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On paper, the neighborhood of Fort National is a vision of everything the international rebuilding effort here could hope to produce: architects' plans show immaculate streets paved with concrete, flanked by sidewalks lined with palm trees, where ambling pedestrians peer through new shop windows and admire tall, condominium-style dwellings painted red, green, blue and purple. But in reality the neighborhood remains a landscape of rubble and shanties, a few tents that have appeared on plots cleared of debris, and the occasional standing building. It's also a case study in the politics of frustration, another symptom of Haiti's overlapping immediate crises and the long-term challenges to rebuilding.
One afternoon last month, 19-year-old Luckenson Francois was standing on the empty concrete foundation of a home destroyed by the quake, combing a friend's hair. For months, she had been living in a shack of scrap metal and wood in a camp outside the National Palace. But it became too dangerous, she said, first because of threats from armed gangs in the camp, then because of riots and political violence. So she returned to Fort National, joining friends living in a shanty.
Haiti's lame-duck president, René Préval, vowed to rebuild Fort National to resettle the thousands of homeless occupying the squalid camp where she lived, which has become the site of violent demonstrations. Residents will have to pay for the new homes, but the construction is funded with $25 million freed up from foreign debt forgiveness, Wilner Valcin, deputy director at the Haitian Ministry of Planning, told me.
The government is also looking for funds to rebuild two other neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince, he said, and conducting soil analyses to identify safe ground to build on with a U.N. geophysicist who has predicted that an even larger quake will shake Haiti down the road. Because it's hard to rebuild on land buried under rubble, removing debris should be the most important priority, according to a RAND Corporation report released last summer. But, as with many obstacles slowing reconstruction, the challenges to clearing the more than 90 percent of rubble that remains reflect Haiti's troubled history, lack of infrastructure and capacity, as well as the failures of international donors. For one thing, it's hard to maneuver within the cramped quarters of the neighborhood, especially after many people returned to rebuild on their own, said Namy Registre, a Fort National resident who works for a government-sponsored rubble removal program. Much of the work is done by hand, ferrying buckets of debris up the hill to be carted away by trucks. But Registre said that the trucks are often delayed because of heavy traffic, and workers, who haven't been provided gloves or respirator masks, are now falling sick from the dust. Still, he's grateful to have a job. "We lost everything here. We lost family members, everything we have," he said. "It's only now that I can buy T-shirts and pants to wear."
The historical shortage of available land is another problem. The Army Corps of Engineers concluded that with six to 10 more dump sites and new roads dedicated exclusively to moving rubble, the remaining debris could be cleared within a year, said Paul Weisenfeld, USAID Senior Deputy Administrator for Latin America & the Caribbean. But that would require invoking eminent domain on a large scale, an extremely tough move politically. U.S. officials say that, given these circumstances, the amount of rubble cleared so far—an amount it took more than two years to move in post-tsunami Indonesia-- is actually a measure of success. U.S. funding has helped move more than half of the 2 million cubic meters cleared from Haiti's streets, according to State Department officials.
The goal is to move another 4 million cubic meters – 40 percent of what remains -- by October. Other international donors are only now starting to step forward with enough funding, according to David Tordjman, a U.N. project manager overseeing rubble removal and other programs. "Removing debris isn't really sexy," he said. "Once you remove it, there's nothing really to show any more. But when you have a [transitional shelter] there's a house to show and people living in it. So that's a better photo op." A deal is in the works to bring more crushing equipment to Fort National, said Weisenfeld. That would speed things up, but there's also a need to balance the efficiency of heavy equipment with Haitians' desire for jobs. "Recovery from the earthquake requires not only building structures but putting money into people's pockets," he told me. In early November, clashes erupted here between neighbors angry about the end of a temporary work program funded by various NGOs and those, like Registre, who still had work with the government-sponsored program. "They went to meet them and said, 'if we cannot find jobs, no one will work in this area,' said 21-year-old Gilbert Midy.
Bricks, bottles and rocks began to fly, and neighborhood clashes escalated until the police arrived, firing in the air and arresting people. Midy was sitting on an empty foundation of the family home he cleared himself with a sledgehammer and buckets. He now lives in a concrete block house next door, which has been declared in need of repair by official inspectors. But he says he's heard no word on whether he will have help. The larger political context has bled into life here, too. Two weeks after the neighborhood battle, the government extended the cash-for-work program, Midy said, seemingly both to appease the jobless and to secure support for the president's preferred successor in the national elections. "The sense of the program now is that it's more political," he told me. "Now, if you're not a supporter of the government, you can't find a job."