- Rebuilding Haiti, By Kenneth Kidd, March 28, 2010, Toronto Star: “The rows of mounded, soggy earth stand nearly a metre tall, all of them fashioned by hand and hoe. By one row, his knee braced against the side, a farm worker is plunging long green shoots into the soil, sweet potatoes in the making. He’ll toil like this for six days a week, six hours per, and take home the equivalent of roughly $14 (U.S.). Next week, or maybe the week after, he’ll tend to his own little plots of land, his other role in the complicated agricultural system that reigns in the Artibonite region, about halfway between Port-au-Prince and Cap Haïtien to the north. The Artibonite is laced with winding rivers and irrigation canals, like strands of leftover spagetti on a dinner plate. Sweet potatoes, bananas, mangoes, rice and corn all flourish, the rich soil yielding three full crops annually. But apart from a few mangoes, scarcely any of this horticultural largesse makes its way south along Rue nationale #1 to Port-au-Prince – a three-hour journey over a dusty, heavily potholed road whose hazards sometimes reduce speeds to 10 km/h. After such a trip, most Artibonite produce simply can’t compete with crops grown closer to the capital in poorer soil, much less against imported, subsidized food from the United States…”
- Quake accentuated chasm that has defined Haiti, By Simon Romero, March 27, 2010, New York Times: “The lights of the casino above this wrecked city beckoned as gamblers in freshly pressed clothes streamed to the roulette table and slot machines. In a restaurant nearby, diners quaffed Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin Champagne and ate New Zealand lamb chops at prices rivaling those in Manhattan. A few yards away, hundreds of families displaced by the earthquake languished under tents and tarps, bathing themselves from buckets and relieving themselves in the street as barefoot children frolicked on pavement strewn with garbage. This is the Pétionville district of Port-au-Prince, a hillside bastion of Haiti’s well-heeled where a mangled sense of normalcy has taken hold after the earthquake in January. Business is bustling at the lavish boutiques, restaurants and nightclubs that have reopened in the breezy hills above the capital, while thousands of homeless and hungry people camp in the streets around them, sometimes literally on their doorstep…”
Tag: Natural disasters
Displaced Earthquake Victims – Haiti
- Rural Haiti struggles to absorb displaced, By Deborah Sontag, March 16, 2010, New York Times: “Before the earthquake that changed everything, Chlotilde Pelteau and her husband lived a supremely urban existence. A cosmetics vendor and a mechanic, they both enjoyed a steady clientele and a hectic daily routine, serenaded by the beeping cars and general hubbub of Port-au-Prince. Now, as roosters crow and goats bleat, Ms. Pelteau, 29, toils by day on a craggy hillside in the isolated hamlet of Nan Roc (In the Rocks), which she had abandoned at 14 for a life of greater opportunity. At night, she, her husband and their two children sleep cheek-to-jowl with a dozen relatives in the small mud house where she grew up. ‘With everything destroyed, what could I do but come back?’ said Ms. Pelteau, wearing a floral skirt as she poked corn seeds deep into arid soil unlikely to yield enough food to sustain her rail-thin parents, much less those who fled the shattered capital city to rejoin them…”
- Haitians who fled capital strain impoverished towns in countryside, By William Booth, March 15, 2010, Washington Post: “The earthquake that struck Haiti’s capital city has also jarred the impoverished countryside, sending 600,000 people into the provinces — where locals are now overwhelmed with the task of feeding and sheltering desperate newcomers. Haitian and international aid officials describe the migration as one of the largest and most wrenching in the hemisphere, as internally displaced people stream out of Port-au-Prince and head to struggling provincial towns in the aftermath of the earthquake like civilians fleeing war zones in places such as Rwanda, Kosovo and the Swat Valley in Pakistan. ‘They are everywhere. They are in the town, and they are sleeping in the fields,’ said Gerald Joseph, mayor of Lascahobas, a farming and trading town about three hours north of the capital. ‘Our schools are beyond full now. Our hospital is full. All our houses are full of people. We don’t have an empty house. Where four people were sleeping before, there are now 14…'”
Haiti Earthquake and the Poor Elderly
Weeks after quake, Haiti’s elderly hobble through chaos, By William Booth, March 12, 2010, Washington Post: “It was always hard to be old in Haiti, but after the earthquake, to be old and poor feels like a curse, say those who are both. ‘We struggle to maintain a little dignity, but look at us,’ said Lauranise Gedeon, who sat, embarrassed, in soiled sheets in the ruins of a municipal nursing home here in the capital. Residents were bathed outdoors with a bucket, trying to cover their nakedness. They spent the long, hot afternoons in hospital beds lined up side by side, six to a tent, fanning themselves with pieces of cardboard. They begged for water to drink. ‘No water today. We are waiting. We are waiting for medicines, for the doctors, for God to help us,’ said nurse Yolette François. ‘I am serious. These old people have a lot of troubles.’ Her patients, about 80 men and women, were scooping rice and beans from dented metal bowls. Asked what they need most, one resident said, ‘Something for the flies.’ Another complained that her spoon had been stolen and held up her fingers, sticky with food. ‘Look!…'”