Transforming the 'Republic of Port-au-Prince' in Haiti's Recovery

Before Haiti's January 12 earthquake, more than 2 million people crowded the capital of Port-au-Prince — a city that was constructed to support less than 200,000 people. As rebuilding efforts develop, local grassroots organizations are calling for the decentralization of Haiti and sustainable development of the country's rural areas.

"Haiti was in a silent emergency before the earthquake," says Agathe Jean Baptiste, a public-health expert, physician, and UUSC's on-the-ground representative in Haiti. Life, she tells UUSC, was marked by poor access to health care and education, political instability, and harsh poverty — most people made less than $2 day, often not even $1 a day.

The few resources and opportunities available with government support were concentrated in Port-au-Prince, where people amassed for the chance to access education, employment, and health care — to the increasing detriment of Haiti's rural areas. With Port-au-Prince set up as sole economic and political center of the country, Haiti garnered the nickname "the Republic of Port-au-Prince."

The capital's overpopulation and poor infrastructure contributed to huge devastation in the wake of the earthquake; Haiti's silent emergency has been intensified and made audible by that devastation. Jean Baptiste has seen the impact of 700,000 survivors fleeing to the countryside, where there is little international or governmental aid to support them. Internally displaced persons (IDPs) who have returned to rural areas have been almost completely left out of aid delivery.

UUSC is working with rural grassroots partners to support the underserved — often completely un-served — people who have migrated to places like the Central Plateau and the Artibonite. Jean Baptiste helps UUSC understand the situation on the ground, directs the organization toward grassroots partners, and coordinates work with those partners. She helps arrange and carry out technical assistance for partners, from working with a women market-vendor group on writing a proposal to brainstorming with partner organizations as they figure out how to care for unaccompanied children in the six camps they coordinate.

The Papaye Peasant Movement and the Lambi Fund of Haiti, two of the many local rural organizations that UUSC is partnering with, are offering support for IDPs in the form of shelter, food, and cash-for-work programs. One work program employs people in protecting local potable water sources in five villages — work that is not only providing a livelihood but also helping local babies and children who are routinely made sick by gastrointestinal infections. The $5 a day that participants receive enables them to meet basic needs, at least in the short term — two to three weeks of this work can translate into several months' support.

Peasant organizations in collaboration with UUSC partners, including the Trauma Resource Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology D-Lab, are also providing training to first responders, community leaders, and IDPs in environmentally sustainable fuel and water-harvesting technologies as well as grief and trauma treatment. The Haitians trained in trauma resilience are already beginning to provide treatment to communities.

Jean Baptiste would like to see all of these programs expanded, translated into long-term recovery plans that incorporate rural areas, and adopted by governmental and U.N. agencies. Hundreds of thousands of survivors are being overlooked by the formal aid mechanisms that have been nominally established to help them, in part because of the dynamics that have concentrated aid in Port-au-Prince despite the migration of many survivors to the countryside.

While the earthquake delivered great destruction and hardship for people already scraping by, Jean Baptiste sees this as a time and place "to start over and think differently." She continues, "It is that spirit that gave us strength after the earthquake" — a strength that is beginning to wane with concerns that things will go back to business as usual, especially as people begin to return to the capital hoping to access aid in the face of a dearth of support in rural areas.

Decentralizing Haiti would serve all Haitians, increasing access for thousands of people in the countryside to the resources and opportunities — education, employment, health care, and more — that drove them to Port-au-Prince in the first place, despite their limited availability even there. And not only would it serve all Haitians to invest in the countryside, it makes sense on a practical safety level — Port-au-Prince still lies on a fault line and the possibility of future major earthquakes remains.