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Pompilus is among the hundreds of thousands of Haitians still living in refugee camps after the devastating earthquake that struck here one year ago today, killing 230,000 by the Haitian government's estimate and injuring many more. Pompilus is one of the fortunate few who have been given a wooden shelter, rather than a tent or a tarp.
At night, the camp is dark. Trash fires from squatters flicker from surrounding hillsides. Pompilus says she sometimes catches sight of people smoking cocaine in the camp and worries for her teenage daughter.
What the area needs, she says, is development: lighting, schools, more accessible police and medical clinics, jobs training. She makes some money reselling snacks and canned goods in the camp, but not enough. "We need something more sustainable," says Pompilus, who sold secondhand goods before the quake.
It took only a half-minute for the earthquake to shatter this island. A year later, the optimism that followed an international outpouring of sympathy, volunteers and money has given way to reality: The problems here are too great to solve in a year's time. Too much of the skilled labor force perished in the quake; concerns about corruption and the need for planning have slowed the delivery of funds; and bickering over how and where to rebuild to avoid re-creating slums has hampered reconstruction.
The United Nations, U.S. aid officials and Haiti's government insist that progress is being made though it's hard to see amid the widespread devastation. Still, that progress is piecemeal, a reflection of Haitian poverty and institutional weakness before the quake, the scale of devastation after, and the challenge of coordinating an international cast of actors carrying out their own rebuilding objectives, say aid experts.
The U.N. reported in December that the number of people left homeless by the quake had dropped from 1.5 million to 1 million. Even that possible sign of progress may not be what it seems, because the U.N. isn't sure whether those who left camps set up for the homeless had found decent housing. Elsewhere in this nation of close to 10 million that was struggling with poverty long before the quake, there is little sense that things have improved.
The unemployment rate here is the highest in the hemisphere. The U.S. government reports that as many as two-thirds of Haiti's workers have no job or are working very little. Most homes, schools and buildings that toppled in the quake have not been rebuilt; even the rubble has not been cleared. Crime is going up.
Despite some "heroic" efforts, former foreign service officer Ray Walser says the humanitarian response has been overwhelmed by the scale of Haiti's needs.
"The indicators on the ground are that the results don't match the effort," says Walser, senior policy analyst on Latin America at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank.
Landscape of rubble
Rubble is one reason that reconstruction has been slow. A RAND Corp. report published six months after the quake said rubble clearance is the "single most important step" to reconstruction. Yet much remains.
The removal process has been hampered by a lack of heavy equipment and difficulty maneuvering within the narrow confines of cramped neighborhoods. Much of the debris is being removed by hand — bucket by bucket, says Namy Registre, 42, a resident of Fort National who is being paid by the government to remove debris.
"The amount of debris in this city will take years" to clear, says Michele Montas, a former spokeswoman for the U.N. Secretary-General who is a special representative in Haiti. "No one has really devised a strategy to do it better. It costs too much."
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and others concluded it would take at least six more dumpsites and several new roads dedicated to moving rubble to get rid of all debris in one year.
The United States has given about $100 million for rubble removal and is responsible for more than half the amount cleared. Cheryl Mills, counselor and chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, considers the debris removed so far an "unseen victory," along with the rapid response to the cholera outbreak, gains in agriculture and getting 80% of the Haiti children who had been in school (a minority of Haiti's children) back to classrooms.
Officials say some progress is difficult to see. When journalists return to Haiti every few months, Montas says, they point to piles of rubble in the same spot they last saw piles and declare nothing has changed since they left.
"It's not the same rubble," she says.
A week before a presidential election in November marred by fraud touched off violent protests, Lesly Isidor sat on a concrete block in his empty tent outside the National Palace eating his first meal of the day — an avocado and a piece of bread. The day before, he had been one of the protesters hurling rocks at police and U.N. peacekeepers because jobless, homeless Haitians like him are fed up.
"They're going to come here with their soldiers and shoot at us and we're going to use what we have. If we have stones, we are going to throw stones at them," he says.
Isidor, 36, complains that neither President René Préval nor the U.N. has improved the jobless situation.
Recent acts by the U.S. Congress have lifted import duties on items assembled in Haiti, opening the door to foreign investment in light manufacturing. But many foreign companies complain that the lack of electricity and roads is an obstacle, Mills says. On Tuesday, the State Department announced a deal with a South Korean garment-maker to build an industrial park that could create an estimated 20,000 jobs outside the capital.
Walser praises the measures, saying Haiti needs market-based solutions to its poverty.
"You don't want to create a vast island that's a massive sweatshop," he says. "But you've got to find ways to occupy what is an island filled with unemployed people who eventually will be weaned from rubble removal and need something to do."
He says it would help to end subsidies of U.S. agricultural products such as rice, which drove Haitian rice farmers out of business.
Haiti's problems predate the quake. Poor health care, filthy water and poor sanitation have been issues for years. The government has been accused of being too timid to tackle corruption, suppress protests or relocate the homeless, presidential adviser Patrick Elie says.
"How it looks right now is that no Haitian government with sufficient legitimacy is going to be in charge of reconstruction. So that leaves the international community in charge," he says.
But Haitians appear to resent the idea that their future is in the hands of foreigners. Recent protests denounced the U.N. forces here as an occupying army.
Haitians make up half of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission that approves reconstruction projects. Its progress has been slow in part because about 45% of the Haitian federal workforce was either killed by the quake, fled the country or hired by foreign NGOs offering higher salaries, government spokeswoman Alice Blanchet says.
Critics argue that the United States and other international donors have been slow to deliver pledged reconstruction funds. Although a lot of money has gone into relief, says Elizabeth Ferris of the Brookings Institution, not enough is being spent on reconstruction. Mills disagrees.
The USA has spent more than $1 billion in the relief effort, including military operations, as well as reprogramming $400 million of previously committed, but unpledged, funds to bridge the gap between relief efforts and reconstruction work, she says.
The USA has also provided $120 million to a World Bank reconstruction fund for projects approved by the Haitian government, and more than $200 million to erase Haiti's debt. Another $700 million is committed to projects in the pipeline.
The vast majority of the projects are being managed by foreign non-governmental organizations, prompting Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive to complain the country cannot become self-sustaining if it is not given more of a leadership role.
Foreign governments have expressed concern that Haiti is too corrupt to manage such programs. But bypassing the Haitian government risks repeating the cycle of dependency that has made Haiti into "the republic of NGOs," Ferris says.
A call for patience
The gaps between what relief agencies have been able to provide and what is needed are on full display in Corail-Celesse. North of Port-au-Prince in a treeless patch of desert, the country's first official relocation camp hosts several hundred wooden transitional shelters and thousands of white tents in rows.
The camp's manager, Bryant Castro, says the camp is supposed to be temporary but looks as if it's on its way to becoming a permanent failed community. Schools have been built, but the doors are shut because no one has stepped forward to pay teachers' salaries. Castro says he is waiting for a response from the government about his proposal to create a task force to consider building a market and production facilities, and doing jobs training.
"There's a clear gap that needs to be filled, and I think in the next year we're going to be confronted by that gap," Castro says.
Inside the official camp, water and other services are provided to about 10,000 people. But outside its perimeter, there are now as many as 110,000 squatters, Castro says.
In a squatter community called Canaan 2, competition for water and other services provided by NGOs has prompted violence. Magdaline Rousseau, 26, says she and other residents have been extorted, threatened and harassed. Castro says the situation is at a crossroads.
"You have either the beginnings of some kind of planned and reasonably stable community or you have the seedlings for a slum filled with gangs," he says. "It can go either way."