Red Cross Blogs

Haiti one year on: from rubble to shelter

By Katrina Crew
January 10, 2011 at 10:00 am

This is the first post in a week-long series about different aspects of the Red Cross’ work in Haiti.

Buildings that had once been a much-loved family home reduced to rubble in seconds – these, for me, are still some of the most distressing images from the Haiti earthquake.

I grew up in southern California – an earthquake-prone region. In school we were drilled on what to do if we felt the ground shaking. We were taught to take shelter under our desks and hold on so we’d be protected from falling ceilings. Several times during my childhood, I was woken in the middle of the night by a tremor. I’d run to the doorway and brace myself, never scared that the house would fall down around me. Falling objects and broken windows were my biggest concerns.

People in Haiti could not have had the same confidence in their homes. Before the quake, Haitian homes had been repeatedly ravaged by disasters, particularly hurricanes and floods.

Haiti has also suffered from long-term poverty. It’s the poorest country in the Americas, ranked 145th out of 169 on the UN Human Development Index for 2010. Most of the damage occurred in the poorest parts of Port-au-Prince, where many residents had built their homes with their own hands.

One year on, an estimated 1.4 million people are still living in camps and are highly vulnerable. Some of these people lost their homes in the quake, and others are from Port-au-Prince’s slums who have been drawn to the camps.

Building permanent homes always takes time, and in Haiti’s case there are special circumstances that slow the process down. Rubble is a huge obstacle. Port-au-Prince is a cramped city, and the rubble makes is hugely challenging to get equipment in to remove it.

Plus, before the earthquake, around 80 per cent of Port-au-Prince’s population were tenants or squatters. This makes it extremely difficult to identify the legal owners of plots of land.

Despite these issues, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement has made progress ensuring people have shelter. We participate in the shelter cluster – a group co-ordinating the shelter effort of all the major aid agencies – which distributed emergency shelter to over 2 million people in the first six months.

We began shelter relief (distributing tents, tarpaulins, wood and tools) immediately after the two-week search-and-rescue operation finished, and the pace of distributing that relief was faster than it was for some other recent disasters. Agencies working under the shelter cluster had reached half the people who needed shelter (650,000 people) after six weeks of distribution, averaging just over 110,000 people a week.

The British Red Cross is running a shelter improvement programme in La Piste camp, which has so far helped over 100 families by replacing worn tarpaulins and repairing the wooden frames of damaged shelters.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) has built more than 2,500 transitional shelters in Port-au-Prince, Leogane, Jacmel, Marigot, Petit Goave and St Marc. These can last for a few years until families have permanent homes. The IFRC’s committed to providing transitional shelters in areas where people want to live.

There are certainly challenges for the future – including repairing and retrofitting damaged but repairable homes, providing training and materials so people can rebuild their own homes, and establishing income-generating programmes so people can generate money to rebuild their own homes or rent new ones.

We also need to be aware that there’s more to a home than four walls and a roof. A home should be a safe place where a family can be part of a community, and have access to water, sanitation, employment opportunities, and educational facilities.

The sad reality is that people who lost their homes in the earthquake will probably be without a permanent home for a few years. But organisations like the Red Cross are working hard to ensure they have shelter in the meantime.

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Tags: disaster, earthquake, Haiti, haiti earthquake appeal, recovery, recovery programme, shelter

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 10th, 2011 at 10:00 am and is filed under Emergencies, International. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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