Six months after the earthquake, life in Haiti's 1,300 camps is crowded, unsanitary and increasingly dangerous. Sue Montgomery goes back to Port-au-Prince and finds electricity, water and schools, but little real shelter in the makeshift settlements. And for most people, proper housing is years away.
A lineup for papers needed to get food rations forms at a new camp on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. The camp has no shade and is a bus ride away from schools and markets.
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A raucous crowd surges from between two rows of tightly packed tents in Camp Dadadou, and from the middle of it, a young woman stumbles, struggling to regain her balance and escape the chanting mob.
Haitians of all ages jeer and push, some laughing, as the mass of sweating bodies moves along the perimeter of the camp. Unable to escape her captors, the young woman falls to the ground, and, after either being hit on the head with a wooden bat or slamming her skull against the concrete, her eyes roll back in her head and she falls unconscious, her thin, soaked body convulsing until it forms just a stiff board.
A few declare her dead. Several cheer the rumour, announcing that justice is served.
Most head back to their tents, the day's excitement over in what has become a miserable, boring existence. Only one -an 11-year-old orphaned boy who looks as if he might cry -asks whether she will survive.
After six months of living first under bedsheets and towels, and now inside torn, sweltering and soaked tents suitable at best for weekend camping, the stress in Haiti's crowded and unsanitary camps is beginning to grow. Normally patient Haitians, already traumatized by the massive loss of life in January's unprecedented earthquake, are starting to lose it.
"I have to leave Haiti," says Genevieve Joubert, a nurse living with about 10,500 others on the former soccer pitch now known as camp Dadadou. "But there's nowhere to go."
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SOURCE: Montreal Gazette
Sue Montgomery
