Aid groups seek out tents, sites for refugee camps as Haitians flow out of wrecked capital

more images

more images

more images

more images

Urgent need for tent cities for Haitian refugees

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The collapse of much of Haiti’s capital has a large part of the nation struggling just to find a place to sleep. As many as 1 million people — one person in nine across the entire country — need to find new shelter, the United Nations estimates, and there are too few tents, let alone safe buildings, to put them in.

That leaves about 700,000 other people living on the streets around Porrt-au-Prince under whatever they can salvage. In the case of Jean Anthony’s family, that’s a blue plastic tarpaulin for a ceiling and a faded pink sheet with a floral print border for two walls.

“I’m not sure what you’d call it, but it’s much more than terrible,” said Anthony, the 60-year-old owner of a collapsed restaurant. Thousands of people were camped around him Monday across from the collapsed National Palace, amid piles of trash and the stench of human waste.

“We live like dogs,” said Espiegle Amilcar, an unemployed 34-year-old who has been staying under a sheet of plastic nearby.

Disturbances erupted near the camp later in the day when Uruguayan U.N. peacekeepers fired pepper spray to try to disperse thousands of people jostling for food aid.

Some people ran, but undeterred young men in the crowd surged forward to grab bags emblazoned with U.S. flags that were filled with pinto beans and rice. It was not immediately clear if anyone was hurt.

Aid organizations say they are collecting tents, but few so far are in evidence. And the International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental agency, says it could take experts weeks to search out suitable sites for enough tent cities to hold earthquake refugees.

Vincent Houver, the Geneva-based agency’s chief of mission in Haiti, said Sunday that the agency’s warehouse in Port-au-Prince holds 10,000 family-size tents, but he estimates 100,000 are needed.

The organization has appealed for $30 million to pay for tents and other aid needs and has received two-thirds of that so far, he said.

The fortunate few to get a formal tent so far include Fenela Jacob, though the 39-year old has to share the 13-by-13-foot (4-by-4 meter) space with four other mothers and 16 children at a camp run by British-based Islamic Relief Worldwide. The land was donated by a Catholic church.

“We’ve got a lot more space; it’s a lot more comfortable” than the bed sheets and sticks people were living in earlier, Jacob said.

The tents are so coveted, Jacob said, that she was forced to give up a second tent the charity had offered for her large group because other people threatened to burn both down if she didn’t give one up.

The Islamic group managed to get 500 people into 82 tents left behind by a Qatari search and rescue team.

Haiti’s government wants many of the homeless to leave the capital city of 2 million people, to look for better shelter with relatives or others elsewhere. Officials estimate that about 235,000 have taken advantage of its offer of free transport to leave the city, and many others left on their own, some even walking.

That may have far-reaching effects, shifting the places where aid and reconstruction must be focused, Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told senior foreign officials in Canada on Monday.

“The distribution of people (and) their needs have changed,” he said. “We have to reassess the whole country,” in terms of job creation and requirements for housing.

An estimated 50,000 to 100,000 people have returned to the region around the coastal city of Gonaives in northern Haiti, a city abandoned by many after two devastating floods in six years.

“Living in Port-au-Prince is a problem. Going to Gonaives is another problem,” said Maire Delphin Alceus. “Everywhere you go is a problem. If I could, I would have left this country and been somewhere else by now. But I have no way to do that.”

Her daughter, Katya, was among the thousands killed in the Gonaives region by the floods of 2004’s Tropical Storm Jeanne. The family moved to Port-au-Prince, where the earthquake killed her 26-year-old son and her half-sister, who provided for them by importing clothes and perfume from Miami for resale in Haiti.

What’s left of the family is back in Gonaives, which is overlooked by mountains denuded by over-farming and rampant tree-cutting for firewood that have cleared a path for destructive floods.

“I’m scared, but I’m living by the will of God,” said Alceus, dressed in white after attending Sunday services at an evangelical church.

More than 150,000 quake victims have been buried by the government, an official said Sunday, but she said that doesn’t count the bodies still in wrecked buildings, buried or burned by relatives or dead in outlying quake areas.

“Nobody knows how many bodies are buried in the rubble,” said Communications Minister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue said. Asked about the total number of victims, she said, “200,000? 300,000? Who knows the overall death toll?”

An estimate of 200,000 dead was reported last week by the European Commission, citing Haitian government sources. As of Monday, the United Nations was reporting at least 112,250 confirmed deaths, based on recovered bodies.

The final toll will clearly place the Haiti earthquake among the deadliest natural catastrophes of recent times. That list includes the 1970 Bangladesh cyclone, believed to have killed 300,000 people; the 1974 northeast China earthquake, which killed at least 242,000 people, and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, with 226,000 dead.

Attending to the living, meanwhile, is an army of international aid workers who have reached 500,000 people with help at least once, the U.N. reported Sunday. But as many as 2 million people are in need.

Much of the aid flows though the capital’s strained airport, not far from a makeshift camp in a public park where Leger Lunes has been living with his wife and year-old daughter under a triangular shelter of blankets propped on sticks.

Lunes, 39, said none of the aid has reached his family, which has survived by selling cookies along the roadside, getting enough money to buy a little rice.

He said he’s willing to move into a more organized tent camp if the government asks.

“It’s not a problem. The only thing I need is a job.”

Key officials from around the world met Monday in Montreal to discuss ways to coordinate relief efforts in Haiti. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was among those attending.

The world’s nations have pledged some $1 billion in emergency aid to Haiti. Organizers of Friday night’s “Hope for Haiti Now” international telethon reported the event raised $57 million, with more pledges from ordinary people still coming in.

Associated Press writers contributing to this story included Michelle Faul, Ben Fox, Paul Haven and Ramon Espinosa in Port-au-Prince; Jonathan M. Katz in Gonaives; Robert Burns and Rob Gillies in Montreal, and John Rice in Mexico City.