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The way Robert Darvin sees it, he is one of the lucky ones.
After being evicted from a tent camp a few months ago, he, his wife and their three children crammed into a rebuilt home the size of a small trailer. But at least a roof shelters their heads, even if a flimsy one that allows the rain to pour through.
“It is made of cheap cement,” said Mr. Darvin, pointing to fresh cracks in the walls. He sounded at once relieved at having found a place and fretful over what another earthquake or hurricane might do to it. “If you think too much about it, you lose your mind.”
More than half of the Haitians driven into tent cities and makeshift camps by the January 2010 earthquake have moved out of them, officially bringing down the displaced population to 680,000 from a peak of 1.5 million, according to the International Organisation for Migration.
But what may seem like a clear sign of progress, officials warn, is also a cause of concern.
Very few of the people who left the camps — only 4.7 per cent, by the group's estimate — did so because their homes had been rebuilt or repaired. Instead, a vast majority appear to have been forced out through mass evictions by landowners, or to have left the camps on their own to escape the high crime and fraying conditions there.
Now, most of the former camp dwellers are doubled up in their friends' or families' homes, scattered at random in tents and improvised dwellings, or living in “precarious housing” that is dilapidated, damaged or partly collapsed, says the organization. In some cases, the cinder blocks that were toppled by the quake are being cobbled together to make walls again, only more unevenly and wobbly than before.
Dugary St. Jean (29), said he left a downtown camp in November with his pregnant wife to return to Fort National, a hilly neighbourhood east of downtown with row after row of crumbled houses. At the camp, they often heard gunshots. They were robbed. Finally, they decided their baby, now six weeks old, would be safer almost anywhere else.
They packed up their tent and headed to the house of a family friend. It is heavily damaged but has a small, spare room where St. Jean, his wife and their baby now live along with his mother and nephew. “I survive day after day thanks to others,” he said.
Giovanni Cassani, a coordinator with the migration organisation, said the mass departures from camps made it more difficult to track and help people, complicating treatment and prevention of a cholera epidemic that has killed nearly 5,000 people since October. “Those returning to unsafe conditions risk falling off the radar because they are much more difficult to find and assist,” said Mr. Cassani. “And all those still in the camps, the more than 600,000 with no housing solution, they are the most difficult caseload.”
Priscilla Phelps, a senior adviser at the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, the panel that is developing reconstruction plans, said disputes over land ownership and delays getting money had kept much housing, beyond sporadic projects, from getting off the ground. “We are putting all the information together,” she said. — New York Times News Service
