Red Cross Blogs

Tackling the challenges of long-term recovery in Haiti

By Nick Young
March 5, 2011 at 2:00 pm

I was in Haiti a couple of weeks ago with our international director, to discuss the Red Cross’ recovery strategy now that the initial relief phase is largely over. This was my second visit since the earthquake a year ago.

While it was encouraging to see signs that Port-au-Prince is beginning to return to some semblance of normality – smiling people, busy streets, traffic jams, markets and shops open – the central areas are still clogged with rubble, and dominated by the large tented encampments that occupy every open space.  Port-au-Prince is not really recovering, but rather learning to live with the aftermath of disaster. Only five per cent of the rubble has been removed, and 800,000 people are still living in camps. Around them, though, life goes on.

We visited three of our projects and came away filled with pride that we have chosen to work in some really challenging areas of huge need, doing some very difficult work indeed.

We started with our cholera treatment centre in the huge La Piste camp. Borry, one of our water and sanitation specialists, showed us round, walking us through the disinfectant foot bath, the triage area and the nursing station to the first ward. There are about 20 patients there now, less than a third of the number a few weeks ago. They lie on their cots, plugged into life-saving fluid drips, with tell-tale buckets beneath them to catch the acute watery diarrhoea that is the dreaded symptom of the disease. A cleaner constantly swabs the floor; a child crouches wide-eyed on a bed; the early morning sun seems insultingly cheerful, but the staff are full of smiles, very conscious of the vital and successful role they have played.

Borry talks of the horror of the early days; of how we were all taken by surprise by the sudden onset and spread of the disease; the panicky first few days of the response; the fears of the population; of how he rescued one sufferer, lying in her own excrement on the street, from a panicking mob and carried her to the centre for treatment.

After the centre, we visited La Piste camp itself, with its shifting population of around 50,000 people on a windswept tarmac plain that used to be the main sports park. Last year, this was a scary place, with an air of tinder box menace and grindingly unsettling impoverishment. It’s no less scary to live there now.

But the camp feels calmer  than it did a year ago, and looks much cleaner. The British Red Cross is now virtually the only agency still working in La Piste, so the onus is on us to continue supporting the local co-ordinating committee to keep the latrines (which we built) clean, the showers working and the water supply maintained. Before long, next year at the latest, we will have to hand over our responsibilities and withdraw; as yet it is not at all clear who is going to step into our place.

Then we went to the Delmas area of town, where we have started our major programme of repairs to earthquake-damaged houses in one of the worst slum areas in Port-au-Prince. Delmas was built on a swamp; concrete and wood shacks nudge and shove against each other, two or three families to a shack. Tiny alleyways, barely wide enough to squeeze through, wriggle past doorways and around corners; rivulets of dirty water, and worse, trickle underfoot. The earthquake picked haphazardly through this mess, reducing some houses to dust, cracking others and missing a few altogether.

Here, our team, a Dutchman called Hans, and a young architect called Amelia, is surveying the shacks block by block, identifying what needs pulling down and what can be repaired, and negotiating family by family to identify suitable building solutions for each. They chat with the locals: one wants two storeys (not affordable), another needs three rooms (maybe), a third is told her house has to be pulled down, a fourth has to face the fact that the repairs they carried out themselves are unsafe.

Each family needs a separate water and sanitation solution (a revolutionary innovation for Delmas), and each will have a livelihoods assessment and the chance of a small grant to get them back on their feet again. This is incredibly intricate, careful and time-consuming work. In time, it will transform this small part of town.

I met with other senior-level representatives from the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. It was a chance to recognise the scale of the Federation’s response so far:

• 2.5 million litres of water distributed daily
• 288,000 people reached with basic health care facilities
• 265,000 people with access to sanitation
• 172,000 household with emergency shelter material
• 3,000 households already rehoused
• 48,000 households receiving livelihoods grants.

It will be a long, long time before the camps are gone from Port-au-Prince but our Red Cross team is an inspiration – unfailingly good-humoured and focussed on the task in hand.

Read more about the Haiti earthquake

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

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