Friday
Jul302010
Rain and Weeping at Camp Corail
Friday, July 30, 2010 at 02:09PM
There is a huge storm in Port-au-Prince this evening, the kind of thunder-crashing, lightning-flashing, windy, rainstorm that is at once exhilarating and terrifying. Tonight there are hundreds of thousands of children, with their parents and grandparents, out in the open with nothing more than a sheet, a tarp, or a tent between them and the cold driving rain.
At the Corail-Cesselesse relocation camp north of the city, children told me about the last big thunderstorm on July 12th. We were standing in the setting sun a few days ago when a twelve-year old girl recounted the fear she felt when her tent was flattened in the wind. She and her six sisters, the youngest of whom is thirteen months old, ran with their mother into the desert that surrounds the camp. They crouched together, close to the ground, and prayed that flying debris wouldn’t hit them. They shivered and wept and waited for the storm to pass.
Haitians have a lovely proverb: Wòch nan dlo pa konn mizè wòch nan soley. The rocks in the water don’t know the suffering of the rocks in the sun. Tonight I am thinking that the rocks in the houses don’t know the suffering of the rocks in the rain.
Camp Corail is meant to be a model camp. It was the first relocation camp created by the Haitian government and served by international NGOs. When the government announced that it would be relocating families from the Petionville Golf Club, located in the heart of a busy Port-au-Prince suburb, out to the newly created Camp Corail in the middle of the desert below Morne Cabrit, the NGOs expected to provide services scrambled to get the camp ready. Now, more than three months later, the camp is still not providing the basic things people need to survive.
It takes an hour to drive from Port-au-Prince to Corail in a private vehicle, and it takes even longer on public transportation. It’s an expensive trip and requires transferring to different buses or tap-taps. The desert begins as you drive out of Croix-des-Bouquets, the closest city and a twenty-minute drive. When the camp management cluster of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) was asked about how far the people are from all existing services, they stated that Corail would have everything the residents needed, like a small self-contained village.
The camp itself is at the foot of a severely deforested mountain on a floodplain. Driving up to the camp, one can observe the washouts of previous rainstorms, and it isn’t difficult to imagine how the whole area fills with water when it rains. When it’s dry, however, there is searing heat and not a tree in sight. Not a spot of shade to sit in for miles around, just cacti and scrub bushes.
As of today, the camp lacks everything but latrines (you can smell the stench coming out of them as you drive on the service road around the camp), stalls for showering, and large rubber bladders to hold water. Unfortunately, mothers reported that their children are suffering from chronic diarrhea, and they don’t consider the water (delivered regularly by Oxfam) to really be proper clean water. They have no other option, so they continue to consume it.
At their previous temporary residence, the Golf Club, food distributions had stopped, but because they were in Petionville it wasn’t difficult to leave the camp and find a market. Markets are not only a place to buy food, they are a place for women to sell food or other items and make a little money. Although the OCHA Camp Management cluster said a market would be built at Camp Corail, nothing has been done to create one yet.
Camp Corail also lacks a school, a church, a playground, a soccer field. There are no green spaces, no grassy spots to sit. It lacks regular public transportation and it is an exhausting, heat-stroke inducing walk to get to anything. There are no trees to cut down the wind or block the dust that blows across the desert. Without basic services, and without regular food distributions – people stopped receiving food about two months ago – how can these families survive?
It was hard to see Corail the day in April when families began to arrive from Petionville. The thunderstorm on July 12th flattened nearly every tent in the camp, and destroyed hundreds. This week I found myself surrounded by children with alarmingly orange-tinged hair, a sign of serious malnutrition. Their mothers came over to tell me about the terror of the rain in Corail, how they cannot find food and don’t have enough money to restart their own small commerce businesses.
We observed small plots of land marked off for the construction of the first transitional shelters at Corail. An employee of World Vision who works at the camp came to talk to me when he saw me walking the perimeter of one plot to get a sense of its size (16 x 22 footsteps, not scientific but it gives you an idea). I told him the plot didn’t seem big enough for a bed and a chair, and there were only foundations for seven so far, at a camp of 10,000, and then asked him how they would decide who would get to live in the new transitional shelters. He told me the Haitian Government would decide. He acknowledged how hard it is in the camp, how for every ten cash-for-work jobs available there are thousands of people who want to work. The women I talked with said there had been some cash-for-work that lasted six days, but that when it came time for them to be paid they were told the money would be used to purchase food instead, and they still haven’t seen any compensation.
My friend, a Haitian journalist, shot footage of the outlines in the ground where these tiny houses would be built, and the maybe one dozen workers surrounded by about a hundred people idly looking on. When people crowded around him and asked him what he thought of the situation, a look came across his face that I have never seen before.
“You should never have come here,” he said.
It is raining hard right now, and it looks like this will be a long storm. I keep thinking of that twelve-year girl at Camp Corail, the fear in her eyes as she described the last thunderstorm, the one she thought would kill her and her entire family. I think about all the confidence, intelligence, attitude and beauty she possesses, those very things that made me fall in love with Haiti, and I think about Haiti’s future embodied in all the tiny children huddling out in the rain right now.
Lately I have felt a sorrow, an anguish that I have never experienced before. The only protection the families of Camp Corail have tonight are canals dug around their tents, deep enough for a child to disappear into. If the children run from the thunder and lightning tonight, who will stop them from falling into these ditches and being swept away in the powerful flood waters?
Who will rescue Haiti’s future?
At the Corail-Cesselesse relocation camp north of the city, children told me about the last big thunderstorm on July 12th. We were standing in the setting sun a few days ago when a twelve-year old girl recounted the fear she felt when her tent was flattened in the wind. She and her six sisters, the youngest of whom is thirteen months old, ran with their mother into the desert that surrounds the camp. They crouched together, close to the ground, and prayed that flying debris wouldn’t hit them. They shivered and wept and waited for the storm to pass.
Haitians have a lovely proverb: Wòch nan dlo pa konn mizè wòch nan soley. The rocks in the water don’t know the suffering of the rocks in the sun. Tonight I am thinking that the rocks in the houses don’t know the suffering of the rocks in the rain.
Camp Corail is meant to be a model camp. It was the first relocation camp created by the Haitian government and served by international NGOs. When the government announced that it would be relocating families from the Petionville Golf Club, located in the heart of a busy Port-au-Prince suburb, out to the newly created Camp Corail in the middle of the desert below Morne Cabrit, the NGOs expected to provide services scrambled to get the camp ready. Now, more than three months later, the camp is still not providing the basic things people need to survive.
It takes an hour to drive from Port-au-Prince to Corail in a private vehicle, and it takes even longer on public transportation. It’s an expensive trip and requires transferring to different buses or tap-taps. The desert begins as you drive out of Croix-des-Bouquets, the closest city and a twenty-minute drive. When the camp management cluster of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) was asked about how far the people are from all existing services, they stated that Corail would have everything the residents needed, like a small self-contained village.
The camp itself is at the foot of a severely deforested mountain on a floodplain. Driving up to the camp, one can observe the washouts of previous rainstorms, and it isn’t difficult to imagine how the whole area fills with water when it rains. When it’s dry, however, there is searing heat and not a tree in sight. Not a spot of shade to sit in for miles around, just cacti and scrub bushes.
As of today, the camp lacks everything but latrines (you can smell the stench coming out of them as you drive on the service road around the camp), stalls for showering, and large rubber bladders to hold water. Unfortunately, mothers reported that their children are suffering from chronic diarrhea, and they don’t consider the water (delivered regularly by Oxfam) to really be proper clean water. They have no other option, so they continue to consume it.
At their previous temporary residence, the Golf Club, food distributions had stopped, but because they were in Petionville it wasn’t difficult to leave the camp and find a market. Markets are not only a place to buy food, they are a place for women to sell food or other items and make a little money. Although the OCHA Camp Management cluster said a market would be built at Camp Corail, nothing has been done to create one yet.
Camp Corail also lacks a school, a church, a playground, a soccer field. There are no green spaces, no grassy spots to sit. It lacks regular public transportation and it is an exhausting, heat-stroke inducing walk to get to anything. There are no trees to cut down the wind or block the dust that blows across the desert. Without basic services, and without regular food distributions – people stopped receiving food about two months ago – how can these families survive?
It was hard to see Corail the day in April when families began to arrive from Petionville. The thunderstorm on July 12th flattened nearly every tent in the camp, and destroyed hundreds. This week I found myself surrounded by children with alarmingly orange-tinged hair, a sign of serious malnutrition. Their mothers came over to tell me about the terror of the rain in Corail, how they cannot find food and don’t have enough money to restart their own small commerce businesses.
We observed small plots of land marked off for the construction of the first transitional shelters at Corail. An employee of World Vision who works at the camp came to talk to me when he saw me walking the perimeter of one plot to get a sense of its size (16 x 22 footsteps, not scientific but it gives you an idea). I told him the plot didn’t seem big enough for a bed and a chair, and there were only foundations for seven so far, at a camp of 10,000, and then asked him how they would decide who would get to live in the new transitional shelters. He told me the Haitian Government would decide. He acknowledged how hard it is in the camp, how for every ten cash-for-work jobs available there are thousands of people who want to work. The women I talked with said there had been some cash-for-work that lasted six days, but that when it came time for them to be paid they were told the money would be used to purchase food instead, and they still haven’t seen any compensation.
My friend, a Haitian journalist, shot footage of the outlines in the ground where these tiny houses would be built, and the maybe one dozen workers surrounded by about a hundred people idly looking on. When people crowded around him and asked him what he thought of the situation, a look came across his face that I have never seen before.
“You should never have come here,” he said.
It is raining hard right now, and it looks like this will be a long storm. I keep thinking of that twelve-year girl at Camp Corail, the fear in her eyes as she described the last thunderstorm, the one she thought would kill her and her entire family. I think about all the confidence, intelligence, attitude and beauty she possesses, those very things that made me fall in love with Haiti, and I think about Haiti’s future embodied in all the tiny children huddling out in the rain right now.
Lately I have felt a sorrow, an anguish that I have never experienced before. The only protection the families of Camp Corail have tonight are canals dug around their tents, deep enough for a child to disappear into. If the children run from the thunder and lightning tonight, who will stop them from falling into these ditches and being swept away in the powerful flood waters?
Who will rescue Haiti’s future?
Reader Comments (1)
This report should be on every media outlet in the world, but it is not. The response to the Haitian Tragedy has been another tragedy of human construction. Transitional Shelter prototype at Corail blew away!!!!! Who CAN rescue Haiti's future? The designers and builders of
emergency shelter that morphs into permanent and relocatable structures. Structures that COULD have, from day one, provided victims with permanent equity in their new homes, rather than disposable tents, tarps and twigs. So much money spent. So little to show for it. The Emperors have no clothes, and are rebuilding their palaces, while approving only MORE POOR HOUSES FOR POOR PEOPLE. Shame on us, Man(un)kind.