Read Part I of this blog.

In my mind’s eye, I’ve been seeing the stern expression of Marie Camel Rubin as she posed for a picture, and the serious look on the face of her son, Noel Jolins, standing close to her, his fate sealed in the field they were weeding.

I was in Haiti, in Nippes, and we had just met the pair in a field of manioc, corn, and beans—a place Noel , 8, was spending a good portion of his time since having to leave school because his mother did not have enough money to send him.

I thought about them when we pulled into a hotel in Petite Riviere de Nippes that evening and there, hunched in their chairs, was a small crowd of school children each with their own sturdy green and white laptop. They had come to the hotel to borrow its electricity—kindly offered by hotel owner Emmanuel Pressoir—and his wireless connection. Their town has neither. They looked up just briefly, and smiled in a distracted way when I asked if I could snap their picture, before getting lost again in their on-screen projects.

It turns out that the computers are part of an initiative their school—Complexe Education St. Antoine et St. Augustin, just down the road—launched last year as a pilot, expanded this year with 50 more computers, and will grow again in the summer when 200 additional laptops arrive. The machines are part of the One Laptop per Child program founded by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte.

Pressoir plays a role in the American Haitian Foundation which helps to fund the school, where he also serves as treasurer. Painted bright pink, the school has about 900 students in grades one through 12—and offers each of them a meal every day, no small gesture in a country where many people struggle to feed their families.
For Pressoir, feeding minds is essential, too. And that’s why he’s happy to let the kids come to his salt-splashed rotunda by the sea, plug into the rusty outlets, and dive into their laptops.

“It’s not only looking on the Internet,” he says. “It’s developing their minds.”

That ‘s a mantra that all of Haiti could use.

Chrisner Roche is among many Haitians who have sent his children to school in Port-au-Prince because there are few educational options in the rural area where he lives.

The plight of Chrisner Roche is a textbook case for all that’s wrong with the educational system in Haiti.

As rain pelted the metal roof, Roche lifted specimen jars from a shelf, ticking off their contents and examining the embryos one by one. This was a rabbit, that one a pig. Here was a goat. And here was a whole jar of intestinal parasites, grown long and fat.

We were in the common room of the Centre de Salignac, an agricultural research, training, and local development facility high in the hills of Nippes in southern Haiti. A complex of stone-walled buildings, the center works with local farmers to produce high-quality seeds and cuttings, and is a source for the tens of thousands of yam cuttings Oxfam Quebec has distributed to farmers across Haiti.

Roche is the Salignac’s director and the rural life seems to suit him: He has been connected with the center since 1978 and has been working in the area since he finished school. But he’s here alone among the rolling green hills and open sky—without his wife and children. Read the rest of this entry »

Boys climbed a tree to watch a soccer game during a festival in the rural Haitian town of Saint Michel. Photo: Ami Vitale / Oxfam America

Oxfam America’s Coco McCabe is in Haiti this week, where she’s reporting on the latest from the rebuilding process in the wake of January’s devastating earthquake.

I missed the voodoo rara the first time it wound through the narrow streets of Saint Michel de l’Attalaye. It was a Friday and we were stuck in the early evening traffic that jammed the square. Before I could climb out of the car, the women in their bright pink dresses and men in blue suits had passed, their sax player and a man with maraccas pacing the paraders as they sang and swayed.

But we ran into them again, a few blocks away, and this time I jumped out, squeezing into the line of marchers, feeling myself swept along by exhilaration and anticipation as the streets darkened on the eve of Saint Michel’s feast—the annual celebration of the town’s patron saint.

For the people of Saint Michel, it has been a long four months since the January earthquake destroyed so much of Haiti’s capital. Now the chance had come to forget—just for one day—all the sorrow and hardship.  Even out here, in this rural community a four-hour drive from Port-au-Prince, the quake has taken a heavy toll.

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Oxfam America’s Coco McCabe is in Haiti this week, where she’s reporting on the latest from the rebuilding process in the wake of January’s devastating earthquake.

Oxfam's Kenny Rae discusses plans with the Rev. Jean Jacques Frederick. Photo: Coco McCabe / Oxfam America

For a moment, it looked like the family of five might have to move again.

Their shelter—a blue cube made of plastic sheeting—stood on the muddy ground where a team of engineers from Oxfam and Allied Recovery International was now considering installing a pair of septic tanks for a new bank of latrines. The old ones at the back of the camp were slowly filling, and having flush toilets would be a welcome amenity for many who have had so few creature comforts since the earthquake destroyed much of Port-au-Prince.

“Hmmm,” said church supporter Magda Pierre Paul, a worried look on her face. She shot the Rev. Jean Jacques Frederick a questioning look. The discussion concerned Delmas 75, a camp of 165 tents across the street from Our Lady of Perpetual Help, a church that had collapsed into a heap of rubble.

Rev. Frederick studied the plans: two 1,600-gallon septic tanks, eight flush toilets—four for men, four for women—and a well to provide water to make the whole enterprise work smoothly. In the small camps that have cropped up across the city, where shelters stand almost on top of each other, space for essentials such as latrines and bathing stalls is at a premium. Any patch of empty earth is also a place a displaced family could pitch a tent, pitting the critical need for protecting public health against the equal imperative of shelter. And now, the engineers were asking for a call to be made in the camp his church had organized.

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The talk this morning, when we arrived at the Oxfam office in Haiti’s capital, was all about the aftershock that jerked people awake in their beds around midnight last night. Did you feel it, they asked each other?

Some did. And at least one couldn’t get back to sleep for hours.

And again this afternoon, another hit, sending some people scampering outside for safety.

In a city that is slowly coming back to life, I had forgotten the fear these aftershocks can trigger, a fear fed by the unpredictable: Could the January 12 earthquake that killed so many people in Port-au-Prince  and caused such massive destruction happen again?

Driving through neighborhoods jammed with cars, school kids, and sidewalk merchants, you get the feeling that people are trying hard to move on. They’re trying to put that terrible time behind them, even as many go “home” at night to temporary camps and shelters made from sheets of plastic, even as heaps of pulverized concrete—all that’s left of office buildings and homes–spill onto the roads, even as people know parts of their old lives may be gone for good.

“Everyone is kind of going back to normal,” says Djenane Gaspard, who returned to Haiti from Canada two months ago to help her parents, and landed a job in logistics at Oxfam Quebec. But that normal has an edge: When will the real reconstruction start? When will new houses go up? When will the city begin to rebuild itself? Those are the questions, says Gaspard, that hang in the air, as heavy as the humidity before a late-afternoon storm.

Read the rest of this entry »

A collapsed tent after a night of rain in Port-au-Prince. Photo: Kenny Rae / Oxfam America

 Oxfam America’s Coco McCabe is in Haiti this week, where she’s reporting on the latest from the rebuilding process in the wake of January’s devastating earthquake.

Swooping in toward Port-au-Prince on a completely packed flight out of Miami, I craned my neck from the bank of middle seats to catch a glimpse of the ground below: neat rows of greens shoved through the earth in small backyard gardens, reminding me that the rainy season had come to the Haitian capital.

The rain is great for plants. But what about the hundreds of thousands of people here whose only shelter are sheets of plastic?

As we rolled across the tarmac in the heavy afternoon heat–the stewardess had announced that it was 95 degrees outside–a blanket of clouds pressed down on the city. They grew darker and thicker as we made our way through customs and into a steaming warehouse that served as the airlines baggage claim area.

Outside, it felt like rain.

And a few minutes later, it came–a great sheet of it, dropping like a curtain on a stage and closing from view all that was behind it. Beyond the Oxfam guest house, the rain swalllowed a steep hillside littered with homes left crumbled, one on top of the other, by the January earthquake. Water shot from a rooftop drain with a force almost as powerful as a fire hose. And out on the street, a spontaneous river rushed along the curb, whisking trash down the hill.

And the people under plastic? How were they managing?

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Members of the Delmas 62 camp leadership committee. Stephan Durogene is on the left and Jennifer Banessa Destine is second from the right.

An estimated 230,000 lives lost; huge swaths of the capital destroyed; more than one million people homeless. Where in the sea of turmoil left by the January earthquake does Haiti begin to right itself? What are the first steps?

Whenever I asked those questions during my recent field visit there, the answer was often a long sigh. So much in Haiti—its infrastructure, its educational system, its job markets–demanded attention before this disaster. Now the need is hyper acute. Where in the world do you start?

One answer seems clear to me: Reconstruction starts with the Haitian people—like the committee of young leaders who emerged at Delmas 62 to help the hundreds of people camped in the yard of a private compound. They needed food and water, shelter and medical care. And they needed to be organized. It was through the efforts of twenty-somethings like Stephan Durogene, Jennifer Banessa Destine, and a handful of others that sorely needed assistance began to flow over the tumbled walls into the makeshift camp. Read the rest of this entry »

Residents help Oxfam dig latrines in a camp where tens of thousands of homeless people are now living.

Late last week, rain doused the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, heightening the dread of hundreds of thousands of people there who have been living in makeshift shelters since a massive earthquake destroyed great swaths of their city in January.

The rains start in earnest in April. And hurricane season arrives June 1. Cardboard and bed sheets—the materials that now serve as roofs and walls for countless people—are no match for Mother Nature. Even a plastic tarp will offer little comfort when the waters rush and rise. And they will.

This is Haiti where unchecked harvesting of wood—for construction, for charcoal–has left 98 percent of the country deforested, adding to the potential for flooding when heavy rain falls. And with many of the drainage channels around the capital now clogged with debris, where will the water go? Read the rest of this entry »

Katty Rebecca Matin, 13, spends several hours each day studying the school books she brought with her in a pillowcase.

For kids not affected by the devastating earthquake that rocked Haiti in January, schools re-opened the first of this month. But few students in the North-West and South departments have shown up—not a promising sign for the government’s intention to open the rest of the country’s schools by March 1. Around Port-au-Prince, the temblor reduced many of them to rubble, making it hard for kids to shake the nightmarish possibility of what that could have meant for them had the quake hit earlier in the afternoon when they were seated at their desks.

It struck just before 5 p.m. Kids had left for the day. Thankfully.

I heard that whisper of relief voiced over and over again on the dusty streets of the capital as we drove past schools with pancaked floors and collapsed walls. Countless lives saved by chance. Thankfully.

But what’s been interrupted now is the certainty, order, and measure of opportunity that the school day brought to the lives of Haitian kids who had managed to secure themselves a place in a classroom—even if that classroom lacked both amenities and rigor. Read the rest of this entry »

A boy assembles a kite at the Petionville Club, a golf course in Port-au-Prince that now houses thousands of displaced earthquake survivors. Photo: Liz Lucas / Oxfam America

Oxfam America’s Coco McCabe is one of several Boston-based colleagues who traveled to Haiti to help with the relief effort. Here’s her latest update, dated February 1.

Tonight’s my last in Port-au-Prince before flying back to Boston. I arrived here about a week after earthquake.  And every day, as I visited the temporary camps where families have slung together shelters of bed sheets or cardboard, the intensity of human need seemed as fierce as the day before–for food, for work, for a decent place to sleep and bathe and go to the bathroom—even as Oxfam is building latrines and setting up water sources as fast as possible.

The hardship people are enduring is profound. I won’t forget it.

But there’s something else I won’t forget either: the ingenuity of the kids and their ability to set aside their worries, even if it’s for only a few minutes, and find the salve that sooths magically: play.

Today, I saw the best thing yet. It was at the crowded Centre Sportif de Carrefour, a sports complex where more than 2,000 people are camped on concrete and hard-packed earth. Weaving between the tents made of tarps from China were small boys—first one, then another, and another. All of them were pulling cars on strings. On closer examination, I realized the cars were small plastic juice jugs, outfitted with axels made from lollipop sticks, and wheels made from the red caps of other juice bottles. For ballast, the boys had loaded their cars with stones. Strips of plastic, tied together, served as strings for towing them.

They were ingenious.

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