, he explains privately that one of the biggest challenges he faces in working with these students is the fact that so many of them never had the opportunity to learn how to type—a handicap for those hoping to dive quickly into this new field.
That gap in learning is an indication of the struggles Haiti has had with providing a solid education for its citizens—about a quarter of the districts have no schools and 38 percent of Haitians over the age of 15 are illiterate. Education is one of the fundamental services rural regions will need to offer if decentralization is ever to become a reality for Haiti.
Michelle Lisette Casimir, mayor of Saint Michel in Artibonite, knows that well. Many of the families in the area sent their children to Port-au-Prince for advanced schooling, and some of them died in the quake. What Casimir longs for Saint Michel to have is a professional school of its own.
“We can’t talk about the future without being concerned about the youth—they way they are living,” says Casimir, adding that education is her top development wish. “With education...we will keep them.”
]]>As we approach Row 1A—one of the neat lines of white tents that make up the Corail resettlement camp, two figures wave at us energetically. Marceline Philidor and her daughter Sabine are as welcoming as when I saw them last, over a month ago. Their family was among the first group of people to be moved from the Petionville Golf Club—where they faced an imminent threat of flash floods—to this site about 15 km outside Port-au-Prince.
Marceline is busy cooking some rice on a small stove, but she pulls up some plastic chairs for us under the awning in front of her tent - one of the few small patches of shade in this vast, sun-baked camp. I ask her what life has been like these last two months.
“Well, life is the pretty much the same here now as when we moved in. Not much has changed. We have our tent. We have enough water from Oxfam to drink and cook and wash. We’ve received food, too, and rice, oil, beans and flour from World Vision. We still have the latrines from Oxfam, and there are enough for everyone, although it would be nice to have our own toilet, or a toilet to share with several families, and keep them clean between us.”
Oxfam has been concerned since the Corail site was selected in April that the area is isolated and doesn’t have markets close by. I ask Marceline what they have been living on and whether they’ve been looking for work outside of the camp.
“I’ve done some work - digging the trenches for drainage here in the camp, making them deeper—so we will have a little money soon. I’ve been the one working, because I had my identification with me when they offered the work, so I signed up. My husband goes out almost every day looking for work. Sometimes he takes the tap-tap (Haitian mini-bus) that goes from here to town, and costs 15 gourdes. But we don’t have much money, so often he has to walk.”
Marceline’s husband, David Deronoil, joins us and tells about his search for work.
“I go regularly into Delmas, to all the old places I used to work before the earthquake. I was a metal worker and then a driver. Often I have to walk, so I leave here at 4:30 in the morning, and I usually arrive around 11.” He pauses. “A man shouldn’t stay at home and not work. He should be able to go out and work to support his wife and child. But there are no jobs.”
Marceline once sold goods at a market stall, and she would like to re-open her business. “But I wouldn’t start it here,” she says. “I would go to one of the markets nearby, in Bon Repos. People say they might create a new market there so people here can work. I don’t know if it’s true. We’ve been asking to have a market and a hospital and a school for the people living here in the camp.”
School is an important topic for David.
“Aside from getting work, our main priority is Sabine’s education. Education is very important. I don’t want my daughter to grow up sitting around here, not learning anything. I want her to go to school and learn. To get an education. There’s a good school in Bon Repos; I would like to take her there, but we would need money. Like before the earthquake.”
I ask David and Marceline what their thoughts are about the future. David shrugs. “I wouldn’t mind having a house here. We like it here; we don’t hate it. And we don’t want to go back to Port-au-Prince. It’s too crowded and there are no homes there. I wouldn’t mind having a home here, or even building one myself.”
He smiles, looking around his tent. For now there isn’t much around their little home—just one or two plants sheltered by the side of the tent—but it’s clear he’s picturing what it could be like.
“We would like a little place to plant trees, so that they could give us shade and we could have mangoes to eat. And some space to keep chickens. Then we could have chicken to eat. We need a real home. We need some privacy. We also need to be able to have fun sometimes, have some kind of recreation.” He laughs. “Maybe watch the world cup on TV!”
He becomes serious again. “But we don’t know if there will be homes. There are rumors that they might be moving us again. So we don’t know.”
Although Corail is designated as a temporary relocation site, nobody knows how long people like David and Marceline will live here. These families need—and have the right—to start earning a living again, to send their children to school, and to have a clear idea when they will finally have a home again. The government of Haiti, with the support of international and national organizations, has the responsibility to develop and implement a housing, resettlement, and job-creation strategy that will get people back into homes and communities, and earning incomes. This is the crucial next step to help Haitians rebuild their lives for the long term.
]]>“Things were difficult right after the earthquake, but we’re Haitian, so we have to get up and move forward,” says Marie Carole Boursiquot. “There was the community canteen, and that work really helped me; I was able to set some money to start my business back up. Now I have my own stall again. Every week I had the canteen, I would put aside some of the profits—1,000 gourdes here, 1,000 gourdes there—and I would send the girls out to buy things for my shop. I also borrowed a little money so that I could buy the rest of the stock. Now I am selling all kinds of things: rice, sugar, beans, pasta, coal…”
I ask her to show us her stock and she is happy to oblige. She shows us the beans and grains first, lined up neatly to one side, in canvas sacks. She scoops up little handfuls of each for us to inspect; kidney beans, black beans, little green beans she calls French beans, Miami beans, wheat, corn meal, and corn kernels. (The corn is for chickens, she specifies, not people.) Then she delves into a box on the floor and pulls out blue sachets of coal, little bags of washing powder, and sugar that she has wrapped in little plastic packages—two sizes: one worth 5 gourdes and one worth 10. For such a small stall, there is an impressive variety of stock.
She puts the boxes back in place and sits down. “I went all the way down to Croix Bossales to buy the stock at the market there. My brother came with me and helped me. With the canteen and now this stall, at least we can all eat. There are ten of us still living together since the earthquake, in the same shelter with a metal roof. But now we have some plastic sheeting—some from Oxfam and some that we bought—so when it rains we don’t get wet like we did before.”
We are momentarily interrupted by the arrival of a customer, a little girl of five or six years, sent to Marie Carole to buy some snacks—chips or crackers of some kind. She is a little shy around us and rushes off without waiting for her change. Marie Carole laughs and lines up the coins on the counter—the little girl will be back.
"The problem now is that this shop is not mine. I have an arrangement with the owners; they have let me set up shop outside the bottom floor [of the building behind us] because they can’t use it anymore, since the top floor collapsed in the earthquake. But the ceiling is cracked and leaks so some of my stock got wet.”
"People from Oxfam [the market support team] came to inspect the site of my old shop. They saw that it was destroyed, and they are going to provide me with a shipping container that I can use as a shop and to store my stock securely. That will be much better for my business. I will be able to buy more, and I will be able to manage my stock better then.”
I ask her what her biggest needs are now, but she is reluctant to answer. She shrugs.
“Oxfam is the only organization helping this whole community. Many things would help me, but I don’t want to ask for too many things. You can’t constantly ask for others to give and give. I am satisfied with what God gives me. But with more money or the container from Oxfam, I would be able to get on even better than now, expand my shop, sell more, and make more money to improve our shelter and to improve our life.”
“There are always needs, but as long as we are healthy, and we have two hands and two feet, we can find things to do, and we will continue living. Things will get better.”
]]>Oxfam staffers and partner groups have been working non-stop to provide water, latrines, emergency shelter, and other essentials for earthquake survivors. We have witnessed remarkable progress, but recovery in Haiti remains one of the most complex humanitarian development challenges in recent history.
Oxfam has produced a media brief, which provides a progress report on our response in Haiti over the past six months: how our programs have reached those affected by the earthquake, the type of services and assistance we have provided, the cost of these programs, as well as our plans for the next six months as our recovery work in Haiti continues. Please click here to download the media brief.
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Like hundreds of thousands of other survivors, they fled the ruins of Port-au-Prince to seek shelter in the countryside, squeezing in with family and friends and relying on them for support in the weeks—and now months—after the disaster.
It’s early May, and the girls are among the 17 relatives and friends Jean Claude and Rose Marie Perard are hosting in their house in Saint Michel, a four-drive from the capital. The household numbered nine before the quake. Now, 26 people—many of them children—crowd the Perards’ small dark rooms and courtyard.
“Day by day we cope,” says Rose Marie Perard.
It’s a refrain repeated across the rugged provinces as Haitians, living in the poorest country in the western hemisphere, open their doors and share what little they have.
But here, on a sweltering afternoon in the main room of the Perards’ house, the strain for some of the family members is beginning to show and the target is NGOs, the non-governmental organizations that offered a patchwork of basic services—education, health care, agricultural support—before the quake and have now ramped up, with billions of dollars at their disposal, to help meet the needs of some of the three million people affected by the disaster. Some locals charge that the NGOs have long been in Haiti to help themselves more than they are to help the Haitians—and they question whether there are lasting benefits to the projects aid groups launch.
Oxfam’s goal is to make a durable difference, one that leaves people with the skills and knowledge to ensure their own growth and success, and that means a long-term commitment that empowers communities to meet their own needs.
Cereste Perard has been waiting, grim-faced, for his turn to talk. He’s 27 and was in Port-au-Prince when the quake hit, along with some of his siblings who were studying there. About 81 percent of Haiti’s schools are private, and many of those at the upper levels, including universities, are concentrated around the capital. Parents often send their children there for better opportunities, which means covering the added expense of room and board along with school fees—a commitment that can severely strain finances, forcing kids to drop out until their families can marshall the resources to allow them to return.
Sinking into an empty spot on the sofa, Cereste Perard offers his opinion about Haiti’s recovery.
“What we need is for us to be independent,” he says, with bitterness in his voice. “The international community is giving us orders on how to live our lives.”
Cereste is pretty clear about how he wants to live his: his goal is to go to university and study industrial engineering, like an older brother, Jean Rodney Perard, who is now working toward a medical degree.
In the long hot months ahead and it’s up to their mother, Rose Marie, to manage the crowded household on a budget stretched by borrowing and pleading with friends for help. Rose Marie collects a small monthly salary from the ministry of public health for which she works five days a week as a technologist in a lab. Her husband serves as the municipal director for Saint Michel, an appointed post.
Having jobs puts the couple in the minority among Haitians who, by some calculations, face unemployment rates as high as 70 percent. But with 26 mouths to feed and a crowd of children to help educate, the Perards’ salaries don’t stretch far.
“I buy food on credit and whenever money comes in, I pay it all back,” says Rose Marie, adding the household eats just two meals a day. And when night comes, everyone stretches out wherever there is room: some in the beds, some on the floors.
As full as this house is, it’s not the only one in Saint Michel packed tight since January. After the quake, more than 11,000 people reportedly made their way to the town and the smaller communities that surround it, and a survey conducted in a month later found that 5,000 of them were still there.
A sudden downpour hammers the metal roof of a small mill in Verrettes, a few hour’s drive from Saint Michel. The rain drowns the voices of 13 men and women sitting in the hot gloom, but their raised hands tell the story: all but one of them has been supporting people from Port-au-Prince and the rice, and all the other seeds, the farmers had hoped to plant have gone, instead, to feed the newcomers. Rony Charles has four of his wife’s relatives staying him; Pierre Riguens had five, now four—sisters and a cousin; Simadieu Descombes is hosting seven.
With planting season upon them—and no seeds to sow—the farmers are hoping they can get access to some microcredit to tide them over. Raising agricultural production levels is the first thing people in his community need, says Charles. And creating jobs for the newcomers is also near the top of the list.
While some people appear to be returning to the capital, Anouce Myrtil predicts that plenty of others will find it easier living in the countryside.
“Even if Port-au-Prince had golden streets, no one’s going to live easy in Port-au-Prince because of fear,” he says, sitting on the site of a new sugarcane mill Oxfam is helping to build in the community of Lacedras, near Saint Michel. It’s part of a range of small-scale initiatives designed to support economic development and improve agricultural output in the region—objectives that are more important than ever as Haiti struggles to overcome the devastation caused by the earthquake and rebuild itself on a stronger foundation. In a country where agriculture employs two-thirds of the workforce yet produces only 28 percent of its gross domestic product, modernizing farm work and expanding production opportunities will be crucial for Haiti’s reconstruction.
And for farmer Elcida Estinat, the chance to learn new skills and expand her earning power are vital now that she is caring for young relatives displaced by the quake. Recently, she participated in an Oxfam-supported training on beekeeping. Equipped with a modern hive, she could potentially produce six times the amount of honey that she could using traditional methods.
And every gallon of honey that Estinat harvests from her hives could fetch as much as $24 at the market. Converted into school fees, that honey is better than gold: it will help her buy a brighter future for her kids.
“I know the value of a good education,” says Estinat.
]]>With the crack of a sledgehammer on concrete, Oxfam's water and sanitation program in Delmas, Haiti, got underway.
The earth was still shuddering with aftershocks when survivors began to dig, carving out latrine trenches 10 feet long, 10 feet deep, and three feet wide through every kind of soil and pavement. Others did their part by quickly shaping platforms out of rocks and earth to support their new source of drinking water: Oxfam water bladders.
It was a race against time, and against deadly water-related bacteria like typhoid, hepatitis, and cholera that can thrive in crowded, unsanitary conditions. And it is a race that—so far, at least—we are winning. After the quake, hundreds of thousands of people had no access to toilets, and the water available wasn't fit to drink; yet, thanks to an all-out effort on the part of the displaced communities and aid agencies like Oxfam, there have been no outbreaks of waterborne disease.
But there is more to water and sanitation programs than health.
"We build latrines not only because they help prevent the spread of disease, but because they should help protect the dignity and safety of disaster survivors living in camps," says Oxfam engineer Kenny Rae, who led the first phase of Oxfam's water and sanitation effort in Delmas.
There is a special focus on the safety of women and girls, because in the chaotic aftermath of disasters, they are particularly vulnerable to harassment and assault. The structure of a latrine—like the firmness of its latches and whether its doors open toward or away from the general population of a camp—has implications for safety, so Rae and his team listened closely to the concerns of women residents.
Shower construction was another important issue. Haiti's weather is so warm that shower stalls can be open to the sky, but where they were installed within view of multi-story buildings, women in Delmas had understandable concerns about privacy—which Rae and his team quickly addressed by adding roofs.
"When it came to sanitation facilities," says Rae, "women in the camps had the first and last word."
Helping survivors recover after disasters is not as simple as doling out goods and services: it requires attention to the many facets of community well-being.
For example, working for pay can help disaster survivors meet a range of needs, both financial and psychological. Oxfam offered wages to residents to dig latrine trenches, cover them with slabs of molded concrete or plastic, and build structures of wood and plastic sheeting around them for shelter and safety.
"We ended up employing more than 300 people to build latrines in Delmas," says Rae. "Their communities benefited from the project, and their families benefited from the income."
But in some cases, the need for community-building trumped the need for money. When it came to constructing platforms for water bladders, everyone worked for free, says Rae. "They treated the work as a contribution to their communities."
Caring for Haiti's fragile environment was another key consideration for the water and sanitation team, which needed wood for construction.
"From the outset," says Rae, "we determined that we weren’t going to use local timber poles because of the impact on deforestation."
The team found a source of timber imported from the US. It was more expensive than local wood, and at first it was hard to find enough of it. But, says Rae, in a country as deforested and as vulnerable to landslides as Haiti, the environmental cost of harvesting timber is tremendous.
When Rae and his team assessed the local water and sanitation situation, they found settlements where thousands of displaced residents had gathered. But Delmas is also dotted with tiny camps and informal schools, and it took time to understand the full extent of the needs. Oxfam staff kept their eyes—and their office—open, continually updating their plans and assessments.
"We had an open-door policy," says Rae. "Pastors, school directors, and other community leaders would bring their requests and concerns to the Oxfam office on a near-daily basis, and we were almost always able to respond."
After helping create water and sanitation facilities in 21 sites, serving 40,000 people, Rae has returned home for a rest. Sort of.
"Of course, I was pleased to get back to the people I love," says Rae, "but I was torn because the needs on the ground in Haiti are so enormous."
When he goes back to Haiti, it will be to work on another key issue in the recovery: shelter. His focus will be not only the homeless in Port-au-Prince, but also the tens of thousands of rural families that are hosting relatives who fled the capital and are now living in very crowded conditions. Rae will be looking for efficient ways to build temporary housing and house extensions to reduce the stress on families.
"Shelter is—and will remain for a while—a huge, huge need," he says.
As for the water and sanitation program in Delmas, says Rae, "I'm confident that the Haitian engineers I helped to train will be able to carry it forward."
]]>The bill allows Haiti to increase its apparel exports to the United States duty free and extends existing US trade preference programs with Haiti for 10 years.
“Trade can be an important part of Haiti’s recovery, and the HELP Act will be instrumental in making this a reality,” said Stephanie Burgos, Senior Policy Advisor for Oxfam America. “The United States is Haiti’s primary market for apparel exports, and this bill will help generate much-needed jobs for Haitians working to rebuild their lives.”
Less than four months after the greatest disaster Haiti has ever seen, Haitians are ready to start working for the reconstruction of their country. An in-depth Oxfam survey of more than 1,700 Haitians last month shows that the number one priority in the reconstruction effort for Haitians are jobs, followed by schools, shelter, and a strong agricultural sector
“Haitians aren’t looking for a hand-out, they want a leg up,” said Burgos. “With income from jobs in the apparel industry and elsewhere, they can feed and care for their families, send their children to school, and build lasting shelter.”
Before the earthquake, the garment industry employed about 25,000 people – nearly 10 percent of formal sector employment and accounted for nearly 80 percent of export earnings. Now, the garment sector could be a source of economic growth and more jobs.
"Companies are ready to invest in Haiti; they need incentives to invest in Haiti to expand exports, and that requires dropping the barriers we have to Haitian apparel products,” said Burgos. “The HELP Act provides these incentives by significantly increasing the amount of Haitian apparel products that can be imported to the US duty free.”
“In times of such partisanship in Washington, it’s heartening to see both parties in the House and Senate come together to help our hemisphere’s poorest country," said Burgos. “By passing this bill, Congress can help Haiti rebuild through trade and not just aid.”
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