Disaster Survivors Abroad and at Home Endure the Same Fate: Life in a Shelter

Posted: 22 December 2005

Natural disasters respect no borders and neither does the homelessness they trigger.

Tucked into the Himalayas, stretched along the coasts of the Indian Ocean, and even here in the United States, millions of people are spending this darkest time of the year in flimsy tents, temporary shelters, and government-issue trailers.

For survivors of the earthquake in northern Pakistan, the tsunami in South Asia, and the back-to-back hurricanes that hit the Gulf Coast states late last summer, permanent homes may be a long time coming. (View a slide show at Homelessness Knows no Borders.) A shortage of relief funds, questions over land rights, and disputes about insurance claims are just some of the issues slowing the rebuilding of homes and communities.

In Pakistan, a meager response to an appeal issued by the United Nations hobbled early relief efforts. Now that winter has arrived, the scramble to provide cold-resistant shelter for some of the 2.5 million people who lost homes has intensified. But complicating the effort was a Dec. 13 temblor in Pakistan that registered 6.7 on the Richter scale. The most severe tremor since the Oct. 8 earthquake, this one triggered massive landslides that reportedly blocked several roads that had only recently been reopened.

To help survivors weather the long, cold months ahead, Oxfam has obtained 20,000 winterized tents and distributed nearly 6,000 of them. The local organizations with which Oxfam works in the region have an extensive knowledge of the terrain. Through careful targeting, Oxfam and its partners will continue to distribute tents as well as winterization packages to families in remote mountain villages. The packages include durable plastic sheets, thermal blankets, and mattresses.

In addition, Oxfam has started to distribute kits that will allow people to construct small shelters called bandis. So far, Oxfam has handed out 765 of the kits, which will help more than 6,000 people.

Insulated with pine needles, straw, and layers of blankets, bandis offer greater protection from the weather than tents do. One of the central design elements of these shelters is the soil bags used for walls. Set low to the ground and flexible, they are easily able to withstand the wrenching caused by earthquakes and their aftershocks. The shelters also use recycled wood. Designed as temporary housing, the bandis can be erected quickly and later taken down again so people can use the materials in the permanent buildings they construct later.

Across South Asia, where the tsunami took the lives of more than 180,000 people and displaced 1.6 million others, a variety of factors has slowed the pace of reconstruction, not the least of which is the size of the job. It is the equivalent of rebuilding a city the size of Philadelphia.

Some of the reconstruction hurdles have been impossible to avoid—such as the fact that in Aceh, Indonesia, land that once housed 120,000 people is now underwater. Other stumbling blocks include the slowness with which some governments in the region have allocated new land for building; confusion over coastal buffer zones in which housing construction is prohibited; and the general inexperience many aid groups have with shelter construction.

Nevertheless, progress has been made. In Sri Lanka, 95 percent of the displaced people have now moved into transitional shelters. And in Aceh, observers expect that by the end of December workers will have constructed about one quarter of the permanent homes the area needs.

For those who have been living in tents since the tsunami hit, moving into a home of their own is a huge relief.

"I don’t have to worry about the wind and the storms anymore. The condition is much, much better in the house," said one 32-year-old man in Aceh province who had been living with his now-pregnant wife in a tent for the past 10 months. Rain and intense heat were just some of the discomforts they endured in that time.

For some of the people displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on the Gulf Coast, tents will continue to serve as home in the weeks ahead while the Federal Emergency Management Agency scrambles to deliver and set up more trailers. Tent cities have now cropped up in several Mississippi communities, including D’Iberville and Pass Christian. Katrina alone displaced 400,000 people. And many people continue to live amid piles of rubble without phone service or electricity.

"It’s very unfortunate that FEMA and local governments haven’t responded to the immediate need for decent housing and trailers," said Derrick Johnson, state president of the Mississippi chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "With the change in weather we have far too many people still waiting for housing and living in tents and hotels with no clear direction on what their next step should be."

Across Mississippi, Jackson said, 7,000 hotel rooms are still being occupied by displaced people. Other people are trying to make the best out of less-than-ideal living conditions—and paying a price.

"A lot of people come and talk to me about their parents or other relatives staying in moldy homes," added Safiya Daniels, Oxfam America’s community development specialist in Biloxi, Mississippi. "They’re having respiratory problems because they haven’t gotten their FEMA trailers."