Rainy season threatens Haiti camps

Port-au-Prince: Every afternoon the clouds pile up on the high ridges above this collapsed city and the breeze descends with a telltale earthy smell. The rain usually waits until dark, when short but spectacular bursts deluge random bits of the capital and unleash torrents of rock and grey mud.

The rainy season is bearing down, and Haiti is not ready.

Three months after the earthquake killed more than 200,000 people, more than 2.1 million Haitians are still living in tents and under tarps, many on dangerous hillsides and tidal flats.

Ernst Y'Voyelle, 38, studies those clouds warily from his hut clinging to the edge of a ravine in a hillside tent camp where as many as 50,000 people live.

"There's going to be a lot of people buried here," he said. A short rain the night before had turned his patch of loose dirt into a sticky slop. Half an inch of clay clung to his loafers.

Aid workers had been talking about moving people out of dangerous spots like this one for weeks, but only last weekend did they begin, with 62 people.

Y'Voyelle was not one of them. Nor was Saluido Desauguste. He was sleeping the other night when water poured out from a drainage ditch near his tent. He had time only to get himself and his two children out before the water swept away the tent and all the possessions he had left after the earthquake took everything else.

A tall man with ropy muscles, he dug through the muck the next morning looking for anything that might be salvaged. He found only his little girl's purple sandal.

Certainly much has been done in Haiti. The bodies in the streets were buried. Residents in Port-au-Prince have more access to medical care than they have had in decades. Aid groups are still distributing food and water.

Moving thousands

But everyone agrees that the next steps require a coordinated plan to get people into safer camps and, ultimately, housing.

Humanitarian groups and the government have been talking about this since a few days after the quake, and set a target date of April 15 to relocate those in the most danger.

That deadline has come and gone. There is a feeling that the temporary is settling into the permanent. Tin and wood are slowly transforming tent camps into shanty-towns, and trails are emerging on the heaps of shattered concrete as if they were part of the natural topography. Claire Basiler, 80, still can't go beyond the 1.2 metre wide alley behind her home on Rue Champs Mars downtown because she is too feeble to climb over 20 feet of rubble. "I haven't left once since the earthquake," she said.

In a sprawling camp on the Petionville Club golf course, engineers have identified 7,500 people to be moved immediately. By Friday, 1,629 had been relocated.

That camp is getting far more attention than any of the more than 1,300 others in Haiti — its manager is the actor Sean Penn, who co-founded a relief organisation doing work in the country.

Relocation is also difficult culturally. Haitians rely on their communities to survive.

The camp where residents of the Petionville Club are being moved is on a dust-blown, desolate slope far from the city, where people will be wholly reliant on aid.