Report From Haiti: Where's the Money?

By Bill Quigley
Published by Portside
October 7, 2011

Broken and collapsed buildings remain in every
neighborhood. Men pull oxcarts by hand through the
street. Women carry 5 gallon plastic jugs of water on
their heads, dipped from manhole covers in the street.
Hundreds of thousands remain in grey sheet and tarp
covered shelters in big public parks, in between houses
and in any small pocket of land. Most of the people are
unemployed or selling mangoes or food on the side of
every main street. This was Port au Prince during my
visit with a human rights delegation of School of
Americas Watch - more than a year and a half after the
earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands and made
two million homeless.

What I did not see this week were bulldozers scooping up
the mountains of concrete remaining from last January's
earthquake. No cranes lifting metal beams up to create
new buildings. No public works projects. No housing
developments. No public food or public water
distribution centers.

Everywhere I went, the people of Haiti asked, "Where is
the money the world promised Haitians?"

The world has moved on. Witness the rows of padlocked
public port o lets stand on the sidewalk outside Camp
St. Anne. The displacement camp covers a public park
hard by the still hollow skeleton of the still
devastated St. Anne church. The place is crowded with
babies, small children, women, men, and the elderly. It
smells of charcoal smoke, dust and humans. Sixty hundred
fifty families live there without electricity, running
water or security.

I talked with several young women inside the camp of
shelters, most about eight feet by eight feet made from
old gray tarps, branches, leftover wood, and pieces of
rusty tin. When it rains, they stand up inside their
leaky shelters and wait for it to stop. In a path in
front of one home, crisscrossed with clotheslines full
of tiny children's clothes, a group of women from the
grassroots women's group KOFAVIV told us Oxfam used to
help administer the camp but quit in May. When Oxfam
left, the company that had been emptying the port o lets
stopped getting paid and abandoned the toilets. Some
people padlocked them and now charge a couple of cents
to use the toilets, money most residents don't have.
There is no work to earn the money for pay for toilets.
The Red Cross has just visited the camp that morning
telling them they would be evicted October 17. Where
will they go, we ask? We have no idea they told us.
Jesus will provide, they told us.

Where has the money raised for Haiti gone? What about
the Red Cross? What about the US government? What about
the money raised in France, Canada and across the world?
What about the pledges to the UN? Where is the money?
The people of Haiti continue to be plagued by the
earthquake of more than 20 months ago. They are our
sisters and brothers. They deserve answers. They deserve
help.

---

Bill is a law professor and human rights lawyer at
Loyola University New Orleans and with the Center for
Constitutional Rights. He volunteers with the Institute
for Justice and Democracy in Haiti and the Bureaux des
Advocats in Port au Prince. You can reach him at
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[Thanks to Bill Quigley for submitting this --
moderator.]

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