This article shows you a small piece of the craziness that exist in Haiti.


Haiti: Where Building a Hospital Can Be Illegal

By Tim Padgett and Jessica Desvarieux / Canaan Friday, Nov. 12, 2010


Camp Corail, a tent city north of Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Eduardo Munoz / Reuters

Rodrigue Jean and his neighbors are building a desperately needed medical facility in Haiti, but in doing so they're also violating a new government decree. The cinderblock clinic is going up in a sprawling squatter camp called Canaan, one of many that have sprung up in a mountain valley north of Port-au-Prince since January's massive earthquake. Some 30,000 families have settled in Canaan, lured by the Haitian government's announcement that it acquired the land for them via eminent domain. The problem is that Haiti's threadbare treasury apparently can't pony up to compensate the owner, and now the government is backtracking — and banning the construction of social infrastructure such as hospitals, schools and streets in the camp. (See photos of Haiti's cholera crisis.)

Jean laughs at the restriction. From the entrance of the clinic, where doctors have agreed to work for nominal fees, he gestures toward Canaan's four schools, its convenience stores and its rough new streets being carved out of the dusty valley. "Only death can pull us out of here now," says Jean, 33, a Port-au-Prince electronics salesman who lost a child in the quake that killed more than 200,000 people, but whose wife is expecting a baby any day now. "I mean, what government is going to tear down a clinic?" (Watch the video "A Breach of Faith in Haiti."

It's a good question. And his defiance is also a sign of how impatient Haitians have become with the slow pace of recovery — and with a weak government that's only beginning to find its reconstruction groove. Canaan isn't one of the squalid tent camps that still house most of the 1.5 million Haitians left homeless by the quake. Its residents live in sturdier, 190-sq.-ft. (18 sq m) "t-shelters," or temporary housing, with plywood walls and tin roofs, built largely by foreign NGOs like the Chile-based Un Techo para Mi Pais (A Roof for My Country). With $2 million funding from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Techo has erected almost 700 t-shelters in Canaan, and is urging the government to drop its infrastructure ban. "If you don't allow formal urban planning in these communities," warns local Techo director Sebastián Smart, "you're just going to end up with gigantic rural versions of Port-au-Prince slums."

The cholera epidemic that this week reached Port-au-Prince has given the postquake housing crisis a new urgency. So have the looming Nov. 28 presidential election (in which the handpicked successor of President René Préval is running second in polls) and the increase in often violent evictions of tent-camp dwellers from privately owned properties. Perhaps as a result, the transfer of displaced Haitians to t-shelter communities, a critical first benchmark for recovery, finally appears to be quickening.

Since August, the number of t-shelters built in Haiti has jumped from fewer than 10,000 to more than 19,000 — close to half the target of 45,000 set for the quake's Jan. 12 first anniversary by the Shelter Cluster, an umbrella body of aid groups including the U.N. Although quake rubble remains a daunting obstacle to finding available land for t-shelter communities (even now, less than a tenth of quake debris has been removed), housing advocates say Préval's government has begun to tackle Haiti's medieval land-title system and is presenting guidelines for identifying who owns what property and how to obtain it for the displaced. "That's a crucial link that was missing before," says Lilianne Fan, a Shelter Cluster coordinator. "We've got a more impressive reconstruction framework now."

Priscilla Phelps, a senior housing advisor to the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission headed by former U.S. President Bill Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive — which is managing most of the $10 billion reconstruction aid pledged by international donors — agrees. "I've gotten great cooperation from the government," she insists, especially regarding a new property-mapping system modeled after one used in Southeast Asia after the catastrophic 2004 tsunami. "We're seeing a lot more housing being built in rural areas."

And the provinces are exactly where Haiti's future may lie. The government wants many if not most tent-camp dwellers to rebuild their urban neighborhoods. But many development experts advocate relocation: establishing viable communities in the underpopulated heartland for the thousands who lost their homes in the overpopulated capital. Tapping its economic potential, they say, is key to making the western hemisphere's poorest country something more than a basket case so dependent on international aid that even before the earthquake, foreign NGOs had effectively become a substitute for government. (Officials blame the bloated NGO presence — even Homeopaths Without Borders has a delegation in Haiti — in large part for Port-au-Prince's current traffic paralysis.)

Creating provincial "poles of development" by promoting local agriculture, tourism and garment manufacturing, says IDB Haiti representative Eduardo Almeida, "is really the best, if not the only, way to develop [Haiti] from here on out." Almeida, whose organization is heading an aggressive t-shelter construction effort in areas outside Port-au-Prince, also agrees that Haiti can't afford to "just construct new slums" in the process.

But Canaan and places like it are a reminder of the difficulty Haiti faces in reconciling the need for well-planned communities with the claims of well-heeled property owners — like the Haitian real estate development firm Nabatec, which owns the land that 30,000 Canaan families have made their home. Nabatec's president, Gerard-Emile "Aby" Brun, says the Préval government's blunder may now cost him both the 600 acres (245 hectares) where Canaan sits and the $19 million he was supposed to receive for it under eminent domain.

Nabatec, Brun claims, had also planned an industrial park for the valley — a source of jobs that he feels may well have benefited the very families now squatting on the land. Equally important to Haiti's development, he insists, are "clear signals that private investment is supported." And he rails at groups like Techo for continuing to build t-shelters in Canaan and arranging the delivery of potable water and other services. "They are violating the [government decree]."

But Nabatec's critics say the land had been idle for too long for the government not to consider it a logical refuge for quake victims. And Techo's Smart insists the NGOs can't turn away families "who have no other place to go," since land for t-shelters is still so scarce. "In the face of the emergency in Haiti," says Smart, "we feel we're doing the only thing we can do." At one of Canaan's schools, principal Joseph Laurent, dressed in suit and tie, herds children wearing uniforms into a sprawling UNICEF tent for classes. "I don't think the government is going to send these children back to Port-au-Prince," says Laurent, whose academy back in the capital collapsed in the earthquake. As its biblical name implies, they see Canaan as their promised land.



Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2031102,00.html#ixzz15MA8BRpx

[B]The Woman Who Would Be Haiti's Next President[/B]

By Tim Padgett and Jessica Desvarieux / Port-au-Prince Monday, Nov. 15, 2010

[IMG]http://img.timeinc.net/time/daily/2010/1011/mirlande_manigat_1112.jpg[/IMG]
Mirlande Manigat, candidate for the Haitian presidency
Orlando Baria / AP


The woman who could be the next President of Haiti — and the first female to be elected to that office — doesn't strike you as an insurgent when she walks into a room. But Mirlande Manigat, a smartly dressed, soft-spoken, 70-year-old Sorbonne Ph.D., insists she's after nothing less than a "rupture" with Haiti's dysfunctional political establishment. "Not one that's violent or brutal, but there must be change," Manigat said in an interview with TIME at her campaign's Port-au-Prince headquarters. "We can't leave so many millions of Haitians abandoned anymore."

So far, her message is resonating inside the western hemisphere's poorest country, which was ravaged in January by an earthquake that killed some 230,000 people — and is beset now by a cholera outbreak that has claimed almost 1,000. Two weeks before Haiti's Nov. 28 presidential election, voter polls show Manigat the clear front runner in a field of 19 candidates. In the most recent survey by Haiti's independent Economic Forum, released late last week, Manigat significantly widened her lead over President René Préval's hand-picked candidate, engineer Jude Celestin, to eight points, 30% to 22%.

That the government's choice is trailing isn't a surprise: Préval's often AWOL response to the apocalyptic quake has alienated most Haitians from his INITE (Unity) Party. Their frustration with Haiti's corrupt, incompetent political elite, which many feel INITE represents, is a big reason the country was exhilarated by the outsider candidacy of Haitian-American hip-hop star and philanthropist Wyclef Jean. When Haiti's electoral council disqualified Jean's bid in August on residency grounds, the question was where his support, especially among the large cohort of young voters, would shift. (Why did Wyclef Jean want to run for President of Haiti?)

To the surprise of many pundits, much of it seems to have moved from the gold chains of rapper Jean to the pearl strands of matriarch Manigat. (She's also eclipsing Michel "Sweet Micky" Martelly, himself a Haitian pop-music star, who ranks third in the Forum poll with just 11%.) If so, one reason may well be that "many Haitians feel the time has come for a woman to lead the country," says prominent Haitian historian and political analyst Georges Michel. "So here's Manigat, a well-respected scholar. She takes many of the populist positions that [Jean] had, and they respond to her grandmotherly image. To a lot of them, it seems to inspire confidence and trust." Those qualities will be in loud demand, because Haiti's next President will oversee some $10 billion in reconstruction aid pledged by international donors. (See Haiti's other rock-star candidate.)

Even though she's a woman, Manigat is by no means a political outsider. She is, in fact, a former First Lady, the wife of former President Leslie Manigat. They met in the 1960s at the University of Paris, where he taught history while in exile — having been condemned to death at home by brutal Haitian dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who died in 1971 — and she was his student. They married in 1970, living in France, Trinidad and Venezuela before returning to Haiti in 1986 after the ouster of Duvalier's son and successor, dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier.

In 1988, Leslie Manigat, under the banner of the Assembly of Progressive National Democrats (RDNP), won the presidency in an election marred by military meddling. After only four months in office, he was overthrown in a coup. He ran again in 2006 and finished a distant second to Préval. But although Préval did not win the 50% necessary to avoid a second round, the electoral council never held a runoff — and in protest, Mirlande Manigat withdrew as the RDNP's Senate candidate. "I cannot support illegality," she said of her controversial move. (See photos of Haiti's history of misery.)

In that regard, Manigat and her supporters may see Nov. 28 as a chance for revenge, especially since many Haitians believe her 80-year-old husband will be a power behind her throne if she wins. But Manigat insists that she and the RDNP — which she calls a center-left, "capitalist with a human face" party in the tradition of successful moderate Latin American leftists like Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — want to check a venal elite that she accuses of "grave social indifference and insensitivity. It was there before, but after the earthquake it has shown itself in worse ways."

Manigat, vice rector of the Université Quisqueya in Port-au-Prince, tells TIME that along with tackling Haiti's nightmarish inequality via reforms like universal access to public education — only about half of the country's children even attend school — one of her big aims is to make the Haitian state something more than an effete subordinate of foreign NGOs. "There are many NGOs positioning themselves to receive the [$10 billion], yet they want to operate outside of state control," says Manigat. "My government will not operate the NGO way."

Manigat feels Haiti's earthquake recovery "has not really started" — admittedly, rubble removal and the rehousing of some 1.5 million displaced Haitians have been frustratingly slow — but like most of the candidates, she's not specific about how she'd hasten it. She backs changing Haiti's constitution to allow dual citizenship, which could aid the country's reconstruction by tapping into the resources and talents of the vast Haitian diaspora, including more than a million Haitian Americans. But critics, based on some of her teachings of Haitian constitutional law, fear that Manigat could have authoritarian designs to expand presidential powers — which she denies.

Manigat has been helped by the uncharismatic campaigning of Celestin, 48, a relatively unknown technocrat. On the stump in the southern port city of Jacmel recently, he repeated his less-than-electric slogan of "stability and continuity" while touching on criticisms of the Préval government by saying, "We know that there were things that were a little ignored." That has pushed erstwhile Préval supporters like Port-au-Prince carpenter Jourdanie Damler, 35, to Manigat's camp. "The INITE guys have forgotten about us," says Damler. "I'll try Madame Manigat."

Since no candidate is likely to win 50% of the vote in the first round, the race will probably come down to a Jan. 16 runoff (less than a month before the Feb. 7 inauguration). Some wonder how Haiti can even conduct a credible election given the lingering quake chaos and cholera epidemic. Manigat says the vote "has to happen" for Haiti to move forward, but after the 2006 dispute, she adds, she and the RDNP "will be vigilant against fraud trickery." This grandmother won't tolerate it.


Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2031412,00.html#ixzz15PAYvsoO