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."
]]>]]>
According to Peru's Civil Defense Institute, the rains have hit 18 of the country’s 24 regions, causing suffering to more than 190,000 people and damaging more than 28,000 homes. Particularly hard hit are communities located along the major Andean rivers in Cusco and Puno in the south.
With a $100,000 grant, Oxfam is supporting its local partner, PREDES, to help 529 families living in temporary shelters in the provinces of Anta, Calca, and Urubamba.
"At the moment, we're improving the temporary shelters to ensure they have clean water and basic sanitation, and so avoid major health problems", said Oxfam’s Elizabeth Cano, who is coordinating the humanitarian response for the organization.
Work includes the installation of separate toilets for men, women, and children as well as the distribution of hygiene kits equipped with basics such as toothpaste and soap. Oxfam and PREDES are also working with civil defense committees to help communities and local authorities improve coordination to be better prepared for future natural events.
"The only thing we haven't lost is our health and our lives,” said Eufemia Araníbar, a member of the Nueva Esperanza neighborhood committee in the district of Izcuchaca. "We haven't lost our children or our husbands. Everything else we can rebuild, because we have our health", she tells us firmly.
In Cusco, on Saturday, Jan. 23, people were already looking with concern at the clouds in the sky and the swollen rivers. Persistent rain had caused the rivers to rise, particularly at their confluence points. In a matter of hours, the Vilcanota, Jatumayo and Huatanay rivers and Huacarpay Lake had overflowed.
"Since Saturday 23, we've been in a state of alert, protecting ourselves, putting sandbags along the edge of the river. But it overflowed upstream, where we didn't expect it, and the houses have collapsed,” said Urbana Huamán, a 43-year-old single mother from Anta Province, as she showed a team from Oxfam the curved shape of a nearby river and lamented the miscalculation.
While in some areas residents stayed on the alert, elsewhere they had observed a reduction in the turbulence of the river and, instead of going out to keep watch and put up barriers, they went to bed, assuming they were safe.
"During the night, the water came and caught us unaware,” said 34-year-old Eufemia Araníbar. “Some people were awake, digging ditches, but some of us were asleep. Suddenly we were woken up by shouting and whistling. When I stood up, I felt water on the floor. My shoes were already wet.”
The first thing she did was to get her children out.
"We couldn't save anything, just a few clothes,” added Araníbar. “The water took everything. It took my pigs, my guinea pigs, my chickens..." And with them she lost she lost her savings.
Since that January night, the rain has not stopped. In March, the Quesermayo, Antarhualla and Kitamayo rivers in Calca Province broke their banks. There have also been landslides and more homes have been destroyed.
]]>Now, it’s all gone—their home and their livelihoods--destroyed in floods triggered by heavy rain in the mountains of southern Peru. Across the country, the rains have affected more than 190,000 people. Eighteen of Peru’s 24 regions have been hit, including Cusco, which has experienced unprecedented amounts of rainfall.
"Suddenly we found ourselves with no house, no business,” said Salinas, as she showed an Oxfam team the plot of land on the river bank where her house used to stand and where now there is only debris.
"I didn't want to leave. I had to be carried out,” Salinas said, describing how the river water rose hip-deep in her house. She wanted to save her goods and her husband's work tools. Three days after she was evacuated, the house collapsed. Now the couple is living in the temporary shelter in a stadium, thinking about how to start over again.
María Gutiérrez, 50, from the district of Izcuchaca in Anta Province told a similar story.
"I used to be a storekeeper,” she said, using the past tense because the disaster has left her with no capital. She would buy corn, wheat, and beans, and store them in her house to sell. But all of that was washed away by the river.
"Even if I had the money, I couldn't set up my business again because I used by house for storage and now I wouldn't know where to store the goods", Gutiérrez added.
While shopkeepers wonder how they will recover their losses, a larger worry for the region may be the harvest. According to Peru's Civil Defense Institute, 21,730 hectares of crops, or more than 53,000 acres, have been destroyed and more than 130,000 acres have seen a partial loss of crops, mostly in the Cusco and Puno regions.
"Nearly 100 percent of the crops have been lost,” said Juvenal Durán, mayor of the district of Yucay in the Sacred Valley. "The farmers have lost their crops: the corn and cabbage are rotting. Agricultural insurance only covers 400 soles ($141), and there are people who rent their land, so what are they going to do when the crops fail? Yucay is dependent on agriculture. What are we going to eat? Where are we going to live? How are we going to be able to send our children to school?"
The communities in the upland regions have also been affected.
"In my community the crops are riddled with pests, late blight. What's more, as we farm on slopes, the soil is being washed away,” said Alejandro Huamán from Andahuaylillas. He’s worrying because farming is how his family makes a living.
The local authorities are aware that the focus must be on how to safeguard the next harvest.
"We've got a plan to ensure the next harvest: seeds, fertilizer, training, river defenses. In addition, we need to rebuild the bridges to improve trade and the irrigation channels,” said Gilberto Gil, a councilor in Urubamba.
At the same time, officials know that they need to think about how to help local communities adapt to unpredictable weather.
"This is going to be permanent due to climate change. We must prepare for rains and droughts. We have to address the immediate problems but also plan for the long term,” said Gil.
"One of our biggest concerns is that these disasters will increase poverty", said Elizabeth Cano, Oxfam’s humanitarian aid coordinator in Peru. "One of the main sectors that has been affected is the small-scale farming sector. Unlike the tourism sector, many small-scale farmers live in poverty, so it takes them longer to recover. We are appealing to the central government to increase support measures for this sector."
]]>Around the camps of Darfur, trees are precious and few. The summer sun is fierce, and the shelter of trees is not so much a comfort as a necessity. Here in the shade, men weave colorful strings into beds, and women take turns pounding corn into meal with a giant mortar and pestle. Children play games and share the cool shadows with a donkey at rest.
Since 2003, when the crisis in Darfur drove millions of people from their homes into temporary settlements, the demand for firewood has taken a heavy toll on trees in and around the camps. But there are subtle signs of recovery: along the wide, sandy streets of the camps near the town of El Fasher, saplings of fruit and forest trees are emerging from behind protective fences built of brick and woven thorn.
The young trees were raised in a nearby nursery and distributed by the Darfur Recovery and Development Organization (DRA), a Sudanese partner of Oxfam. There are lemon and guava trees for fruit; the fast-growing neem, which has medicinal qualities; and the arak, which can survive any drought – 5,000 trees in all, distributed to the displaced communities for planting and care. Soon there will be shade and fruit, and the beginnings of a forest to replace those that were lost.
It was under a laloba tree that Adam Musa used to wait with 60 or 70 other men for an offer of work each day. The labor was hard – often loading trucks with sand, rubble, and bricks. Ten men might get hired on a given morning, but Musa was at a disadvantage: he was wounded in the war during an attack on his village. His right calf is scarred and painful, and he walks with a visible limp.
“If Allah has given you more life,” warned his doctor, “you should not carry heavy things.” But with parents and children to support, he had little choice.
It’s different now, thanks to DRA and a gentle donkey named Murzoog. DRA worked with community leaders in the camps around El Fasher to identify 100 residents – of whom Musa was one – who were struggling to care for their dependents. The agency provided them with carts, donkeys, and training in the care and feeding of the animals – teaching them how to make a harness that won’t cause injury, the importance of veterinary care, and how to provide all the nutrients a hard-working donkey needs to stay healthy.
He and Murzoog now make deliveries around the camp, hauling small loads of construction material, fuel, water, and whatever else needs moving. The work is easier and the money is better than before. Now Musa is able to send all his children to school and supplement their diet of sorghum and lentils with okra, tomatoes, dried meat, onions, milk, and salad. Sometimes there is rice for the children, he says. “It’s everything we need.”
In the nearby camp of Zamzam, Kobra Khatir hires people like Adam Musa to transport her produce, though not long ago, it was far beyond her means.
Khatir’s husband was killed in the conflict, and for years she struggled to raise four young children on her own. When DRA asked community leaders in three camps near El Fasher to identify 150 women and youth who were in greatest need of assistance, she was chosen – a decision that has changed her life.
The agency provided her a grant of $135 and a series of trainings in entrepreneurship, and now she is a successful market vendor. “Before I received support, I had nothing,” she says. “I used to go and work for people all day and come back with five pounds [$2.25].”
Now she sits in the shade of a laloba tree selling fresh food like limes, grapefruit, oranges, bread, and homemade peanut butter. Each day she earns two to four times what she used to make as a casual laborer – enough to feed and clothe her children and send them to school when they come of age. And she’s saved up enough for a goat, so the children have milk – and the promise of more goats to come.
Like a skillful tailor, DRA gathers up the broken threads of life in Darfur and weaves them back together, matching the needs of the most vulnerable camp residents with the demands of the marketplace, and the needs of the environment with those of the people who live in it.
So far, it is working well.
“A vulnerable widow who had nothing in the past now has something,” says Musa Ibrahim Musa, a community leader whose camp has benefited from all three programs of DRA. “The donkey cart program helped people earn an income. Trees are growing and maybe next year will bear fruit. These programs have really improved the lives of our people.”
]]>EXCERPT: “At Impasse Fouget, our first task was to build a large platform with rubble, rocks, and earth on which the bladder could rest. A bladder like this filled with water weighs ten tons…. A flexible pipe running to a set of five outdoor faucets carries the water from bladder down to where people can draw it. Chlorinating water ensures its safety. Oxfam is working in camps of many sizes. Our team’s focus is on 35 smaller encampments in the Delmas district. Working at this scale makes our community-based approach for chlorination effective.”
EXCERPT: “But the most important and admirable humanitarians are the Haitians: they have shown incredible courage, resilience and solidarity: many have rescued people with their bare hands and many are still housing strangers. And these are not middle class families: most lived on less than $2 (US dollars) a day before the quake. Some of our Haitian staff do not even have a place to stay, yet there is no day of the week when they do not come to work.”
EXCERPT: “What Préval probably means, Mr. Cohen adds, is that seeds and fertilizer should be provided quickly, and that food aid ‘already in the pipeline’ be allowed to ‘taper off’ so that Haiti’s next harvest early this summer is bountiful but does not encounter a glutted market. Longer term, Cohen says, Préval’s plan will require more than seeds and fertilizer and can work only if better job opportunities, schools, and services are provided so that rural areas become as attractive as the capital as a place to live.”
EXCERPT: “Everywhere you turned, there were processions of hundreds of people marching, singing and waving leafy green branches. Men in suits, women in their finest, children in fluffy dresses of all colors. Renaissance on the streets of Port-au-Prince. The work goes on but the healing has begun.”
EXCERPT: “Groups such as Oxfam are scrambling to get 30 more toilet-sanitation trucks shipped in from abroad. Sanitation specialists are exploring more exotic methods, such as toilets that can separate liquid and solid refuse. In the short term, plastic bags may have to suffice in certain places -- but with a more reliable system for collection, said Nicholas Brooks, an Oxfam sanitation and hygiene specialist.”
EXCERPT: “Paul O'Brien of Oxfam America says the lessons of the harm of flooding a country like Haiti with subsidized rice should have been learned a long time ago. ‘The days are gone when we can throw up our hands in terms of unintended consequences; we know now what these injections can do to markets,' he said. 'The question we want asked is what is being done to guarantee long-term food security for Haitians.’”
EXCERPT: “The persistence of the committee members paid off. First they got water delivered to the site. Then, when it started to rain, they appealed for tarps, and got some of those, too. Deliveries of kitchen supplies--pots for cooking, utensils for eating--followed from Oxfam, with the committee organizing an orderly distribution the following day. And soon, Oxfam was also digging latrines at the site and setting up a more permanent water supply in the form of a large collapsible bladder.”
EXCERPT: “The earthquake has turned some Haitian citizens into civic leaders, who are helping individual neighborhoods recover, writes Coco McCabe, a writer with Oxfam America. On the aid group's blog, she says these people should be an integral part of the country's rebuilding.”
EXCERPT: "I have a tentative plan for the next two weeks: to identify priority sites for additional water tanks, and start to set these up, to have one of the engineers trained in how to properly chlorinate and test water, to continue assessments to identify priority sites for more toilets and have these built."
EXCERPT: "Port-au-Prince will need 18,000 latrines by the end of April to beat the rainy season, says Jacobo Ocharan, disaster risk reduction manager at Oxfam America. So far his group has built about 5 percent of that number."
EXCERPT: "Oxfam officials in Haiti also fear diarrhea and other waterborne diseases could spread because of the poor drainage, crowding, and lack of latrines. They urged the government to quickly decide when and where to relocate the homeless, and called on the United States to provide stronger leadership for the hundreds of nonprofit agencies with operations in Haiti."
EXCERPT: "The government has said for weeks that they have identified sites, but time is getting short and there has been little progress."
EXCERPT: “But the need remains enormous, especially as the rains approach and threaten to slop human waste into temporary settlements and crowded camps where there is little room to improve the drainage."
EXCERPT: "I dread to think what would happen if we had an early sustained tropical downpour. There's a great risk of flooding. If there's a lot of run-off, the latrines would overflow…People use alternative means. Some go back to their homes, they use plastic bags and throw them away or they just find somewhere else to go."
EXCERPT: “As well as providing latrines and water, we also distribute hygiene kits, buckets, basins, soap, sanitary towels and underwear so that people can maintain at least a basic level of personal hygiene. We are starting our distribution in one of the first camps we visited. Security at distributions takes a lot of organizing so our strategy is to concentrate on distributing our kits to the smaller camps and communities where there are less people to manage who are less likely to receive aid from other organizations.”
EXCERPT: “Justine Lesage, an Oxfam relief worker, said the group recently removed 7,000 cubic feet (200 cubic meters) of waste created by 45,000 people at one of the city's camps in just a week. ‘We're also working very hard to make plans for relocating people, but the Haitian government's plan for this is not clear yet.’”
EXCERPT: "For kids not affected by the devastating earthquake that rocked Haiti in January, schools re-opened the first of this month. But few students in the North-West and South departments have shown up -- not a promising sign for the government's intention to open the rest of the country's schools by March 1. What's been interrupted now is the certainty, order and measure of opportunity that the school day brought to the lives of Haitian kids who had managed to secure themselves a place in a classroom -- even if that classroom lacked both amenities and rigor."
EXCERPT: "'(While) the international community has acted rapidly and generously to provide for Haiti's immediate emergency needs,' said Emma Seery, Oxfam's campaign manager, 'The G7 must now also make sure that Haiti is not left saddled with crippling debts as it recovers and rebuilds. They must agree to all new financial support being in the form of grants, not loans, and commit to a clear plan to cancel what remains of Haiti's debt.'"
EXCERPT: “Oxfam America, an international relief and development agency, said quickly renewing the trade benefits would give companies the confidence they need to reinvest in Haiti.”
EXCERPT: “Every day, around 1,000 kits are assembled and distributed to needy communities. Oxfam buys the items from local companies to try to help the Haitian economy; and around 50 people displaced or affected by the earthquake have been hired by Oxfam to help get the kits ready and out to communities as quickly as possible."
EXCERPT: “'We’ve learned from experience that people prefer money to goods or food. That way they can buy what they need, and who better to decide that than the people themselves?'"
EXCERPT: “Mike Delaney, director of humanitarian response for Oxfam, says there are practical reasons why it’s important that Haitians oversee the reconstruction plans, including specifics, such as the design of houses. '…I’ve seen housing projects in many places where in the end houses are built for people after an emergency and they don’t end up living in it. They end up putting their farm animals in it just because it wasn’t the kind of housing they needed.'"
EXCERPT: “Dario Arthur, an Oxfam staffer leading part of the emergency response, says he could have ordered pre-assembled kits to distribute in the camps. But that would have been a missed opportunity to give people jobs. The assemblers, who need to work fast and will be employed for just two weeks, are earning 500 gourdes (about $12.25) a day: a rate substantially above the local minimum wage. Warehouse workers will likely stay on the job for two or three months, as different supplies pass through."
EXCERPT: “'We're not only looking at the now and present,' [Alex Yiannopoulos] says. 'We're also looking at four years down the road and further. So these activities have to be linked into our longer-term effort. And we're trying to be creative about making sure there's an overlap in our immediate response and our more long-term programs.'....Oxfam already has a few hundred people earning cash for clean-up work, and hopes to eventually hire 5,000 Haitians. Other broom-and-shovel brigades are cleaning up trash, debris and rubble for other aid groups throughout the Haitian capital, and even more cash-for-work programs are ramping up this week."
EXCERPT: “So far, good shelter is in short supply. Oxfam has distributed some plastic tarps and more are on the way. We're negotiating with an orphanage in Port-au-Prince that has the space to allow us to cut large pieces of plastic down to a household size. People can use the tarps in a variety of ways to meet their individual requirements--and our goal is to get those tarps into the hands of people before the wet season arrives. But still, the need here is enormous. The Haitian government has appealed for 200,000 tents."
EXCERPT: “'There are people who have lost five children,' [Pharisien Marcaise] said quietly above the hum of the camp around him. 'I have to keep going with my life.' For now, that means keeping a small generator chugging so he can charge the batteries on the cell phones everyone here carries. Without a regular source of electricity, people depend on small vendors like Marcaise to keep them connected with their friends, their families, and the world."
EXCERPT: “Oxfam worked in the neighborhood before the quake, helping people access food when prices sky-rocketed. It has now begun a new project this week -- paying community members to start cleaning up the area; removing rubbish and waste. The cash-for-work programs mean that not only do communities begin to improve their living conditions, but people can earn desperately -- needed money so they can buy food and other necessities."
EXCERPT: “Many of those who have set up shop along both sides of the road that runs through this teeming camp have lost everything--homes, small businesses, and worst of all, family members. But there is a tenacity and determination here that, with the right support, could be the foundation for a thriving economy as Haiti begins to rebuild itself. But what's needed, said many, is money--money to rebuild homes, make communities stable, and invest in small enterprises so they can grow."
EXCERPT: “…But how do you distribute tons of goods to small camps scattered across a city snarled by traffic, earthquake debris, and roads more pothole than pavement? With human sweat. Lots of it. That's the awesome thing about all of this: The flood of good will, pouring in from round the world for the people of Haiti, stacked next to the tangle of challenges in making sure the help gets where it needs to go--as fast as possible."
EXCERPT: “At a time when a nation is facing such a dramatic calamity, and is, in effect, faced with rebuilding its national institutions, its state institutions, as well as its civil society institutions, debt forgiveness is a first step and an important step. We’re hoping the IMF will lead and others will follow."
EXCERPT: One of the main worries in Haiti now is health and sanitation. One agency that works directly on those issues is Oxfam. Yolette Etienne is Haiti's country director for Oxfam. She has been working long hours to just to make the places around the tents clean. At the same time Yolette is dealing with her own tragedies. Her mother was killed, her house was destroyed, and now she's responsible for two orphans. Yolette joins Dick Gordon to talk about the realities of living and working in Haiti after the quake.
EXCERPT: Radiohead raised more than $500,000 for Haiti earthquake relief at a special weekend concert that attracted celebrities and die-hard fans... Attendees bid online for tickets, with proceeds going to Oxfam International, a group that works with developing countries.
EXCERPT: "If we move too quickly, we fall into the trap of rebuilding the Haiti that existed two weeks ago. The Haiti that existed two weeks ago we do not want to rebuild," Robert Fox, executive director of Oxfam, said. "It was a country of inequality, and of poor infrastructure."
EXCERPT: "The first step in an emergency will be getting clean water to people who need it as we know from experience that shocks like this disrupt water lines, and transportation is completely broken down," said Michael Delaney, director of Oxfam America's humanitarian response department. "As we've seen time and again, in emergencies the poor are hit the hardest… Given the severity of this earthquake and the poverty of the country, our response will be long term."
EXCERPT: Oxfam America organizer Sophia Lafontant has been in touch with family and friends in Port-au-Prince. She said, "The scene described was something out of a movie or war zone. Gray filled skies, dust debris, and broken structures and bodies."
EXCERPT: "It's going to be hard to recover, but hopefully we will," says Rooby Pierre, who lingers briefly in the shade of a tree, recounting the urgency of the minister's sermon: to help people find a place to sleep, food to eat, medicine to get better. "We have to do anything we can to rebuild our community--and our country. It's our job as a church to give hope back to the people."
EXCERPT: Haiti’s Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others will take part in closed-door talks today in Montreal to map out key priorities for rebuilding Haiti. Oxfam is calling on foreign ministers attending the talks to cancel Haiti’s outstanding $890 million international debt.
EXCERPT: “The camps must not become warehouses of people waiting for permanent homes that never materialize,” said Rick Bauer, a shelter expert for the international aid agency Oxfam.
EXCERPT: “It was probably easier in the first few days, then it got a bit complicated in sense of the logistics especially with the airport,” said Claude St. Pierre, Haiti country director for the aid group Oxfam, in a telephone interview from Port-au- Prince. “We’re now sort of better at this so a lot of the material and the resources that we need and a lot of the people have been coming through Santo Domingo over the border and in from the border to Port-au-Prince.”
EXCERPT: “I don't know much French, but I know enough to hear gratitude and the thrill of being alive. A man dashing across the street had spied our driver--a friend--and a smile of wild joy shot across his face. ’Nous vivons!’ he shouted. We live!”
EXCERPT: Organizers for the all-star "Hope for Haiti Now" telethon say the event raised $57 million -- and counting... Among the organizations who will receive funds from the telethon include Oxfam America, UNICEF, and the Clinton-Bush Haiti Foundation.
EXCERPT: "What can you say?" said Louis Belanger, a spokesman for Oxfam Great Britain. "It is very often the case that the strongest and fittest get help. ... Those left behind are the elderly and the women with children, so we are working hard to make sure aid is coordinated."
EXCERPT: As buildings crashed to the ground around her after Haiti's earthquake, Yolette Etienne reacted as any longtime relief worker would.
"I had the idea to say to people: 'Don't panic. We are Oxfam. We help people,' " the group's Haiti director said …
But about 7 p.m., when she finally walked home, she found it a mountain of rubble. In the back yard, she came upon her mother's body.
Etienne grieved for two hours. Then it was time to try to find out what had happened to other family members and friends.
"I said: Tomorrow I have to inform my children, bury my mother -- but find out what happened to my colleagues," she recalled.
Etienne was at work by 8 a.m.
"I know, as an Oxfam worker, an aid worker, I can help people. I've got the resources to help people," she said in Haitian-accented English, fighting back tears.
EXCERPT:
MARINA GIOVANNELLI: … activists point to a similar disaster not long ago as an example of what’s possible. Mike Delaney of Oxfam says that parts of the Indonesian province of Ache have made remarkable progress in the five years since it was pummeled by a tsunami.
MIKE DELANEY: Many of those communities ended up with new homes and water actually going into their homes for the first time.
MARINA GIOVANNELLI: Delaney says the progress in Ache was the result of collaboration between local and foreign governments, the United Nations and private aid groups. But he says that only worked because local people had a say in key decisions. Of course Haiti is not Ache and Haiti faces its own challenges. But Delaney says if done right, the attention suddenly focused on Haiti could help make the disaster a turning point in its unhappy history.
MIKE DELANEY: We’ve said it countless times this week: you know Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Well, you know, maybe it won’t be in a couple years.
EXCERPT: "The infrastructure in Haiti is, more or less, zero. We are, for all practical purposes, planning on the basis that we're starting from scratch.Our staff can be fairly resourceful. When you're in that situation, you think a little bit more outside the box than you'd normally do..."
"We're making sure we have secure distribution points where we can give out supplies in an orderly fashion. People have been heavily affected by this; they are traumatized, they are hungry, they are tired..."
"Initially we'll make sure we get the right life-saving materials to people in Haiti. From then on, we'll start a massive rebuilding process, coordinated by all of the people on the ground."
EXCERPT: Eleven broadcast and cable networks will show a two-hour telethon next Friday night to benefit the victims of the Haitian earthquake, MTV Networks announced on Friday ... The telethon will be hosted by Mr. [George] Clooney in Los Angeles, the Haitian-American musician Wyclef Jean in New York and the CNN newscaster Anderson Cooper, who will be broadcasting from Haiti ... Donations raised during the telethon will benefit the organizations Oxfam America, Partners in Health, Red Cross, Unicef and Yele Haiti Foundation.
EXCERPT: Although it's too early to do more than estimate the dollar amounts, aid officials agreed that for a variety of reasons -- including the extent of the devastation, the depth of poverty in Haiti before the earthquake, the proximity of the country to the United States and the large number of Haitians with family members who live here -- Americans have responded with swift generosity.
"You would not have any idea that we're in this economy," said Stephanie Kurzina, a vice president at Oxfam America.
EXCERPT: Headquartered in Boston, Oxfam America has a staff of about 200 people on the ground in Haiti and a 15-member emergency specialists team that is responding to the public health, water and sanitation issues that are unfolding as a result of the crisis. In addition, the organization is taking more donations and gearing up in the event more Oxfam staff need to fly into Haiti and assist with relief efforts.
"There’s been a nice trend in the donor community over the past 20 years around understating the importance of cash over goods," said Mike Delaney, director of humanitarian response, Oxfam America. "Ten or 15 years ago, there was a trend of people gathering old clothes and canned goods and shipping it somewhere. And what that did was clog up ports and no one was there to accept the donated goods and sort them out. Now people understand the importance of cash donations, so we can buy the right materials and the right goods and get them to the right places."
EXCERPT: … "what we're trying to do now is assess the situation as best as we can, bring our best people together to make sure that the assessment needs right away, so that we can move as quickly as possible … It's the poorest country on the Western Hemisphere. And the regions, especially some of the slums that have been hit around Port-Au-Prince, are extremely poor. You‘re talking about people are living on a dollar day, and colleagues have told me that everything has collapsed. And it's a very, very difficult situation, not only of human suffering, but of, you know, the level of—just a level of chaos that is happening right now in some of the parts of the cities."
"And last night, he was telling me that people were just standing around with no shelter and nowhere to go, just looking for some fresh water, looking for someone to take care of them, whether they had injuries or what not. So it's a very desperate situation."
EXCERPT: "Right now what we’re trying to do, Keith, is just regroup, make sure that, you know, we talk to one another, make sure that the aid is delivered in the most efficient way. I think your reporter was right, if it’s not done in the right way, it can be chaos and that’s what we want to avoid. So once we have that communication system fully back on, we can talk to one another, coordinate."
"I mean, we all know what we have to do. Oxfam, you know, is an expert in delivering water. The World Food Program is obviously an expert in delivering food. I mean, we all know our roles. We have the staff. We just need to sort of coordinate it better and just get in on the way. I think you can expect the next 48 hours to improve drastically."
Watch the complete interview.
EXCERPT: "We're mostly focused on the issue of water and providing clean water. We know, even prior to the earthquake, in many communities there was no access to clean water. The earthquake has devastated even the existing infrastructure around water ... Initially we're going to be providing stations where we can have water [accessible] to communities. People can go to these stations and get clean water for their short term needs. That's going to be vital in these next few days. And time and time again, in these these types of emergencies, it's the poorest of the poor that are hit the hardest."
EXCERPT: As you know, there was a terrible earthquake in Haiti yesterday evening. Oxfam has a staff of about 200 people on the ground in Haiti and a team of 15 highly-experienced emergency specialists based in the capital that are responding with public health, water and sanitation services to prevent the spread of waterborne disease.
"The first step in an emergency will be getting clean water to people who need it as we know from experience that shocks like this disrupt water lines, and transportation is completely broken down," said Michael Delaney, director of Oxfam America’s humanitarian response department.
..."Given the severity of this earthquake and the poverty of the country, our response will be long term."
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The death toll has reportedly reached nearly 800 people. The quake has affected an estimated two million people. News photos show collapsed highways, crumbled houses, and pancaked floors of concrete from Santiago south to Concepcion, Chile’s second largest city.
Slowed by a closed airport and damaged roads, Oxfam's emergency response team arrived in Santiago Tuesday morning and made their way to Concepcion, near the epicenter. Reports indicate the city was one of the most affected by the disaster. Team members also traveled to Constititucion, a coastal community hit hard by quake-triggered waves.
Oxfam's five-member team, including water engineers and logisticians, are assessing the situation and will return to Sanitago while the assessment results are considered and a decision is made on what Oxfam's response will be.
“Chile is a developed country with a very capable government and while it is unlikely that this disaster will be as severe as what we saw last month in Haiti, we want to be in place to help if we are needed,” said Frank Boeren, deputy director of Oxfam America's South America office.
In addition to the assessment team, Oxfam is planning to send some relief supplies–blankets, water buckets, and water filters–to Chile from a storage warehouse in Bolivia.
More than 90 aftershocks—some with magnitudes of 6.3 and higher—continued to rattle the region after the quake.
The disaster comes just weeks after a 7.0-magnitude temblor struck near the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince on January 12, leaving 230,000 people dead and more than one million homeless.
Poor construction practices, weak building codes, and a very limited ability of the government to respond added to the scope of destruction in that Caribbean country, the poorest in the western Hemisphere. Oxfam immediately launched an emergency response in Haiti, which includes the provision of water, sanitation services, and shelter, and aims to reach more than 500,000 people.
Though the quake that hit Chile Feb. 27 morning was substantially more powerful than the one that leveled great swaths of densely populated Port-au-Prince, the South American country is far better positioned to manage the consequences—and that will determine the level of Oxfam’s involvement.
“While this was a massively powerful earthquake, the capacity of the government in Chile and the resources it has available are fundamentally different from those of Haiti,” said Michael Delaney, head of Oxfam America’s humanitarian response department. “The role that Oxfam will need to play there will be markedly different from the response we are now carrying out in Haiti.”
]]>For centuries, Haiti has been a country of great inequality, with human rights violations, and endemic and massive poverty. More recently, its governments have been trying to change some of these patterns and address the lack of educational opportunities and lack of health care. It was making considerable progress just as the quake hit.
As we go forward, one of the major challenges for Haiti will be creating a social compact among Haitians of all social and class levels, to commit to re-conceiving Haiti as a nation and taking advantage of the willingness of the international community to support a new Haiti.
What are some of the particular challenges in the short and medium term? There is a tremendous need to address housing and basic services for Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas. A lot of thinking is going in to how communities can be resettled in temporary housing and whether some of their houses can be restored and made livable.
There is thinking going on about what Port-au-Prince should look like in the future. It may be very much like New Orleans, which now has two third of the population it had before hurricanes Katrina and Rita. There is a sense in Haiti that perhaps Port-au-Prince may have been too big for the geography of hills and wetlands where it is located.
As a consequence of the earthquake, many citizens have moved to other cities around the country. They are seeking educational opportunities, access to health services, and temporary housing with relatives. One of the questions is whether the international community-- and the Haitian government, which has expressed interest in doing this--will assist people in resettling in other locations. Decreasing the overall population in Port-au-Prince would probably be a good outcome for the city.
The other question about rebuilding: Is Haiti going to actually create a dynamic economy and offer the jobs its citizens desperately need? There’s been some effort to build textile manufacturing operations in Haiti that are employing some 25,000 people now. This may be a good start. It may resemble what is happening in Bangladesh, where in the early ‘90s there were 50 garment factories, and today there are 4,000. Could Haiti, given its proximity to the US market, become an export platform for garments?
Could it become a site for a successful tourism industry? Next door in the Dominican Republic you can actually see and feel the impact of tourism dollars on the economy. The restoration of the capital Santo Domingo has been driven by tourism dollars. Haiti has historic monuments and places of interest that could be restored for tourists.
Most importantly, the agriculture sector needs investment. And [Haiti’s] ecology needs to be improved, its hills reforested, and its watersheds protected and improved. The agriculture sector needs better links to markets internally and improved infrastructure, but also links to supply chains in US markets and in Latin America and the Caribbean in ways that will tap in to its potential for producing rice, coffee, sugar cane, rum, and dried tropical fruits. Haiti could produce these and derive great benefits for its citizens—if we can make the appropriate investments.
One of the critical players will be Haitian civil society. Over the last 30 years, civil society and the not-for-profit sector have grown substantially. During the Duvalier years it was very difficult to organize any sort of not-for-profit or small, grassroots peasant organization. But more recently there has been an explosion of these types of organizations and they play a dynamic role in the country. You can see that in the emergency response. Oxfam is interacting with many of them on the ground: Settlement areas have been organized by church groups and Haitian organizations, very effectively.
But going forward, the Haitian people need to be a part of the re-imagining of their country. Tens of thousands of Haitians have struggled for decades to build their country and rid it of poverty. It is going to be critical for their presence to be felt in the way the international community designs the investment programs that are for the benefit of Haitian citizens. There will be donor meetings in the coming months, but there will also be civil society meetings, prep conferences, and comprehensive plans developed by civil society organizations as input to the donor meetings. Civil society needs to organize and prepare the way forward and become a full participant in these events.
]]>Here are Rankin's opening thoughts about the project—and about a place in which he has found "the basic, beautiful business of life."
I first visited the DRC with Oxfam in June 2008. I expected to be depressed. I had done my homework; the statistics were horrific. I could only imagine what the human face of those statistics would look like. The people I met confounded my expectations. I met fathers, mothers, children... all getting on with life, making it through, even having a laugh and a joke. These people didn't see themselves as victims, despite the bad hand that fate had dealt them. They were human beings, exactly the same as you and me.
I wanted my portraits to do something different. The West has been anesthetized to traditional pictures of disaster zones. My style of portraiture is always about bringing people out of themselves, getting them to share something. I chose to photograph the people against a stark white background instead of in their physical environment. The expressions in their eyes and on their faces—their humanity—was what I wanted people to notice and relate to.
It didn't seem morally or politically right to just go and take pictures. So I decided to put on a show in the refugee camp, and give the people prints of their portraits. Give them something back. It was incredible. One guy said to me, 'This photograph is amazing. I wanted to let you know that I will use it on my coffin when I die.' No-one has ever said anything so moving to me.
The overriding feeling I had while I was out in the DRC was one of anger and powerlessness. That taking a few snaps was inconsequential in the face of the insurmountable problems that were being faced there. But when I got back, we put on an exhibition. I pushed the images, did press interviews, raised awareness. I believe that it made a difference to the people I met.
I was inspired to return to the DRC in October 2009. I didn't want to do the same thing as I had done the year before and, as on my first trip, I felt that it was important and right to give something back. So this time I held photographic workshops. I gave out cameras so that the people could have authorship over their own images—show us what was important in their lives. The collection of shots from my second trip builds on those from the first one, but focuses on the relationships that bind people to each other—a mother's love for her child, a husband's love for his wife, two friends. The basic, beautiful business of life.
I hope that these photographs can aid understanding. They are neither ugly images of brutality, nor sentimental images of suffering. The world needs a more sustainable form of imagery that, instead of encouraging pity and powerlessness, promotes understanding, connection, and ultimately action. It's about making people accessible to each other."
]]>“The destruction across the capital was stunning, and the sight of countless camps crowded with families gave me a powerful sense of how devastating this earthquake has been for people,” says Oxfam writer Coco McCabe, who recently returned to Boston from Haiti.
The camps are spontaneous, makeshift neighborhoods, marked out by plastic tarps, cardboard, and bed sheets strung between whatever’s there. Posts to hang materials on are in short supply, so people are scavenging wood from the wreckage of buildings.
“I saw one man with a flat, wide board, working hard with a small hand saw to cut the board into narrower pieces that could serve as poles for sheets, plastic, scraps of clothing—anything that might offer the semblance of a wall or roof to give families privacy,” says McCabe.
Plastic sheeting strung from poles may seem like a minimal shelter solution, and it is. But at this moment in the emergency, it’s something that works. Colored tarps keep off the sun and rain and, unlike tents, can be made to fit whatever space and terrain is available – or whatever other purpose they’re needed for on a given day.
Over the next two months, Oxfam aims to boost the supply of sturdy plastic sheeting, providing enough for at least 4,000 families (20,000 people) – a project that includes a cash-for-work component: we are employing local people to cut giant rolls of the material down to size. Families will get two pieces, each six meters by four meters, along with two 10-meter lengths of rope.
Meanwhile, we’re making plans to assemble and distribute home-repair kits to help those whose houses need patching up, not rebuilding.
But when it comes to figuring out if what’s left of your house is a danger to your family, no one should have to rely on guesswork. Oxfam will assemble a team of structural engineers to survey the damage to homes in Haiti and share their knowledge and suggestions with local residents, builders, and officials.
How long will it take for survivors of the quake to make their way from camp sites to temporary houses to real, permanent homes? For many, it will be years. But if donors continue to support the aid effort generously, Haitians will get the support they need every step of the way.
“Building back all that was lost in just a few seconds,” says McCabe, “is going to require a sustained commitment from us all.”