Haiti Still Buried Under Rubble

Nearby, however, in the Ravine Pintade bidonville, or slum, Emma Labrousse is singing. With an $8 million grant from the U.S. Office of Foreign guess handbags Disaster Assistance (OFDA), two American NGOs, Cooperative Housing Foundation International (CHF) and Project Concern International (PCI), have helped connect Ravine Pintade to running water, set up a health clinic, installed latrines and built a daycare center. Most important, they've rented heavy machinery, and employed local workers, to extract the tons of rubble choking the bidonville's entrances and arteries. Kids are playing soccer again, and residents can expect sturdy, temporary housing, or "t-shelters," in the coming months. "We can move around, we feel like the country is turning around," says Labrousse, 63, who lost a teenaged daughter to the quake but is belting out hymns today inside her tiny local church. "We're living again."
Unfortunately, on the first anniversary of one of history's worst natural disasters, FranÇois' despair is still vastly more common among Haitians than Labrousse's optimism. The quake drew a remarkable emergency response from the international community. It also prompted ambitious plans to reconstruct, even reinvent, the hemisphere's poorest nation - to "build it back better," as the mantra went. "But the recovery process really hasn't begun yet," argues Leslie Voltaire, an urban architect and presidential candidate. Two-thirds of the 1.5 million Haitians left homeless by the quake still live in tents, and fewer than half the 45,000 t-shelters that U.N. and other housing organizations that the U.N. and other agencies had envisaged would be built by now have been erected.
The biggest impediment to the reconstruction is the most summer fashion trends basic. "Nothing can really be done," Voltaire notes, "until the rubble is removed." And only 5% of the up to 22 million cubic yards of heavy debris has been tackled. While it took more than two years to clear less than half that amount of rubble from the Indonesian province of Aceh after the 2004 tsunami, at the current rate of removal it will take another 19 years to clear Haiti.
Another obstacle is the sheer enormity of the concrete deluge: Almost all of Port-au-Prince, a hyper-densely populated capital with criminally lax building codes, was reduced to gravel. Worse, the city's jagged topography (San Francisco can seem flat by comparison) and its chaotic maze of narrow byways makes maneuvering large equipment an ordeal. Liability concerns are a further restraint: rubble removal often involves demolition and the risk of sending a condemned structure crashing onto other properties. Then there's the problem of where to dump it. Right now, the only available site for Port-au-Prince rubble sits alongside one of the city's most troubled slums, CitÉ Soleil - a spectacle that does little for the "build it back better" campaign.
The challenges are forcing innovation. Ann Lee, program director for CHF in Haiti, is promoting the use of conveyors, hillside chutes and cranes. She also suggests that the cash-for-work programs that employ Haitians to remove rubble consider basing wages on output as well as hours. Residents of the Port-au-Prince district of Nazon, for example, tell TIME they want foreign contractors, because locals too often treat the cash-for-work effort as a laid-back political patronage deal. "There's been a lot of impressive effort by the international community," says Lee, "but we could have done a lot better. It shouldn't take a year to clear just 5% of the rubble."
Many Haitians disagree, however. Voltaire suggests that precisely because the Haitian state is so ragged, the U.S. should drop its delusion that PrÉval and company can steer the recovery and instead "recognize that its nation-building is actually needed here." But that's hardly where Washington wants to go these days. PrÉval, meanwhile, couldn't even ensure a transparent presidential election to choose his successor - angry Haitians, who've had to deal with a recent cholera epidemic on top of all their other woes, are still waiting for reliable results from their
power balance Nov. 28 balloting. That's a reminder that the other rubble that needs to be removed in Haiti is centuries of misrule.