Haiti: Life After The Apocalypse

They haven’t heard of Ray Houghton or come up against England in a major tournament, but Haiti do have somebody who’s put the ball in the Italian net.

“It happened at the 1974 World Cup in West Germany. Their keeper Dino Zoff hadn’t let in a goal for 1,142 minutes but Manno Sanon, who’s dead now, opened the scoring. Italy ended up winning 3-1 but it’s still a moment everybody in Haiti, young and old, remembers.”
Proudly telling us this is Ducière Sacré-Coeur Dambleu – one thing you quickly learn about Haitians is that they have far better names than us – who’s the head of the sporting committee at Camp Oscar in the Delmas 75 area of Port-au-Prince.
“The earthquake left a lot of the children severely traumatised, so we organised football tournaments as a sort of therapy for them,” Dambleu explains. “Kids who’d suffered terrible losses were suddenly running around and smiling again.”
Football as you may already have gleaned is a quasi-religion in Haiti, with Barcelona and Brazil the favourite teams; Jamaica the near neighbours they love to hate; and Jean Sony “Tiga” Alcenat who plays for Portuguese Primeira Liga side Rio Ave the current national hero that all the youngsters want to emulate.
Home six months ago to 192 families who were pretty much abandoned by central government when the ‘quake struck, Camp Oscar is now empty thanks in main to Concern Worlwide’s ‘Return To Neighbourhoods’ scheme.
Under it, families are given US$500 to move into basic accommodation for a year; $250 to set up their own small business and mentoring wherever needed. By the end of 2012, Concern hopes to have helped 14,000 displaced people to leave the camps and return to longer-term homes,
It’s a model that’s been adopted by other relief organisations and embraced by the country’s new President Michel Martelly, a close friend of Wyclef Jean’s who up until a few years ago was a Caribbean top ten regular himself under the alias Sweet Micky. Let us all promise now not to make childish jokes about his name this week, when Sweet Micky meets our own Micky D. in the Áras. Incidentally, there’s some fabulous footage of the Pres kicking out the jams with Wyclef, Pras and Haitian band CaRiMi at .
Untainted by previous political scandals – Ireland’s brown-envelope culture is positively quaint compared to what goes on in Haiti – 49-year-old Martelly only took up full office in November but already there are signs of him doing a better job than his predecessor René Préval who according to another former Camp Oscar resident, “went missing after the earthquake. He only cared about his own family and his own people. We were left to fend for ourselves until Concern turned up. They brought us the water and medicine and tents that should have been provided by the government. Préval and his cronies let the whole country down.”
That sort of emergency aid doesn’t come cheap, with Concern at one point spending $60,000 a day to provide 75,000 earthquake victims in its care with clean water. There’s no mains supply in Haiti – former dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier made sure of that by diverting over $200 million of American developmental aid into his own bank accounts during his 14-year reign of terror – and
most of the country’s rivers and lakes are polluted beyond rescue.
With the President decreeing that water should no longer be given out free, Haitians are now having to pay the equivalent of 13¢ per bucket, which is a fair old whack in a country where 70% of the population is getting by on $2 or less a day.
Concern’s ‘Return To Neighbourhoods’ scheme has certainly benefited Maria Vierge Caite, the twenty-something mother of two who’s now making a living wage cooking up huge pots of pork with orange and lime on her roadside stall. She hasn’t got all of her rent money yet, but is grateful to Concern for rescuing her family from poverty.
Those sentiments are echoed by Maria’s 74-year-old neighbour Mercile Sanon, who lives in a modest one-bedroom apartment with her daughter, granddaughter and four-month-old great-grandson.
“President Préval,” she says, “didn’t know we existed. Lots of the houses in this street collapsed during the earthquake. Some people I know died instantly. Others were trapped under the rubble – we could hear them screaming for help but there was nothing we could do. I still have nightmares about those screams.
“Life is much better now than it was in the camps. My daughter makes enough money from selling phone-cards and sweets to pay for food and water. The electricity we have to borrow… but don’t tell the power company that!”
Madame, our lips are sealed. We’re only supposed to be meeting two families in the Delmas 75 area, but walking round we keep being stopped by people anxious to tell their stories.
Our chat with Sherly Phillipe starts out upbeat – courtesy of her Concern grant the 20-year-old’s studying to become a bilingual secretary – but then takes a tragic turn.
“I’m sorry my mother’s not here, but she’s had to go to Port-Au-Prince to be with my brother,” she volunteers. “He was shot in the neck on Saturday night when some men stole his motorbike. The doctors aren’t sure if he’ll walk again.”
Like most of her fellow countryfolk, Sherly is a devout Catholic with a picture of Our Lady dominating one of her living-room walls. Asked whether the church has offered her help, she shakes her head and says, “ No, they haven’t done anything.”
It’s an oft-repeated and from my own research, valid criticism. The Pope asked the world to be “generous” towards Haiti after the earthquake, but has subsequently neither visited the country nor delved into the Vatican coffers to help it. The feeling in some quarters is that Il Papa is miffed that along with Catholicism, 75% of Haitians practice voodoo.
The reason I’m in Haiti this week is to commemorate the second anniversary of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake, which killed 230,000 of its people and left a further 1.6 million of
them homeless.
“It was 35 seconds of complete terror,” recalls Olivier Sever, a 20-year-old interpreter living in Port-au-Prince. “As soon as it finished, people started rioting and looting because they were afraid they wouldn’t be able to get food and water. There were so many dead bodies that they had to throw them into rubbish skips – babies included. It felt like the world had ended.”
President Préval’s government wasn’t exactly running smoothly before the disaster, but went into total meltdown after it. With no army, an undermanned police force and precious little in the way of other emergency services, the only immediate assistance people received was from the NGOs already on the ground in the country.
Haitians probably thought things couldn’t get any worse, but they did in October 2010, when an outbreak of cholera accounted for another 7,000-plus people being put in what by necessity have often been mass graves. Concern have subsequently distributed 80,000 treatment kits in the most vulnerable urban and rural areas.
Whether justified or not, Haitians blame Nepalese members of the UN peacekeeping force for starting the outbreak and were further scandalised when a group of Uruguayan soldiers allegedly raped an 18-year-old man and posted footage of it onto YouTube.
The full extent of the country’s problems become evident when you drive through the capital’s Carrefour district, where over a million people
are crammed into an area not a whole lot bigger
than Ranelagh.
The first thing that hits you is the smell – a gag-inducing mix of raw sewage, rubbish and stagnant water, which is a breeding ground for cholera and typhoid. There are kids splashing around in the water, climbing on top of the rubbish piles and playing giddy-up with the giant Creole pigs and goats that feed on the toxic pavement mulch.
This is one of the areas where street gangs reign supreme, with Haiti’s police either too afraid or under-resourced to curb the gun crime that’s an everyday occurrence here.
We find out just how lawless parts of Port-au-Prince are when we meet Jackson Nozil, the co-ordinator of St. Martin’s 3PSM (Partnership for Peace and Prosperity) organisation.
“There are kids as young as 12 walking around with 9mm and 45-calibre guns that they’re not afraid to use,” he reveals. 14 people were killed before Christmas when an outside gang tried to move into St. Martin, which is next door to the infamous
Cité Soleil.
“From the centre of St. Martin there’s a kilometre circle that the police won’t go into,” Jackson continues. “A 14-year-old murdered one of the existing gang leaders who, as he lay there dying, shot the kid. His friends then set the 14-year-old on fire. Kidnappings are common. Everyone has a price and if you don’t pay up they’ll kill you.”
Nozil blames what he calls “dirty politics” for adding to the problem.
“When it came to election time, the parties used to hand out guns and money to buy votes,” he claims. “Michel Martelly ran a different sort of campaign though – he seems to be an honest man.”
Concern brought a 3PSM delegation to Ireland last year to attend the Dáil and Stormont, meet Sinn Féin and the DUP and compare notes with their counterparts from the Glencree Centre For Peace And Reconciliation whose praises they can’t sing loudly enough. Jackson and his colleagues were also given a lesson in cross-community bridge building by Martin Snodden, a former Ulster Volunteer Force lifer who visited Port-au-Prince in 2010 and was well-received by the locals.
“The Glencree people have also been in Afghanistan, Colombia, Pakistan and the Basque country, so they know everything there is to know about conflict resolution,” Nozil proffers. “We’ve had major gang leaders renouncing violence, but unfortunately there’s always somebody waiting to take their place. It’s all about providing the gang members with alternative, legal ways of making money. The President’s number one priority has to be creating employment.”
Having heard about President Martelly’s plans to introduce free education, we head to L’Ecole Fort Mercredi on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. Fees at the Concern-supported school are just $12 a year, but that’s still too expensive for a lot of parents living in the neighbouring shantytown, which looks like a stiff breeze would bring it all tumbling down. La Directeur, Jean-Roosevelt Pompee, is fulsome in his praise of Concern who’ve provided equipment, teacher training and water stations and soap to help curb the spread of cholera. The government’s part of the deal is to pay the staff their wages, but there’s been no money for Pompee and his 19 teachers since October. The last thing they want to do is abandon the 1,350 secondary school kids in their care but they’ve got families to feed and may have no alternative but to seek other work.
After that it’s off to Caroussel to see one of the five Temporary Learning Spaces, which Concern maintains in camps where there’s no access to other education. A functioning school for 283 kids has been fashioned MacGyver-like out of five marquee-sized tents bearing the UNICEF logo. The kids look fit, well and happy as they spend their afternoon break skipping (the girls) and recreating El Clasico (the boys). In all, 15,000 children are back in the classroom thanks to Concern’s efforts.
We also get to visit the Nutrition Unit at Port-au-Prince’s General Hospital where Concern are working to promote breast feeding in a country where culturally it’s not the norm. The babies getting their meals from mum are as fat as Kerrygold – full of life nippers who can’t keep their wide eyes off their ghostly pale English and Irish visitors.
It’s a different story across the tented ward where a four year-old boy suffering from malnutrition and TB stares vacantly into space. Only recently able to walk, none of the staff can remember him ever smiling. There’s virtually no interaction between him and his mother who’s mourning the loss of another child she took to a voodoo doctor. Again, the smell is overwhelming with a skip outside filled to the brim with discarded needles and other medical waste.
Concern’s 500-plus personnel in Haiti have helped set up maintained camps where, following negotiations with landowners, families are given their own prefab houses which they’re allowed to remain in for up to three years. What happens after that remains uncertain.
Some of the stories you hear are truly heartbreaking – a mother of seven told me how shortly after the earthquake her then ten year-old daughter was gang-raped in an unregulated camp.
“I was devastated,” she states. “She lost her reputation. Everyone was calling her names. We
were shamed.”
Hearing of the family’s plight, Concern moved her into their Tabarre Issa camp where now installed in her own prefab she says, “My daughter and other children finally feel safe. We can go to sleep at night knowing bad things won’t happen. We also have water, proper toilets and shops here, which we didn’t have in the other camp.”
Living a few doors down from the Cadeus family is 24 year-old mum-to-be Miselane Dieujuste. Both of her parents were killed during the earthquake, leaving her to look after her two young brothers and sister. Again, she told us how thanks to Concern she’s been able to move into safe accommodation and start her own business selling underwear.
Miselene wanted to be in Port-au-Prince for January 12’s earthquake commemoration ceremonies, but with a baby on the way can’t afford the tap tap
bus fare.
The increased police presence in the capital turns out to be unnecessary. Rather than raging against the government or the United Nations – even before the earthquake demonstrating was a national pastime – Haitians have decided that this is a day for quiet contemplation. Well, except for in the city’s numerous churches where the congregations are celebrating the lives of their lost loved ones by singing, clapping, stamping their feet and generally behaving like they’re at a Prince gig. Not for the first time since arriving, I’m overwhelmed by the sense
of community.
Towards the end of the day we catch a glimpse outside a hotel of Sean Penn who’s been named an Ambassador at Large to Haiti by their Foreign Minister Laurent Lamothe. His J/P Haitian Relief Organisation has transformed a swanky 18-hole golf course into a camp for 40,000 people.
The actor told Fox News that after a slow start, relief and building efforts are moving forward at a rate of knots.
“Haiti was a country that not only suffered from enormous poverty, and then had this devastating earthquake, but also the earthquake happened at a moment where there was going to be a shift in power. It made it very difficult for the former president to move forward with projects, to have trust in international donors that those projects would continue in an unknown next administration. 
“Now the targets are in sight about how to really begin this reconstruction,” Penn continued. “You have a very decisive leadership and a very decisive people who put that leadership in place. Also there were, in many ways, too many organisations working in Haiti as a reaction on the basis of the emergency. One of the upsides of organisations thinning is that we know who the players are that we can depend on.”
The players Penn was referring to include Irish mogul Denis O’Brien whose Digicel company rules the telecommunications roost in Haiti. Mobile phones have taken on a new importance since the earthquake being used as they are as a de facto banking system.
A household name throughout the country, O’Brien has not only helped rebuild 50 schools, but is also promising to build 80 new ones by 2014.
“It’s all about project management,” the 53 year-old told the New York Times last week. “Everyone’s on hand for the photo op, but where are the 100 houses that were promised after the cameras are gone? I’m the guy who’s going to count them.” 
It’s clear from my time in Haiti with Concern that the money already donated is changing hundreds of thousands of lives for the better. President Martelly will no doubt make that point forcibly when he’s in Dublin, and put pressure on the Irish government to increase the rather miserly $1 million it gave his country last year. You’d be doing Haitians an enormous favour if you do the same.