IRIN
3/9/2010
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Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today led United Nations staff and the family and friends of personnel who perished in the Haitian earthquake in honouring the memory of the 101 men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice in the service of the Organization.
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“Today, we commemorate the single greatest loss the UN has suffered in its history,” a visibly shaken Mr. Ban stated during the memorial ceremony held at UN Headquarters in New York. The 7.0-magnitude quake, affecting one third of Haiti’s 9-million strong population, brought down the Christopher Hotel, which houses the UN headquarters in Port-au-Prince, and other buildings hosting the world body’s offices.
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“We remember 101 lives of consequence,” Mr. Ban told the gathering, which was also attended by senior officials, representatives of Member States, and colleagues from the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH).
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The Secretary-General’s Special Representative to Haiti and head of MINUSTAH, Hédi Annabi, his Deputy Luiz Carlos da Costa and Acting Police Commissioner Doug Coates were among those that were killed.
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“We honour 101 unique paths that joined in Haiti to write the larger story of the United Nations,” he said of the diplomats, humanitarians, doctors, drivers, police officers, soldiers and various other professionals who died on 12 January.
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Though they came to Haiti from all corners of the world, from all walks of life, they had one thing in common, noted the Secretary-General. “They shared a common conviction… a belief in a better future for the people of Haiti, and a common resolve to help them build it. “And as they fulfilled their mission in Haiti, they illuminated a profound truth – earthquakes are a force of nature, but people move the world.”
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Today’s ceremony featured a reading of the names of the 101 civilians, military and police personnel from 29 countries who died, as well as of a poem written by Ambassador Antonio Pedro Monteiro Lima of Cape Verde about Haiti and a song performed by Haitian singer Emeline Michel. General Assembly President Ali Treki paid tribute to the fallen, stating that one way to honour their sacrifice is to support the Government and people of Haiti. “The major challenge is to ensure that Haiti can continue to develop… and it is up to the international community to carry out this lofty objective,” he stated. Haiti’s Ambassador to the UN, Léo Mérorès, expressed his gratitude for the efforts of those who perished, highlighting their invaluable contribution to peace and development in his country.

Brookings Institution
3/8/2010
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The tragic earthquake in Haiti has shown us the immense forces of nature to which mankind is exposed. The international community reacted swiftly and comprehensively to this crisis. I was—and still am—particularly impressed by the response of the people of Haiti and its solidarity with the victims of the disaster. Most Haitians suffered from this tragedy in one way or another. They deplore family members who were killed or hurt, lost jobs or livelihoods, or had their houses and properties destroyed or damaged. And yet the people showed an amazing generosity with those who were even more affected than themselves. A large number of the displaced have found refuge with and have been given support by host families and host communities within and outside of Port-au-Prince.
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Today, seven weeks after the disaster struck, the emergency phase, which focused on life saving activities, has come to a close. Even if humanitarian needs remain significant and require the on-going attention of the humanitarian actors, in particular in terms of shelter and sanitation, our focus must now shift toward the recovery and rebuilding of Haiti. The internally displaced persons in Haiti must be provided with the means to rebuild their existence and to resume their life. They must be able to find a durable solution to their displacement. The road toward durable solutions is long and arduous. The full commitment of the international community is needed to support and facilitate the tasks of the national and local authorities in Haiti, which have the primary responsibility to create conditions conducive to durable solutions.
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Finding durable solutions for internally displaced persons is never easy. It is a gradual and long term process, during which human rights, humanitarian, development and reconstruction challenges need to be addressed. It also requires the close coordination and co-operation of national and local authorities, humanitarian and development actors. I have seen situations where the displaced continue to live in rundown camps or collective shelters years after a natural disaster has struck because the political will or the capacity to reintegrate them into society is lacking. I have visited places where the displaced were not able to return to their homes because of unresolved property disputes.
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I have met with displaced persons, whose initial hope after a disaster has given way to frustration about unmet expectations and desperation about the lack of perspective due to lack of access to livelihoods. And I have come across far too many displaced persons who were not able to fully enjoy their human rights and faced discrimination and marginalization and yet officials called the recovery process a success.
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Together with humanitarian and development actors I developed a Framework for Durable Solutions, which gives guidance for a rights-based approach to durable solutions to the displacement of persons who were forced to flee or leave their homes but remained within their own country. The Framework identifies key elements and good practices regarding the process that should be followed and sets benchmarks against which the achievement of durable solutions can be measured. Based on the experiences from many countries affected by internal displacement, the Framework stresses that more than return and reconstruction of houses is needed to make solutions durable: Rather, durable solutions are only achieved once all rights affected by the displacement are restored and affected persons no longer have displacement-specific needs, i.e. needs they would not have had they not been displaced.
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The Framework was endorsed by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee and forms an annex to my annual report to the Human Rights Council.[1] Let me briefly illustrate how the Framework and its elements can be of use in Haiti in preparing for and implementing recovery measures that lead to durable solutions.
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* Informed choice on whether or not to return
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The Framework clearly states that durable solutions can be achieved through sustainable integration at the place of origin (return), at the location where affected persons were displaced to (local integration), or at a location in another part of the country (settlement elsewhere in the country). It stresses the right of internally displaced persons to choose between these solutions on the basis of sufficient information as well as the right to be consulted on and participate in the planning of durable solutions. In the context of Haiti, this means that early recovery and recovery programs should not only respect these rights but build on them. Thus, recovery programs should not only be designed for the areas which have suffered destruction in order to promote return of the displaced, but also for host communities in order to allow for local integration of those among the displaced who opt for this solution.
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* Long term safety and security
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IDPs must enjoy physical safety and security. In the case of Haiti this means that Disaster Risk Reduction measures—to reduce seismic risks as well as flooding and mudslide risks linked to environmental degradation—have to be an integral part of the reconstruction process. The focus should be on helping IDPs who want to return to build back better, so that their houses and public infrastructure can withstand future seismic or meteorological disasters. Relocations to other parts of the country should only be considered as a last resort, and to the extent that safe return or local integration at the location they fled to is impossible, because these locations would remain unsafe and life threatening even if reasonable disaster risk reduction measures are taken. Relocations without the consent of those affected have to be based on a law, planned on the basis of an expert assessment and conducted with due information and participation of the affected persons in a non-discriminatory manner taking special measures to protect the most vulnerable and are only permissible if they are the only possibility to protect people against a real risk of serious harm to life and limb.
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Finally, the duty of the government to protect its population, including the displaced, requires strengthening the police and legal structures as part of the recovery efforts in order to be able to provide security and access to legal protection mechanisms.
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* Enjoyment of an adequate standard of living without discrimination
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IDPs in Haiti must have adequate access to essential food and potable water, basic shelter and housing, essential medical services, sanitation and at least primary school education not only during displacement but also in the areas where they can find a durable solution for them. In this context, it is essential for donors to fund programs to support small scale farmers and restore food security.
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* Access to livelihoods and employment
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Securing livelihoods and employment opportunities in the long run will be a significant challenge in the recovery process given the widespread poverty and the lack of employment opportunities before the earthquake. In the short term, the cash for work programs run by UNDP and many other organizations are an important opportunity for Haiti’s displaced to take their life into their own hands and to avoid an aid dependency syndrome. The enormous needs for reconstruction also offer employment opportunities, which could be linked with appropriate training programs. More thinking has to go into involving women into such programs and create livelihood opportunities for persons with disabilities
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* Effective and accessible mechanism to restore housing, land and property
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Haiti doesn’t have a reliable property register and many documents were destroyed in the earthquake. It has to be ensured that IDPs who want to return can regain physical possession of the housing and land they left behind. At the same time, an effective mechanism to settle property disputes should be created as regular courts my not be in a position to handle a great number of cases, and alternative proofs of property and ownership in the absence of formal titles should be admitted.
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* Access to personal documentation without discrimination
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Many people lost their personal documentation, which causes a number of very practical problems, e.g. international money transfers cannot be picked up without an ID card. An expedient procedure to issue personal documentation needs to be set up, which will also be important for the next elections. The absence of death certificates could also raise questions regarding pension or inheritances, which have to be carefully analyzed.
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The list of tasks is long and overwhelming. What is urgently needed is a well-planned recovery strategy, a ROADMAP to rebuild the lives of Haiti’s IDPs that uses a human rights-based approach. It will be important to ensure a participation of the IDPs in the planning and the management of early recovery, recovery and development strategies and I encourage intensive consultation with the persons affected and displaced both in and outside of Port-au Prince in the preparation of the Post Disaster Needs Assessment. In order to make the solutions truly durable it will also be important that IDPs can make a voluntary and informed choice on where to rebuild their lives, whether their former place of residence or at another location in Haiti.
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I am confident that the Post Disaster Needs Assessment will give answers to many of these questions and will provide a solid basis for the development of a strategy for durable solutions. The respect of the human rights of those affected by the disaster must be an integral part of this strategy. I also call upon all actors remain fully engaged in this process. The victims of the earthquake deserve no less than that.

By Tim Padgett
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Backhoes and other rubble-removal equipment can't climb the steep hills and narrow streets of the bidonville, or slum, known as Carrefour-Feuilles in Port-au-Prince. More than a month after the Jan. 12 earthquake that ravaged Haiti, and which slammed Carrefour-Feuilles especially hard, much of the bidonville's clean-up is still being done with shovels and wheelbarrows. As pigs and billy goats forage in the debris, Patrick Massenat stares out at a concrete-smothered hillside. He recalls his 79-year-old mother, whose corpse he helped pull from the wreckage he's now helping to clear away. "It at least keeps you busy," says Massenat, 39, a local sanitation official. "Takes your mind off the pain." (See TIME's cover story on the Haiti earthquake.)
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Most if not all the laborers alongside Massenat — all working as part of the U.N. Development Program's cash-for-work project — lost a family member in the temblor. Nothing can erase that hurt, but they say cash-for-work has helped to ease it — not only by paying them a wage in a city where jobs collapsed along with buildings, but by making them more than just dazed and helpless bystanders in the Haiti recovery process. "Life stopped with the earthquake," says Denise Metelas, 34, sporting a blue UNDP T-shirt and baseball cap. "I feel like I'm among the living again." Massenat sees a more practical value. "Whenever there was a disaster in Haiti before," he says, "the international community never directly involved the poor. We're finally taking part in getting things done now." (Read about the prophetess of Port-au-Prince.)
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To its detractors, cash-for-work is glorified street sweeping — a small-scale, feel-good scheme that helps deflect attention from how poorly the U.N. is doing with bigger, more consequential jobs like getting displaced Haitians decent shelter and sanitation facilities. But its backers say the program bears the seeds not only of a more effective rebuilding effort in Haiti, but of a new development strategy that's less about top-down, welfare-style aid and more about economy-stimulating engagement of the grassroots. "The old, more paternalistic way of doing charity was easier," says Brazilian aid worker Eliana Nicolini, a UNDP cash-for-work coordinator in Haiti who first helped bring the plan to Port-au-Prince a couple years ago. "This is different — I really believe it has longer-lasting development effects because it's the local community, not the foreign community, that's executing it." (See pictures from Haiti's catastrophic earthquake.)
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The U.N., in fact, hopes the idea behind cash-for-work will be applied to broader efforts like earthquake-resistant building construction and more democratic community organization — especially as half a million Haitians relocate outside Port-au-Prince in the coming months. Perhaps its biggest cheerleader is former U.S. President Bill Clinton, the special U.N. envoy to Haiti, who in the 1990s championed "workfare" as a key to welfare reform. More hands-on participation in the recovery, Clinton argued recently, will give Haitians "the opportunity to, in effect, re-imagine the country." (The U.N. is also trying cash-for-work projects in developing countries like Brazil, India and South Africa.)
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The Haiti cash-for-work program, which is expected to last through the spring, has employed more than 35,000 locals since it began early this month, at a cost of about $175,000 a day. (Workers earn about $4.50 a day, slightly more than Haiti's minimum wage, UNDP officials say, but not enough to siphon workers from the country's other vital economic sectors.) But the goal is 100,000 workers — a number that will require more than the $25.5 million the UNDP has so far garnered in donations and pledges for the project, which is why the agency has been bringing celebrities like Angelina Jolie and recent American Idol winners to Haiti to promote it. Participants, who have to be at least 18 years old, work six-hour shifts each day for two weeks; only one worker per family is allowed and that family has to have been affected in some way (a death, a destroyed house) by the earthquake. (See pictures of UNICEF's child registry in Haiti.)
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Those criteria, which the UNDP insists it verifies for each hire, help prevent the program from becoming a political patronage orgy. UNDP officials say the Haitian government has been remarkably cooperative. But Haitians aren't shy about noting how thoroughly corrupt that government is. Many workers openly laud the fact that they don't need to know (or kick back to) a local machine boss to get a cash-for-work spot — "If the government were running this, I probably wouldn't have this job," says Sentelis Doassalit, 30 — and that the pay goes directly to their hands and not through a venal, lethargic Haitian bureaucracy.
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In Carrefour-Feuilles, at least, cash-for-work also encourages local entrepreneurship. Much of the recyclable waste collected from the rubble there is used to make long-burning fuel bricks for cooking, manufactured with equipment workers helped design and build. The venture is an economic engine for the bidonville and a sustainable one as well, since it provides an alternative to the traditional charcoal fuel that has contributed to Haiti's vast deforestation.
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Bruno Lemarquis, a UNDP director in Haiti, says the plan now is to "redirect" cash-for-work beyond clearing streets to tackling the country's drainage infrastructure, which is impossibly clogged with earthquake rubble but has to be cleared now that the rainy season is near. In the end, says Lemarquis, "cash-for-work can only be a temporary step in the recovery process. After that, Haiti and the international community have to take this approach to a broader level, especially to the private sector." It's not a panacea, but so far it's proven to be one way to keep Haiti among the living.

Army Times
By Joe Gould
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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Pfc. Jean-Louis Smith knows how to change frowns into smiles, even in a place where that’s not easy. A seemingly endless line of edgy, scowling faces awaited him at a distribution point near a tent city in Port-au-Prince, where the people were waiting for shelter tarps.
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Smith, a Haitian-American soldier, flicked on a portable loudspeaker and reggae star Sean Paul’s hit “Temperature” washed over the crowd, turning part of the queue into a virtual conga line of grins, tapping feet and nodding heads. A native of Port-au-Prince and a Creole speaker, Smith spoke to the crowd in Creole, making calming announcements and helping Haitians forget their misery with music — at least for a while.
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“It feels real good to come here and do what I do,” said Smith, 25, a cook with 525th Military Intelligence Brigade. “When we started, it was real bad, we had people pushing and passing out. But right now, we have taken control, and it’s getting better.”
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More than a month after the Jan. 12 earthquake summoned the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, to Haiti, paratroopers with the 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment have learned that crowd control takes more finesse than force.
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For their security mission, these paratroopers were employing not only Haitian-American soldiers such as Smith, but a strategy of easy-going attitudes and engagement. Staff Sgt. Christopher Bartholme, 27, showed off his dance moves, strutting beside the line at the distribution point where Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” poured from the speakers.
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He had spotted a rooster crowing weeks earlier at one of the company’s first distribution sites, and he mimicked it and cracked up the people waiting in line. Then he built up his repertoire, and now it includes the rooster call, his “Thriller” shuffle and singing along with Bob Marley.
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“These are very happy people, they like to laugh and they like to have a good time, and we find that the more we laugh and joke around with them, they forget they’re standing in line, they forget about pushing,” Bartholme said. “It eases our mood, it eases their mood, it eases the tension between the people and helps keep them under control.”
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John Barozie, a 20-year-old waiting in line, seemed to agree. “I’m sleeping in the camp, and when it rains, it’s not fun, it’s a bad life,” Barozie said. “The music, everybody like, everybody dance. The Haitian people, you move your body and you have no problem.” Never did Bartholme, the leader of Alpha Company’s 1st platoon and a veteran of multiple tours in Iraq, suspect that his ability to boogie would be mission-critical.
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“But hey,” he said. “Whatever works, use it.” “I think it’s been a huge learning curve since we’ve been here,” said Capt. Edward Kim of the 325th’s Charlie Company. “When we first got here, it was basically a soldier wall of guys, shoulder to shoulder, trying to control the crowd. We’ve really minimized that now to visual intent, using vehicles or cones. People understand that, and you don’t have to put a whole platoon out to control crowds. You can put four or five dudes.”
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Crowd control is one of the main missions of the 325th Infantry, or White Falcons, whose area of operations is Port-au-Prince’s inner city, said Maj. Eric Flesch, unit operations officer. The 325th’s section is the most populous and earthquake damaged swath of Haiti; it includes the National Palace, the University Hospital and the national stadium.
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A month after the quake, the White Falcons said they have been scaling back as the Haitian government slowly steps up. They were still standing guard at distribution points, clearing rubble downtown and serving at a compound for Disaster Medical Assistance Teams from the U.S. while they waited for U.N. forces to take over some security duties.
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“The more we work to complete these missions, the more we work ourselves out of a job where the [nongovernmental organizations] are doing it — or the Haitian government — the closer we are to going home,” Flesch said. “That’s a pretty good motivation for the guys out there.” For Haitian-American soldiers who work with the 82nd Airborne, the motivation is to help their homeland.
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Smith said his commanding officer granted him permission to deploy to Haiti. For several weeks, he has been part of a two-man psychological operations team, under Joint Task Force-Haiti, which augments the 82nd. In Port-au-Prince, Smith sought out his father, whose auto parts shop collapsed. He was relieved to see his father alive, but witnessing Haiti’s misery has been tough.
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“I have seen stuff that has been kind of painful. It hurts to see people living the way they do,” Smith said. Because he is Haitian, Smith is adept at collecting information in crowds, said his partner on the psychological operations team, who identified himself only as Sgt. Anthony.
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“There are usually some trouble-makers or gang members in the crowd, and he’ll say, tell me who they are, and we’ll pull them out,” Smith’s partner said. “They all know him; they know he’s Haitian so they feel more comfortable telling him their problems, and they accept what he says, as a native.”
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The distribution points were scenes of chaos early on, according to soldiers and humanitarian aid workers, with crowds reportedly overrunning or hijacking aid trucks and rushing aid workers because the people thought food and supplies were limited and that distribution would be on a first-come, first-served basis. These days, many nongovernmental organizations are using a ticket system to better organize aid distribution, said Jacques Montouroy of Catholic Relief Services.
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On a recent morning, not far from the ruins of the national palace, paratroopers from Charlie and Delta companies were helping keep the peace at a distribution point for a nearby tent city. The paratroopers first drove past a long line of people who had lined up in the wrong place. When the Humvees rolled by, the line turned into a fast-moving throng that followed the Humvees for several blocks before trying to form a line again.
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As the troops stopped and situated themselves, people ran to jockey for a place in the new line. Weapons slung over their backs, the troops formed a security “bubble” around the NGO workers and the queue. The outer perimeter of paratroopers and Humvees blocked vehicle traffic at intersections and allowed in only ticket holders. Paratroopers stood about a dozen feet from each other in three rows, each parallel to people lined up single-file.
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Sgt. 1st Class Nicholas Rennon of the 6th Psychological Operations Battalion, attached to the 82nd, made announcements in Creole over a Humvee loudspeaker. “Usually I tell them to stay calm. Sometimes people get a bit rowdy,” said Rennon, who left Haiti at 19. “I tell them that we’re here to help, that we’ll do everything we can to help them. Just stay calm and cooperate with the NGOs and the soldiers.”
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They worked the queue person by person, ejecting those without tickets. Small crowds, almost of exclusively young men, formed at the perimeter, and people without tickets tried to argue their way in, to no avail. Montouroy credited the 82nd’s calm approach to keeping the peace. The American soldiers ensure that the elderly have a place in line, and they move pregnant women to the front, he said.
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“It’s not strength first, think later. It’s think first, strength if there’s nothing else you can do, which is how it should be,” Montouroy said. “People respect them, and there’s no fighting, nothing. They joke, but they know where to stop. With a crowd, you can’t be too chummy.” The brigade combat team has developed such techniques during evening forums for commanders and by reading papers from the Center for Army Lessons Learned, said Kim, whose Charlie Company was guarding the Catholic Relief Services distribution site.
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“In general, there’s a mutual feeling that we’re here to help, and they respect that,” Kim said. “We don’t have to be as hostile, or come in here with a very, very aggressive posture, because as an infantryman, that’s probably your natural posture. But ... we come in here, our weapons are slung behind our backs.”
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The ticketing system has its problems. Haitians have been complaining that tickets are being sold and that their distribution is mired in camp politics, according to Creole-speaking soldiers. “They want the U.S. soldiers to give out the tickets, but we can’t do that” because the NGOs are responsible for that, Rennon said. Montouroy conceded that the ticketing system is not perfect.
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“We go to a camp and we have to get a list from the camp leaders, and we have to trust them, and we know that they’re not all trustworthy,” Montouroy said. “It involves politics and games. They will put friends on there and they won’t put somebody they don’t like on the list, so it gets very difficult. But that’s the best we’ve got.”

By LAWRENCE DOWNES
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The Haitian boy’s kite starts with thin sticks — woody reeds or straight twigs scraped smooth with a razor blade and cut to equal length, about eight inches. These are lashed in the middle to make stars of six or eight points, sometimes more. Thin plastic, ideally the wispy kind from dry-cleaning bags, is stretched over the frame and secured with thread. Rag strips are knotted for the tail, then tied with thread to two of the star’s lower points: a Y with a long, long stem. More thread is tied to the kite’s taut chest, the rest spooled on a can or bottle.
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The kites are beautiful: some have layers of black and clear plastic forming diamonds and stars. Some have decorative edges, the plastic razor-sliced into piñata fringe. But they work, catching the breeze and jack-rabbiting into the smoky air. Small kites are notoriously hard to fly, but these are perfectly engineered. A boy I met in a camp down the block from the ruins of the Catholic cathedral in Port-au-Prince pointed to the sky. Blinking into the sun, I took forever to find his kite: a darting black dot far above the shattered steeples.
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Making do with next to nothing is the way of life in Haiti, though many earthquake survivors now have less than that. But while Port-au-Prince has been knocked flat, it hums day and night. There is too much work to do, and too many things to make. People are still collecting the dead. Some are clearing rubble. Others are collecting aluminum or lumber, like the silent man I saw picking his way through the cathedral loft. I saw a man using hand-cranked bellows in a forge to straighten pretzeled rebar. Another spooled copper wire to rebuild an engine. Others sharpened chisels, framed shelters, piled bricks.
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Relief agencies gave out the tarps that now house tens of thousands of families, but they didn’t frame them. Ingenious Haitians did that, making things like the door hinge I saw at the Pétionville Club camp: the torn sole of a plastic sandal, fastened by nails through bottle caps, which act as washers.
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The Pétionville Club, once the capital’s only golf course, has clinics, toilets, tents and classrooms, gifts of outside charity. But it also has a homemade cinema, a market district, nail salons, barbershops and a disco. This disaster rewards those with skills, strength and luck. Not everybody has those. The old and the sick, single mothers with babies — the helpless — live in shelters whose fragility can leave you sick with unease. Even a short rain here makes mud that clings so hard to boots it feels as if the earth were desperate to pull you back into it.
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One way to resist is to fly. The kite makers dance through the camps with rubbery exuberance, trailed by younger children, all lost in the moment, the most important in the world. Kites battle kites, their makers yanking their lines to cut each other’s, as the kites whirl and spin. When one kite wins, the jubilation is explosive. It’s one of the few signs of joy you see in Haiti, entirely handmade.

New York Times
By Simon Romero
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/world/americas/07schools.html
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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Thousands of schools in and around this devastated capital could remain closed for months or never reopen, according to Haitian and United Nations education officials. That leaves vast numbers of children languishing in camps or working in menial jobs as they struggle to survive. Even before the Jan. 12 earthquake, only about half of Haiti’s school-age children were enrolled in classes, a glaring symbol of the nation’s poverty.
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Unicef, basing its estimates on talks with government officials, said that more than 3,000 school buildings in the earthquake zone had been destroyed or damaged. Hundreds of teachers and thousands of students were killed, and officials are questioning the safety of the remaining buildings after violent aftershocks in recent weeks, making the goal of Haitian education officials to reopen many schools by April 1 seem increasingly remote.
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“We have six engineers in the Education Ministry to survey more than 10,000 schools to see if they’re safe,” said Charles Tardieu, a former education minister who is pushing for schools to reopen in tent camps. “Let’s face the reality that many schools are never going to be used again, and that we urgently need other ways to revive the system,” he said.
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With their options limited, thousands of children are toiling on this city’s streets instead of going to school. Marckin Sainvalier, 10, helped his grandmother wash clothes one recent morning alongside the rubble of Rue Bonne-Foi in the central commercial district. As for school, “that was before the earthquake,” he said, explaining that his mother left him in his grandmother’s care in the chaotic days after the quake struck. “A lot has happened since then.”
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On another street in the commercial district, Dieuvenson Semervil, 12, scavenged for padlocks in a collapsed hardware store. Before the quake, Dieuvenson said, he dreamed of becoming a mechanic. A body decomposed next to him to as he picked through the rubble. Near the ruins of the partly destroyed Lycée Alexandre Pétion, one of the city’s public schools, Samanta Louis, 11, swept the sidewalk, work she said helped support her nine siblings and parents who lived in the tent camp of Champs de Mars. A former student at the Lycée, Jean Pierre Lestin, 15, scavenged brick from a collapsed wall to sell. “I would like to be an engineer someday,” he said.
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Children staying in the camps face trials beyond laboring in the streets. Health workers in the camps are reporting a rising number of young rape victims, including girls as young as 12. Alison Thompson, an Australian nurse and documentary director who volunteers at a tent clinic on the grounds of the Pétionville Club, said she had cared for a 14-year-old girl who was raped recently in the camp.
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“The entire structure of the lives of these children has been upended, and now they’re dealing with the predators living next to them,” Ms. Thompson said.
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The government here has recognized the urgency of reopening schools to provide some structure to those picking up the pieces of their lives. But its efforts to do so have faltered. Officials declared schools open in unaffected areas as of Feb. 1; some students have trickled into those schools, but many have not, say education specialists.
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Here in the capital, symbols of the devastated education system lie scattered throughout the city. Metal scavengers are still picking through the wrecked Collège du Canapé-Vert, where as many as 300 students studying to become teachers died in the earthquake.
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Foreign aid groups here say that Haiti differs from other poor nations recently struck by natural disasters, like Pakistan and Bangladesh, in that the quake gutted the education system of the capital in a highly centralized country. In New Orleans, more than half of the public schools remained shut a year after Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, said Marcelo Cabral, an education specialist with the Inter-American Development Bank.
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Haiti’s education system was already dysfunctional before the earthquake. Only about 20 percent of schools were public, with the rest highly expensive for the poor. Even in public schools, poor families struggled to pay for uniforms, textbooks and supplies. While other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean spend about 5 percent of their gross domestic product on education, Haiti was spending just 2 percent, according to the Inter-American Development Bank.
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“The quality of education was very low, with about a third of teachers having nine years of education at best,” Mr. Cabral said in an interview here, after a recent meeting with Haitian officials in an attempt to come up with a plan to reopen schools. Mr. Cabral said the Inter-American Development Bank estimated that Haiti needed $2 billion over the next five years to rebuild its education system.
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Children make up about 45 percent of Haiti’s population, and they are flooding the camps. Hundreds of children milled about the latrines of a camp at the prime minister’s office complex one day at the end of last month. “I have nothing to do,” said Belle-Fleur Merline, 11, who lives at the camp with her father and two siblings.
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Placid Francoise, 17, said she had hoped to become a nurse before the earthquake destroyed her family’s home and forced them into a camp in front of the ruins of the presidential palace. Her mother, a street vendor, had used her meager savings to pay Ms. Francoise’s tuition at the Frères Monfort school.
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Now Ms. Francoise lives in a one-room shack with more than a dozen relatives. She said she had no idea when she would return to school. “I work for my mother each day now, so that we may eat,” she said, pointing to the bags of charcoal they sell in front of their hovel. Some educators and relief officials are not waiting for the government to act, deciding to open their own schools on a piecemeal basis in some camps. Alzire Rocourt, a headmaster at a private school here before the earthquake, opened a school last month under tents donated by the Israeli Army in the sprawling Pétionville Club camp. She teaches reading, math and geography. The students play volleyball on the dirt outside during recess. And they sing, with vigor, Creole folk songs.
.
“Apran yonak lot,” the children sang, beaming. “Learning together.” “Rinmen yonak lot,” they ended. “It means, ‘Loving each other,’ ” Ms. Rocourt said. She smiled, too, until she recalled how much more needed to be done. Of the more than 25,000 children living in the Pétionville camp, just 260 are in her school.

New York Times
By Simon Romero
.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/world/americas/07schools.html
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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Thousands of schools in and around this devastated capital could remain closed for months or never reopen, according to Haitian and United Nations education officials. That leaves vast numbers of children languishing in camps or working in menial jobs as they struggle to survive. Even before the Jan. 12 earthquake, only about half of Haiti’s school-age children were enrolled in classes, a glaring symbol of the nation’s poverty.
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Unicef, basing its estimates on talks with government officials, said that more than 3,000 school buildings in the earthquake zone had been destroyed or damaged. Hundreds of teachers and thousands of students were killed, and officials are questioning the safety of the remaining buildings after violent aftershocks in recent weeks, making the goal of Haitian education officials to reopen many schools by April 1 seem increasingly remote.
.
“We have six engineers in the Education Ministry to survey more than 10,000 schools to see if they’re safe,” said Charles Tardieu, a former education minister who is pushing for schools to reopen in tent camps. “Let’s face the reality that many schools are never going to be used again, and that we urgently need other ways to revive the system,” he said.
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With their options limited, thousands of children are toiling on this city’s streets instead of going to school. Marckin Sainvalier, 10, helped his grandmother wash clothes one recent morning alongside the rubble of Rue Bonne-Foi in the central commercial district. As for school, “that was before the earthquake,” he said, explaining that his mother left him in his grandmother’s care in the chaotic days after the quake struck. “A lot has happened since then.”
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On another street in the commercial district, Dieuvenson Semervil, 12, scavenged for padlocks in a collapsed hardware store. Before the quake, Dieuvenson said, he dreamed of becoming a mechanic. A body decomposed next to him to as he picked through the rubble. Near the ruins of the partly destroyed Lycée Alexandre Pétion, one of the city’s public schools, Samanta Louis, 11, swept the sidewalk, work she said helped support her nine siblings and parents who lived in the tent camp of Champs de Mars. A former student at the Lycée, Jean Pierre Lestin, 15, scavenged brick from a collapsed wall to sell. “I would like to be an engineer someday,” he said.
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Children staying in the camps face trials beyond laboring in the streets. Health workers in the camps are reporting a rising number of young rape victims, including girls as young as 12. Alison Thompson, an Australian nurse and documentary director who volunteers at a tent clinic on the grounds of the Pétionville Club, said she had cared for a 14-year-old girl who was raped recently in the camp.
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“The entire structure of the lives of these children has been upended, and now they’re dealing with the predators living next to them,” Ms. Thompson said.
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The government here has recognized the urgency of reopening schools to provide some structure to those picking up the pieces of their lives. But its efforts to do so have faltered. Officials declared schools open in unaffected areas as of Feb. 1; some students have trickled into those schools, but many have not, say education specialists.
.
Here in the capital, symbols of the devastated education system lie scattered throughout the city. Metal scavengers are still picking through the wrecked Collège du Canapé-Vert, where as many as 300 students studying to become teachers died in the earthquake.
.
Foreign aid groups here say that Haiti differs from other poor nations recently struck by natural disasters, like Pakistan and Bangladesh, in that the quake gutted the education system of the capital in a highly centralized country. In New Orleans, more than half of the public schools remained shut a year after Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, said Marcelo Cabral, an education specialist with the Inter-American Development Bank.
.
Haiti’s education system was already dysfunctional before the earthquake. Only about 20 percent of schools were public, with the rest highly expensive for the poor. Even in public schools, poor families struggled to pay for uniforms, textbooks and supplies. While other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean spend about 5 percent of their gross domestic product on education, Haiti was spending just 2 percent, according to the Inter-American Development Bank.
.
“The quality of education was very low, with about a third of teachers having nine years of education at best,” Mr. Cabral said in an interview here, after a recent meeting with Haitian officials in an attempt to come up with a plan to reopen schools. Mr. Cabral said the Inter-American Development Bank estimated that Haiti needed $2 billion over the next five years to rebuild its education system.
.
Children make up about 45 percent of Haiti’s population, and they are flooding the camps. Hundreds of children milled about the latrines of a camp at the prime minister’s office complex one day at the end of last month. “I have nothing to do,” said Belle-Fleur Merline, 11, who lives at the camp with her father and two siblings.
.
Placid Francoise, 17, said she had hoped to become a nurse before the earthquake destroyed her family’s home and forced them into a camp in front of the ruins of the presidential palace. Her mother, a street vendor, had used her meager savings to pay Ms. Francoise’s tuition at the Frères Monfort school.
.
Now Ms. Francoise lives in a one-room shack with more than a dozen relatives. She said she had no idea when she would return to school. “I work for my mother each day now, so that we may eat,” she said, pointing to the bags of charcoal they sell in front of their hovel. Some educators and relief officials are not waiting for the government to act, deciding to open their own schools on a piecemeal basis in some camps. Alzire Rocourt, a headmaster at a private school here before the earthquake, opened a school last month under tents donated by the Israeli Army in the sprawling Pétionville Club camp. She teaches reading, math and geography. The students play volleyball on the dirt outside during recess. And they sing, with vigor, Creole folk songs.
.
“Apran yonak lot,” the children sang, beaming. “Learning together.” “Rinmen yonak lot,” they ended. “It means, ‘Loving each other,’ ” Ms. Rocourt said. She smiled, too, until she recalled how much more needed to be done. Of the more than 25,000 children living in the Pétionville camp, just 260 are in her school.

New York Times
By Simon Romero
.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/world/americas/07schools.html
.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Thousands of schools in and around this devastated capital could remain closed for months or never reopen, according to Haitian and United Nations education officials. That leaves vast numbers of children languishing in camps or working in menial jobs as they struggle to survive. Even before the Jan. 12 earthquake, only about half of Haiti’s school-age children were enrolled in classes, a glaring symbol of the nation’s poverty.
.
Unicef, basing its estimates on talks with government officials, said that more than 3,000 school buildings in the earthquake zone had been destroyed or damaged. Hundreds of teachers and thousands of students were killed, and officials are questioning the safety of the remaining buildings after violent aftershocks in recent weeks, making the goal of Haitian education officials to reopen many schools by April 1 seem increasingly remote.
.
“We have six engineers in the Education Ministry to survey more than 10,000 schools to see if they’re safe,” said Charles Tardieu, a former education minister who is pushing for schools to reopen in tent camps. “Let’s face the reality that many schools are never going to be used again, and that we urgently need other ways to revive the system,” he said.
.
With their options limited, thousands of children are toiling on this city’s streets instead of going to school. Marckin Sainvalier, 10, helped his grandmother wash clothes one recent morning alongside the rubble of Rue Bonne-Foi in the central commercial district. As for school, “that was before the earthquake,” he said, explaining that his mother left him in his grandmother’s care in the chaotic days after the quake struck. “A lot has happened since then.”
.
On another street in the commercial district, Dieuvenson Semervil, 12, scavenged for padlocks in a collapsed hardware store. Before the quake, Dieuvenson said, he dreamed of becoming a mechanic. A body decomposed next to him to as he picked through the rubble. Near the ruins of the partly destroyed Lycée Alexandre Pétion, one of the city’s public schools, Samanta Louis, 11, swept the sidewalk, work she said helped support her nine siblings and parents who lived in the tent camp of Champs de Mars. A former student at the Lycée, Jean Pierre Lestin, 15, scavenged brick from a collapsed wall to sell. “I would like to be an engineer someday,” he said.
.
Children staying in the camps face trials beyond laboring in the streets. Health workers in the camps are reporting a rising number of young rape victims, including girls as young as 12. Alison Thompson, an Australian nurse and documentary director who volunteers at a tent clinic on the grounds of the Pétionville Club, said she had cared for a 14-year-old girl who was raped recently in the camp.
.
“The entire structure of the lives of these children has been upended, and now they’re dealing with the predators living next to them,” Ms. Thompson said.
.
The government here has recognized the urgency of reopening schools to provide some structure to those picking up the pieces of their lives. But its efforts to do so have faltered. Officials declared schools open in unaffected areas as of Feb. 1; some students have trickled into those schools, but many have not, say education specialists.
.
Here in the capital, symbols of the devastated education system lie scattered throughout the city. Metal scavengers are still picking through the wrecked Collège du Canapé-Vert, where as many as 300 students studying to become teachers died in the earthquake.
.
Foreign aid groups here say that Haiti differs from other poor nations recently struck by natural disasters, like Pakistan and Bangladesh, in that the quake gutted the education system of the capital in a highly centralized country. In New Orleans, more than half of the public schools remained shut a year after Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, said Marcelo Cabral, an education specialist with the Inter-American Development Bank.
.
Haiti’s education system was already dysfunctional before the earthquake. Only about 20 percent of schools were public, with the rest highly expensive for the poor. Even in public schools, poor families struggled to pay for uniforms, textbooks and supplies. While other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean spend about 5 percent of their gross domestic product on education, Haiti was spending just 2 percent, according to the Inter-American Development Bank.
.
“The quality of education was very low, with about a third of teachers having nine years of education at best,” Mr. Cabral said in an interview here, after a recent meeting with Haitian officials in an attempt to come up with a plan to reopen schools. Mr. Cabral said the Inter-American Development Bank estimated that Haiti needed $2 billion over the next five years to rebuild its education system.
.
Children make up about 45 percent of Haiti’s population, and they are flooding the camps. Hundreds of children milled about the latrines of a camp at the prime minister’s office complex one day at the end of last month. “I have nothing to do,” said Belle-Fleur Merline, 11, who lives at the camp with her father and two siblings.
.
Placid Francoise, 17, said she had hoped to become a nurse before the earthquake destroyed her family’s home and forced them into a camp in front of the ruins of the presidential palace. Her mother, a street vendor, had used her meager savings to pay Ms. Francoise’s tuition at the Frères Monfort school.
.
Now Ms. Francoise lives in a one-room shack with more than a dozen relatives. She said she had no idea when she would return to school. “I work for my mother each day now, so that we may eat,” she said, pointing to the bags of charcoal they sell in front of their hovel. Some educators and relief officials are not waiting for the government to act, deciding to open their own schools on a piecemeal basis in some camps. Alzire Rocourt, a headmaster at a private school here before the earthquake, opened a school last month under tents donated by the Israeli Army in the sprawling Pétionville Club camp. She teaches reading, math and geography. The students play volleyball on the dirt outside during recess. And they sing, with vigor, Creole folk songs.
.
“Apran yonak lot,” the children sang, beaming. “Learning together.” “Rinmen yonak lot,” they ended. “It means, ‘Loving each other,’ ” Ms. Rocourt said. She smiled, too, until she recalled how much more needed to be done. Of the more than 25,000 children living in the Pétionville camp, just 260 are in her school.

3/7/2010
LA Times
By Joel Rubin
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The line of patients at this city's battered General Hospital forms early. The sick come to be seen by "the good doctors." At 10 on a recent morning, Jean Fenisto Joseph, 58, and his 28-year-old daughter, Roselord, were two of the several hundred Haitians standing or sitting on benches -- a tightly packed crowd of people sweating silently under a Caribbean sun that had already pushed temperatures into the 90s. The pair had been waiting for about five hours, they said, and had at least another hour to go.
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Like most in line that day, the father and daughter had not suffered any injuries in the earthquake that laid waste to Port-au-Prince in January. Instead, both complained of general aches and pains, describing the symptoms of common colds. "I know the good doctors are here. I came to get some of the good help," said Joseph, speaking quietly through an interpreter. "I would have stayed home if it was like before."
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In the wake of the 7.0 temblor that leveled much of Port-au-Prince and other communities in Haiti, a massive influx of emergency medical aid arrived to tend to the thousands of people injured. Doctors, nurses and medical supplies from more than 200 different medical organizations, by one estimate, descended on the island nation.
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Now, however, the immediate medical crisis is over. The vast majority of victims in need of surgery, amputation or other life-saving interventions have been treated. The foreign doctors and nurses are still swamped, however, spending an increasing amount of time and supplies treating regular ailments not related to the earthquake.
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They are becoming the de facto healthcare system for a country that has long failed to care for its own. That reality has started a delicate and uncomfortable conversation among aid groups and Haitian health authorities over the inevitability that, in the weeks and months to come, much of the foreign medical aid will depart. Efforts are already underway to persuade wealthy donor nations to fund nascent plans for training a new generation of Haitian medical professionals and spend the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to build appropriate facilities.
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In the face of so much need, however, such talks have been slow to gain traction, medical aid experts say, leaving many with the unsettling notion that Haiti's ragged network of clinics and hospitals could soon be left largely on its own again.
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"Access to healthcare in Haiti has been an issue for as long as anyone can remember," said Hans van Dillen, head of mission of the Dutch chapter of Doctors Without Borders, which has provided medical services in Haiti for much of the last 15 years. "At the moment, Haiti is flooded with help -- the whole humanitarian circus is here. Most came with no planning horizon and will soon leave. And then what? We'll try, but it won't be enough. In that respect, we'll be back to square one."
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At the General Hospital, in the heart of Port-au-Prince's devastated downtown, about 70% of the roughly 600 to 700 patients seen on a typical day recently had ailments unrelated to the earthquake, said the facility's harried director, Dr. Alix Lassegue. That is different from the first weeks after the earthquake, when the hospital grounds were full of the injured and dead.
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The number of patients arriving each day is also up by several hundred compared with a typical day before the earthquake, Lassegue said -- indicating that many are taking advantage of the unusual availability of services. By noon, for example, Dr. Fred Martin, who works in Chicago's Cook County Hospital, had treated a man with a knife wound, a 2-year-old boy who had a seizure and another boy who had a fractured leg after being hit by a car, among dozens of other patients with chronic illnesses who had rarely, if ever, visited a doctor.
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Outside, a mother showed New York City nurse Holly Parker a growth on the back of her infant daughter's head. Parker explained to the young woman that it was not an emergency and that she should come back in a few months to speak with a surgeon. "We are having to tell a lot of people that," she said.
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The staff at the hospital is a mix of Haitian and foreign medical personnel, with the balance still heavily leaning toward foreign. Only about a third of the hospital's 1,900 Haitian staff members have been heard from since the earthquake hit. And many of those have yet to return to anything approaching full-time work at the hospital as they continue to deal with the personal fallout of the earthquake, said Dr. Neil Joyce of the International Medical Corps. The IMC has doctors and nurses working in continuous shifts of about 20 people and is coordinating the overall foreign aid response at the hospital.
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Joyce estimated that the IMC can sustain its current rate of volunteers for about a month longer. In an effort to bring Haitian nurses back to work before the foreign staff tapers down, the IMC has converted what was the postoperative ward tent into a living space for nurses left homeless in the quake. It is also looking into providing transportation to the hospital for doctors and nurses who need it.
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Similarly, the fivefold increase in the size of the Doctors Without Borders staff since the earthquake cannot be maintained for long, Van Dillen said. Meetings to discuss how best to transfer back control of the healthcare system have begun between medical aid groups and officials from the country's badly damaged Health Ministry. Little has been decided. Joyce and Van Dillen said they hoped the attention on Haiti's plight might make it possible to raise at least some of the funds needed to improve a badly broken healthcare system.
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In Haiti, those who can afford it pay for access to private clinics while the masses of poor frequently stay away from the few public hospitals, where they are forced to pay at the gate and are treated with disdain. About 65% of women, for example, do not seek medical attention when giving birth.
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Medical experts would not hazard a guess at the cost of building the five additional major hospitals that Van Dillen estimated are needed in Port-au-Prince, along with rehabilitating existing facilities and implementing a large-scale training program for Haitian medical students. The huge costs for such an endeavor and the lack of a clear plan on how to go about it, Joyce said, have made it a tough sell in conversations with potential donor nations.
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The cost of letting the system return to its pre-quake days, however, would be paid for in human lives, Van Dillen said. That was a sentiment shared by Jean Fenisto Joseph as he continued to wait. "I hope the good doctors never leave," he said.

3/7/2010
Washington Post
By William Booth
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Before Haiti and international donors can rebuild this devastated city, they must first destroy it. The task of knocking down, smashing apart and hauling away the mountain range of rubble left by the Jan. 12 earthquake will take years and cost as much as $1 billion, according to some estimates.
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"I have heard the president say that based on what the engineers tell him, it will take 1,000 dump trucks working for 1,000 days to clear away the debris, and I am not sure even the experts know how big is the pile," said Leslie Voltaire, an architect and diplomat who is leading the effort to plan Haiti's reconstruction. What the experts do know is that the rubble is very heavy and very much in the way. U.N. rapid assessment teams estimate that the 245,000 ruined or hopelessly damaged structures in Haiti will produce 30 million to 78 million cubic yards of broken blocks, twisted metal and pulverized concrete -- enough to fill the Louisiana Superdome, from playing field to roof, up to 17 times.
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U.S. contractors with experience clearing Baghdad after bombings and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina recognize that there are fortunes to be made moving Haiti's debris from point A to point B. They are scrambling to partner with local construction firms to secure access to workers and heavy equipment and to align themselves with the Haitian business leaders who have connections to the government and the international donor consortiums that will write the big checks. When Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva met recently with Haiti's president, René Préval, the two discussed rubble removal and what Brazilian companies could offer, according to a participant in the meeting.
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Préval might have been overly optimistic about the 1,000 days. If a Mack truck can haul about nine cubic yards of concrete debris, the cleanup could require as many as 8 million trips -- through the snarl of downtown Port-au-Prince's narrow streets to the still-nonexistent dumps and recycling centers at the city's edge. "How long did it take to remove the twin towers after 9/11? It took them two years, and that was in New York City, and it cost a lot of money. We are Port-au-Prince, and our government doesn't have any money," said Philippe Cineas, director general of Haiti Blocs, a concrete-block maker and construction company that has cleared rubble from five sites, including a bank "where we had to work very slowly, very carefully, because they were looking for the vault."
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The heavy lifting of rubble removal -- what a U.N. task force dedicated to the job prefers to call "debris management" -- has barely begun, but it already offers a glimpse of the colossal effort the project will entail. One engineering consultant here likened it to "unbuilding the Pyramids."
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The Haitian government, using funds from the international community, has targeted only a handful of sites, beginning with schools, hospitals and public offices where large numbers of people might be buried. It has also begun to topple a few larger, listing buildings that are in danger of sudden collapse. Some private companies and individuals have paid to have debris cleared in order to get back to work or to recover the dead. Only a few homeowners have started to dig out.
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"How can I take down my house?" asked Oliver Chaumont, whose two-story hand-built concrete-block home appeared to have folded down around him. Chaumont was living with his extended family and some chickens in the back yard. "It will take big machines to lift all this heavy rock," he said, "and big money." Little guys like him, with wheelbarrows and shovels, cannot do it by themselves, he said, as much as they would like to get started.
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At La Source school, across the street from the ruins of the Sacre Coeur church, a huge Komatsu excavator was crawling one recent day atop an unstable hilltop of concrete slabs, its tracks sliding on the steep grade, to pick apart the building with its extended claw. Work stopped abruptly when the operator came upon a six-week-old corpse, which the workers dragged to the sidewalk on a sled made of corrugated tin, their shirts wrapped around their mouths and noses. As pedestrians scurried past the body, the burrowing, scooping and lifting resumed.
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The red-eyed foreman, covered in white dust, said his crews had filled 38 trucks on this day, and he estimated that removing all the rubble at the school site would take 15 days or more. "It's a lot of hard work," he said. In a city of rubble, the king is the man with the Caterpillar excavators, and in Port-au-Prince that man is Reynold Bonnefil, president of Haytian Tractor & Equipment Co. Sitting in his office, his three cellphones blipping and purring on his desk, Bonnefil pondered the question: How many excavators are there in Haiti?
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"Not enough!" he shouted, and smiled. "You always need more." Bonnefil said there are maybe 150 excavators, tops, in the whole country, counting new and used. He said his firm controls 90 percent of the market, though he expected it would soon have lots of company. Excavators are not cheap. An Internet search for used Caterpillar and Case excavators for sale in the eastern Caribbean found the workhorse models priced at $124,000 to $240,000 each, plus shipping and customs duties.
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Bonnefil said he has fielded calls from at least 10 U.S. construction companies, "all looking to buy or rent heavy equipment." On his desk, he has a picture of himself with former president Bill Clinton, special U.N. envoy to Haiti and a leader in the reconstruction efforts. "I am told that they are working on a package that will cost $1 billion," Bonnefil said, to be funded by a combination of donors and financing that might include the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank. Dismantling a single large building can cost $20,000 to $80,000, he said. Many such decisions will be made leading up to a crucial U.N.-led donor conference this month.
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"It's not cheap," Bonnefil said, pointing out that the work can be technical and dangerous, posing risks to lives, machinery and neighboring structures. "But you must remove the rubble before you can do anything else." What will be done with the debris is under discussion. Twisted metal rebar can be salvaged and recycled but should not be reused because it is weak. Concrete blocks can be reused for pathways and retaining walls, and for new construction. They can also be crushed and sifted to be used for fill -- to build jetties, roads and levees or to extend the port. But there are no machines for such jobs in Haiti. Not yet. Bonnefil waved a catalogue that had been lying on his desk. "Crushers," he said.

Associated Press
By BEN FOX and JENNIFER KAY
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U.S. troops are withdrawing from the shattered capital, leaving many Haitians anxious that the most visible portion of international aid is ending even as the city is still mired in misery and vulnerable to unrest. As troops packed their duffels and began to fly home this weekend, Haitians and some aid workers wondered whether U.N. peacekeepers and local police are up to the task of maintaining order. More than a half-million people still live in vast encampments that have grown more unpleasant in recent days with the early onset of the rainy season.
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Some also fear the departure of the American troops is a sign of dwindling international interest in the plight of the Haitian people following the catastrophic Jan. 12 earthquake. "I would like for them to stay in Haiti until they rebuild the country and everybody can go back to their house," said Marjorie Louis, a 27-year-old mother of two, as she warmed a bowl of beans for her family over a charcoal fire on the fake grass of the national stadium.
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U.S. officials say the long-anticipated drawdown of troops is not a sign of waning commitment to Haiti, only a change in the nature of the operation. Security will now be the responsibility of the 10,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force and the Haitian police. A smaller number of U.S. forces - the exact number has not yet been determined - will be needed as the U.N. and Haitian government reassert control, said Gen. Douglas Fraser, head of U.S. Southern Command, which runs the Haiti operation.
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"Our mission is largely accomplished," Fraser said. American forces arrived in the immediate aftermath of the quake to treat the wounded, provide emergency water and rations and help prevent a feared outbreak of violence among desperate survivors. They also helped reopen the airport and seaport.
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There has been no widespread violence but security is a real issue. A U.N. food convoy traveling from Gonaives to Dessalines on Friday was stopped and overrun by people, who looted two trucks before peacekeepers regained control, U.N. officials said.
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They managed to escort the other two back to Gonaives. There were no reports of injuries. The military operation was criticized by some Haitian senators and foreign leaders as heavy-handed and inappropriate in a country that had been occupied by American forces for nearly two decades in the early 20th century. But ordinary Haitians largely welcomed the troops, many out of disenchantment with their own government.
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"They should stay because they have been doing a good job," 35-year-old Lesly Pierre said as his family prepared dinner under a tarp at an encampment in Petionville. "If it was up to our government, we wouldn't have gotten any help at all." U.S. soldiers said they had nothing but warm encounters with the Haitian people.
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"They're real good people. They just want help," Army Private First Class Troy Sims, a 19-year-old from Fresno, California, said as he prepared to board a flight back to the U.S. "I feel that us being here helped a lot. If we weren't here, things probably would have gotten out of control."
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There are now about 11,000 troops, more than half of them on ships just off the coast, down from a peak of around 20,000 on Feb. 1. The total is expected to drop to about 8,000 in coming days as the withdrawal gathers steam. The military said more than 700 paratroopers left this weekend.
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Soldiers are now gone from the General Hospital, where they once directed traffic and kept order amid the chaos of mass casualties. There are no more Haitian patients on board the USNS Comfort, which treated 8,600 people after the quake. At a country club in Petionville, where some 100,000 Haitians are living in rough shelters in a muddy ravine, only a few soldiers remain of the several hundred there after the disaster. Alison Thompson said she was nervous about the smaller U.S. troop contingent.
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"Soon we are not going to have any security," said Thompson, medical coordinator of the Jenkins/Penn Relief Organization, which runs a field hospital at the edge of the ravine. "Everybody is just so worried that they are pulling out because it's going to get dangerous." It was the same concern for Louis at the national stadium.
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"If the troublemakers see that there is some kind of force here, they will think twice before they do anything," she said. "They are already getting ready to stir up trouble." But Ted Constan, chief program officer for Partners in Health, said that the way to address security is to get adequate shelter and other aid to the hundreds of thousands of people who are now stranded in squalid encampments. "The real solution is to deliver services ... rather than turn Haiti into a military state," he said.

By Miriam Jordan
.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870486930457510393072427417...
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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti— Hairdresser Yasmine Beaupin has found a new calling in the wake of the earthquake that ravaged this city: running the affairs of a teeming tent city. The quake left nearly 1.3 million Haitians homeless, more than 750,000 of them in metropolitan Port-au-Prince, and paralyzed the government, reducing ministries to rubble. Nearly two months after the Jan. 12 tragedy, relief still hasn't reached many needy people.
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Inside the many tent cities now home to hundreds of thousands of people, a rudimentary social order is beginning to emerge as committees agitate to secure food, water and supplies in high demand from international aid organizations. "We knew we wouldn't receive any assistance unless we formed a committee," says Mrs. Beaupin, 38 years old, president of the Impasse Osseille encampment, home to more than 2,000 people.
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She presides over an executive committee of six members, who oversee three smaller committees that represent each of the sprawling camp's divisions. They handle everything from getting people to sweep outside their tents in the muddied terrain to ensuring that the sick and injured get treatment.
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"There is no government but us," says Mrs. Beaupin, seated on a rusty metal bench outside a large brown tent that her family of four shares with 15 other people. The executive committee coordinated a census of the entire community—2,136 people in all—and produced a list with each family's last name and the number of members, which they have delivered to aid groups. Aid groups often prefer to deal with the committee leaders in tent cities because they believe that supplies might be distributed more equitably and efficiently.
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When representatives of a charity called Our Little Brothers and Sisters International showed up, Mrs. Beaupin handed them the roster of families and a printed list of requests for the camp, including food, bed sheets, kitchen supplies and cleaning agents. "She told me 'I'm president. I have this many families here. Here's what we need,' " recalls Dortje Treiber, director of country support for the international group. It plans to start a food program for the children in the tent city.
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"There are natural leaders out there," adds Ms. Treiber, who has encountered such committees in all nine tent cities she has visited in Haiti. Many Haitians are reluctant to return to houses that weren't completely destroyed but whose walls are lined with cracks and holes. For some, the temporary settlements may become home for the long term, and many encampments have started to issue identification cards to their inhabitants as well.
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Some camps are struggling because they have no leadership. There is little oversight of the committees. Some tent-city dwellers have accused their leaders of stealing food and other donations, international aid organizations say. In at least one tent city, there have been reports that a committee hoarded food coupons instead of distributing them to residents. Ms. Beaupin says her committee is acting appropriately. "I know my responsibility," she declares. "I'm president."
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When a vehicle from World Vision stopped by on Friday, Mrs. Beaupin rushed over and demanded tents that the organization had hoped to get her for families still living between sheets propped up on sticks. "We don't have any tents available now," World Vision official Claudy Saint-Jacques told her. But he promised to deliver shovels, rakes and pails so members of the low-lying encampment can dig ditches for water drainage ahead of the rainy season.
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The U.N.'s World Food Program is delivering food to 40 communal kitchens in Jacmel, a quake-hit town in southern Haiti. Each group has organized itself to identify who will receive the food, prepare it and distribute it. "The communities are managing themselves," said a WFP spokeswoman. Among the more vital tasks of tent-city leadership is keeping the peace in the crowded, informal settlements.
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The committee at a camp adjacent to the capital's airport enlisted 40 inhabitants to work shifts as security guards. They sport T-shirts with "Securité" stamped on the back. At a recent committee meeting, 11 members voted to stop a local entrepreneur from setting up a booth to sell Internet access there.
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"He was trying to build for his own interest," said committee spokesman Jean Jacques. Families still waiting for tents will need the land, Mr. Jacques explained, and "who needs an Internet here, anyway?"
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When the would-be entrepreneur reported the committee's president to the police for blocking his venture, the tent city's committee called on a young lawyer living in the tent city to help solve the problem. Ultimately, the police told the entrepreneur to leave the area, according to Mr. Jacques and Jude Cadet, the lawyer.

By MICHELLE FAUL
Associated Press Writer
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The skinny teenager appears nervous, and with reason: He is waiting for a tap on the shoulder that could send him back to the dismal prison where he spent four years without being charged or seeing a judge.
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He is one of more than 5,000 prisoners who fled their cells after January's devastating earthquake and are now being rounded up by Haitian police and returned to a system notorious for appalling conditions and delays.
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Legal experts say the earthquake has given the country a chance to reform its judiciary, which has been the source of international condemnation for years. But the young man on the run, who insists he is innocent, is afraid any solution will come too late for him.
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"I'd like to be able to go to them and just say, 'You were wrong, let me be free,'" said the 19-year-old, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of his legal situation. "But I'm scared that they'll just lock me up again."
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Justice Minister Paul Denis acknowledged that the justice system is guilty of "extremely serious" human rights violations and agreed the problem is particularly bad for juveniles. Authorities will seek to speed up the process in the future, he added, though no one has yet offered a formal plan for rebuilding the judiciary.
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Still, Denis said the country is seeking to round up all the prisoners who were either released or escaped during the Jan. 12 earthquake under circumstances that remain murky. "It's an unacceptable situation, but what can I say, it's the law. They must give themselves up and will without doubt be re-arrested," Denis told The AP at his temporary office in a prefab building behind the collapsed Ministry of Justice.
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There are conflicting accounts about what happened on the night of the earthquake. A guard, who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity, said the prisoners began to riot and set fire to the building. The guards, faced with the choice of shooting or releasing them amid the chaos and aftershocks, chose to let them go.
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The teen, who only gave the AP his first name, Guy, supported the guard's story, saying the prisoners shook the bars and screamed for help as the walls shuddered. Some prisoners set a fire to force their release. "We thought we were going to die," Guy said.
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U.N. officials say eight of the country's 17 prisons were destroyed or damaged, and 60 percent of the 9,000 prisoners fled — including 300 considered very dangerous. Some were notorious gang leaders, while hundreds were jailed supporters of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was ousted in a violent rebellion in 2004.
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Denis said that as of Wednesday about 160 had been recaptured. Two more were arrested Friday as they tried to cross the border into the neighboring Dominican Republic. Haiti has reopened its national penitentiary in the largely destroyed downtown. The prison built for 800 held 4,300 at the time of the earthquake, which the Haitian government says killed at least 230,000 people.
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Many prisoners and detainees suffered from a lack of basic hygiene, malnutrition and poor quality health care, the U.S. State Department said in a 2009 report on human rights. Incidents of preventable diseases such as AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis "remained a serious problem," it said.

Associated Press
Jonathan Katz
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The world's bill for the Haitian earthquake is large and growing - now $2.2 billion - and so is the criticism about how the money is being spent. A half-million homeless received tarps and tents; far more are still waiting under soggy bed sheets in camps that reek of human waste. More than 4.3 million people got emergency food rations; few will be able to feed themselves anytime soon. Medical aid went to thousands, but long-term care isn't even on the horizon.
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International aid groups and officials readily acknowledge they are overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster. Haitian leaders - frustrated that billions are bypassing them in favor of U.N. agencies and American and other non-governmental organizations - are whipping up sentiment against foreign aid groups they say have gone out of control. In the past few days, someone scrawled graffiti declaring "Down with NGO thieves" along the cracked walls that line the road between Port-au-Prince's international airport, the temporary government headquarters, and a U.N. base.
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Ahead of a crucial March 31 post-quake donors conference in New York, many are taking a hard look at the money that's flowed in so far. First the good news: Assistance has indeed been pouring into Haiti, sometimes from unexpected places.
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Donations from Americans for earthquake relief in Haiti have surpassed $1 billion, with about one-third going to the American Red Cross, the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University said Friday. Other major recipients include Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. Fund for UNICEF and the U.S. wing of Doctors Without Borders, according to a separate report by the Chronicle for Philanthropy.
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An analysis of U.N. data shows that private donations make up the bulk of the total, accounting for more than $980 million of what has already been delivered or that donors have promised. The United States leads all countries with its commitments of $713 million - with Canada, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Japan and the European Union among other top donors. Saudi Arabia poured $50 million of its oil wealth into the U.N. Emergency Response Relief Fund. Even countries with their own troubles rushed to Haiti's aid: Afghanistan provided $200,000.
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A Nevada real estate developer agreed to send $5 million worth of circus tents formerly used by Cirque du Soleil. Leonardo DiCaprio and Coca-Cola are each sending $1 million. Dollar General is donating $100,000. Hanesbrands is shipping 2 million pairs of underwear. But leaders including Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive are not happy with the way the aid money is being delivered.
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"The NGOs don't tell us ... where the money's coming from or how they're spending it," he told The Associated Press. "Too many people are raising money without any controls, and don't explain what they're doing with it." Haiti wanted aid organizations to register with the government long before the quake, a goal identified as a priority by former U.S. President Bill Clinton when he was named U.N. special envoy in 2009. But it was never completed.
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U.N. and U.S. officials said there is close monitoring of NGOs who receive funds. The U.S. Agency for International Development requires recipient groups to file reports every two weeks on how their activities are lining up with their planned programs, said Julie Leonard, leader of the agency's Disaster Assistance Response Team. Governments tend to give funds to agencies from their own countries.
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USAID paid at least $160 million of its total Haiti-related expenditures to the Defense Department, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, two local U.S. search and rescue teams and, in at least two instances, itself. Tens of millions more went to U.S.-based aid groups. While much of that bought food and other necessities for Haitians, it often did so from U.S. companies - including highly subsidized rice growers whose products are undercutting local producers, driving them out of business.
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One cent of every dollar has gone to the Haitian government. Saudi Arabia's donation is essentially a blank check for the U.N. fund to spend on Haiti relief as it sees fit. So is Afghanistan's. DiCaprio's million is going through the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, while Coca-Cola and Dollar General's donations are headed for the American Red Cross. The underwear is going through the Atlanta, Georgia-based aid group CARE.
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The circus tents are for the Haitian government. In the days immediately after the quake, this is exactly what many Haitians said they wanted. Distrustful of leaders they said were corrupt, some went so far as to say they hoped the U.S. would annex the country.
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But the top U.N. official in Haiti said the country's leaders are right: For half a century, the international community has kept Haiti's government weak and unable to deal with disaster by ignoring officials and working with outside organizations.
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"We complain because the government is not able to (lead), but we are partly responsible for that," said U.N. Assistant Secretary-General of Peacekeeping Operations Edmond Mulet. Worse, the patchwork of roughly 900 foreign and thousands more Haiti-based NGOs do not coordinate, take on too many roles and swarm well-known neighborhoods while leaving others untouched - doing what Mulet called "little things with little impact."
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He said the individual organizations should identify specific roles, such as road construction, and stick to them to make it easier for the Haitian government to coordinate the overall response. A French Foreign Ministry official said the solution is to take the Haitian government seriously.
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"It's a bit the image of a child: If you believe he will never become an adult, he will never become an adult," said Pierre Duquesne, who oversees foreign aid. Clinton has put out two statements in the past week noting that much has been left undone in the massive international relief effort. Refugees International published a report saying the "the humanitarian response has fallen short of meeting the Haitian people's immediate needs."
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Deputy U.N. emergency relief coordinator Catherine Bragg said the group was being unreasonably pessimistic. "The Haiti situation, as has been said many, many times since the first day, is the most complex humanitarian response we've ever had to deal with," she said.
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The government estimates the quake killed 230,000 people - though without a civil registry or accurate means of counting, nobody really knows how many died. More than 1.2 million lost their homes, about half of those fleeing the capital to the even harder-to-track-and-reach countryside.
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The Haitian government has gone through three prime ministers in two years, had a president overthrown in 2004 and was already helpless to rebuild from hurricanes and riots in 2008. It lost nearly all its major buildings and much of its staff in the quake.
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Mulet said a strong plan at the New York donors' conference could help organize the response, strengthen the government and provide help for the Haitian people. But doing so will mean changing the way things have been done in Haiti for decades.
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"If this shake-up was not enough to really change us nor them, then I don't know what will," he said.

Associated Press
By BEN FOX
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Their home is a pile of rubble, their church in ruins and their honeymoon suite a tent shared with eight relatives. But Emmanuel Beauzile and Mary Leon found plenty to celebrate as they exchanged vows under a blue tarp in the ruins of Haiti's capital.
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"We're still here," Beauzile said. "No matter what the situation is, we are going to be together."
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The couple tied the knot in the shadow of the Notre Dame d'Haiti Cathedral, where they attended Mass and the bride sang in the choir before the earthquake caved in the roof and two sides. The occasion was not entirely joyful: It was hard not think about those who would have attended had they survived the quake, but the ceremony had already been postponed once and the bride and groom felt it was important to go ahead.
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It is hard to overstate the devastation of the Jan. 12 quake. It killed an estimated 230,000 people and forced 1.2 million more from their homes. For much of the past seven weeks, ordinary life pretty much stopped. Nearly everyone's life has been upended and grief is universal. But signs of normality are beginning to emerge. Schools in the capital are still closed, but at least one resourceful businesswoman has set up classes in a tent camp. An unknown number of businesses were lost, but new ones - from beauty salons to stalls that charge cell phone batteries - have emerged in the encampments to serve the newly homeless. Commercial flights are again arriving in the Port-au-Prince airport - and the traditional troubadour band is back greeting people at the arrivals gate.
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Some say such small steps are important as a comfort to people who have lost so much. Alzire Rocourt, a singer and music teacher, sees hope in the choir rehearsals now held twice a week in the yard of her home. The students from two Catholic schools, many of whom lost parents and friends, wanted to resume their twice-weekly routine of rehearsals. But they had nowhere else to meet.
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"Singing for them is consolation. That's what they like to do," Rocourt said. "They find their equilibrium in singing." Beauzile, 33, and Leon, 30, pulled together many of the trappings of a typical wedding. She wore a full white gown with elbow-length white lace gloves. He wore a charcoal-gray suit. There were several hundred guests. Dozens of passers-by watched from atop piles of rubble in the dusty downtown streets. Guests sang hymns accompanied by a lone drummer.
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Leon said she tried unsuccessfully not to think about those who couldn't make the ceremony, including two fellow singers in the choir, because they had been killed in the earthquake. "I was happy and sad at the same time, because I had friends who were supposed to be there," she said. Beauzile, who lost a cousin and several friends, focused on the ceremony and pushed out darker thoughts.
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"I had to forget everything that has happened in the country for a minute," he said. "It was a special moment." The Rev. Edwine Saint-Louis, the Roman Catholic priest who presided, said he has performed several weddings. But this was the first at the cathedral since the earthquake.
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"The church is destroyed, but we can still carry on," he said. "People are still building families and the church is there to support them." After the ceremony on Sunday, the couple went back to their temporary home at a tennis-club-turned-refugee camp in Bourdon, a neighborhood off the road that climbs the hill heading out of Port-au-Prince. They had a small celebration, then went off to spend the night at relative's home that survived the quake. Their own was demolished.
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"The only celebration we had was we got to spend the night together," Leon, who repeatedly fidgeted with her new gold wedding ring during the conversation, said with a laugh. The next day, the couple returned to spend the rest of their honeymoon in the family tent. Their immediate prospects are not good. The couple is expecting a child, a girl, in May. Leon worked as a cashier in a clothing store that collapsed and now she is jobless. Beauzile works as a driver of the often riotously colored taxi-buses known as tap-taps, but he has to sublet a vehicle from the owner and can't get one every day.
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As camps go, theirs is among the best. Everyone has an actual tent, as opposed to one fashioned from bed sheets. There is plenty of shade, and the residents have been careful not to disturb the clay courts, though laundry hangs from the nets. Still, it is a camp - with fat rats crawling over the ruins of the clubhouse, where seven people died - and the residents fear the owner could force them to leave at any moment. Beauzile said his immediate plans are to find a single tent for him and his wife and to get back to work. "I just want everything to get back to normal," he said.

BY JONATHAN M. KATZ
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After seven weeks with seven kids huddled under a shelter of tarps and bed sheets on the median strip of a busy road, Lissithe Delomme says the Haitian government can't reopen schools fast enough.
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``If they would open right now I'd be pretty happy,'' she said, trying to ignore the tumult of two of her boys wrestling as she fried up a batch of plantains for sale. ``They're just sitting around doing nothing.''
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The Jan. 12 earthquake dealt a devastating blow to Haiti's already struggling schools: More than 80 percent in the earthquake zone were damaged or destroyed. All in Port-au-Prince and the other affected towns remain closed, and with tens of thousands of bored and restless children living in increasingly squalid encampments, patience is growing short.
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On Monday, a group of private school directors delivered a petition to President René Préval decrying the lack of government action and demanding schools reopen immediately -- be they in tents, temporary buildings or other makeshift facilities.
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But some are urging caution before rushing back into a system that never really worked in the first place.
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``This is an opportunity in a lifetime to radically change the educational system in Haiti,'' said Marcelo Cabrol, head of the Inter-American Development Bank's education division. ``We want to be aggressive.'' The problems are monumental: Just one in 10 Haitian teachers is a qualified educator, according to the IADB -- and a third have not even completed ninth grade. The government is unable to support more than a handful of schools, leaving the system dominated by fly-by-night, for-profit storefront schools whose onerous fees and other costs keep half of Haiti's children from enrolling at any given time.
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Buildings were so unsafe that one school collapsed on its own in 2008, a year and three months before the quake, killing 100 students and adults. Wealthy Haitians and foreigners opt out entirely, putting their children in upscale schools that cost some $8,000 per year -- more than most Haitians will spend on food and basic necessities in 20 years.
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Before the earthquake, Associated Press journalists visited classrooms in rickety warehouses, one with an open-pit toilet dug alongside the desks. In a private elementary school just blocks from the National Palace a teacher slumped in his chair, half asleep, while a teenage student scrawled rote Creole phrases on a flimsy blackboard. That school is gone now -- one of the more than 3,800 damaged or destroyed in the quake. Nearly 4,000 students, and more than 700 teachers, principals and staff were killed during afternoon classes. All that's left of the Ministry of Education's main building is a crater filled with torn workbooks and lost teachers' ID cards.
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Education advocates see a chance for a fresh start. Celebrities like Shakira, Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban have pledged money to rebuild individual schools and prominent U.S. educators are volunteering to help restructure the system. Paul Vallas, a former Chicago and Philadelphia superintendent working to rebuild Louisiana's storm-ravaged Recovery School District, is working with the IABD, researching ways to build hurricane- and earthquake-resistant buildings in Haiti and create a unified Creole-language curriculum to improve math, reading and other skills.
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``We benefited from the generosity of others and we almost feel there's an obligation for us to the same,'' Vallas said in a telephone interview from New Orleans. The IADB has also reached out to Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp proposing a program for Haiti that would train and employ teachers, drawing from some of the estimated 35,000 university students who lost their classrooms, as well as Haitian diaspora and others overseas.
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Education officials know they have limited time to act. The education ministry is eyeing an early April return. ``A country can't function without education. We can't have our children in the streets,'' said Laguerre, who attended Catholic schools in Haiti and earned advanced degrees in Paris and Montreal.
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Before schools can open, however, officials want to assess buildings, while locating tents, food for students, financial support for teachers and psychological counseling for students affected by the quake, said education ministry director general Pierre Michel Laguerre. Some aid groups are running school-like programs. Israeli and Haitian volunteers teach basic lessons like hygiene and counting in the sprawling makeshift camp behind the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne base in Pétionville, but organizers say it is a temporary program.
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On Monday, a Catholic school in Pétionville reopened for a couple hours to teach students earthquake preparedness and provide psychological counseling, but regular lessons will not resume until the government reopens its schools, teachers said. For most like Delomme, the long interruption piles stress onto an already catastrophic situation. School lunch is often the only nutrition her kids get in a day.
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``The schools remain the only sector that is still closed. The banks reopened, the markets are opening, transportation is functioning again,'' said Charles Tardieu, a former education minister and member of the committee that petitioned Préval's office.
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Its members agree that reform is necessary, but argue that reopening schools can't wait for ingrained problems to be solved. Delomme, who never completed elementary school, had managed against the odds to keep her kids in school. Fees were a struggle, classes were lousy and teachers often didn't show up, but it meant everything to the 41-year-old mom who wanted to give them the chance she never had.
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With no radio or electricity for a television under the family's musty tarps, her only information about school comes from conflicting rumors about when classes might begin. She hopes word that it won't be much longer until schools reopen is true.``All I can give them is an education,'' she said.

Associated Press
By MICHELLE FAUL
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The Miami property developer, volunteering after Haiti's earthquake, was horrified to see children sleeping in the dirt under makeshift tents of bed sheets propped up on sticks. A global, billion-dollar aid effort should be able to do better, he thought.He decided he could do better himself.
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Michael Capponi flew home, collected donated tents, flew them back to Haiti and persuaded a mayor to let him build a proper camp for hundreds of families on the soccer field of a gated community of luxury villas. It took him three days and less than $5,000.
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"I didn't put this together to get a pat on the back, but to show the world it can be done rather quickly, and with limited funds," said Capponi, 37. Haiti has two relief campaigns under way: a massive, lumbering international operation comprising U.N. agencies, foreign military and hundreds of private aid organizations; and the collective efforts of individuals acting on their own in frustration at what they see as shortcomings in the international response.
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The do-it-yourself aid workers say the bigger operation is inefficient and confused, and brag about their ability to get things done quickly, on the cheap. Officials with governments and more established relief groups applaud the smaller operations, but say such efforts will never be enough to meet Haiti's enormous needs. The story of shelter is a case in point.
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The United Nations says nearly 1.3 million people - 762,708 of them in metropolitan Port-au-Prince, the devastated capital - don't have anywhere to live, and officials have said for weeks that shelter is their most urgent priority as the rainy season approaches.
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But seven weeks after the Jan. 12 catastrophe, the international rescue operation has managed to distribute 23,000 tents and 131,000 tarps, reaching just a third of those in need. Capponi, who came to Haiti after the quake as a volunteer with the University of Miami-affiliated Project Medishare, could not understand what was so difficult about getting tents to people in need.
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First he called ShelterBoxUSA, the American affiliate of a British-based private aid group that the Haitian government has designated as the lead agency for tents, and which has distributed 8,200 tents in Haiti. Capponi was startled to hear that a tent kit for a 10-member family costs $1,000. Capponi found a Miami company offering a waterproof tent for five, the average size of a family in Haiti, for $90 including ground sheets, poles and mosquito nets. Then he found another that asked $37.05 per tent - including shipping to Haiti - if he'd buy 50,000 of them.
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Veronica Miller, president of ShelterBoxUSA, said their kit includes a multipurpose blanket, water purification kit, stove and cooking pots - as well as the cost of securing permission to use land and coordinating who gets help first.
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She said ShelterBox tents are designed to last for years. "Other tents that are out there may help for a few months, but then what?" she asked. "The weather and elements that they endure will leave them without shelter and they are back to the same situation."
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GuideStar USA, which monitors nonprofit organizations, said the magnitude of Haiti's crisis and the logistical difficulties involved in getting the aid to the people who need it most means it's a job for established organizations.
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"I respect and appreciate people's passion and enthusiasm and energy," GuideStar President Bob Ottenhoff said. "But this is one of those moments where, in order to do this on a massive scale, I think we have to rely on the experts."
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Many independent operators disagree. Shaun King, lead pastor of The Courageous Church in Atlanta, set up a Web site for people to donate money and tents priced from $55 to $800. Working with 200 volunteers, Haitian orphanages and a makeshift camp in Port-au-Prince, King has collected 1,505 tents to shelter 7,525 people and $24,185.
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"We pledge that 100 percent of the funds we raise will go directly (and only) to tents," the Web site promises, a swipe at the overhead costs at big humanitarian organizations. While Red Cross shelter experts were "working against the clock" to finish a blueprint for a temporary wood-frame house, a Latin American charity already had volunteers busy with nails and hammers showing homeless Haitians how to build them themselves.
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The Chile-based group, Un Techo Para Mi Pais - "a roof for my country" - worked with 150 foreign volunteers to erect 20 wood cabins with corrugated metal roofs in three days, said project leader Luis Bonilla of El Salvador.
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"I'm going back to the Dominican Republic to buy more wood, and we will have 100 more houses up in two weeks," Bonilla said. He said the longer-term goal is to build 10,000 houses in Haiti. Capponi, meanwhile, took two days to set up a camp of 70 tents with two water tanks and two portable toilets that is sheltering hundreds of families.
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He went back to Miami to buy and beg more tents, and returned this week with enough tents to give decent shelter to 1,500 of the people camping on a soccer field in Port-au-Prince's posh Belleville neighborhood. (Another $10,000 worth of tents disappeared at the Port-au-Prince airport, he said.)
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Capponi, who didn't want to single out any aid group to avoid making enemies, questioned why relief workers need all the new white SUVs that have suddenly appeared in Port-au-Prince. "People need to learn to be efficient with funds here," he said. "I have seen too many big NGOs (non-governmental organizations) waste too much money and I am fed up."
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Capponi recalled the joy with which people receive their tents. "People started chanting and praying. One woman was so overjoyed, she kissed the flap of her tent," he said. One the front of one tent, a grateful family has written "Dieu est grand" - "God is great."

LA Times
By Ken Ellingwood
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When a city crashes to the ground, how do you dispose of it? Six weeks after an earthquake reduced Port-au-Prince to ruins, Haitian and foreign officials who hope to build a new capital first have to confront the wreckage of the old one.
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The capital is a panorama of rubble: collapsed and half-fallen stores, banks, apartment buildings and homes, hillsides covered by broken shacks that fell like dominoes. Gnarled steel rebar lies all over in massive tangles, like a thousand Medusas.
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The amount of debris is stunning. Officials estimate they will have to clean up as much as 25 million cubic yards of material — enough to fill the Louisiana Superdome five times over. By comparison, detritus from the destroyed World Trade Center amounted to about 1 million cubic yards.
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Haiti's leaders, working with officials from the United Nations and United States, last week approved a rubble-disposal plan that is expected to take at least two years to complete. The initial phase focuses on clearing debris from drainage ditches and around the most congested encampments in order to help shift people away from areas prone to flooding before spring rains arrive at the end of March.
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"We don't have the luxury of stepping back and doing this in a relaxed way," said Mike Byrne, a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) official who co-chairs a multilateral committee on debris here.
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The longer-term cleanup will involve an armada of front loaders, excavators and trucks. Haitian President Rene Preval has said the effort will require 1,000 dump trucks for 1,000 days — which U.S. planners say is fairly accurate.
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"We're going to have to go 24-7 on this," said Byrne, who was the government's point man in the World Trade Center cleanup. Haitian officials have identified a handful of possible disposal sites, which are to include facilities for hazardous materials, separating refuse and crushing the concrete chunks. Early assessments indicate 90 percent of the debris can be recycled into road-building material, melted or put to other uses, Byrne said.
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Many Haitians are attacking the broken mounds on their own. Impatient homeowners and businesspeople with means have hired digging machines and workers to clear their properties. Concrete debris has been dumped hurriedly along the side of one of the main roads leaving the city.
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Destitute Haitians have sought to turn rubble into opportunity. The destruction has spawned a new scavenging specialty in a city where jobs were already scarce. Around the city, residents clamber over the chalky piles with undersized hammers, shovels, hacksaws and, most often, bare hands.
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"Everybody has to figure out a way to survive until things get back in place," said Demarseilles Nelson, who after half a day of scavenging with bare hands had piled his wheelbarrow with a 3-foot-high stack of metal scraps. His yield included a manual typewriter that appeared to date to the days of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, the 1960s-era dictator.
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Impromptu scrap markets have sprung up where enterprising young men with homemade scales buy steel rebar they drag away by hand or in shabby wheelbarrows. In one forlorn corner of the city, amid dust and truck exhaust, 16-year-old Nahem Inora was offering 4 cents a pound for the metal. He said he planned to resell it to big-time traders for about 7 cents a pound. He had arrived that morning with $20 and had burned through half of it within hours.
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"I would be more successful if I had more money to buy steel," Inora said. Waiting to sell their treasure were two boys who had carried and dragged a grimy sack loaded with 2-foot lengths of rebar.
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The piles of rubble entomb an unknown number of dead — a reality that will require sensitivity when it comes to clearing. That could mean digging by hand in places where bodies are believed buried.

Associated Press
By BRADLEY S. KLAPPER
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Aid workers, with the help of Google Earth, are uploading key information onto the Web to illustrate the needs of hundreds of thousands of people left homeless by Haiti's earthquake — an innovation that could significantly boost the ability to respond to future disasters.
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The idea is new and relatively simple: U.N. and non-governmental aid officials can log onto Google Earth from makeshift settlements housing more than 600,000 people in Haiti and provide real-time details about the population and its global positioning.
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Although there have been some teething problems, officials believe the tool could greatly speed relief efforts. "The humanitarian agencies have some catching up to do when it comes to things like Skype and hand-held e-mail," said Alex Wynter, a Red Cross spokesman in Haiti. "But in the base camps, we're connected and disaster relief is going online."
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Users with Google Earth on their computer can go to the Web site, http://www.cccmhaiti.info, where a link offers a map of many of the 414 tent sites, churches, government buildings, schools and refugee camps that have sprung up since the Jan. 12 tremor that killed over 200,000 people. Over a normal Google Earth screen of Haiti, blue spots appear showing where Haitians have settled. Some are named by street, zone or landmark, and others are simply numbered as "IDP" — internally displaced persons — camps.
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Each blue spot can be clicked on, calling up an information box that gives a site's longitude and latitude, commune and estimated number of families and individuals. The details are updated regularly so that, in theory, charities and government officials can foresee aid shortfalls, and potential dangers such as landslides and floods.
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"It is the first time a tool of such sophistication has been deployed in such short order by humanitarian actors after a major emergency," said Jean-Philippe Chauzy, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, which teamed with Google, the U.N. and humanitarian information body iMMAP on the project. Aid workers from a number of agencies are already updating the system, Chauzy said.
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But it still has shortcomings, reflecting the tangled web of aid groups involved in providing humanitarian assistance in Haiti, as after any major disaster, and older systems for sharing information. Though it's hardly technically challenging, separate pages still must be consulted to find out about the conditions, needs and agencies responsible for helping each group of people.
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Aid officials say the information should be harmonized, and made accessible with a simple mouse click on Google Earth once enough staff have been trained and the program develops. "That's the next logical step," conceded Brian Kelly, a senior IOM official involved in the project.
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Kelly said in an interview Tuesday that the project aims to give policymakers and common citizens a better understanding of how complicated aid operations work. While few Haitians have Internet access, he claimed the project would allow people directly affected by future catastrophes to help identify shortages.
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"It gives you a quick snapshot: 'Hey, look, there's no water there,'" Kelly said. "When something happens, the initial questions we ask are: 'Where is everyone? How are they living? What services are they getting?'" Chauzy said IOM mapping experts started the project shortly after the earthquake, with civil engineers and Haitian geographers who had extensive knowledge of local boundaries and street names. The cooperation with Google was a key step up from previous mapping exercises, which used PDF files that were less user-friendly and less accessible.
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Google's offices in Switzerland and Germany wouldn't comment, but U.N. spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs praised the company for delivering images so quickly after the earthquake, first by satellite and then enhanced by shots from the ground. "These satellite images were crucial," Byrs said.
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She said the site was populated with information from "all existing sources at that time." The U.N. then developed a "common language" for aid workers updating the information.
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Chauzy said he hoped the maps could serve a key purpose in coming weeks by helping aid officials identify safer places to house Haitians during the rainy season, when floods and landslides pose a threat. The system's long-term future advantages are clear. There should be less duplication of aid efforts, greater information for donors asking where their money is going, and less complicated coordination meetings — which aid officials say are often too time-consuming.
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"A lot of time and effort goes into logistics. If you don't know what's coming, where to take it, you are in trouble," Kelly said. "We need to understand, not in month three but in week two, where people have moved and what their conditions are. This is going to cut through a lot of bureaucracy."

Thirteen dead. Submerged houses. Fields and banana plantations waterlogged. Drowned livestock. Impassable roads. Fresh trauma for quake-displaced thousands. This is the plight of Les Cayes, a city on Haiti’s south coast, after an unseasonal deluge. And hurricane season is not far off.
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Trucks loaded with 4,030 meals left Port-au-Prince on 2 March for emergency distribution in and around Les Cayes. Food has also been sent to Nippes region, north of Les Cayes, which has experienced bad flooding. The UN World Food Programme, with local authorities and NGOs, plans to supply 10-day rations to affected populations, including some 3,000 people evacuated from their homes.
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"The poor state of the sewers caused flooding in every [district] of the city," said the regional president of the Haitian National Red Cross Society, Jean-Yves Placide. “In some places the waters rose to ceiling level in people's houses," he said. "The situation will be really worrying if it continues to rain. The sun is out now, but the storm clouds come and go." “People are used to dealing with floods, just not this early,” one aid worker in Les Cayes told IRIN.
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A mother of two in the city’s Solon district told IRIN her family had lost everything to the flooding. “All our belongings were destroyed – our beds, our clothes, everything.” Rains hit the area on 27-28 February. On 2 March many homes still had standing water, the aid worker told IRIN.
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“Many, many people have told us they lost their crops [including banana trees and sugar cane] and their animals,” he said. Local NGOs who work with Christian Aid are assessing damage to agriculture, Prospery Raymond, the charity’s head in Haiti, told IRIN.
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According to Haiti’s Department of Civil Protection, agriculture has been “heavily affected”. The rainy season proper usually starts in the beginning of April and peaks in May. According to Iain Logan, head of operations for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in Port-au-Prince, Haiti is ill-equipped to cope.
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“The early floods in Les Cayes are a sharp reminder that the very significant disaster preparedness effort we started after the 2008 hurricanes will have to be expanded and adapted,” he said in an IFRC release. "We face an almost unique set of circumstances generated by a catastrophic quake, a rainy season, and a hurricane season, one after the other in rapid succession," he added.

2/27/2010
The Miami Herald
By AUDRA D.S. BURCH
aburch@MiamiHerald.com
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The rumors traveled urgently from Haiti: Beyond all the death and wreckage, one of the nation's greatest exports -- its cultural scholarship -- was buried that awful afternoon in January. The three largest heritage libraries and the National Archives -- keepers of much of Haiti's complicated, heroic, rich story -- were reportedly lost to the random nature of earthquakes.
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Within days of the Jan. 12 disaster, a university staffer 750 miles away worked frantically to deliver better news: the buildings were shaken but still standing; their precious rare books, manuscripts, newspapers and brochures had been spared. And the people who spend day after day caring for the collections were all safe.
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But Brooke Wooldridge also learned help was desperately needed to rescue and preserve the treasures that help chronicle Haiti's history, clustered mostly in the four institutions in downtown Port-au-Prince. ``First I worried about the people and making sure everybody working at these institutions were OK, and then I thought about all of those collections,'' said Wooldridge, project coordinator for the Digital Library of the Caribbean at Florida International University. ``I felt very conflicted. Emotionally, I knew there was so much life lost, but I also knew that if the collections were ignored, Haiti's collective memory could be lost. I knew we needed to help'.''
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So Wooldridge quickly assembled like-minded culturalists who were already a part of the Digital Library, an international coalition of research, governmental and educational institutions that provides access to Caribbean-related electronic materials.
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The organization, founded in 2004, was perfectly poised to help. Led by Wooldridge, it had already been working with Haiti's librarians and curators over the years to digitize their collections. Within weeks, the group launched a campaign to rally international contributors, raise money and provide technical support for the recovery and protection of Haiti's cultural resources -- the already brittle rare books and documents scattered and dusted by the quake.
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They joined a small cadre of other organizations and Haiti's own volunteers that pushed the same broader cultural mission: save the public and private collections, all essential to the national identity. To date, about $4,200 has been raised and 50 volunteers have signed up. Wooldridge and historian Matthew J. Smith, who heads the Haitian Task Force at the University of the West Indies, have traveled to Haiti to bring back a detailed list of needs.
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``In real terms, the urgency is to get the collections cleaned and repaired and restored,'' said Chantalle Verna, assistant professor in FIU's department of History and International Relations and member of the Digital Library advisory board. ``If we lose these documents, we lose what can help us understand Haiti better.''
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The group's Protecting Haitian Patrimony initiative includes assisting four institutions in Port-au-Prince:
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• Archives Nationales d'Haïti, which houses civil and state records as well as those of the Office of the President and most government ministries.
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• Bibliothèque haïtienne des Pères du Saint-Esprit, founded in 1873 by the Fathers of the Holy Spirit, holds documents chronicling the history of Haiti, French colonization, slavery and emancipation and 20th century records.
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To support the Digital Library of the Caribbean's project to protect some of Haiti's libraries, archives and personal collections, sign up at www.dloc.com. The campaign calls for people to make contributions, organize fundraisers, collect and ship requested materials, and travel to Haiti if requested by the local partners.

Alerntnet
2/26/2010
By Olesya Dmitracova
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Seasonal rains and hurricanes spell trouble for Haiti at the best of times, but with hundreds of thousands of people living in flimsy shelters after last month's earthquake, this year the dangers are much greater. The rainy season usually begins in earnest in early April and the hurricane season in early June, according to the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). Both can be deadly.
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"If a hurricane hits Haiti head on, the loss of life will be severe and every temporary housing camp will be wiped out," blogged Cameron Sinclair, co-founder of non-profit design and building group Architecture for Humanity. Margareta Wahlstrom, the U.N. Secretary-General's special representative for disaster risk reduction, offered a similar warning for the Haitian capital. The city bore the brunt of the Jan. 12 earthquake, which has killed up to 300,000 people.
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"Port-au-Prince is built on vulnerable small slopes and mountains. With the rains, these slopes start softening up and cause mudslides like we have seen in the past, causing schools to collapse and more deaths," she told AlertNet from Geneva.
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A series of storms in Haiti in 2008 showed the extent of damage they can cause - even to sturdy buildings. More than 800 people were killed and nearly 1 million left homeless or in dire need of help. Haiti is extremely vulnerable to floods and mudslides because most of its hillsides have been stripped bare. Cutting down trees to make charcoal to sell for fuel is a last resort for many rural Haitians who have no other income between harvests.
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Within the aid community in Haiti, there are no expectations of being able to build sufficient durable housing before the storms start, and no mention so far of evacuation plans in case of floods or mudslides. "We have a huge challenge in terms of just providing emergency shelter - something we feel that if we put all our weight behind, as we are doing right now, we will be able (to do), to get plastic protection materials out to everyone," said Kristen Knutson, a spokeswoman for the U.N. office coordinating the international relief effort, in a telephone interview from Haiti. She added that more robust housing would be needed in the longer-term.
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The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), which is coordinating shelter-related aid work in Haiti, is only just completing its first model "transitional" house, but hopes construction of more houses will begin before the rainy season.
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In the meantime, aid agencies are focusing on providing earthquake survivors with waterproof shelter materials and improving sanitation and health care - all essential in wet conditions that help infections spread. "Neither tents nor tarpaulins, however, will provide more than minimal protection from the Haitian rainy season which peaks in May, when Port-au-Prince gets an average 230 mm of rain and sometimes as much as 50 mm in two hours. The hurricane season, which begins later in the year, is of special concern," IFRC said in a statement.
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The WMO has been discussing with the Haitian authorities and aid groups on the ground whether it would be possible to anticipate floods and move displaced people - many of whom are camping out on low-lying plains and near the sea - to safer ground, according to Maryam Golnaraghi, who heads the disaster risk reduction programme at the U.N. weather body. She added she did not yet know the outcome.
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To organise a successful evacuation, reliable and consistent forecasts of extreme weather must reach the government and relief groups quickly. That is difficult in Haiti as the earthquake destroyed its weather stations, which the WMO estimates will cost $1 million to rebuild. Since the quake, the United States, Canada, Britain and the Dominican Republic have provided weather forecasts for Haiti which have supported aid operations. But to prevent any confusion, the WMO is working with Haiti's authorities to ensure that all forecasts are channelled through the impoverished country's official meteorological service.
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Another challenge is disseminating the information, now that only a fifth of Haiti's media is up and running, Golnaraghi said. As progress is made towards these aims, Haiti will become better prepared for the upcoming storm season. But time is short and the number of people at risk enormous.
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"We recognise that this is minimal perfection," said Knutson from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
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(Additional reporting by Anastasia Moloney in Bogota) (Editing by Megan Rowling)

Kenneth Merten, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti, said on Thursday that American troops would stay in the country to aid in its recovery, Agence France-Presse reports. "There are about 6,500 soldiers in Haiti at the moment. There were some 20,000 for the emergency effort launched in the wake of January 12," Merten said. "What is planned for the moment is more and more staff from USAID on the ground and fewer and fewer troops. Gradually, they'll leave. In my opinion, we will need some American troops to stay here for the foreseeable future" (2/25).
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In a departure from previous plans, relief officials are recommending that homeless Haitian earthquake survivors return to their damaged homes as the rainy season approaches, the Associated Press/New York Times reports. "Officials had initially planned to build big camps outside Port-au-Prince. They still anticipate creating some settlements, but they decided this week to instead emphasize getting people to pack up their tents and tarps and go home. For that to be possible, authorities will need to demolish hundreds if not thousands of buildings and remove mountains of rubble," the news service reports.
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According to the news service, "The International Organization for Migration began registration at the plaza Wednesday, collecting people's old addresses in hopes that most can be resettled relatively quickly in their old neighborhoods." Some people will not be able to return to their homes, but this process will help relief officials identify within about two weeks the structures that can be used and the ones that should be demolished, according to U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. John Blackwell, who is helping to coordinate the plan (2/26).
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Meanwhile, Reuters examines the health risks and other challenges that are expected with the upcoming rainy season. "Seasonal rains and hurricanes spell trouble for Haiti in the best of times, but with hundreds of thousands of people living in flimsy makeshift shelters after last month's earthquake, this year the dangers are much greater. The rainy season begins in earnest in early April and the hurricane season in early June, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Both can be deadly," Reuters writes.
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"Beyond distributing waterproof shelter materials, aid agencies are also working to improve sanitation and health care – all essential in wet conditions which help infections spread." The article includes quotes from aid workers and U.N. officials on the ground and looks at their work aimed at minimizing the negative impact of the rainy season (Dmitracova, 2/25).
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A second Reuters article examines the role U.N. troops played immediately following the earthquake in Haiti last month. "There were about 9,000 uniformed U.N. peacekeepers stationed in Haiti when the quake struck on January 12 and they were the logical 'first responders' to the disaster in the impoverished Caribbean country, whose notoriously weak central government was overwhelmed by the scale of the tragedy," according to Reuters.
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"Initially, however, none of the peacekeepers appeared to be involved in hands-on humanitarian relief in what emergency medical experts describe as the critical first 72 hours after a devastating earthquake strikes." The article looks at the factors that impeded the U.N. response, including the need to maintain order while delivering aid.

Dear Friends of Project Medishare,
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More than six weeks have passed since Project Medishare's volunteer doctors and nurses arrived on the ground in Haiti to assist those devastated by the January 12th earthquake. After working in the country for over 15 years, we have built strong relationships with the people of Haiti. These relationships allowed Project Medishare to be one of the first foreign medical teams on the ground immediately assisting those in need of critical care.
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We are working towards transitioning our field hospital to be the first trauma and rehabilitation hospital in Haiti. Currently, this transition includes offering physical therapy and psychosocial support for those with spinal cord and brain injuries, as well as the many amputees who lost limbs due to severe crush wounds. So far, we have purchased over 500 prosthetic limbs for our patients at the field hospital in Port-au-Prince. Soon our volunteer doctors and nurses will begin working with amputees in the fitting for these limbs, as well as providing the physical therapy necessary to help these people work toward living normal, productive lives.
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As you know, Project Medishare will continue to be a driving force in providing care for those affected by the disaster. We will be working in the coming months and years to help Haiti recover and rebuild. Our transition to rehabilitation demonstrates one of the many reasons we need your ongoing support. The earthquake's damage lingers far beyond the city limits of Port-au-Prince. Before the earthquake, Project Medishare's Community Health Program in Thomonde served 85,000 in the Central Plateau. After the quake, a mass exodus of over 400,000 people from Port-au-Prince migrated to rural Haiti in search of shelter. Our staff in the Central Plateau are already noticing a population explosion in Thomonde and Marmont. Such growth will place an additional burden on our ongoing health programs. Currently, we are conducting a census to determine how much our population has been affected by this mass migration.
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Many heroic volunteer doctors and nurses are still working hard in Haiti today. These heroes will continue to work in Haiti for a long time to come. One of the ways you can show your continued support is to set up a recurring monthly donation. By setting up a recurring donation you can join these heroes by helping us continue to fund our relief efforts on the ground in Haiti as we transition towards the most immediate needs. Anything you can give each month will help: $25, $50, $100, or more each month will help us provide ongoing relief. Click here to go to our secure online site to set up a monthly recurring donation.
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Because of the great need of funding relief efforts like ours, shortly after the quake the U.S. government created a new tax relief law allowing those who contributed to charities providing earthquake in Haiti in 2010, to take a tax deduction for the contribution on their 2009 tax return. March 1, the deadline for this tax relief, is approaching quickly. There are still five days left to make your tax-deductible donation for the 2009 tax year.
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If you have made a donation already, we thank you. If you are able to give more, please click here to make your 2009 tax-deductible donation before March 1. We thank you for your ongoing support in helping us provide continuous care to the all those we are serving in Haiti during this time of great need.
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In Solidarity,
Ellen Powers

By JONATHAN M. KATZ
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An international aid group has assumed day-to-day management of a nursing home in the Haitian capital where elderly residents were left starving in the dirt after the Jan. 12 earthquake.
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HelpAge International will run the facility for the next six months after taking over from the government of Port-au-Prince, according to Jonathan Barden, the London-based group's emergency response team leader. He said Wednesday that the group will pay three-quarters of the salaries for the home's 40-odd employees, while the government will pay the rest.
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In the days after the quake, the Municipal Nursing Home's elderly residents were left with little food, water or medicine, sleeping in the dirt among rats. Besides the six residents killed by the earthquake, two more perished of apparent hunger and exhaustion in the following days.
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Residents who accused the mayor's office of abandoning them welcomed the news that HelpAge would be in charge. "I'm good for six months. I don't care about the mayor's office until then," said Licienne Petion, 90.
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Conditions remain poor at the home in the middle of a makeshift tent city of more than 2,000 people. Flies are everywhere and chickens peck at the mud. Most residents napped outside Wednesday, on the ground or in their wheelchairs. Elderly women pulled off their clothes and bathed in public.
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But nobody has died in weeks, and Barden said there was no need to bring in the doctor Wednesday because there were no urgent health problems. He said an engineer determined the building is structurally sound, and residents are gradually being moved back in. A local gang is providing security, Barden said - a necessity given the realities of post-quake Haiti. He said the gang members asked for flashlights and pistols to do their jobs. HelpAge provided the flashlights.
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"Everything is a struggle. Everything needs to be negotiated," he said. Food initially came from the charity World Vision, he said, but the soy-enriched bulgur wheat, while nutritious, was hard for the elderly residents to digest. He said HelpAge went to local markets to buy food.

2/24/2010
UN News Center
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The United Nations remains strongly committed to doing everything possible to help the people of Haiti but is realistic about what it can accomplish before the rainy season begins in earnest on 1 May, said a senior official with the world body.
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“When the rains come, the UN will still be there in solidarity with the people of Haiti living in conditions not so dissimilar from many of them and working hard to help them,” Anthony Banbury, Acting Principal Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General at the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), told journalists in New York.
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Mr. Banbury – who is scheduled to return to Haiti tomorrow – admitted that while plans are underway to provide more than one million homeless people with some form of shelter and sanitation, not everyone will have “good shelter” or “good sanitation” before the heavy rains start. More than 66,000 families (330,000 people) have received emergency shelter materials, about 30 per cent of the estimated need.
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He praised the UN response effort as “truly impressive” given the challenges, and said that the expectation that “people were just going to be housed overnight” was beyond the scope of any group or organization. More than 66,000 families (330,000 people) have received emergency shelter materials, about 30 per cent of the estimated need. More than 250,000 tarpaulins and tents are in the pipeline and will be distributed immediately upon arrival, according to the latest report from the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
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In addition to distributing shelter materials, there is a critical need for rubble removal as well as for the identification of suitable land for the construction of transitional shelter to alleviate decongestion in overcrowded sites. Comparing the recovery effort in Haiti with those he experienced following Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar in 2008 and the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, Mr. Banbury said the complexity of the situation in Haiti made it the “most challenging disaster response that that the United Nations has ever faced in its history.”
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The most serious problems currently in Haiti – sanitation and shelter – are interconnected in a way that makes it impossible to solve one without the other, posing challenges for the UN system of clusters in which one agency takes a lead on managing a humanitarian issue, Mr. Banbury said.
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He also praised the UN peacekeepers for taking on a new role as emergency first responders during the 12 January earthquake. “The UN peacekeeping apparatus is not designed for, and really has very little experience dealing with, sudden onset natural disasters. So we had to do – in this case – something that we have never done before,” Mr. Banbury said.
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As relief efforts continue, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) announced it has started distributing aid to quake survivors and host families in a poor region of Haiti, near the border with the Dominican Republic. Local officials and Haitian Red Cross staff began distributing the UNHCR aid on Saturday in the town of Fonds-Verrettes, where the local population has been swollen some 10 to 15 per cent by the arrival of people fleeing from the devastated capital, Port-au-Prince.
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Each family, including many hosts, was given an aid pack that contained a blanket, a bucket, five bars of soap, a flashlight, a cooking pot, five spoons, matches and sanitary pads. “This small-scale aid is intended to help meet some of the most basic non-food item needs of those host families whose already very limited resources are being stretched to the absolute limit,” said UNHCR spokesman Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, adding that the agency hoped this would also help prevent further displacement.

Associated Pres
By FRANK BAJAK
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Six weeks after a catastrophic earthquake flattened downtown Port-au-Prince, power has returned to nearly half the city's neighborhoods. Most, however, are in the hilly southern suburbs, which look down at night on the miles of near blackness where most of the quake-rendered homeless abide in teeming tent cities.
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Even before the Jan. 12 quake, electrical service in Haiti meant an average of 10 hours of power a day delivered by a rickety grid to just a quarter of the population - not even half of them paying customers. If Haiti now hopes to shake off its status as the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation, experts say, it will need to build a power system far better than the highly subsidized, cash-hemorrhaging utility it had before the disaster.
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It is starting almost from scratch. The state-owned Electricite d'Haiti, like the government, is essentially broke. Fewer customers than ever are able or willing to pay. Their jobs disappeared along with their homes in 30 violent seconds.
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Haiti immediately needs $40 million to get its grid back to pre-quake status and pay its 2,500 workers, hundreds of whom are living in tents, the utility's director-general, Serge Raphael, said in an interview with The Associated Press. The company said it needs to figure out how to finance itself - the payroll alone is $15 million a month - as well as provide power to the millions of Haitians who can't afford it. "This is one of the most pressing problems that Haiti is facing," said Ernest Paultre, the U.S. Agency for International Development's chief engineer for Haiti.
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The challenge is as glaring as the bare yellow bulb of a makeshift street lamp, hooded by a scrap of tin, that lights up a dirt path in the Debrose 33 neighborhood on the side of a ravine. Joseph Dessier, 47, now lives with his wife and five children in a shack cobbled together of tin, paperboard and a tarps in the yard of a former auto repair shop alongside neighbors who also lost their homes. The camp's residents power lamps, TVs, cell phone chargers and blow driers off a single line that somebody strung up from the ravine. Nobody is paying for the electricity.
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Then again, hardly anyone in Debrose 33 was paying before the quake. "You could count on your fingers the number of people who had meters and were able to pay for electricity," said Dessier. So many people filched power that the grid would periodically overload the neighborhood transformer, causing it to blow. Two days later, a utility company crew would show up to fix it.
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"All the way down the ravine people were tapping into the line," he said. "It's not something you can stop." Dessier, a university messenger, said he paid his bill in full until rates doubled last year due to rising oil prices. Afterward, "I managed to pay some of it but not all," he said.
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Utility chief Raphael said his biggest problem has always been the utility's inability to collect from its users. "In the slums, how can you make people pay for power?" he said. The utility has only been able to collect on between 10 to 15 percent of December's bills, he said, and it only expects about one in three ratepayers to pay up through the end of April.
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When the quake struck, the company was installing a computerized system to improve bill collection and management that was bankrolled by a $14 million grant from the Inter-American Development Bank.
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Another $18 million grant is in the pipeline for this year, but rehabilitation money isn't anywhere near enough to begin shoring up the utility, says Lumas Kendrick Jr., IADB energy specialist in Haiti.
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"The global community has to step up," added Kendrick, noting that the utility has been running a deficit of about $80 million a year out of a $200 million budget. "The real issue is how we get more funding," he said Wednesday. "The fact of the matter is: The government doesn't have the resources to pay any civil servants."
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Rebuilding Haiti's power grid and expanding its generation capacity are among priorities - along with roads, water and sanitation - for an international donors conference set for late March at U.N. headquarters in New York. Until then, without additional emergency funds, little can be done to further restore service on a hobbled distribution network. Power poles and cables still lie snapped on streets all over town.
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"It's going to take six months to a year to get the materials in here to build up the areas that don't have power now," said Myk Manon, an engineer with the U.S. National Rural Electric Cooperative Association who has been managing international efforts to restore electrical power. "In the meantime, a lot of people are going to be in the dark."
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Hospitals, embassies, government offices and other key facilities in the meantime will continue to be powered by generators - just as Haiti's main businesses have always been. Manon says he will have to pull out in two or three weeks because relief donations are drying up.
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He said wooden power poles are especially needed in this forest-denuded land, as are more crews of foreign volunteers; those from the neighboring Dominican Republic are due to go home later this week. But even with new crews, cash and material, the utility's endemic flaws must be addressed.
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It has always been a major vat of political patronage - with three times more workers than needed, their productivity limited and skill level low, said Manon. "Electricity in many countries is a political tool and it's definitely one in Haiti. That's why the rates are so cheap and why they are losing so much money," he added.
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During a political crisis in 2004, the utility became financially crippled, throwing the entire country briefly into the dark. The U.S. government bailed it out with $20 million for diesel fuel that kept it running for 10 months.
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The USAID engineer Paultre, a Haitian with three decades of experience grappling with infrastructure issues in this politically unstable land, says its electricity challenges, like so many others, can't be solved overnight. "The technical aspect can be addressed," he said. "But the problem is a social one."
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Associated Press Writers Michelle Faul and Evens Sanon contributed to this report.

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Miami Herald
BY MARIE BELL
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In the aftermath of last month's earthquake, thousands of newly orphaned Haitian kids have been taken in by families here in the United States. After the trauma of the disaster, and the pain of losing their loved ones, they find themselves on a strange journey, in unfamiliar surroundings.
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These children need love and support, but they also need to stay connected to the culture and history of their homeland. It is who they are. So, to the adoptive parents, I offer a primer on what it means to be a Haitian. Call it ``How to be Haitian 101.''
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First, we love our food, music, history and art. We think it's the best in the whole world. The national dish is griot and national rice -- (spicy fried pork chunks and rice and red beans). We have bouillon (meat stew) on Saturdays and soup (pumpkin soup) on Sundays. Never get these mixed up. We have the best and largest variety of mangoes in the world.
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Our music is called Konpa. Top artists are Nu Look, Harmonik, T-Vice, Sweet Micky, Kreyol La, Tabou Combo or whoever would have been King of Carnival this year. We love to sing and dance. We are very proud of the fact that we became the first black republic in the world in 1804, just a few years after the United States gained its independence. Toussaint L'Ouverture is the George Washington of Haiti.
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Independence was from France. We've been trying to get right since then. Simón Bolivar trained in Haiti and Haitian soldiers helped fight for the independence of Colombia and Venezuela.
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Soldiers from Haiti also fought in the battle of Savannah. Haiti had one of the strongest armies at that time and had beaten Napoleon's army. Some historic notables of Haitian descent: Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, and John James Audubon, born in Cayes, Haiti, of the Audubon Society. We kiss everybody.
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I think we inherited that from the French. Kids usually kiss all adults in the room. It's a sign of respect for elders. Hate to be told we don't look Haitian. Haitians are the rainbow coalition. We are jet black, marabou to blond with blue eyes. Haitian art is usually very vibrant with bold rich colors. Haitian art hangs in some of the most well-known galleries in the world.
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Haitians live predominantly in South Florida, the New York area and Boston. But we have raised flags in almost every major city in the country. I have family in Salem, San Francisco, New York City, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Orlando and Miami. We're also in Nashville, Dallas, St. Louis, Cambridge, and Omaha, to name a few. Chicago was founded by a Haitian, Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable.
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Every friend of your parents is your aunt and uncle. It's also a sign of respect. Just think that the estimated 1804 population was 400,000 people in Haiti, and now it's eight million. I guess we are all cousins. Our official language is French and Creole, most important documents are written in French, but everyone speaks Creole. ``Sak pase'' -- what's going on?
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When older Haitians speak, they tend to use a lot of exclamations and sounds. Don't worry, we are not fighting, but expressing ourselves. Haitians are hard workers. Haitians are always very proud, dignified and resilient even in this catastrophe. We're not used to government being part of our lives. We help each other and everyone sends money home.
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Education is very important. All the children should be highly educated. It is a sign of pride in every family. We tend to be religious and conservative. We are mostly Catholic, but we do have a lot of Protestants, some Jews and Mormons in Haiti.
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Haitians are very generous and will share whatever they have with you. When you visit their house, they will give you the best they have. In Miami, we have many cultural organizations and several universities offering classes in Creole. The Haitian Cultural Center in Little Haiti is offering dance and art classes. The Haitian American Youth Organization, Hayo, gets kids together to perform. We have a few day-care centers, including Our Little Ones in Little Haiti. You can follow what we are doing on the Internet with Sakapfet.com. (What's going on?)
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Teach your child to be proud of where he or she comes from and show him or her lot of love. Take them to our beautiful white sandy beaches with turquoise water. Teach them our rich history. Take them to La Citadelle, our ``eighth wonder of the world.'' Remind them that Haitian people were the heroes after the earthquake.
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Haitians are usually very friendly, so if you meet someone of Haitian descent I am sure that they will adopt you and show you everything you need to know about Haitian culture and complete the ``How to be Haitian 101.'' course.

By NANCY SAN MARTIN
nsanmartin@MiamiHerald.com
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Maralon Dorelas has reluctantly come to accept that the hotel where his son, Gibson, worked and lived will have to serve as his final resting place. A month after a monstrous earthquake rumbled through this nation, taking down countless structures, tearing up roads and swallowing perhaps as many as 230,000 lives, the corpse belonging to his son remains buried beneath the rubble of a downtown hotel -- along with many others who could not get out.
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``The government hasn't done anything with those people under the concrete,'' said Dorelas, 73. ``It's still the same thing.'' Dorelas' painful experience is shared by tens of thousands in this grieving nation. While daily life resumes and recovery begins to slowly take shape, there is a heavy sense of sadness here. Haiti always has been a place with an addictive level of energy, punctuated by blaring music and laughter, even in the midst of grueling poverty and political violence. But the incomprehensible tragedy unleashed by the 7.0 magnitude earthquake before dinner time on Jan. 12 has made Port-au-Prince a somber place.
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Sadness is as thick as the dust and heat that gives this bustling capital city a persistent haze. ``No more satisfaction,'' said Alix Toyo, who lost two relatives to the quake. ``No more happiness.''
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While heavy machinery clears roads and work crews sweep the streets, survivors go on living as best they can, suppressing the numbing pain that comes from the loss of loved ones. ``God gives me the strength to cope,'' said Dorelas.``I don't want it. It's God's will.'' He takes some solace in knowing where his son took his last breath. An unknown number of others also were buried by falling debris, their identities still not confirmed.
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The government has stated that it buried 170,000 bodies in mass graves. It is unclear how many other recovered bodies have been buried privately or disposed of by civilians. Bodies now reduced mostly to bones remain trapped under piles of rubble spread across areas hit hard by the quake. The government has not finalized its death tally.
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Dorelas, a retired Haitian army sergeant who earned a living as a plumber, learned of his son's death when his daughter-in-law showed up to say she had not heard from Gibson for two days following the earthquake. Dorelas went downtown and saw the body pinned between massive chunks of concrete that used to house the Auburge du Port-au-Prince hotel where the 40-year-old worked as a security guard.
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``I didn't imagine he could die this way,'' Dorelas said recently. ``The way that he died, I could never imagine that.'' When he first discovered Gibson's body, which he could see through a side opening in the mound of rubble, Dorelas would stop by every day to try to find a way to retrieve it for burial. But rescue workers were busy trying to recover those still alive.
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He sent word to two sons in South Florida and Boston to send money so he could hire someone to do the job, but obtaining funds proved difficult. His daughter-in-law managed to scrape together enough cash to pay for a bulldozer to dig out her husband of six years, but the driver fled following sporadic violence sparked by looting.
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As heavy machinery now clear roads, pushing rubble up against other piles of debris, Gibson's body is buried deeper and consists mostly of skeletal remains. ``Even if I could get the bones, I could put [them] in a coffin,'' Dorelas said. ``But there is nothing I can do. This will be the cemetery for Gibson and all those other people in there. There are many, many people under the concrete.''
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Dorelas described his son as a calm man who could become stern when provoked. ``He was a very quiet man. Sometimes he got tough with some people, with the thieves who tried to steal,'' Dorelas said. ``But he was a very quiet guy, very educated.''
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Like his son, Dorelas also is soft-spoken but clearly respected by those around him. He is originally from Ouanaminthe, a city on the northeast border with the Dominican Republic. He enlisted in the Haitian army on Feb. 3, 1959 and served for 36 years while the country was under the dictatorships of the François ``Papa Doc'' Duvalier and then Jean-Claude ``Baby Doc'' Duvalier. Even as the army's power was blunted by the regime, Dorelas climbed the ranks to sergeant and was sent abroad for training in Washington and California.
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Gibson also served in the Haitian army before it was disbanded in 1995 by then President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The Dorelas family lives in a home built in the 1950s specifically for military personnel. The neighborhood is known as Cite Militaire. In 1965, Dorelas moved into the sturdy concrete home, which is now shared by a total of 10 family members. Even though it withstood the earthquake, the Dorelas family has joined neighbors in tents set up at a basketball court across the street.
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``Everyone is afraid to sleep in their house because they don't know what is going to happen at night,'' Dorelas said. As he mourns the death of his son, Dorelas suffers alongside many others in the same predicament. Even those who still have homes have lost their jobs and are struggling to obtain enough food, water and other basic necessities. ``People think I am a rich man because I have children in the United States. But I don't get a lot of help,'' Dorelas said.
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His relatives abroad, including Gibson's mother who lives in South Florida and remains ``inconsolable,'' have been in touch with Dorelas and are trying help as best they can. ``At first, I could not get in touch with my father in Port-au-Prince,'' Alex Dorelas, 39, who lives in Boston, said in a telephone interview. ``My father can't find anybody to help him remove my brother's body.''
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``It's really tough,'' he said. ``I didn't get to talk to my brother the last time he called. My mother has been crying every single day. We all feel really bad inside. Most of my friends lost a family member. It seems that every one of us lost one, two or three family members. We're all going through the same thing. It's horrible.''
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Meanwhile, in Port-au-Prince, the elder Dorelas spends his day trying to figure out how to move on.
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``I walk around, sit down. Talk to people. Nothing else,'' he said. ``If I could find a job, I can work. I feel in my body that I have the strength to work.''Like his mother, Gibson's widow also is inconsolable.``She sheds tears all the time,'' Dorelas said. ``She talks about him all the time.''
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Asked if he cries, Dorelas became quiet for a few moments.``Sometimes,'' he said, softly. ``When I think about him, I shed tears.''

Miami Herald
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Chilean President Michelle Bachelet says a group of South American nations has committed to providing $100 million in aid for earthquake-ravaged Haiti. She says the money from the 12-member Union of South American Nations is meant to help Haitian President Rene Preval get his government going in the aftermath of the Jan. 12 quake.At a news conference late Tuesday in Trinidad's capital, Bachelet told reporters that Unasur will provide nearly half of the aid in about three weeks. Bachelet made the brief comments during a stopover in Trinidad after a conference of 32 Latin American and Caribbean countries in Mexico where the Haiti aid was agreed upon.

Reuters
By Pascal Fletcher
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Haiti's main seaport at Port-au-Prince has managed to handle container traffic at a level higher than before the January 12 earthquake, and full repairs to damage should be completed in April, a senior US military officer said on Wednesday. The Caribbean country's main maritime terminal for import and export shipments was badly damaged in last month's quake, especially its south pier, initially blocking off a key entry point for urgently needed humanitarian supplies and imports.
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Divers from the US Navy and other countries have been working for weeks on repairs to clear debris and wreckage from blocked channels and berths, and contractors brought in floating piers to help unload containers. "We've had several days where we've delivered 600 containers in a single day, so their capacity is ahead of where they were before the earthquake," said Major General Daniel Allyn, deputy commander of the US military Joint Task Force participating in the international relief effort in Haiti.
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This compared to the 200-250 containers the port was handling a month ago, following the disaster.
Repairing the main seaport was seen as a critical step to bring in sufficient volumes of humanitarian supplies and equipment needed to help the victims of the quake, which may have killed up to 300,000 people, according to the Haitian government. More than a million people were left homeless and in need of assistance.
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"The really good news story is that the Haitians are running port operations at Port-au-Prince, from the ship's pilotage to the offloading of the ships," Allyn told Reuters. He said the majority of incoming port traffic in the last week had been commercial cargo, while humanitarian aid cargo had tapered off from previous levels. Off Port-au-Prince, both warships and commercial container ships could be seen.
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"I think that's a sign that we're past the immediate emergency response window and we're sort of in that phase in between, when the reconstruction cargo starts coming ashore in large numbers," the US general said. He expected repairs on the south pier, the port's primary pier before the quake, to be completed about April 10.
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Allyn was speaking aboard the USS Carter Hall, a US amphibious warship which played a key role in putting ashore US Marines and heavy earth-moving equipment west of Port-au-Prince in the days following the Jan. 12 earthquake.
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After President Barack Obama mobilized US armed forces to assist the Haiti relief effort, US military personnel have carried out a wide variety of roles, ranging from protecting aid distribution and patrolling dangerous slums, to providing medical services and assisting with the complex planning and logistics of the humanitarian operation. From a peak at one point of about 22,000 US military personnel involved in the Haiti operation, Allyn said the US presence was being adjusted according to the needs of the Haitian government and its relief partners.
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"Our footprint is down in the 6,000 range ashore and about 6,000 afloat and obviously we'll continue to adjust that as the mission requires as we go forward," he said. "We will remain committed as long as we are needed, as the president of the United States has announced," he added.
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The USS Carter Hall, stationed off the coast near Petit Goave and Grand Goave, was pulling back and reloading heavy equipment and other vehicles which had been used to clear debris and assist survivors in Haiti's western region.

The Assistant Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), Ambassador Albert Ramdin, announced Wednesday that the hemispheric organization will host a meeting of the Haitian Diaspora March 21-23 at OAS headquarters in Washington, DC. The meeting will promote dialogue on the rebuilding of Haiti in preparation for the March 31st international donor conference to be hosted by the United Nations in New York.
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This effort by the OAS, the Haitian authorities and the Haitian Diaspora to stimulate the participation of Haitian expatriates in the reconstruction of Haiti is a significant step toward the development of a broader plan of assistance in rebuilding the earthquake-devastated nation.
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Ramdin, who also chairs the OAS Group of Friends of Haiti, stressed “the importance of being inclusive as we prepare for the international donor conference and provide an opportunity for the Haitian Diaspora in the USA, Canada, France, and elsewhere to indicate in concrete terms how they can assist their fellow nationals in building a new future.”
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The OAS’s decision to facilitate this meeting signals the hemispheric organization’s continuing commitment to provide and coordinate international assistance to the people and government of Haiti following the January 12 earthquake. It also aims to promote dialogue on how best to help the Caribbean nation pave the road ahead to its recovery and development.

Caribbean Net News
1/25/2010
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TORONTO, Canada -- Two of the world's most highly-ranked resorts have pitched in to help earthquake survivors in Haiti. The stunning Jade Mountain, named the number one resort in the Caribbean and in the top three worldwide by Travel & Leisure magazine, and framed by the spectacular twin Pitons peaks of St Lucia, are contributing rooms to a Haiti fundraising benefit set for this Sunday, February 28 at the Lula Lounge at 7 p.m. (1585 Dundas St West) in Toronto.
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Jade Mountain Resort, overlooking St Lucia's twin Piton peaks Regarded as one of the most sought-after resorts on the planet, Jade Mountain is famed not only for its three-walled suites but also for its "green" construction which, at owner Nick Troubetzkoy's request, uses, among other things, recycled glass, plastic, wood and water.
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Troubetzkoy, a Canadian who was "green" before green was fashionable, personally supervised the felling of trees in Guyana for his hotel to ensure not only the best quality of wood, but also to determine that the trees felled would not adversely impact the rainforest ecosystem. Donating the rooms, some of which retail for over US$2,430 a night, Jade Mountain marketing manager Karolin Troubetzkoy, said "We can't just sit here in our splendid isolation while people of our region suffer.
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We have been looking for ways to help - and supporting the 'Haiti Carnival' in Toronto is a way we can contribute to the excellent work of people like Maria Noa Habchi plus Airline Ambassadors International and the Caribbean Media Exchange."
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Karolin and Nick Troubetzkoy are also putting up for auction in Toronto a vacation at their neighboring property, Anse Chastanet, which sits on 600 lush tropical acres. Listed as one of the most romantic hotels in the world, Britain's Esquire Magazine named Anse Chastanet, which features a room wrapped around a tree, one of the "Top 10 sexiest hotel rooms in the world."
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Underscoring the romantic atmosphere generated by the resort, on Monday March 1, ABC airs this season's finale of "The Bachelor: On the Wings of Love" from the Celestial Terrace of Jade Mountain. Karolin Troubetzkoy is getting in the mood of the hit show's stay at Jade Mountain and is offering an "Elope for Free" summer promotion "in honor of the Bachelor." Guests staying in one of the infinity pool sanctuaries can "take the plunge" with a free wedding if they stay a minimum of 5 nights between August 1 to September 30, 2010. That proposal is very hard to refuse with Jade's special summer rates and promotions.
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Maria Noa Habchi, organizer of the Haiti fundraiser this Sunday, delighted at the surprise offerings from two of the world's best hotels, said, "it's obvious the quality of these fabulous resorts emanates directly from the people who built and run them." One of the region's "friendliest" hotels, St Lucia's Coco Palm, favored by savvy travelers, has also stepped up to the plate to support the fundraiser, along with the lush and luxurious Radisson Aruba Resort, Casino & Spa, a sparkling oasis surrounded by fragrant gardens, exotic lagoons and cascading waterfalls. The Saint Lucia Tourist's Board's Canadian office will also be contributing to the Toronto gala.
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All proceeds from the event will support the work of Airline Ambassadors International which has delivered up to two million pounds of food, water, medicine, tents etc. and more than 600 doctors and nurses to Haiti. They are running the best public-private hospital in Haiti which is being positioned to become the leading teaching institution in the country for orthopedic after care, including amputations and re-amputations.

AFP
By Thony Belizaire
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WASHINGTON — Haiti's top reconstruction planning official owns part of the country's largest concrete company, which stands to reap major gains from the coming wave of international rebuilding aid. Patrick Delatour, Haiti's tourism minister, leads a commission that has been crafting plans to rebuild Port-au-Prince and other earthquake-devastated areas. He acknowledged he is 5% owner of GDG Concrete and Construction, which he started in 2000 with his cousin. The company, which calls itself Haiti's only supplier of ready-mixed concrete, helped construct the U.S. Embassy and several other major buildings in Port-au-Prince, it says on its website.
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"I own a 5% share of that particular company, and in the long term, when that company continues to grow, it is obvious that I will have my interest protected in there," Delatour said in an interview from Haiti. "It is normal. I don't see any conflict of interest." The company's website lists Delatour as vice president, but he said he took a leave from that post when he became tourism minister in 2006.
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That majority owner, Haitian-American Michael Gay, is Delatour's cousin, both say. GDG employs the minister's nephew, Bernard Delatour.
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A graduate of Columbia University, Delatour lost his elderly parents in the earthquake. He has been featured in several news stories since the quake as a spokesman for the government's reconstruction efforts, which he says could require $3 billion in international aid. His interest in the construction company has not previously been reported.
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Delatour said that he declared his ties to the company on a disclosure statement and that Haitian law allows his holdings. He compared his situation to that of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who owns a majority of Bloomberg, a media company.
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New York's Conflicts of Interest Board ruled that since Bloomberg's company does no business with the city, the mayor was not required to sell his shares. CDG has done work for the Haitian government, its website says, including the Department of Transportation and Public Works, Toussaint L'Ouverture International Airport and a government residential building.
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"That is three government projects among hundreds of private ones," Delatour said. Delatour also likened his situation to that of Dick Cheney. After Cheney became vice president in 2001, he retained stock options in Halliburton, an oil services company, and their value soared as the company became a major player in Iraq rebuilding. Before taking office, Cheney signed an agreement to donate the options profits to charity.
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"American Cabinet officers are not paid wages that are below the poverty level," Delatour said. "Haitian ministers make less than taxi drivers." Delatour should cut his ties to the company, said Robert Maguire, a Haiti expert at Trinity Washington University in the District of Columbia.
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"How appropriate is it, in the aftermath of this tragedy, when massive contracts may be left to this company and a minister may be in a position to reap personal benefits?" Maguire asked. Gay, who spent most of his career as an engineer in the USA, said the company is clearing rubble and doing rebuilding work for private companies. GDG is in position to win donor-funded rebuilding contracts, Gay said, but he fears that large international companies will get most of the work. "No American company is going to be giving you a subcontract just because you are the cousin of a minister," Delatour said. "They are not in the charity business."

2/24/2010
Miami Herald
by H. E. LUIZ INACIO LULA DA SILVA
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In 2004, a major challenge brought us to Haiti.
Brazil, with a U.N. mandate and welcomed by the Haitian government, arrived to help establish security and stability. Above all, our objective was to sow the seeds of a longstanding peace.
The U.N. Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) sought to create a new paradigm for peacekeeping missions.
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Our intent was to show that security can only be assured by achieving development and social justice.
The Jan. 12 earthquake struck a terrible blow: 220,000 lost their lives. Much of the physical infrastructure of Port-au-Prince was destroyed.
Houses, universities and hospitals vanished.
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A nation that previously endured precarious conditions now faces the challenge of struggling to survive. I will visit Haiti on Thursday. My presence in Port-au-Prince expresses Brazil's fraternal solidarity with the long-suffering people of Haiti. Brazil shares the pain of those who lost family members and their possessions, but we will also help to rebuild lives and homes. I will reaffirm Brazil's commitment to cooperate in order to once again lift up a country that has already demonstrated its determination to find its way back to development, political stability and democratic participation.
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Before the earthquake, the endemic violence in the Cité Soleil neighborhood had become a memory. Businesses were resuming production, agricultural recovery projects were advancing, schools were full of students with dreams for the future. No earthquake can shake our confidence in that promising future. Now we are taking in Haitian university students, so they can complete
their studies in Brazil. They will return to Haiti fully prepared to work on rebuilding their nation.
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Brazil and MINUSTAH must persevere because we know the Haitians themselves will not give up hope. We are certain of that after witnessing the countless demonstrations of heroism and solidarity in the wake of the earthquake. The sacrifice of our heroic soldiers who lost their lives reinforces our commitment to Haiti. We are inspired by the unyielding determination to survive by those
who endured days, or even weeks, under the rubble.
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They never ceased to believe in being rescued, nor did the rescuers lose hope, as they relentlessly dug, even with their own hands, in search of signs of life. With that same sense of urgency and dedication, Brazilian Air Force flights have been delivering humanitarian assistance to Haiti daily.
Brazilian ships weighed anchor immediately, transporting doctors, civilian volunteers and helicopters, as well as tons of food, medicine
and water. I dispatched three of my cabinet ministers to Port-au-Prince to oversee these actions. The total funding allocated by Brazil in emergency assistance to Haiti has now reached $210 million. We are also ramping up our presence, sending an additional 1,300 soldiers to strengthen MINUSTAH and assist in reconstruction.
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This is a joint national effort. Brazilian companies and representatives of civil society are also deeply engaged. Their work is inspired by the example set by Dr. Zilda Arns, the founder of the ``Pastoral da Criança,'' who, along with hundreds of
other Brazilians and foreigners who perished in Haiti, embody a model of love and devotion.
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At the Haiti Donors' Conference in March, we will have the opportunity to mobilize this renewed solidarity internationally. Brazil has redoubled its coordination with the world community to
ensure that its assistance arrives promptly to those who are most in need. Once the current emergency is behind us, Haiti will continue to
confront the challenge of creating productive capacity adequate to sustain the country's development.
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In order for Haiti to find new ways to develop its potential fully, we should avoid the proliferation of disconnected stand-alone projects that would fragment the country. We need long-term responses that will enable Haiti to implement, with
sovereign control, programs that are truly in its national interest. With this goal, Brazil conducted a viability study for a hydroelectric
power plant project that will supply water and energy for the reconstruction of Haiti. We are prepared to contribute financially to
this project. Toward the same end, an emergency meeting of the South American Union
of Nations, held in Quito with the participation of Haitian President René Préval, decided to strengthen regional solidarity with Haiti.
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We invite Haiti's principal trading partners to give privileged access to exports of Haitian manufactured products. We call on the business community and investors to resume their
investment plans for Haiti. For this purpose, it is essential that we all grant access to our
markets for Haitian goods. I am not afraid to say that the destruction caused by the earthquake
was exacerbated by the international community's longstanding lack of engagement in Haiti.
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I am certain, however, that the international community also needs Haiti. Our planet is undergoing an unprecedented crisis. We now face the
imperative of finding genuinely global solutions to the threats we have in common. The world yearns for examples from people -- such as the Haitians --
with a strong determination to live and the readiness to confront adversities with a spirit of serenity and generosity. A popular Haitian saying captures this spirit perfectly: ``The victory
belongs to those who perform miracles, not to those who wait for them to occur.''
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We need to see Haiti return to being the nation that inspired generations and gave birth to heroes, such as Tousaint L'Ouverture, who led Haiti to independence and empowered peoples around the world.
Haiti is now rising up to fulfill its destiny. Its people and government have already shown us that they will not succumb to powerlessness and fatalism.
The international community now has both the opportunity and the duty to assist them in performing this miracle. Without losing sight of
what is truly essential, it is worth noting that the Haitian people continue to recognize their legitimately elected officials as the true
leaders for the reconstruction of their country.
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Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is president of Brazil

The Boston Globe
By Frank Bajak
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Police padlocked the main gate to the hillside camp, where about 2,500 homeless people live under bedsheets and tarpaulins propped on sticks on the sloping hill leading to the office. Stinking garbage with swarms of flies was being allowed to pile up, and portable latrines were filled, camp residents complained.
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Witnesses said police beat 22-year-old Dalida Jeanty after she picked up a broom to sweep around her tent. “They called her, and she did not come, so they beat her,’’ said her cousin, Alix Jeanty.
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He was among the friends and relatives who carried the woman down the hill, where UN peacekeepers from Chile and India arranged for her to be taken to the hospital. A police officer guarding the gate to the prime minister’s office refused to give his name or comment on the alleged beating.
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Nor would he discuss accusations they have been turning away trucks carrying food and water for the past 10 days. Calls to the Information Ministry yesterday were unanswered, as was an e-mail to the prime minister’s chief aide. We’ve been here for a month, and we were being treated well, but for the past two weeks we have been mistreated,’’ said Markinson Midey, a 22-year-old student. “Anytime they bring food or water, the police make the trucks leave.’’
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Midey and other residents, some of them shouting angrily and banging pans when they saw reporters, said they believe the government wants to make the camp conditions so bad that people will be forced to leave, even though they have nowhere else to go.
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After reporters arrived, police opened the gate they had locked. Many government buildings were damaged in the Jan. 12 quake, and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive is working out of the same office as President Rene Preval at a temporary government headquarters set up in the headquarters of the judicial police, near the airport.

Associated Press
By FRANK BAJAK
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Homeless victims of Haiti's earthquake said Monday that police are halting deliveries of food and water to try to force them to leave their camp on the grounds of the prime minister's office.
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Police padlocked the main gate to the hillside camp, where about 2,500 homeless people live under bed sheets and tarps propped on sticks on the sloping hill leading to the office. Stinking garbage with swarms of flies was being allowed to pile up and portable latrines were filled, camp residents complained.
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Witnesses said police beat 22-year-old Dalida Jeanty after she picked up a broom to sweep around her tent. "They called her and she did not come so they beat her," said her cousin, Alix Jeanty.
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He was among the friends and relatives who carried the woman down the hill, where U.N. peacekeepers from Chile and India arranged for her to be taken to the hospital. A police officer guarding the gate to the prime minister's office refused to give his name or comment on the alleged beating. Nor would he discuss accusations they have been turning away trucks carrying food and water for the past 10 days.
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Calls to the Information Ministry on Monday were unanswered, as was an e-mail to the prime minister's chief aide. "We've been here for a month and we were being treated well, but for the past two weeks we have been mistreated," said Markinson Midey, a 22-year-old student. "Anytime they bring food or water, the police make the trucks leave."
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Midey and other residents, some of them shouting angrily and banging pans when they saw reporters, said they believe the government wants to make the camp conditions so bad that people will be forced to leave, even though they have nowhere else to go.
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After reporters arrived, police opened the gate they'd locked. Many government buildings were damaged in the Jan. 12 quake and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive is working out of the same office as President Rene Preval at a temporary government headquarters set up in the headquarters of the judicial police, near the airport.
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The Jan. 12 earthquake killed about 200,000 people and left 1.2 million homeless, according to the government. More than half a million people fled devastated Port-au-Prince, but 700,000 are living in every available piece of open land, from public squares and school yards to sidewalks, their only protection makeshift tents of sheets propped up by sticks. There has been no evidence of any concerted government policy to forcibly remove the homeless from the many spontaneous settlements, however authorities have made it clear they plan to resettle the refugees as soon as more permanent camps can be established outside town.
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Many inhabitants of the capital's miserable tent camps got soaked by an overnight downpour. Doctors say many children - half the population of Haiti is under 15 years - are suffering from colds, coughs and diarrhea. Bellerive told The Associated Press last week that the government will be forced to appropriate private land to build better tent camps with tarpaulins.
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But aid agencies taking part in a massive international effort to help victims say the government is dragging its feet even as the rainy season approaches and the need to get people out of congested camps that pose health risks and under proper cover becomes more urgent.

By IANTHE JEANNE DUGAN
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CORPORANT, Haiti—An agricultural program that helped inch people out of poverty and hunger in this village about 25 miles north of Port-au-Prince is racing to feed thousands who flocked here after the earthquake. The increased role of the program, called Zanmi Agrikol, shows the catastrophe's effects on the countryside, where an estimated half-million people fled from the capital. Since the mid-January disaster, the Haitian government has been trying to figure out how to provide food and jobs in rural areas neglected for decades. Zanmi Agrikol—which means "Partners in Agriculture" in Creole—is one model of how the agricultural industry and cottage businesses will help meet the challenge.
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"Since this business started, we have been able to buy food and send our son to school," St. Jean Nadine Wadley said recently, as she walked home with her husband and son, after washing clothes and bathing in a nearby river. Through Zanmi Agrikol, the Wadleys and 240 other families receive seeds, farming equipment as well as trees for reforestation and food, including mango, citrus and banana trees. They are taught techniques, such as planting, composting and terracing sloped yards. As a result, most families here are cultivating tiny plots of land at home, so they can grow their own food and sell a small surplus.
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Now, with refugees having more than doubled the size of the village, organizers and residents are racing to expand the program. "Now we have ten new people in our house. And we don't have enough food," Mrs. Wadley says. In Haiti, which now imports 80% of its food, the government has focused development on the capital and not rural areas in the surrounding départements. Nearly all government services, police and schools were concentrated in the crowded capital, Port-au-Prince.
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The earthquake changed this dynamic in 30 seconds. Since then, more than 160,000 people went to the département of Artibonite. An estimated 6,000 went to Grand-Anse. And at least 9,000 journeyed to the Central Plateau, where Corporant is located.
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This rare reverse urban migration is creating a crisis in rural areas that were relatively stable immediately after the earthquake. Many people are looking to agriculture to help solve the problem, though most caution that Haiti needs far more than agricultural programs to turn the country around.
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"It's a very dangerous situation," says Johanna Mendelson Forman, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "There is an urgency to take a serious look at expanding agricultural projects that had been in the works. The country needs to grow its own food. But it is not going to solve all the economic and socioeconomic issues."
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In Corporant, as many as 20 additional people have moved into each home, typically one or two-bedroom huts with mud floors, says Gillaine Warne, an Australian-born horticulturalist who runs Zanmi Agrikol. Ms. Warne recently called an emergency meeting with 27 Haitians—agronomists, technicians, nursery men, tractor drivers, and gardeners—on the 80-acre farm where Zanmi Agrikol grows peanuts and other crops for a local nutrition program. They put together a long list of vegetables—such as Haitian spinach, eggplant, sweet potatoes, beans, corn and peanuts—that will grow quickly, between planting seasons, and can be harvested in three months.
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"This will be the 'stop gap' food until the real harvest comes in later," Ms. Warne said. The program will then identify another 2,000 families to become part of the program. Ultimately, she aims to help more than 5,000 families. Ms. Warne, who started Zanmi Agrikol in 2004, splits her time between Haiti and Greenville, S.C. Funding for the program comes from Partners in Health, a Boston-based medical and social services organization that operates clinics and hospitals in Haiti, as well as an Episcopal church in South Carolina, and Rotary International.
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The goal is to make this region self-sufficient—"to move away from dependency on handouts," Ms. Warne said. "This is a rural country, and now it is coming back to its roots." The Haitian government and a number of private organizations have stepped up efforts to revive the farming industry. One hurdle is Haiti's lack of trees—98% of the country was deforested, first to pay off its debt to France in exchange for liberation in 1804 and later to supply energy. Deforestation has caused soil erosion, making much of the farmland infertile.
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Even before the earthquake, more than half of Haiti's population was undernourished. Now, food prices are too high for many people. For example, the price of a 55-pound bag of rice, rose after the quake by roughly 40% to about $42, said Louise Ivers, a physician working for Partners in Health in Port-au-Prince. Haiti's agriculture sector accounts for 60% of the country's annual economic output, but is still sclerotic. Most land is broken into small and disorganized holdings. Haitian farmers have little access to capital, modern machinery, and marketing muscle. As a result, sectors such as the fruit industry have lagged behind those of the neighboring Dominican Republic.
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Johnny Celestin, a Haitian native who works for the Atlantic Philanthropies, a non-profit in New York, is working with the National Association of Fruit Processors, which provides technical assistance to Haitian fruit processors. They help maintain quality, round up equipment such as mills, get labels, and buy jars less expensively in bulk.
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He is creating a fund to provide low-interest loans to farmers. "My investment would simply get recycled to other groups until there is a critical mass," he says. At Zanmi Agrikol, the new crops would be brought to market and sold for low prices. "It is hard to pick who to distribute food to," Ms. Warne says. "So we will make it available for prices they can afford."
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Among those benefiting from the program is Gaspard Benjamin, who lives with 15 relatives in Corporant, where his father works on the Zanmi Agrikol farm. Thanks to the program, the family has been able to build a roof on their house and eat balanced meals.
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Mr. Benjamin says the program has taken on urgency now that eight relatives displaced by the earthquake have moved in, including a brother who was studying in Port-au-Prince to be an electrician until the college collapsed in the catastrophe.
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"I have many friends who this program has helped," says Fereste Sonneus, the program's chief agronomist. "Many of these people don't have an education."

IOM is supporting the Haitian Government in a new surge to register people displaced by the earthquake and to identify their home areas. The registration is part of a broader strategy to address the issue of congested temporary settlements throughout the capital, Port-au-Prince. The objective is to enable as many people as possible to return to their places of origin.
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The exercise will focus on priority temporary settlements, which have been identified as suffering from over-crowding. It will begin in the Champ de Mars settlement, a large public park which faces Haiti ’s destroyed presidential palace.
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Champ de Mars is currently home to an estimated 16,000 people, many living in shelters made from plastic sheeting and local materials. They have access to water and latrines, but camp management experts warn that the situation is unsustainable in the long term. Today, IOM teams will fan out through the Champ de Mars and distribute color-coded tokens, signifying age bracket, to every resident.
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Heads of families will be asked to go to a series of registration points with their tokens on Wednesday, where they will provide their family details and home address, as well as details of whether they were owners or tenants. They will also be issued with a temporary identification card. The ID cards are purely for denoting place of origin and do not imply any other entitlement at this stage.
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This latest strategic surge reflects a sense of urgency ahead of Haiti ’s rainy season, which begins in a few weeks. The goal is to find shelter solutions for as many Haitians as possible, focusing upon priority areas, before the rains begin. Solutions include:
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1) Where possible, the government and partners will enable displaced people to return home and rebuild.
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2) People should seek shelter in the premises of a host family, such as relatives or friends.
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3) If neither of the above is possible, the government and its partners will plan and sanitize the largest ad hoc settlements where people have gathered since the earthquake.
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4) Where none of these alternative options are possible, IOM will support the government in the establishment of new planned sites.
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To date, 415 spontaneous sites with a total population of 551,140 individuals (110,285 families) have been identified in the following communes: Bel Air, Bourdon, Carrefour, Cite Soleil, Croix des Bouquets, Delmas, Deprez, Grand Goave, Gressier, Kenscoff, Lasile, Leogane, Nazon, Petionville, Port-au- Prince and Tabarre.
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This represents an increase of 84 sites since the last report, as identification is progressing. In addition, nine sites with a total population of 48,074 individuals or 9,715 families have been identified and designated by the government as transitional settlements sites.
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Out of the total 415 sites, 21 sites have been prioritized for decongestion. The total population in those sites is 217,960 individuals and 44, 470 families, which is about half the size of the population in all the spontaneous sites identified so far.
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In Leogane, 83 sites have been identified, with a total population of some 51,095 individuals (9,679 families). In Jacmel, approximately 80,000 families are living without shelter on four large sites, as well as many smaller ones. In Petit Goave, 98,989 displaced people are living in 367 sites. A further 88 sites have been identified in Grand Goave.
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For more information, please contact Mark Turner at IOM Port-au-Prince , Tel. 509 3643 79 14. Email mturner@iom.int or Jean-Philippe Chauzy, Tel. 41 22 7179361. Email pchauzy@iom.int

By Henri E. Cauvin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 22, 2010
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PETIONVILLE, HAITI -- Here on the hills above Port-au-Prince, a vision for a very different capital city is taking shape. n a loft of architectural offices, a map of greater Port-au-Prince promises a reordering of the country's historic capital, overtaken long ago by sprawl and slums and struck last month by a cataclysmic earthquake.
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"Expressway" is etched along the city's winding seaboard. "New Housing Area" is written over a swath of undeveloped land far from the detritus of downtown. And "Debris" is written in several spots where it is to be put to constructive use.
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Presiding over the map, and over the massive reconstruction effort that will define the country for generations, is a Haitian-born Howard University graduate who serves as Haiti's tourism minister. Working out of spare space far from his destroyed downtown offices, Patrick Delatour must sell a future for Haiti to his own people and an audience of international donors, who will help fund an urban rebirth starting from virtually zero.
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"This," he said, looking out the window as his police driver navigated the swells of a ramshackle back alley, "is urban development without urbanism, architecture without architects, engineering without engineers." Although the international response to the Jan. 12 earthquake was swift, the international role in reconstruction is still taking shape, slowed by the scale of the humanitarian crisis and freighted by the often prickly relationship between the Western hemisphere's poorest country and the foreign actors who have loomed so large in its history.
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The earthquake has spurred talk of remaking not only the capital and the country, but those complicated ties between Haiti and the rest of the world. Foreign governments, concerned about corruption, have long channeled much of their aid through nongovernmental organizations. That arrangement, some Haitians say, has stunted the Haitian government's own development and given the NGOs an outsize role that comes with little accountability for the country's persistent poverty.
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Since the earthquake, foreign government and international organizations have been trying to send a different message, noting, at almost every opportunity, the role that the Haitian government has played in the rescue and relief operations and the leading role that it will play in the reconstruction of the country. Next month in New York, the international community's commitment to Haiti's reconstruction will face its first big test. At a meeting of donor nations and international organizations, the Haitian government is to present its preliminary reconstruction plan, which it hopes will set the stage for a large and lasting commitment by the rest of the world.
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Even before he knows precisely what sort of help his country will receive, Delatour has been talking to, among others, the French government and a number of American universities about providing technical assistance in planning and other disciplines critical to this early phase of the reconstruction effort.
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Still, he said, Haiti's reconstruction must be shaped by the Haitian government and the Haitian people. "I'm confident in Haiti's ability to offer the leadership that is necessary." Before the earthquake, about a quarter of Haiti's nearly 10 million people lived in and around Port-au-Prince, many of them in dozens of slums that dot the capital region.
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But the problems that have imperiled Port-au-Prince have some of their roots in distant, desperate corners of Haiti that for years have sent so many of their young people to the big city in search of work. As the country's leaders cast the earthquake as an opportunity to remake the capital, the outcome of their efforts could turn as much on creating jobs in agriculture and tourism as drawing up a charming esplanade and a bigger airport for Port-au-Prince.
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So it is that an architect and preservationist who has been championing the promise of tourism in places like Labadee and Fort Liberte, far from the capital, has emerged as a key government voice on the rebuilding of Port-au-Prince and the remaking of Haiti. In a post that promises plentiful contact with the U.S. government, Delatour is no stranger to Washington. As a teenager, he moved to the District, where he finished high school at Coolidge Senior High before studying architecture at Howard. He returned to Haiti for a time before studying historic preservation at Columbia University, where he received a master's degree. For the past three decades, he has worked in the private and public sectors in Haiti.
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The commission that Delatour leads is drawing on architects, planners, bankers and others from the private and public sectors to work on setting up short-term shelter, clearing the wreckage and creating a new urban model. Among those who have been enlisted is Leslie Voltaire, an influential figure in Haitian politics who has a master's degree in city planning from Cornell University and is spearheading the commission's urban planning effort. As a veteran international emissary, Voltaire, even more than Delatour, brings to the job a familiarity with the United States and other foreign stakeholders.
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The office here in Petionville is not the war-room environment one might expect. There are no whiteboards full of color-coded task lists. There are no PowerPoint presentations or overhead projectors. And there is no cacophony of office conversation -- only the din of the street market below. From behind a big desk, Delatour juggles a pair of BlackBerry devices and confers with a small cast of aides huddled around a circular table. They are discussing a February deadline for a report for the country's top officials. Everyone is using small notepads until architect Henry Robert Jolibois arrives with his silver MacBook.
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On this afternoon at least, there is no talk of grand visions and sweeping changes. The conversations are more bureaucratic. At one point, the blizzard in Washington comes up. A World Bank contractor in Washington who is supposed to travel to Haiti to help organize its needs assessment has been stranded by a snowstorm that seems almost unfathomable here in the Haiti's stultifying heat.
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But to talk to Delatour and to economists and historians and other intellectuals, a vision is emerging of a city that while perhaps still the capital would no longer plays the central role that led one Haitian historian to call it the Republic of Port-au-Prince. In the rebuilt Haiti they envision, government would be decentralized, with many state functions and jobs moved outside of Port-au-Prince. Tourism would be built up in the provinces. Agriculture would be bolstered. And industry, which already has a presence in textiles, would be given the incentives to capitalize on the prospect of more tourists and more agricultural products.
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On the streets of the city, where the ordinary people hardest hit by the quake come and go, little is known about the government's plans. Asking about expressways and esplanades elicits quizzical looks. For most people here, before and especially since the quake, the concerns are simply too day-to-day to be indulging in fanciful conversations.
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"The first thing would be clean the streets," Sabine Desgraviers, 26, said last week as she walked near the university hospital downtown. She was also concerned about the lack of jobs and reliable public transportation. But the earthquake had hardly given her hope that anything was going to change. "I don't see anything that can fix the country anymore," she said. "Only God can fix the country."

Kaiser Family Foundation
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The major earthquake in January in Haiti could have killed as many as 300,000 people, an estimate that includes bodies buried in the rubble, Haitian President Rene Preval said on Sunday at a meeting of Latin American and Caribbean leaders in Mexico, Reuters reports.
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"More than 200,000 bodies were collected on the streets without counting those that are still under the rubble," Preval said. "We might reach 300,000 people" (Rosenberg, 2/22). "Speaking after arriving in Mexico for regional meetings that will include discussion of Haitian aid needs, Preval gave no indication of how he reached the figure," the Associated Press/Washington Post writes. The government's previous estimates put the death toll between 170,000 and 230,000 (2/21).
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News outlets examined the ongoing health challenges in Haiti. The Wall Street Journal examines how poor housing conditions are fueling the spread of diseases. "Health-care experts say conditions in the crowded tent communities that sprang up after the Jan. 12 disaster are exacerbating cases of diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria. When the rainy season begins in May, those types of illnesses will grow more quickly. Weather is a fresh concern, joining disease, security, food, overcrowding and other woes for the makeshift communities," the newspaper writes.
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The article looks at one of the worst hit areas and includes quotes from people involved with aid on the ground. The article also notes that "[a] number of preventive interventions are under way, such as a vaccination campaign by the Haitian government. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also is compiling an epidemiology report that will track occurrences of unusual events in the health field and regularly publish alerts of emerging trends" (Luhnow/Dugan, 2/19).
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A lack of sanitation and ways to deal with human waste could spread diseases and lead to "major disease outbreaks, including cholera," the New York Times reports. "Some American and Haitian public health specialists here consider the diseases stemming from the buildup of human waste in the camps as possibly the most pressing health threat in the city. Doctors are already seeing a spike in illnesses like typhoid and shigellosis, which arise from contaminated food or water." The article also reports on how aid groups are trying to address the problems (Romero, 2/19).
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The Boston Globe reports that as the rainy season draws near, "[a]id workers are warning that 1.2 million people left homeless by the powerful Jan. 12 quake still lack basic shelter and latrines, putting them at high risk of flash floods, mudslides, and diseases such as typhoid and malaria. ... After the rain, Haiti will face new problems, as puddles become breeding grounds for mosquitoes that spread malaria, dengue fever, and other illnesses, said [Robert] Tauxe, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Also, clean water and sanitation are major concerns. If safe drinking water and latrines are unavailable, people could be exposed to fecal-contaminated water and contract diseases such as dysentery, hepatitis A, or typhoid, he said" (Sacchetti, 2/20).

By Beverly Bell
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"Collapsed house, no number" is an old expression that Haitians uses to indicate that their flimsy homes of sticks-and-mud or shoddy cement blocks have finally fallen apart. Today that expression could serve as the motto for the capitol city of Port-au-Prince. Take Helia Lajeunesse, an unemployed children's rights activist. When her little house on the side of a gaping green sewer in the Martissant slum collapsed in the earthquake, she moved herself and three of her surviving children to the cement courtyard of nearby St. Bernadette Church. Within the church gates, Helia and her family spend their nights with at least 700 others. "Here is where we go when it rains,"she said, pointing to an outer church wall. "We stand here all night long. And here's where I keep my stuff. This neighbor watches it for me." She gestured to a woman sitting beside a pile of bundles wrapped in sheets. "And here's where we wash," indicating a thin rivulet of water running down a wide crack in the sidewalk. "Yes, really. Me and the kids. Where else are we going to get water?"
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Members of the middle and upper classes who lost their homes in what people here call 'the event' typically moved in with friends or relatives with space to spare, or rented an apartment or hotel room. The homes of the poor collapsed in far higher percentages, both because of the inferior construction of the houses and their placement on the sides of ravines and other insecure spots; in those cases, few had a place to turn for substitute shelter. Port-au-Prince has thus become a city of refugee camps. In most open spaces - an out-of-business Hyundai dealership, the landing strip of the old airport, a rare city park, the edges of slums, the courtyards of schools - the displaced have spontaneously created their own camps. Estimates of the numbers of amps and their residents differ greatly.
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International aid agencies talk about their tent distribution program, ut it is not obvious where the programs are in operation. Isolated Coleman camping tents rest amidst lean-to's on streets throughout town, making roads so narrow that cars can barely pass. This observer has seen tents in groups of several dozen only a handful of times. In these cases, the plastic walls are printed variously with UNICEF, Canada, the People's Republic of China, the Buddhists of Taiwan.
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Many humanitarian aid tents go to people with connections. For those not well enough networked, they can buy one in the black market which has sprung up around the commodity. "I got this for $110," Mezilla Youyoute explained as she showed off an octagonal blue-and-white tent nestled amidst a maze of slapped-up shelters. A French man she knew donated the money for her purchase. "Pretty good price, huh?" In today's Haiti, tents are luxury living. The dominant form of shelter is a bedsheet attached atop and around four sticks, most of those sticks smaller than a woman's wrist. Those
better-off use a tarp for a roof. Some enterprising builders have made collage walls of cardboard, strips of tin, broken 2x4's, and foam – and in one case, a U.S. flag. But more often it's bedsheets, no floor. Or, as in Helia's case in the church yard, there is no shelter at all, nothing but a slab of cement under the body.
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And now the rains have arrived in Port-au-Prince. They come every few nights and crash for hours with gale force. Until the climate change of recent years, it rained annually between May and October, but now the season has become unpredictable. When it rains, those living on the streets stand or sit up all night long. The shacks and lean-to's in the no-address camps are often no wider apart than a human body, and some of the paths are muddy with eater or sewerage. The stench of human waste is strong. Flies, mosquitoes, and trash abound.
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Always more vulnerable in conditions of crisis, women in these outdoor spaces are enduring extreme levels of violence, both rapes and beatings, according to grassroots advocates. Cassandre St. Vil's analysis is that rape might have been just as prevalent before the earthquake had the rapists had the easy access to their prey they have today, with tens of thousands of girls and women sleeping in the streets. A newly homeless 18-year-old who speaks softly with downcast eyes, Cassandre was raped by four men. "Raped and raped and raped," she said. She could not find any police then, and has no idea where to file a complaint now. The entire justice system, weak before January 12,appears nonexistent to most citizens' eyes now.
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Despite the conditions, life is busily underway in the refugee camps. A glance around one during an afternoon walk revealed: A baby taking her first steps. Two men in underwear bathing with buckets in a trash-strewn, empty fountain. A girl running, laughing, down the sidewalk pushing an older boy in a wheelbarrow, until she tripped and dumped him. A teenage girl scrubbing an umbrella in a bucket. A man and his son hammering 2x2 panels of rusted metal together to form their new house. A girl combing another's hair. A woman filling tin bowls with food for her children. Barefoot boys pulling with strings trucks they've fashioned from tin cans. A baby sleeping on a sheet, her body thickly surrounded by flies. A small group listening to a static-y radio emission. A boy with his foot in a shoddy cast sitting quietly, alone. A toddler walking down a path carrying a quart-sized plastic bucket filled with garbage; his mother walking behind him carrying a five-gallon plastic bucket filled with garbage.
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People in the camps report that no one has told them what their fates may be. A rumor has gone around that those in public spaces will be evicted and sent to the town of Croix des Bouquets soon. Another rumor is that all the camps are going to be going to concentrated into a few, each containing 50,000 to 100,000 people. "They'll just recreate the slums," commented one woman. The mayor of Delmas declared over the radio that people must vacate school yards by the end of January. "Just watch him try to get them out," someone remarked.
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Soldiers with weapons appear at random times and in random neighborhoods to distribute rice. In those instances, word spreads quickly on the streets and people run to line up. "Why can't they tell us when they're coming?" said a man residing in one camp on a traffic-clogged thoroughfare. "We make schedules. Why can't they?" For those who have lost everything and thus lack stoves, cooking the rice often proves impossible. Some of this group line up anyway, for they can sell the rice and use the money to buy food they can eat.
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In some larger camps, like those surrounding the ruined National Palace, the UN and other international agencies have brought in non-potable water for washing. At times aid workers bring in free drinking water, though some who have drunk it claim it have them diarrhea. Excluding this water, the erratic hand-outs of uncooked rice, those sparsely distributed tents, and new clinics established by groups like Doctors without Borders and Partners in Health, homeless citizens report receiving no goods, services, or information. The survivors are left to their own devices to find drinking water, bathing water, bathroom systems, food, cooking systems, electricity for charging cell phones, psychological care, and security. This is in a context in which most refugees lost not only everything they owned, but also their cache of merchandise to sell on the streets in the informal economy, and often their jobs; money to obtain necessities is in extremely short
supply.
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In one camp, a visitor with no official function asked, "Who all has come to check on you?" A resident replied, "You." Members of some camps have organized themselves to watch over each other. In some cases, elected mayors and vice-mayors have created volunteer teams to provide security for the area and to seek outside aid interventions. Some have hammered signs stating their needs on telephone poles, like "Camp Africa. Need: food, water, medicines, tents." In at least one camp, residents have taken tallies of the number of pregnant women, babies, sick people, and children living there, and try to ensure that the medical needs of all are met. In another, a grassroots women's group is circulating 'know your rights' tracts to women, and intervening in cases of violence. Still other camps have organized informal education programs for the children, since all schools except a very few private ones are closed.
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Laurent Manel, a community organizer who lost everything except his family, said, "The government has primary responsibility for us. They're the ones who take our taxes. But they're totally irresponsible. They didn't even take responsibility for getting people out from under crushed buildings. We did that with our own fingers."
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Wearing clothes that she said were the only thing she was left with after her house turned to rubble, Marjorie Dupervil said, "I don't expect anything from the state. There is no state." Some refugees amuse themselves by quoting to each other one of the few public comments that President Rene Preval made in the days following the earthquake: "I lost my palace." The statute of limitations on patience may be running out. "Haitians aren't zombies," Josette Perard of the Lambi Fund said. Protests against the government have commenced. A large one occurred last week in front of a police headquarters, with people denouncing the absence of government response and the way that aid is being distributed.
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Speakers shouted over microphones that housing, food, medical care, and work were their rights. Bill Clinton's visit on on February 5 met with demonstrators demanding aid and rights, as did Nicolas Sarkozy's visit on February 17. Protesters with similar messages take to the streets in small groups on a near-daily basis. "The government had better watch out," said Carolle Pierre-Paul Jacob of Solidarity Among Haitian Women. "The camps could quickly become sites of resistance."

2/20/2010
AFP
By M.J. Smith
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Haitians arrived Friday on the first commercial flight into their country since last month's earthquake, desperately hoping to find family members alive and their homes still standing.
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"I want to see my wife," said Jean Felix as he waited to board the plane before takeoff in Miami.
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"She's living in the street and she's told me by phone that we lost everything... I'm going there with my heart broken." One of the pilots of an American Airlines flight coming from Miami, Florida waves a Haitian flag from the cockpit window upon arrival to Port-au-Prince's international airport.
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The American Airlines plane touched down in Port-au-Prince to a warm welcome after leaving from Miami, but many passengers carried a heavy emotional load.
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The flight came to a stop at the terminal with 132 passengers onboard. A pilot waved a Haitian flag from the cockpit window. A band playing Creole music in the terminal greeted their arrival -- a common practice prior to the devastating quake -- but the passengers were bussed to a separate building to pass through immigration and customs controls because of damage to the airport.
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Amid the small celebration, travelers were anxious to visit family members who survived and the graves of those who did not. Some wondered about how their own homes had fared in the disaster. Marie Ange Levasseur, 45, began to cry as she spoke of how her cousin, who died in the quake, used to greet her at the airport when she would visit.
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Levasseur now lives in Miami but still has family in Haiti. "The first destination I want them to take me to is my cousin's grave," she said as she waited in line for immigration. "It's very sad, this trip. I've never had such a sad trip like that."
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The capital's airport has been an aid lifeline for the devastated country in the wake of the January 12 earthquake that killed more than 217,000 people and left over a million homeless. Officials said resuming commercial traffic would inject crucial revenue into Haiti's crippled government.
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But for Haitians, it was simply a way of finding out who was still alive. "I don't have news from my sons nor from my brothers," said Maurice Gernier, before boarding in Miami. "I don't know anything, nothing about anybody... I need to go and see what happened." Jean Eddy Porche, 49, who also lives in Miami, arrived in Port-au-Prince with his wife to check on family members and the house he still owns here. He had been told it was damaged and was not sure whether it could be repaired.
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Homes belonging to his mother and sister were completely destroyed. "I have friends who are dead, cousins," said Porche, adding that he felt "completely traumatized" upon arrival.
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Outside the Port-au-Prince airport, family members waited under the sun behind yellow caution tape for the passengers to emerge. Some embraced as they saw each other, while others seemed weary and simply turned and walked down the street together.
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Since the earthquake, the country's largest commercial airport has been transformed into a makeshift military base, with over a hundred armed forces and UN flights passing through each day when traffic was at its peak. Thousands of tonnes of food and medical aid, along with disaster relief personnel have poured into Haiti via the hub, which at times has been overwhelmed, forcing officials to turn away some aircraft.
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US embassy spokeswomen Elizabeth Detmeister said the resumption of commercial routes meant that US evacuation flights would now be phased out. American Airlines will offer two flights a day from Miami and one from nearby Fort Lauderdale. A flight from New York's JFK International Airport will operate four times a week, the airline said.
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From March 12, the airline's American Eagle service will launch a new daily route to Haiti from Puerto Rico, and two flights through Santo Domingo and Santiago in the neighboring Dominican Republic.

2/10/2010
By Te-Ping Chen
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As efforts in Haiti turn from relief to recovery, Change.org sits down to talk with Karl Hofmann, President and CEO of Population Services International (PSI). A global health organization that works to harness market-driven solutions in the fight to combat issues from malaria to HIV, PSI has been working on the ground in Haiti for 20 years. Hofmann spoke with Change.org about access to clean water in Haiti, lessons learned and the success stories they have seen:
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PSI's top priority in Haiti has been helping secure access to clean water. What did access look like prior to the quake, and what strategies are you using now?
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Access to water has been our priority for awhile now, though we've also been doing HIV work with condoms for many years and malaria work. Even prior to the quake, water access was horrible -- really appalling, especially for kids. Right now, we're using a chlorinated water solution, sold in small bottles, which can be used to treat household water. There's also a Proctor and Gamble product that we've used in Haiti, PUR, which you dissolve into water and stir. Since people are probably going to be living in refugee-like settings or camps for awhile, that's where this sort of solution can be really helpful.
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In past weeks, commentators have been weighing in about the challenges of aid in Haiti. PSI has worked in Haiti for 20 years on a range of issues --what are the success stories you'd tell?
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We've been using a companion product to oral rehydration salt (ORS) for awhile [to help treat dehydration]. All our products in Haiti haven't been donor-funded for awhile, so we sell it as a cost-recovery product. It's a success that we've gotten our ORS product to the point that there's enough commercial infrastructure to carry it. Mothers in Haiti are willing to pay a cost to keep the product in the market, and that's a development success for us. As you know, ORS is a miracle product that happens to suffer from not being very sexy, in terms of funders, but we are passionate about it everywhere we can use it.
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The lesson we take from Haiti is that marketing can be a very powerful way to ensure increased use of a lifesaving product. There doesn't have to be a negative or positive price attached to a product -- we're agnostic about that. It could just mean using vouchers that pay people to do the right thing. But we have to be able to apply market discipline to reach vulnerable communities -- that's one thing we've seen through our work in Haiti and other countries.
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One of the conversations I've had lately is with the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti's Brian Concannon, on the importance of partnering with the Haitian government in recovery efforts. What have PSI's efforts looked like on that front?
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We've talked about the need for a post-government to own and lead the response to development challenges, but in Haiti, that's proven to be unnaturally hard. It's an outgrowth of almost 200 years of poor governance, and failed governance. Now, you can debate what the causes are there, and who's responsible, but ultimately the Haitian people pay the price. Development problems are fundamentally as much or more a problem of government and leadership than resources. So Haiti bears a double burden there: a deficit in governance, as well as in resources.
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Looking forward, how is PSI positioning itself? What sort of timeframe are you thinking about for your efforts?
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We're not a relief organization, so our timescale is much longer. We've been in Haiti for 20 years, and I assume we'll be in Haiti for 20 more years. Before this tragedy, the health challenges were already significant -- and despite the international community's best work this time, they'll be huge even after everyone's gone home...But while there are long-term development challenges, there's also a real prospect of success. The more Haiti takes ownership of those challenges, the better, and we want to be there supporting them.

IRIN
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With eight natural disasters in Haiti since 1994, January’s earthquake is likely to see hundreds of thousands more Haitians emigrate, not only to escape the impact of the latest disaster but also to avoid the next one - as well as political strife and poverty. The cost of rebuilding Haiti after the earthquake on 12 January, which killed 217,000 people and displaced 511,405, could reach US$14 billion, according to a new study by the Inter-American Development Bank.
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An exodus of Haitians fleeing legally or otherwise has begun; in addition, there are more than 500,000 internally displaced, according to the UN. Mark Turner, an official of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Haiti, said: “Large numbers of Haitians migrated abroad in the past 10 years but we knew that the diaspora will grow faster after January’s earthquake.”
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According to Kathleen Newland and Elizabeth Grieco of the Migration Policy Institute, the principal destinations are the US and Dominican Republic. Others historically include Guadeloupe, France, French Guyana, the Bahamas and Martinique.
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Statistics compiled by the World Bank in 2009 show about a million Haitians were living overseas in 2009, about half of them in the US. According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), a few days after the January earthquake, foreign governments started tightening border controls and putting in place more secure procedures in anticipation of the expected influx from Port-au-Prince.
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Media reports say a million Haitians were living in the neighbouring Dominican Republic before 12 January. After the earthquake, the country suspended repatriation of illegal Haitians and opened its borders to let in the injured. The country also processed documents for Haitians seeking to legalize their stay so they could visit family in Haiti. Media reports estimate that 30,000-50,000 Haitians could have entered Dominican territory in the past month, including 15,000-20,000 injured.
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Haiti receives $1.5-$1.8 billion in remittances each year. World Bank economists say that allowing a larger number of Haitians to reside abroad would actually help the nation’s economic development as a strong diaspora would send remittances home while decreasing domestic pressures on the Haitian government. According to Dilip Ratha, lead economist at the World Bank, Haiti receives $1.5-$1.8 billion in remittances each year. With a 20 percent increase in the average remittance per migrant, another 200,000 migrants could remit an extra $360 million in 2010.
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According to the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey, the US hosted 535,000 migrants from Haiti in 2008, of whom only 230,000 were lawful permanent residents. The survey indicated that in 2008, Haitians comprised the fourth-largest immigrant group (in the US) from the Caribbean, after Cuba (975,000), the Dominican Republic (771,910) and Jamaica (636,589).
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On 15 January, the US Department of Homeland Security announced that Haitian nationals residing in the US before 12 January could apply for Temporary Protected Status (TPS). Another 200,000 Haitians immigrants are expected. So far, TPS is granted to qualifying citizens of Haiti, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Somalia, and Sudan.
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Haitians applying for TPS would receive a work permit for 18 months, on the basis that their personal safety would be endangered by returning to Port-au-Prince. According to the US Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, as of 12 February, 12,000 Haitians had applied for TPS status. Another 50,000 have been approved to reunite with family in the US but are in Haiti awaiting a visa.
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After the earthquake hundreds of thousands more Haitians are likely to emigrate (file photo)
Although there are no official figures for the total number of people who have fled Haiti since January, in the past 10 days alone, the US Coast Guard is reported to have stopped two large boats with 78 and 88 Haitians respectively.
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The two groups were immediately repatriated to Cap Haitien, amid international criticism because of a lack of asylum screening. This led to an appeal by UNHCR on 12 February, urging governments to suspend all involuntary returns and grant interim protection to Haitians regardless of their legal status on the basis of the emergency.
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According to UNHCR, some countries neighbouring Haiti were planning to force Haitians to return home despite the fact that with over 1.2 million still homeless, the conditions are not conducive.
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The technical definition of refugees, according to the 1951 Refugee Convention, includes people feeling persecution but not those fleeing natural disasters; hence, Haitians moving because of the earthquake are not considered refugees.
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Loren B Landau, director of Forced Migration Studies Programme at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, told IRIN: “While some Haitians are clearly not victims of political persecution and fled only as a result of the earthquake, there are both moral and political imperatives to ensure that people are protected either within the country or elsewhere. Even if this is not an example of climate change-related displacement, the world’s response to this crisis may set the stage for how wealthy countries that border poor or island states will respond when those homelands are no longer able to sustain their populations.”

2/17/2010
UNESCO press release
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UNESCO laid the foundations for an International Coordination Committee (ICC) for Haitian culture at a meeting on 16 February in Paris , opened by Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO. The meeting was chaired by Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassègue, Haiti ’s Minister of Culture and Communication, and Françoise Rivière, the Organization’s Assistant Director-General for Culture.
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Addressing the Minister, Ms Bokova said, “Our goal is to define the most effective means that will allow UNESCO to help prepare and implement a comprehensive programme for the benefit of Haitian culture, by drawing on the vast capacities of your country’s cultural community, which has already mobilized its efforts, and by calling on internationally renowned experts.”
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The Committee, which will be similar to those established by UNESCO for Cambodia , Afghanistan and Iraq , will be officially created once it receives final approval from UNESCO’s Executive Board at its next session (30 March – 15 April).
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Having recalled that the earthquake on 12 January killed 230,000 people and displaced another half-million, the Haitian Minister stressed that her country had also “just lost 100 years of architecture”. The purpose of the meeting, she continued, was to “set up this programme to inventory, safeguard and rehabilitate all the assets and remains linked to Haitian heritage.”
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The 150 participants included representatives from UNESCO Member States and organizations including Interpol, Blue Shield, the World Customs Organization, the International Council of Museums (ICOM), International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM), International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), and museums including the Quai Branly (France) and the Smithsonian Institution (United States).
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The first part of the meeting focused on assessing the damage the earthquake inflicted on tangible as well as intangible heritage and on cultural industries. The most urgent measures to be taken - at the same time as the creation of the CIC – were examined. UNESCO will provide institutional support to the Haitian Ministry of Culture in order to establish with utmost urgency the inventory of sites and collections to be safeguarded. A fund to support artists and help them to continue their work is also being considered.
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The Haitian delegation stressed that all of the emblematic buildings in Port-au-Prince had been damaged, particularly the cathedral, National Palace, Palace of Justice, Dessalines barracks, Alexandre Pétion school, Trinity, Saint Anne and Saint Joseph churches, justice and culture ministries and Saint-Louis de Gonzague school.
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Jacmel was among other cities struck by the earthquake. On Haiti ’s Tentative List of properties to be proposed for inscription on UNESCO’s World Heritage List, Jacmel has sustained extensive damage, particularly downtown.
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In Leogane, close to the epicentre, damage is also considerable although the wooden colonial houses are relatively intact. The Institute for the Preservation of National Heritage (ISPAN) has not yet completed a detailed inventory of the town’s devastation.
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In addition, numerous museums and art galleries, both public and private, libraries and national archives have been severely damaged and risk looting. UNESCO Director-General On 27 January, Irina Bokova wrote to Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, calling for safeguarding measures “to ensure, as far as possible, the immediate security of the sites containing these artefacts.”
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Ms Bokova will go to Haiti on 9 March to meet with Port-au-Prince authorities to examine the implementation of UNESCO’s assistance, not only in culture but also in education and science.
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Contact: Lucia Iglesias Kuntz, Bureau of Public Information
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+33 (0) 1 45 68 17 02; l.iglesias@unesco.org
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Donations for Haiti : http://www.unesco.org/en/haiti-quake
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Sue Williams
Chief, Media Section
Bureau of Public Information
UNESCO
+33 (0)1 45 68 17 06
+33 (0)6 15 92 93 62

The Economist
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JUST two days after Haiti’s earthquake, Leonel Fernández, the president of the neighbouring Dominican Republic, ordered a helicopter to fly him over the border for an unannounced visit. He was worried that his Haitian counterpart and friend, René Préval, was still incommunicado. What made this neighbourly gesture remarkable was that the two countries that share the island of Hispaniola have long been divided by mutual suspicion. During a previous term in the 1990s, Mr Fernández became the first Dominican president to visit Haiti in 60 years.
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Mr Fernández says he found Mr Préval alone in a small, dark back office at a police station near the airport. They talked about how the Dominican Republic could help. It has, a lot. Crews of Dominicans, including engineers, telecoms technicians and the Red Cross, were among the first to join the relief effort. Mr Fernández dispatched 15 mobile kitchens to provide hot meals to survivors. He is now sending 100 old buses, refitted with desks and chairs, to serve as temporary classrooms. Dominican health teams are helping to treat earthquake survivors at a makeshift hospital in Jimaní, on the border. Victor Atallah, a Dominican cardiologist, is building a rehabilitation clinic in Jimaní where he plans to fit amputees with prosthetic limbs.
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The mistrust between the two countries goes back a long way. The Dominicans won their independence in 1844 not directly from Spain, but from Haiti, which had occupied the whole island after its own rebellion against France. Dominican children are taught of Haitian atrocities in that period. Haitians recall that Rafael Trujillo, a notorious Dominican dictator, ordered the slaughter of all Haitians living in the Dominican Republic. More recently Haitian migrant cane cutters have suffered abuses. Some Dominicans (who are mainly mulatto) have a racist attitude to mainly black Haitians.
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Though their populations are roughly equal (about 10m each), the Dominican Republic is twice as big and six times richer, with successful tourism and manufacturing industries. Haiti was overpopulated even before the disaster. Many Dominicans fear a flood of illegal migrants unless reconstruction is swift and effective. In June Mr Fernández will host a donor conference in Santo Domingo. There is understandable self-interest in his admirable solidarity.

New York Times
By Simon Romero
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/20/world/americas/20haiti.html?ref=world
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As hundreds of thousands of people displaced by last month’s earthquake put down stakes in the squalid tent camps of this wrecked city, the authorities are struggling to address the worsening problem of human waste. Public health officials warn that waste accumulation is creating conditions for major disease outbreaks, including cholera, which could further stress the ravaged health system.
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Some American and Haitian public health specialists here consider the diseases stemming from the buildup of human waste in the camps as possibly the most pressing health threat in the city. Doctors are already seeing a spike in illnesses like typhoid and shigellosis, which arise from contaminated food or water.
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“We’re witnessing the setup for the spread of severe diarrheal illnesses in a place where the health system has collapsed and without a functioning sewage system to begin with,” said Ian Greenwald, chief medical officer for a Duke University team of doctors working here this month.
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The problem has become impossible to overlook in many districts of Port-au-Prince, with the stench of decomposing bodies replaced by that of excrement. Children in some camps that are still lacking latrines and portable toilets play in open areas scattered with the waste. The light rains here this week caused some donated latrines in the camps to overflow, illustrating how the problem would grow more acute as the rainy season intensified in the months ahead.
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“Haiti’s pigs live better lives than we do,” said Dora Nadege, 28, as she wandered back to her tent camp in Place St.-Pierre from a ravine on the camp’s edge, where its hundreds of inhabitants relieve themselves throughout the day in the open air. “When the rains come, we’ll be lucky not to drown in our own excrement,” said Ms. Nadege, a mother of four, who sold bread on the street before the earthquake.
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Aid groups are trying to address the problem by distributing more than 10,000 latrines and portable toilets, and employing dozens of new desludging trucks to empty the toilets. But these solutions seem to be a stopgap measure, at best. “It’s a drop in the ocean of what’s needed,” said Jessica Barry, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, which is distributing latrines with special sludge pumps. “You can have 100,000 latrines, but you need a way to remove the excrement.”
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With the number of people displaced here by the earthquake estimated at 700,000, emptying the latrines from one location creates a new problem when the waste is disposed in another. Haiti, a nation of 10 million, does not have a single sewage treatment plant. Trucks often simply take the waste to the Troutier trash dump near the slums of Cité Soleil on this city’s edge.
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The trucks empty into pits filled with medical waste like intravenous bags and garbage. Smoke billows from burning piles of trash. One truck from a private company, Sanco, with its motto “Fighting for a Clean Environment” emblazoned on its side, did not bother to go to a pit, dumping its cargo of human waste on the open ground. A squatter community of a dozen families, including some new arrivals whose homes were destroyed in the earthquake, tries to eke out its survival by scavenging in this setting.
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“There’s food to be found here, and sometimes wood to cook with,” said Mackinson Charles, 14, who wandered around the pools of waste with his brother, Mickenson, 12, as dusk fell here one day this week. Four other boys accompanied them, including two who were barefoot. “This is where we live,” Mackinson said. The human waste problem was daunting even before the earthquake. Lacking a municipal sewage system, many families here employ a socially scorned class of nocturnal latrine cleaners known in Creole as the “bayakou.” They descend into latrines to clean excrement with their hands, before transporting it in carts to improvised disposal sites.
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The current problem is part of a politically delicate debate over the future of the camps themselves. Even as many of those living in the camps dig in, building wooden shacks instead of resigning themselves to living in tents or under sheets, some here are calling for the camps to be broken up. “We need to acknowledge that the sanitation problems cannot be solved in the current camp structure, and that what’s needed is to resettle people in cities outside Port-au-Prince,” said Peter Haas, executive director of A.I.D.G., an American nonprofit group that does development work in Haiti.
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Viva Rio, a Brazilian nongovernmental group, has begun operating a project in the Kai Nou slum in this city’s central commercial district that turns human excrement into a biogas used as fuel for cooking and electricity. “This crisis can trigger innovation for Haiti, allowing us to move beyond the desperation you see now,” said Volmir Fachini, the director of the project, which the group hopes to emulate in a sprawling tent camp of about 3,500 families adjacent to Kai Nou. “The solutions to the waste problem are within our grasp.”
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Still, disease specialists fear that the scale of the problem could soon overwhelm such projects.
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Robert Redfield, a co-founder of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland, cited the example of a 1994 outbreak of cholera in refugee camps in Congo among the hundreds of thousands who fled Rwanda at the time.
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“The real culprit right now is the flies, which become vectors by taking fecal waste from one place to another,” said Dr. Redfield, who got sick himself with salmonella typhi while working in Haiti this month. “This means you can control what you eat and still get something,” he said. “The arrival of the rains could make malaria and dengue more problematic as well.”
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Some families seeking shelter have nowhere else to turn. “This is my life now, my family’s life,” said Sindia Michel, 33, who moved to the Troutier trash dump after her shack collapsed in the earthquake. She scavenged for firewood with one of her five children near the pits of excrement.
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“I do what it takes to endure,” she said.

2/20/2010
Boston Globa
By Maria Sacchetti
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Aid workers are warning that 1.2 million people left homeless by the powerful Jan. 12 quake still lack basic shelter and latrines, putting them at high risk of flash floods, mudslides, and diseases such as typhoid and malaria. Some rain typically falls every month in Haiti, meteorologists say, but heavy downpours could begin as early as this month, intensify in April and May, and continue through hurricane season, which runs from June through November.
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Even in an ordinary year, the rainy season can be deadly. Deforestation on the towering mountains provides little to stop torrential rains from flooding Port-au-Prince below. This year, the earthquake has left tens of thousands of people sleeping under flimsy tents of bedsheets or plastic tarps, and surrounded by wreckage that could become projectiles in high winds.
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“They’re like sitting ducks right now,’’ said Stephen Leatherman, the former director of the International Hurricane Center at Florida International University, who had been scheduled to visit Haiti the week of the earthquake to evaluate the risk of flooding from hurricanes.
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“With the rain, everything’s going to get worse.’’
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In Carrefour, a city outside Port-au-Prince, rain poured down around 4 a.m. on a recent morning, soaking thousands of people still sleeping on soccer fields and in the streets, Harry Jean, 36, reported in a telephone interview.
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“We don’t have tents, and we have no house,’’ said Jean, who has relatives in Boston. “Everybody is in the street. We are very worried about the rain.’’
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With stronger downpours expected in coming months, government officials and aid workers have a narrow window to act. The hurdles are extraordinary: More than 75 percent of Port-au-Prince was destroyed, according to one aid agency, Oxfam International; thousands of people are living in flimsy tent cities that could easily be washed away; and a government laboratory that diagnoses diseases is struggling to become fully operational.
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Even weather forecasting systems are decimated. After the earthquake, the most reliable weather reports for Haiti have been coming from a team of meteorologists with the National Weather Service in Fort Worth. The reports are sent to the US military and aid workers, but the thousands of Haitians who still lack electricity and access to news cannot get them first-hand.
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“That’s what’s so extraordinary about this right now - so much of the stuff we count on in a society has been destroyed there,’’ said Robert Tauxe, deputy director of the food- and water-borne diseases division at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which has officials working in Haiti. Meteorologists warn that even an ordinary rainstorm can cause major damage in Haiti because of the vast deforestation and the flimsy housing, in a country where, even before the earthquake, 80 percent of the people were poor.
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“It’s not even that it has to be a major hurricane,’’ said Philip Klotzbach, research scientist at Colorado State University’s atmospheric science department. “Even a tropical storm, if it moves slowly and drops a lot of rain, can be devastating.’’ Kerry Emanuel, professor of atmospheric science at MIT, called for an independent international weather-forecasting system that would have a mandate to warn the people about an impending storm.
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“It’s the rain that you really worry about, the freshwater flooding,’’ he said. “That’s always a concern with Haiti and it’s obviously worse because of the fact that the country’s very susceptible right now.’’ The probability of a major hurricane hitting Haiti this year is about 13 percent, according to Colorado State. The rainy season blends into hurricane season, which peaks from August through October.
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Hurricanes have caused widespread deaths in the impoverished nation. In September 2004, Hurricane Jeanne killed more than 3,000 people in torrential rains and floods. In 2008, four punishing hurricanes left more than 700 dead. As the weather turns, aid groups are intensifying calls for money and action before the rains arrive - and afterward.
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Last week, Kim Bolduc, the United Nations humanitarian aid coordinator in Haiti, issued an urgent call to governments and other institutions to provide funding for shelters. About 270,000 people have received tents or plastic sheeting, but more than 1 million need them. 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.
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Leatherman, the Florida hurricane specialist, urged Haitian officials to consider relocating the capital to another part of the country, at least its government operations, because the city is on an earthquake fault line and in the middle of a flood plain. Such a move would be controversial, but not unprecedented: Belize shifted its capital inland after Hurricane Hattie demolished much of Belize City in October 1961.
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“There was a lot of resistance in Belize, too, but somebody’s got to make these decisions, and with the capital city being there, it becomes no government’’ if another natural disaster hits Port-au-Prince, Leatherman said. “With no government, you’ve got total chaos.’’ After the rain, Haiti will face new problems, as puddles become breeding grounds for mosquitoes that spread malaria, dengue fever, and other illnesses, said Tauxe, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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Also, clean water and sanitation are major concerns. If safe drinking water and latrines are unavailable, people could be exposed to fecal-contaminated water and contract diseases such as dysentery, hepatitis A, or typhoid, he said.
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About 2 inches of rain could fall this month, a much smaller amount than in April, when 6 or 7 inches could fall, said Jud Ladd, chief of the operational services division for the National Weather Service’s southern region.
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William Gray, a longtime hurricane forecaster at Colorado State, said they are forecasting a slightly above-average year for hurricanes, but said it does not mean that Haiti will be hit.
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’’The earthquake has done so much damage,’’ he said. “The last thing they need is a lot of heavy rain and mudslides and all that to complicate things. Let’s hope it doesn’t happen to them.’’
In devastated Haiti, a wary look to the sky
With 1.2 million homeless, rainy season will add to miseries

2/19/2010
Reuters
By Jorane Derazin
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Haitian earthquake victims traded blows and wrestled on Friday over plastic shelter materials being urgently distributed by authorities to improve flimsy survivors' camps before the onset of rains. More than five weeks after the magnitude 7 earthquake that reduced parts of the capital, Port-au-Prince, to rubble, Haiti's government and its foreign aid partners say providing shelter for the more than 1 million left homeless by the quake has become the top priority.
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Some downpours this month heralding the start of the rainy season in mid-March have added urgency to the need to improve shelter conditions for hundreds of thousands of quake victims camped out across the capital. The Jan. 12 earthquake killed more than 212,000 people. At the Culture Ministry, a government handout of packaged synthetic shelter material triggered fights between residents of a nearby sprawling survivors' encampment that carpets a square in front of the damaged presidential palace.
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The yelling survivors scuffled, wrestled and exchanged blows over the packages, scattering only when armed police moved in to break up the fights. One man was pushed over in the melee, broke his leg and was carried off by bystanders. In another fracas outside the Plaza Hotel near the same square, men threatened each other with chunks of masonry from the quake ruins as they noisily disputed the ownership of a compressed package of plastic tarpaulin.
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Haiti's government, which has appealed for tents and tarpaulins from donors, is discussing with aid partners how to tackle the huge task of trying to clear an estimated 63 million tonnes of quake rubble from the ruined city. USAID says it is rushing in thousands of rolls of plastic sheeting to give more effective shelter to the survivors before the coming rains turn their makeshift camps into muddy quagmires, raising the risk of disease.
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Acting U.N. mission chief Edmond Mulet has said that not even the U.S. and Canadian militaries or the U.N. Brazilian army contingent helping the relief effort in Haiti have sufficient heavy equipment there to shift all the rubble. He has suggested specialized private companies be brought in. Haitian businessman Charles Clermont, who is part of an urban recovery commission tackling the shelter, housing and rubble removal problem, said foreign relief experts had told him the Haiti earthquake was one of the most complex disaster situations ever seen in modern times.
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He said the government could not afford to wait months for a solution, but needed action in the coming weeks. Working with international aid partners, the U.S. military and United Nations plan to bring in tents, plastic sheeting and portable toilets as part of a multi-pronged strategy to provide better shelter to survivors and "decompress" affected zones of the city by starting to clear some of the rubble. Experts says some victims may be relocated to improved camps, while others will be given materials to build temporary shelters or even repair their quake-damaged homes. "Even if their house is damaged, you can help them make a temporary shelter in their own homes," Clermont said.