Smashed Hopes: Six Months On, Haiti Remains Covered in Rubble

LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN, 9 Aug 2010

Sandra Schulz in Port-au-Prince - Spiegel

A half a year after a devastating earthquake claimed at least 222,570 lives, the work of rebuilding Haiti is still in the early stages. Helpers have traveled to the country from around the world, but reconstruction has barely progressed. In many parts of the country, people have simply moved on with their lives amidst the rubble.

Daniel Strode, a man likes to describe himself as being a bit like a cockroach, is also the man who helped Haiti to regain its independence. To do so, he had to tear down a wall and part of a ceiling. Every step taken in this building was potentially life threatening. In the end, though, he found the giant stone plaque, hanging at a height of three meters.

There it was, word for word, engraved in marble, the declaration of independence of the Haitian people, dated Jan. 1, 1804, and not a letter had been damaged. He had the plate taken outside, placed it on top of cardboard boxes and tires on the bed of a truck and then turned it over to an envoy of the Haitian government.

Then he returned to work. Five days later, in the same spot, where the massive white Palais Législatif once stood, nothing remained but a dusty open space. In fact, it looked much the same as it does wherever Daniel Strode completes a job. “No one likes cockroaches, but without cockroaches we’d have garbage all over the place,” says Strode.

Strode likes empty spaces. A tall, bearded, 45-year-old American, he works for the aid organization Cooperative Housing Foundation International (CHF), and he likes clean, orderly space. Strode’s nightmare is a number: 25 million cubic meters of debris. It’s because of that number that he is here in Port-au-Prince, more than six months after a major earthquake struck the Haitian capital. The first, cautious estimate was 25 million, but Strode believes that there are at least 50 million cubic meters of debris. And all of it has to be removed.

For Strode it’s debris, but for Georges Emanies, the wreckage is still his house. Emanies was inside a church, in the middle of a hymn, when the earthquake struck. It dragged down his wife and their children, who were at home at the time, together with the kitchen where she was cooking rice and beans, and it brought down the house next door, where his youngest daughter, four-year-old Taïna, was watching cartoons on television.

Now Emanies is standing in front of his hut, which he has cobbled together with tarps and corrugated metal on top of the ruins of his former house, looking up at the sky. The clouds are gray and heavy over the hills. It will rain at night, and the water will shoot down underneath the tarp and wake up the children. The wind will rip at the tarp, and Taïna will cry when she hears the loud flapping and snapping noises in the darkness, afraid that another earthquake is about to strike.

The Struggle to Survive

On the hill in the distance, where the clouds are, the quake triggered a landslide, and an avalanche of gravel cut a long, vertical brown line into the landscape. The line hits the road at a right angle. People say it looks like a giant cross, buried in the mountain.

There are still 14 bodies under the rubble in Emanies’ neighborhood, 10 on this side of the small canal and four on the other side — 14 of the 222,570 dead the earthquake claimed. Sometimes, says Daniel Strode, people try to stop his excavators, saying that they would rather remove the debris with their hands. It isn’t because of the bodies. The initial mourning period is over, says Strode. Now people are just struggling to survive, and they are trying to salvage whatever belongings they can from the wreckage.

Sometimes the young men dance as they push their wheel barrels full of rocks. With one arm stretched to the sky, they move their bodies back and forth, swaying to the rhythm of a song a Haitian DJ composed. It has only one line of lyrics. “Nathalie? Fabienne?” the singer calls out, and then, in the chorus sings: “Under the rubble.” All of Port-au-Prince is now singing the same hit song.

The Competition to Tell Haiti’s Saddest Story

It’s a time in Haiti when an Icelander travels to the island and sets a prosthetic leg on a hotel bar. It’s his own invention, a revolution, comfortable to wear. There are reportedly more than 4,000 amputees in the country. The Icelander says that he waited before bringing his invention to Haiti, to give the people time to process the trauma. But now, he says, the time has come for action. The talks are going well, he says, unwilling to provide any additional information.

It’s a time in Haiti when older women with the organization Homeopaths Without Borders ask themselves how much they should tip in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. It’s a time when one isn’t sure whether to believe the girl in the first row of tents in front of the presidential palace, who claims she is an orphan and was raped, and who has just given another interview.

The truth is that these cases do exist in the camps, where people have been living for six months, and where everything turns pitch-black at night. And the truth is that there is a competition underway over who can tell Haiti’s saddest story. People have learned that the only way to get help is to be in dire straits. And so a woman says that her husband is dead, even though he’s standing next to her, as if it weren’t enough that her parents had already died in the quake. The world feels obligated not to forget this country, but Haiti has little to offer except the news that everything is still as miserable as it was before.

‘Rubble Isn’t Sexy’

It starts with the wreckage. People still live in tents because they’re afraid to return to their collapsed houses or because the debris prevents them from building a new home on their property. “It should be an easy process,” says Strode. “First you clear the property and then you rebuild.” But where does all the debris go? There is only one approved dumping site he’s allowed to use, and it’s a long way away.

At first, Strode was paying truck drivers by the day, but then he discovered that they were spending too much time doing nothing. Then he paid them by the cubic meter, and they simply dumped the debris somewhere along the side of the road. Finally, Strode came up with a system in which the drivers are given a ticket when they deliver their loads to the approved site. This system, enhanced with a barcode, could later be used in transportation throughout Haiti. “The disaster,” Strode says, “forces you to think.” That’s the only good thing about it.

Everyone wants Strode to tear down the ruins as quickly as possible — that is, they want him to produce even more wreckage. When his job is done, the only thing that remains of a building is a piece of paper on which the amount of debris is carefully noted. A Protestant school: 406 cubic meters. A college: 699 cubic meters. The notes from the American demolition expert’s work are already enough to fill two thick ring binders, but Strode is still getting hundreds of letters from homeowners, school principals and hospital directors — all of them begging him to come and destroy the remains of their buildings. They are desperate and furious, and they even call him on his mobile phone. By now, though, Strode’s only response is to send them a standard letter stating that, unfortunately, he cannot help them.

He’s out of money. There are construction machines in Haiti that have been standing around for so long that tall grass is now growing around the excavator shovels. This exasperates Strode, who likes to read Buddhist texts. He needs as much heavy equipment as he can get, but the leasing rate is high and he has already exceeded his budget. Of course, the aid organizations have money for all kinds of things, like shelter and drinking water, but it’s a question of how those funds are distributed. “Rubble isn’t sexy,” says Strode.

Everything that’s related to the wreckage is expensive and time-consuming. First Strode has to find the address using Google Earth, but in some cases there isn’t even a road to the house. Or he first has to remove the debris from the street and the wreckage of the house next door before he can even reach the correct one.

Georges Emanies, 43, is staring at the palm trees behind the wall. He believes that it’s the direction from which they’ll come. It’s a day he fears. He can already hear Strode’s yellow machine, droning as it teeters on top of a pile of debris like some giant animal, its torso bigger than the tent in which Emanies’ neighbor is living, and its arm in the process of tearing down the second floor of another house. Emanies, a gaunt man wearing a worn jersey from a football club in Lucerne, Switzerland, is happy that his property is on a hillside, surrounded by debris. It gives him more time.

Time is the problem, says Strode. Before he demolishes a house, he has to find the owner. But how does he determine who that person is? Sometimes people have been living in a house for two generations, and yet they have no documents to prove that they own the property. And the authorities aren’t much help, either. The government was already in poor shape before the earthquake struck, and now many computers and documents have become part of the rubble. In fact, the Haitian government itself is in a ruinous state.

Charting the Wreckage

Raymond Hygin, an engineer trained in Belgium and Canada and a senior official in the Ministry of Public Works, only controls little dots these days. Red, green, yellow dots — there are now 202,195 of them, and more are added every day. Hygin supervises the inventory of demolished buildings. Every morning, he sends out about 200 people with cans of spray paint in their backpacks. They inspect and mark each building, spraying their way through the city, with a color for each decision. A04 fire red means: dangerous, do not enter. 13 fresh green: safe to enter. Yellow: damaged but reparable. Every evening, Hygin has a new map covered with large numbers of colorful dots. After four months, he can conclude that the earthquake destroyed or severely damaged about half of all buildings.

Hygin’s old ministry is also a dot, a red dot, which is why he is sitting here now, penned in between stacks of moving boxes in a large office he shares with others. He draws a cross onto a napkin to indicate his former office on the second floor. There is no second floor anymore. All that’s left of the building is the façade, and on the ground, surrounded by rocks, are a diskette, a cable and a check issued by the ministry. There is a spot directly beneath his old office window, which is now a hole with green shutters, where people from the tent camps are now getting their water. Water is gushing out of a burst pipe underneath Hygin’s former office, turning the spot into a spring of sorts, in the midst of the wreckage, a secret, wondrous place for those in the know, who appear at the gate every morning with their buckets and toothbrushes, asking the guards to let them in.

Hygin says that he lost all of his paintings, including the beautiful one of a band, which saddens him. For 27 years he worked in the building, but today it has been degraded into a place with graffiti on the wall stating: “Don’t shit inside.”

A Government’s Slow Return

Still, even if the United Nations is helping Hygin manage his demolition inventory, and even though American engineers trained the Haitian inspectors, the people out in the streets are finally feeling the government’s presence again.

It comes in the form of the young men wearing the emblem of the ministry on their T-shirts, the men who tell them that they can now return to their homes, at least during the day, to cook and watch TV, or who warn them to stay away.

The government is literally putting its stamp on the capital. The stencil it presses against the walls bears the abbreviation of the ministry: MTPTC. More than six months after the earthquake, the Haitian government is reappearing in the form of a code of letters spray-painted onto the ruins.

There is only one building Hygin’s men have left out of their inspection of downtown Port-au-Prince: the Presidential Palace. As a joke, one of the American civil engineers drew a dot onto his map to indicate the palace — in red, of course. The earthquake nearly completely destroyed the edifice and today its cupolas perilously dangle off the sides of the building and parts of the interior are exposed because parts of the roof collapsed. No one needs a red dot to know that the structure is dangerous.

A Government Desperately Tries to Maintain Its Dignity

When Hygin’s men showed up at the palace gate, they weren’t allowed in. They were told to contact the secretary of the Presidential Palace and obtain a permit. “We can get the permit at any time,” says Hygin. “I’ll request it immediately.” But he also understands how delicate the situation is. At the same time, the palace is an important symbol of the country, and he would like to see it repaired soon.

The government is desperately trying to maintain its dignity, as Hygin’s homeless boss does in his small office. A paper sign taped to the door reads: Bureau du Ministre. The man uses a lot of words to convey two messages: that the government has excellent relations with the international organizations and is very pleased with the results, and that it has, of course, its very own technical experts.

Every morning, the wind carries the sounds of a marching band to the ruins of Hygin’s ministry. At 8 a.m., they raise the Haitian flag in front of the Presidential Palace and march, with their trumpets and kettledrums, past the demolished building.

These are the small gestures of a small nation, looking on as foreigners try to compress the catastrophe into their Excel tables, as the aid organizations divide up the city’s neighborhoods and the whole world shows up to rescue Haiti — with support from a literal rainbow of organizations, like the United States-based Convoy of Hope, Hungarian Baptist Aid, the Jesuit Refugee Service, the Taiwan-based Buddhist Tzu-Chi Foundation, Britain-based Islamic Relief and many others. In Haiti these days, stickers are affixed to every water tank, every portable toilet and just about anything else so that everyone will know which organization or institution they should be grateful to.

‘We Received Nothing’

“No one has helped us,” says Georges Emanies. “We have received nothing from any organization, nothing.” He says that looters stole his savings, about €160 ($211) which he had set aside over a year, from the wreckage of his house. He had planned to get married and had just bought his girlfriend, with whom he already has seven children, a wedding ring before the earthquake. He didn’t have enough money for the second ring, he says, and now, after the quake, he has had to pawn his girlfriend’s ring to feed the children.

He doesn’t understand why he can’t participate in the “Cash for Work” program in his neighborhood, one of the many programs sponsored by the aid organizations. The people are paid about five US dollars a day to clear away the rubble with shovels and wheelbarrows. The goal is to provide income and prevent unrest.

Emanies has no money to send Taïna to kindergarten and no money to pay for his sons’ lessons. He has owed the school the tuition for almost a year, and now it is refusing to allow his children to take their exams. He lives in a foul-smelling, hot hut without windows and sleeps directly below the cracked wall that’s left of his house. Emanies’ bad luck is that he was lucky.

His life doesn’t match the criteria of the aid organizations. He didn’t lose a wife or a leg, he has many children but not just young children, he isn’t old and frail, and he no longer lives in a tent, where his family lived for two months. Each morning, the family must get their drinking water in the morning from a tank provided by an aid organization called Project Concern International (PCI). One of his children plays in the PCI children’s tent in the morning. And his sons still walk to school every day along a path cleared by the “Cash for Work” people. They’ve also taken Taïna to the PCI clinic, because she spits a lot.

One can’t say that the world has forgotten Emanies. There are just far too many men and women like Emanies in Haiti, and when the international community comes to visit and scrutinizes his world, the first thing it sees is a canal full of garbage and pigs digging through the garbage. But the garbage is a good sign, and so is the rivulet of dirty water running through it.

It’s a good sign because the water is flowing, and because there is room for it to flow. In the earthquake, the houses on both sides fell into the riverbed. If 126 workers hadn’t spent two-and-a-half months clearing away the wreckage with their bare hands, the brown water would have backed up and eventually flooded everything. Emanies and everyone else in the ruins would have been living in a cesspool, surrounded by swarms of mosquitoes that transmit malaria and dengue fever.

Now they have only the rats with which to contend. Emanies killed three of them last week, crushing them with a shoe he managed to keep after the earthquake. The rats scurry from one pile of wreckage to the next, eating their way through the tarp where a wall once stood and crawling over the children. Last night a rat ran up Taïna’s arm, Emanies says with a short laugh.

A few houses farther down the hill, a Haitian woman carrying a megaphone hurries through the neighborhood, calling out: “Please do not throw any debris into the canal. We have just cleaned it. This is good for all of us.”

Things are moving forward very slowly. But would things really be better if help came quickly? One church group, for example, simply built a new hut here. It was the only hut erected in Emanies neighborhood, and the group only built it because the homeless people were devout churchgoers. This hut now stands in the middle of an area Daniel Strode will eventually demolish. And will it be a good thing if the big aid organizations soon descend on Emanies’ neighborhood, searching for empty land, and turn their noses up at the reconstruction plans Strode and the people at PCI have devised?

Strode tested his idea in Burma in 2008, after a devastating cyclone struck the country. Instead of simply building new houses where the old ones used to be, he discussed different floor plans with the residents, plans that might include installing latrines or planting trees. Strode, the man who wants to demolish the old Port-au-Prince, has already envisaged a new city in his head.

But the aid organizations are feeling the pressure of donors, who want them to start building now that the materials have finally arrived. The containers had been held up at Haitian customs for some time. NGOs imported the materials because they were worried about turmoil on the local market and that it would otherwise become too expensive for Haitians to repair their houses.

Georges Emanies managed to buy 12 wooden beams and 10 sheets of corrugated metal. For the past four months Emanies, who is just one of Haiti’s 1.5 million homeless, has been puttering around on his new home. The International Organization for Migration has distributed identification cards with the following words printed on the back: “Get registered so that you can help us change Haiti.” Emanies’ family stood in line for an entire day to get its number.

When they were asked where they wanted to go, Emanies’ girlfriend said: Canaan. It was what the others had said. She thought: Perhaps it’s where they’ve built proper, safe houses for us. She thought Canaan sounded like a nice place. Later, Emanies told her that Canaan was a location in the wilderness, and that it was full of snakes. Now they are terrified that they will be forced to move to the promised land.

Emanies doesn’t want to give up his new house, built on top of the wreckage of the old one. No one should be allowed to tear it down either, he says. For his part, Strode says that he would never tear down the house without Emanies’ permission. But Emanies doesn’t know this. All he knows is that he can hear the droning of Strode’s excavators behind the palm trees, and that the drone is getting louder and louder.

He has just applied a coat of pink paint to the doorframe. Strode, the American who has him so worried, lives in a house that’s painted the same bright pink. Emanies plans to build a window soon.

He won’t vote this year, because, as he says, nothing will change in this corrupt country anyway. Emanies says that he would rather be an American than independent. He is now devoting his full attention to his house.

In five months, Strode has already removed 210,000 cubic meters of debris, but he has millions more to go. The site where he dumps the debris, the debris and the bones in the wreckage, is Haiti’s real mass grave.

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