“This Place is Hell”

That’s how a woman I met this morning described living in the tarp settlement at Champs de Mars.  It’s in Port au Prince, and the last time she or anyone she knew had a meal to eat was Friday. 

Today is Monday. 

I’m back in PAP representing You.Me.We., and have teamed up with lawyers from the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti and the Bureau de Avocates Internationaux to bring a human rights perspective to the resettlement phase of the disaster response.  

I thought I was up to the task.  I was in Haiti a month ago, and since then have all but memorized the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement.  I brought copies of the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights, and studied up on how to petition the IA Commission for precautionary measures.  I’m a lawyer, it's what we do.

But right now, none of that matters.  The 5000 people living at Camps de Mars haven’t seen an aid worker for months, which basically means no meals and no medical care.  That’s a big problem when the water you bathe in makes you break out in hives, and what you drink makes you vomit for days.  It seems like every woman you meet is either recovering from rape, has barely escaped being raped, or is taking care of a child whose been raped.  I asked one survivor how often women are assaulted in the camp, and she laughed.  “Every night,” she said, “every night.”   Moms make their kids go to the bathroom in a bag because no-one is safe walking to the latrines in the dark.  Some of them sleep with machetes by their side, for obvious reasons, but also because it sounds a good alarm when you bang it against a cooking pan or broken lamp pole.  

The Dads and the brothers and their cousins guard the perimeter at night, but there are too many open entrances to keep an eye on.   They’re outnumbered, one man told me, and outgunned.  And they need work.  Any kind of work, but that’s hard to look for during the day when you’re up patrolling the camps all night.  Besides, there is no work for them in PAP, so some are thinking of leaving the camp to head for the countryside to find a job.  When that happens, one woman confides to me, she’ll kill herself.    

Despite all of this, there is a veneer of normalcy that fools you into thinking things are better than they were four months ago.  The traffic is jammed, the schools are open (well, some of them are), and there’s a good deal of commerce in the streets - flip-flops and backpacks are hot items.   But food is getting harder to find.  No-one feels safe.  And everyone knows that time is running out.

 

 

Comments

[Charlie Martel]

This is harrowing news Kathleen, but it is important to make it visible.

[Kathy]

Worst part is, Charlie, things appear to be getting even worse, not better, than they were when we visited in March. For now, I'm trying to think small, focusing on what we might be able to do, rather than all I know we can't.

Will try to post some more in the coming days.