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Tents in front of collapsed presidential palace
It’s now nearly five months since Haiti was hit by a devastating earthquake. Reporter Amy Bracken is back in Port au Prince. Marco Werman gets her impressions about progress there since January’s earthquake. (Photo: Amy Bracken) Download MP3
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MARCO WERMAN: It’s been five months since a devastating earthquake struck Haiti. The quake killed hundreds of thousands of people. It also left an estimated 1.5 million Haitians homeless. Reconstruction efforts have been slow so far. The World’s Amy Bracken is in Port Au Prince. She’s noticed some changes since her last visit three months ago.
AMY BRACKEN: I was actually initially pretty shocked by how much uglier things are in the city. Some of it is a sign of progress. There’s a lot more rubble in the street which means that buildings that need to be destroyed have been destroyed. That makes the city look more like it’s turning into a giant slum, but it’s actually a sign of some slow progress. Other things, not so much progress. There seem to be more tents in the streets. The camps are still enormous. I was talking to some people in a camp yesterday who kept saying we can’t find work, we’re not getting the food that we were getting before, the distributions are more targeted for students who have gone back to school, for mothers and infants. There are a lot of men who haven’t been able to find work and they can’t find food or clean drinking water. There’s a lot of frustration and not finding an easy solution for a lot of people.
WERMAN: Let’s take a look at that rubble that’s being cleared away first of all. Who is doing all this work right now?
BRACKEN: Some of it is being used as an opportunity to employ people temporarily. So their cash for work, what they call cash for work programs, funded by a number of organizations that are attempting to employ people in camps and elsewhere to sort of put rubble in wheelbarrows and shovel out some places. There are some larger organizations, I know there are Dominican and American companies that are scooping up the rubble and moving it out, but in my few days here I’ve seen almost none of that actually happening. I know there are some big trucks moving around and some big cranes, but they are very few.
WERMAN: It’s the rainy season now, full fledged rainy season. How are people coping with that?
BRACKEN: I’m actually pretty surprised by how well people are coping. I was at a dormitory the other day where university students are staying; there about 50 of them in the backyard of this building and every morning there’s sunshine and they drag their mattresses out from under tarps and tents, let them dry out a little bit and then the rains come, very heavy rains come in the afternoon and they drag them back under the tarps. A number of people in the camps are dealing with fraying tents and fraying tarp. There’s mud where there used to be just concrete before, like in the downtown tent camps. It looks really awful, but somehow people seem to be surviving. There isn’t as much flooding as had been anticipated and there isn’t yet as much disease a people had been anticipating, although there has been reported sickness, especially among children; diarrhea as well as malaria and some other issues.
WERMAN: You know it’s hard to imagine life ever being normal when your whole life is shoved into a pup tent or under a tarp, but is a sense of normalcy returning to some people’s lives in Port au Prince?
BRACKEN: I think that there are a lot of efforts at normalcy. Even for people who don’t have jobs and have trouble finding food and shelter. There is entertainment and so there are a lot of artists who are trying to help people at least forget their woes for a little bit by performing music, showing movies, having parties in and around the camps. But there is, I think for the children, there is the great challenge of play, especially with mud everywhere and the difficulty of being able to get outside and kick a soccer ball around or play with toys. Some organizations are trying to set up tarps and create a tent space for mothers and children to play in, but it’s just few and far between.
WERMAN: Reporter Amy Bracken in Port au Prince, Haiti. Thank you very much for your time Amy.
BRACKEN: Thank you Marco.
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