By Bill Quigley

Bill is the legal direc­tor of the Cen­ter for Con­sti­tu­tional Rights and a fre­quent vis­i­tor to Haiti for human rights work over the past decade.  You can reach him at Quigley77@gmail.com

Despite the fact that over a mil­lion peo­ple remained home­less in Haiti one month after the earth­quake, the U.S. Ambas­sador to Haiti, Ken Merten, is quoted at a State Depart­ment brief­ing on Feb­ru­ary 12, say­ing “In terms of human­i­tar­ian aid delivery…frankly, it’s work­ing really well, and I believe that this will be some­thing that peo­ple will be able to look back on in the future as a model for how we’ve been able to sort our­selves out as donors on the ground and respond­ing to an earthquake.”

What?  Haiti is a model of how the inter­na­tional gov­ern­ment and donor com­mu­nity should respond to an earth­quake?  The Ambas­sador must be over­worked and need some R&R.  Look at the facts.

The UN Office for the Coor­di­na­tion of Human­i­tar­ian Affairs (OCHA) reported Feb­ru­ary 11 there are still 1.2 mil­lion peo­ple liv­ing in “spon­ta­neous set­tle­ments” in and around Port au Prince as a result of the Jan­u­ary 12 earth­quake.  These spon­ta­neous set­tle­ments are sprawl­ing camps of home­less Hait­ian chil­dren and fam­i­lies liv­ing on the ground under
sheets.

Over 300,000 are in camps in Car­refour, nearly 200,000 in Port au Prince, and over 100,000 each in Del­mas, Peti­tionville
and Leogane accord­ing to the UN.

About 25,000 peo­ple are camped out on one golf course in Peti­tionville.  Hun­dreds of thou­sands of oth­ers are liv­ing in soc­cer fields, church yards, on hill­sides, in gul­lies, and even on the strips of land in the mid­dle of the street.  The UN has iden­ti­fied over 300 such spon­ta­neous set­tle­ments.  The Red Cross reports there are over 700.

The UN reported that barely one in five of the peo­ple in camps have received tents or tarps as of Feb­ru­ary 11.  Eighty per­cent of the hun­dreds of thou­sands of chil­dren and fam­i­lies still live on the ground under sheets.

Many of these camps are huge.  Nine­teen of these home­less camps in the Port au Prince area together house 180,000 peo­ple.  More than half of these camps are so spon­ta­neous that there is no orga­ni­za­tion in the camp to even com­pre­hen­sively report their needs.

Another half a mil­lion peo­ple have left Port au Prince, most to the coun­try­side.   As a result there are sig­nif­i­cant food
prob­lems in the coun­try­side.   About 168,000 inter­nally dis­placed peo­ple are liv­ing along the bor­der with the
Domini­can Repub­lic.  Many are with fam­i­lies.  Oth­ers are in “spon­ta­neous set­tle­ments” of up to a 1000 people.

Peo­ple liv­ing in these densely pop­u­lated camps will be asked to move to more orga­nized set­tle­ments out­side the city. Relo­ca­tion, says the UN, will be on a vol­un­tary basis.

The U.S. Ambas­sador knows full well there are 900 or so aid agen­cies are on the ground in Haiti.  Coor­di­na­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion between those agen­cies and between them and the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment con­tin­ues to be a very
seri­ous challenge.

Though many peo­ple are try­ing hard to meet the sur­vival needs Haiti, no one besides the Ambas­sador dares say that it is a model of how to respond.  Part­ners in Health direc­tor Dr. Louise Ivers reported on the very same day that “there is more and more mis­ery” in Port au Prince as fears of typhoid and dysen­tery haunt the camps as the rainy sea­son looms.

But the still the Hait­ian spirit pre­vails.  Every­one who has been to Haiti since the earth­quake reports inspir­ing sto­ries of
Haitians help­ing Haitians despite the trag­i­cally inad­e­quate response of the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment and the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity.  That spirit is some­thing peo­ple should admire.  Let me fin­ish with a story that illustrates.

One orphan­age out­side of Port au Prince, home to 57 chil­dren, was promised a big tent so the chil­dren would no longer have to sleep under the stars.  The tent arrived but with­out poles to hold it up.  The same group was promised food from UNICEF.  Twelve days later, no food had arrived.  They impro­vised and con­structed scaf­fold­ing to cre­ate an awning over the mat­tresses lying on the dirt.  They are find­ing food from any­where they can.  “We’re hold­ing on,” said the Hait­ian direc­tor Eti­enne Bruny, “We’re used to dif­fi­cult times.”

Haitians are hold­ing on despite the inad­e­quate human­i­tar­ian response.  They are the model.