One month after earthquake, Haitians reach out to forgotten survivors

By Martha Thompson | Read it on Boston.com

A Haitian child at a displaced-persons camp in Mariani, Haiti, where there is very little access to potable water. (Photo by Wendy Flick/UUSC)

Martha Thompson, of Jamaica Plain, is manager of the Rights in Humanitarian Crises Program for the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee in Cambridge. She filed this report from Haiti, where she is leading an assessment mission to see firsthand the enormity of the devastation caused by the January 12 earthquake, meet with survivors and grassroots organizations, and develop a mid- and long-term strategy for helping to rebuild lives and livelihoods.

PAPAYE, Haiti — We were sitting in the dimly lit dining hall of the Papaye Peasant Movement (MPP) training center the first day we arrived. The 65 displaced persons who had left Port-au-Prince were sitting around us telling their stories. The first man who stood up began to talk about his friend.

"He went to mechanic school with me, we worked together, every day we had lunch together. His wife would cook for us; his older daughter would sometimes wash my overalls if my wife was sick.

"Their house fell down and my friend's wife died; they never could get the body out of the house. I think about my friend all the time and when I think about him, I want to cry." He paused then, with tears in his eyes, but recovered himself. "Now he is living in the street with eight children; he is sleeping on the ground. I cannot stop thinking about him."

Hundreds of thousands flee capital to countryside
The situation is even worse than depicted in the mainstream news media. More than half a million earthquake survivors have poured out of Port-au-Prince to go somewhere, anywhere, away from the ruined city. Over 60,000 have arrived in the Central Plateau, about three hours north of Port-au-Prince, and about 10,000 have arrived in Hinche, one of the main centers where a hospital can be found. The hospital is full to overflowing and there are tents scattered over the yard.

International relief is only set up in Jacmel, Gonaive, Port-au-Prince and Leogane. The rest of the country has no aid coming in at all. However, hundreds of thousands of people have gone back to relatives' homes and are seriously straining the food resources there as well as completely overcrowding the homes, burdening the water supply and sanitation facilities. Schools in Papaye were not allowing the children to enroll at all. Some people are living in public spaces and begging or trying to find work. The situation is very serious, and there is no indication from the capital that anyone is setting up a supply line for these areas.

In Port-au-Prince, tents crowd the main streets and the alleys of the city. Food distribution is chaotic but by now, a month after the earthquake, most places are getting some kind of food. In the outlying areas where UUSC is supporting the work of the grassroots Platform of Community Organizations of the Port-au-Prince Metropolitan Zone (COZPAM), people are in worse shape. In one camp we visited, there are no tents, and Action Aid and COZPAM were the first organizations working at all in Mariani, a very low-income area on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince.

Water is a huge problem — people simply don't have enough of it, and distribution is extremely uneven. In one camp we went to in Mariani, they had no water in seven days and children had fanned out all over the area to find broken pipes or other water sources.

In the first camp we visited, the leaders were worried about the unaccompanied children. They were hungry, dirty and had been missed in the head count for food because only heads of households were counted. The camp committee was cooking food for the orphans but they were worried about how to take care of them.

A rural hospital overflows with quake survivors
People crowd the passageways of the hospital in Hinche. It's a hospital with a tropical feel, built around courtyards, with the patients' wards on one side and the covered hall open to the central court on the other. The patient beds are all full, even the children's cots, with people with bandaged limbs surrounded by family members. American, Haitian and Cuban doctors and nurses mix languages and instructions as they move between the operating room and the patients.

When we deliver the boxes of medicines we have brought from international rescue teams that include the MPP, a UUSC partner, the hospital director talks to Chavannes Jean Baptiste, the director of the MPP, about the food supply. MPP has been sending food to the hospital to help feed the patients and their families.

In Haiti, families are responsible for feeding patients during their stay in the hospital. But the people who got off the bus from Port-au-Prince often just have the clothes on their back and can't feed the patients among them. The hospital is overburdened and has almost no food. UUSC has given the MPP funds to purchase food for the hospital until something can be worked out.

We walk along the wards, which are crowded with amputees. One woman has lost both legs. She is supported by her daughter, but she is clearly in deep distress and trying to figure out how she is ever going to manage her life again. She has eight children and seven of them are now south of Port-au-Prince, and also displaced. As we leave, one of her sons comes in; he has just gotten off the bus. Tears spring into his eyes when he sees her. She reaches out for his hand, a smile breaking over her face.

Chavannes explains the dilemma of the doctors. They need beds for new patients, but how can they turn away patients who cannot walk? There is no place for them to go. If it were not for the MPP, they would have nothing to eat. The doctors know they need to let them stay on a little longer. It's clear that no one from the government is going to appear with a solution. The MPP leaders and the doctors are taking on this responsibility because no one else is. This is what we find everywhere we go in Haiti. Haitians from every walk of life are just picking themselves up and taking on responsibility to care for their fellow Haitians because there is no one else.

The forgotten families of displaced Haitians
"My daughter arrived with 16 people, what could I do except take them in?" said Chrisiane, a Haitian peasant leader and the matriarch of a large family. "If God spares someone, what can you do? You must help them." The adjacent house did not look like it could shelter the 11 people already living there, let alone 16 more. "Oh, some of them sleep over there," she gestured, "and some under the beds."

Chavannes Jean Baptiste is taking us to visit the homes of some of the peasant families who have taken in more than 7,000 survivors who have streamed into the Central Plateau from Port-au-Prince. These people are all being cared for by peasant families like Chrisiane's. Many are family members and many are people that sons and daughters have brought home with them, looking for food and shelter.

In another house we visited, there are 25 people living in a small house. People gather around the slight shade of a tree in the late afternoon, after giving us three of the six chairs they have. "The whole house fell down, I got hit by a brick, but I got out. I lost my husband, a wall fell on him. This child was hit by the bricks when they fell down but we got him out."

A Haitian farmer family lives a hard life trying to coax crops from dry deforested hillsides. People have very little food, the only substantial meal eaten at midday. Now, Chavannes explains, they have new mouths to feed when there is little enough for those at home. There are tens of thousands more people in the Central Plateau and no aid. The World Food Program sent one truck with food for 1,000 people — that’s it.

Hope lies with the MPP, a 30-year-old peasant movement deeply rooted in Papaye that helps peasants fight for land and teaches new sustainable farming methods. They have distributed the World Food Program supplies and are working to get more. They feel the urgency of the situation and know exactly how limited the resources of the peasants are. People look to Chavannes as he moves between the hospital, the peasants' houses and the MPP training center, trying to find resources for the forgotten survivors. And after years of experience with the MPP, people believe that they will find them.

For more information about UUSC’s Haiti relief program, visit www.uusc.org/haiti. To learn how you can blog for Passport, e-mail Lydia Rebac at lrebac@globe.com.