Angela Bruce Raeburn is Oxfam America’s senior policy adviser for humanitarian response in Haiti. Last month, she visited the largest “spontaneous settlement” in Port-au-Prince.

This photo at the Petionville golf camp was taken 10 months after the earthquake in Haiti. Photo by Chris Hufstader / Oxfam America.

Located at the end of a winding road in the posh part of town, past the home of the US Ambassador to Haiti and the tennis courts, sits a golf course. It is the site of a make-shift camp plastered with the big letters naming the large aid agencies that have provided assistance here since the earthquake.

It has also been the home of approximately 16,000 men, women, and children since January 2010 when the quake decimated the already fragile and tenuous lives they once led.

Romelus Raynald, the coordinator of water, sanitation, and hygiene promotion activities at the camp, noted: “The people come to my office and they tell me their stories. They want work, they want food, and they want their kids to go to school.”

Raynald is an impressive, soft-spoken man whose face is an open book of sadness and details about the camp and its residents. He says that the camp population has fallen from about 9,000 families to roughly 4,500 families. “Many have returned to their homes, others have found alternative homes and temporary shelters.”

“But those who are left behind truly have no place to go. “There has not been a lot offered by anyone to help. It is really Sean who has helped us.” Read the rest of this entry »

Sophia Lafontant is Oxfam America’s lead Haiti organizer, working on policy and advocacy issues with the Haitian diaspora. In her first post about Haiti—hours after the earthquake—she recounted her profound worry as she tried desperately to learn the fate of family members still living in the country.

Before my 25^th birthday, I hadn’t been to Haiti since I was a girl in the 1980s. My parents were among the second wave of Haitians that left the country in the decade prior and once the Duvalier regime fell there was enough uncertainty that Haiti became an all but distant memory for them. But I held on to my fond and vivid memories of growing up in my grandmother’s house on Avenue Christophe, in the heart of Port-au-Prince, a few blocks away from the famous Olfoson Hotel which counted Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Mick Jagger as some of its famed international guests during its heyday.

Sophia Lafontant, right, worked with Jacqueline Morette, a farmer and head of an Oxfam partner organization in Haiti.

While I lived in Boston, MA, I always had a foot in Haiti. Like most children of the diaspora, I felt the need to embrace both places. In the summer of 2007, I embarked on my first trip back to Haiti: it had been on my mind and it was time to return to the place I now scarcely remembered. I will never forget the blast of heat that rushed over me when we touched down; it was like someone was holding a blow dryer to my face.

It’s difficult to explain why, but Haiti instantly felt like home. The familiar foods, music, language filled with allusions and metaphors, the stream of relatives and family friends that trickle in throughout the day to greet and welcome me; the constant color everywhere—on tap taps, sides of buildings, street art and of course the brightly painted houses. It all beckoned me–with so much beauty it’s hard not to smile still.

A friend once asked me what makes Haiti so different from other Caribbean countries. I paused to think about what answer I would give. My response was “the struggle.” The long struggle. Haiti has had more than its share of pain and tragedy. Whether it’s the subjugation and indignation of slavery, 32 coups in its history, harsh and crippling international sanctions and policies, and tense relations with its neighbor, the Dominican Republic, and seemingly endless battles with mother nature, Haitians miraculously dig deep to find an inner strength that escapes most of us. And it is that spirit and determination to make a way out of no way that I find beautiful and admire so much.

It’s been two years since the devastating earthquake. Despite the inactions or action of those in power, Haitians will continue to pull money together to pay their children’s school fees, continue to ensure that their uniforms are pressed and clean, and continue to hope that tomorrow is better than today. It is that seemingly bottomless well of hope that keeps me at my computer late into the evening some nights. It’s what keeps me on conference calls with allies and cranking out organizing plans. All minuscule in the grand scheme of things, and none of which can be credited with saving lives or adding to the meager incomes of the millions of Haitians that live on two bucks a day.

Still, it’s the very least I can do for a nation that has given me so much—so much laughter, color, and so much love.

Rice farmer Ynodyl Fils. Photo by Brett Eloff/Oxfam America

Got an unexpected Christmas present this year: I woke up on December 25 to find a story in the New York Times on rural livelihoods in Haiti: Quake-Scarred Nation Tries a Rural Road to Recovery.

Here’s the key paragraph from the story: “When the earthquake leveled Port-au-Prince on Jan. 12, 2010, planners and visionaries here and abroad looked past the rubble and saw an opportunity to fix the structural problems that have kept Haiti stuck in poverty and instability. An idea that won early support was to shrink the overcrowded, underemployed, violence-ridden capital and revive the desiccated, disused farmland that had long been unable to feed the country.”

So I spent part of Christmas morning studying the piece, as I had just spent part of the previous month in Haiti, and was trying to finish a story for Oxfam’s Exchange magazine on the very same topic. (Exchange readers will see it in their mailboxes in about a week.)

(The Times followed this up with an Op-Ed on 9 January by the co-directors of the Haiti Humanities Laboratory at Duke University entitled Haiti Can Be Rich Again encouraging support for small-scale farming. Conclusion: “The return on the investment in the rural economy would be self-reliance, the alleviation of dangerous overcrowding in cities and, most important, a path toward ending Haiti’s now chronic problems of malnutrition and food insecurity.”)

A quick review: lack of investment in agriculture and Haiti’s rural infrastructure, combined with macroeconomic policies that brought in cheap foreign competition in rice and pork and other food, has made farming a difficult way to make a living. Agriculture used to comprise nearly half of Haiti’s GDP; now it amounts to less than a quarter. Haiti now imports much of its food, and farmers have streamed into the city to seek work, part of the reason the January 2010 earthquake was such a disaster: a city designed for roughly a quarter million had about 3 million people there, many living in poorly constructed housing. Read the rest of this entry »

Oxfam’s Caroline Gluck retraces her steps and finds that the challenges many people faced in the wake of the disaster continue to persist—as does their hope for change.

I wasn’t looking forward to returning to Haiti. Two years ago, I was one of the first of Oxfam’s emergency team to fly to the island, arriving three days after it was hit by a devastating earthquake, which killed more than 220,000 people and left more than a million others homeless.

Marguerite Ulysse holds her two-year-old daughter, Neika, who was born in a camp two days after the earthquake. Photo by Caroline Gluck

 First impressions weren’t good. Rubble still lay in the streets. Though much of it was carefully piled up, many collapsed buildings still remained balanced precariously in between other spaces where rebuilding had taken place. 

And then there were the camps of tents. Not the flimsy shelters made of clothing scraps and plastic sheets I’d become so familiar with on my first visit.  These camps appeared depressingly permanent. It seemed people were settling down for good; that what had been a temporary option was now the only long-term solution available.

But many tens of thousands of families camped on private land, not in public spaces, now face the threat of forced evictions, often through the use of violence, by the owners who haven’t received any rent for the past two years. 

I spent the first few days retracing my steps. The old Oxfam office – part of which had been seriously damaged in the quake – had been remodelled and repainted and was now the office of a private company. The damaged annex had been fenced off and the collapsed top two stories had been removed.

The enormous camp for displaced families occupying what had been a golf course in the leafy and well-to-do suburb of Petionville was still bursting at the seams.  Although the number of residents had decreased, people were still living cheek-by-jowl. The daily struggles for the basics–clean water, some privacy, and work–were still as pressing as ever.

Read the rest of this entry »

Kii Arens created custom artwork for the DVD.

As last week marked the one year anniversary of the devastating earthquake that threw Haiti into turmoil, it’s especially encouraging to me to see that Oxfam’s friends and supporters from the world of music continue to help raise funds and awareness about our recovery work there. 

One such project is Radiohead For Haiti, a completely fan-sourced DVD document of Radiohead’s Oxfam America benefit concert in Los Angeles on January 24, 2010. The video is comprised of footage from 14 different people who were in the crowd that evening, each of whom captured bits and pieces of the concert on a variety of devices, from Flip cams to semi-professional video recorders. The project was curated over the internet through Radiohead message boards and email, and then painstakingly edited together over the course of nine months.

Once the DVD was completed, the video-makers contacted Radiohead’s management for permission to release the project to the public. The band granted their official blessing, with the proviso that downloaders and viewers should be encouraged to donate to Oxfam America’s Haiti Relief and Recovery Fund at www.oxfamamerica.org/radiohead (using the same kind of pay-what-you-want approach that marked the band’s landmark release of the album In Rainbows in 2007). And fans have stepped up: since the film’s release on Christmas Eve, they have donated over $16,000 to support Oxfam’s work in Haiti. 

 If you’ve got a bit of spare time and some decent speakers, you can watch a streaming version of the video below, or go here to download your own copy of the DVD:

Yolette Etienne speaks with young survivors days after the earthquake destroyed much of Port-au-Prince. Photo by Liz Lucas/Oxfam America

I met Yolette Etienne about a year ago in the midst of chaos and sorrow. It was less than two weeks after the earthquake had turned Haiti’s capital into a sea of dust and ruin, killing more than 220,000 people—Yolette’s mother among them. Still, Yolette came to work each day at Oxfam through the snarl of traffic backed up behind the rubble, reminders of all that was lost at every turn, a heartbreaking beginning to days that seemed to have no end.

How did she manage? I don’t know. But she did, with a warmth I felt instantly, even though I was a stranger and had arrived at a terrible time. And when I asked about going to church, it was Yolette who said, yes! Let’s go. It was a Sunday and strangely still, the air heavy with people longing for normalcy. I thought they might find it in church, with prayer, with song. Read the rest of this entry »

Men use a hand auger to drill a well in Haiti. Photo by Tom Mahin/Oxfam

Tom Mahin, a drinking water specialist, flew to Haiti recently to help Oxfam stem the spread of a cholera outbreak that has now reached every province of the country. Here, he recounts some of the challenges of that work.

 

 

 

I arrived a few days ago in the Artibonite Valley in Haiti to work with Oxfam on its response to the cholera outbreak. My focus is on drinking water. The valley is much different than Port-au-Prince where I worked for Oxfam for five weeks after the January 2010 earthquake. Here, it is greener and much less congested, but the valley is also where the cholera outbreak has been the worst. Lack of adequate safe drinking water in villages is a major problem for people, now even more so because of the cholera outbreak.

One of my first tasks was to accompany an Oxfam public health engineer to sites selected for some new wells to provide safe drinking water—key to preventing the spread of cholera– and to see the drilling of wells underway. Oxfam has contracted with two local drilling companies to do the work. The companies don’t rely on expensive drilling rigs: They mostly use hand augers, though sometimes workers dig the wells by hand because rocks make the use of augers impossible.  Read the rest of this entry »

Last month I met a young man named Sady Civil in Port-au-Prince at a camp called Delmas 3 where he is an assistant public health promoter. His job is to teach people the importance of good hygiene as a means to avoid major disease outbreaks, which can kill just as many people as any earthquake.

When he first arrived, there were about 7,000 people living in Delmas 3. “It was very dirty, there were feces everywhere,” he says, walking along the main road next to the camp. On the day we visited workers were digging several large pits to install 16 new permanent latrines. This would make roughly one latrine for every 110 camp residents, still not enough, but an improvement.

“It’s a lot cleaner here now,” Civil says. “We’ve seen a lot of good changes.” Read the rest of this entry »

Charitable Pierre stands in her shop in greater Port-au-Prince. Photo by Toby Adamson/Oxfam

I was in Haiti a couple of weeks before Christmas—11 months after the devastating quake hit near Port-au-Prince. Not much had changed in those long months since my first visit in January 2010. Reduced to rubble, the cinder block city teemed with hundreds of thousands of people camped in tents and under tarps.

It was a time of political instability as Haitians wrestled with who would become their next president. Campaign posters coated the capital and in the most direct way possible, people voiced their sentiments—in slogans dashed with paint across the city’s walls and sometimes on the cloth of their sagging tents.

It made me think about how people communicate, about the power of brevity. Nowhere is that power expressed with more elegance than through proverbs, and Haiti is fantastically rich with them. So I began asking the people I met for the proverb that best described how they felt at that moment, in that place—sitting on a rough wooden bench in the shell of a building, pumping the peddle of a sewing machine in a resettlement camp, glancing from the door of a tiny shop next to a rubble-strewn alley. Read the rest of this entry »

It took me all year, but I finally made it to Haiti earlier this month. It’s a fascinating and beautiful country facing some daunting challenges, and it was an honor for me to participate in Oxfam’s response to the earthquake and the cholera epidemic.

The best moments of the trip were meeting with entrepreneurs rebuilding their businesses right out of the rubble of their homes and their lives. We met one woman named Carole who runs a small shop in the Carrefour Feuilles district in Port-au-Prince out of a small shipping container on the ruins of her home. She painted it pink on the inside. “I just like pink,” she says. She now lives in what used to be a warehouse next door. The roof leaks so much, when it rains, she says, “it’s like being outside.”

“Oxfam is the only one who came here,” she says. We gave her the shipping container, set it up on her land, and helped her with a grant to stock it with drinks, toilet paper, matches, and canned goods. “It put joy in my heart,” she says, “If it weren’t for this container, I don’t know when I would be on my feet…” Now, she says, “I’m on my way.”
Read the rest of this entry »