Haiti's Camp from Hell

Alex Wynter, a good friend of HDEO (check out his great posts on Albinism and Rwanda) has been working for us in Haiti for most of the last months since the earthquake struck. He has been regularly doing media interviews and posting stories. Alex is now en route out of Haiti for a well-deserved break - here is one of his latest and one of his best stories from Britzon Camp 6 otherwise known as the camp from hell. Photos from colleague José Manuel Jiméniz. 

Many quake camps in Haiti are unpleasant because they’re next to rubbish dumps; or dangerous for being on flood plains or at the foot of unstable slopes; or isolated and possibly forgotten for being in the middle of nowhere or buried at the end of side streets. 

But for sheer hellish living conditions nothing beats this place: Camp Bizoton 6, Route Raille.

“I’ve worked in at least 35 camps now, and none was anywhere near as bad as this,” says Jens Poul Madsen, team leader of the International Federation's Danish Red Cross relief emergency response unit, which has just done an assessment there and now plans to expedite a distribution.

Madsen, by common consent one of the most experienced and determined of the relief delegates who have worked in Haiti, uses his words advisedly.  (Photo: A mother and child in their shelter at Haiti’s Bizoton 6 camp. The backs of the shelters face the eastbound side, their fronts the westbound).

The Bizoton 6 “camp” consists of a single file of shacks nearly a kilometre long on the central reservation of Route Raille – the busy coastal highway leading west out of Port-au-Prince.

Tyres and stones

The front of the shelters face the westbound side; their backs the eastbound.

The quake-affected residents – 965 of them according to the local committee – have placed tyres and stones on the road to force traffic to stay a couple of metres from their doors.

Even just standing outside one of the shelters is an ordeal.

Every truck that roars past spews dust and diesel exhaust right into the doors and windows. Should any vehicle linger, it’s immediately blasted forward by a cacophony of horns – standard practice in the Haitian capital.

It’s difficult to talk and – many residents say – impossible to sleep. The combination of noise, dirt, heat, fumes and stress is overwhelming.

Every trip to the toilets involves darting through the traffic. As does any trip anywhere for that matter.

“Last resort”

Parents are permanently terrified for their children, choosing simply to lock them in the shelters for much of the time.

Occasionally, they’re run down, like nine-year-old Emmanuela Mondesir was recently; she had a lucky escape, losing only a front tooth after she was knocked onto her face.

“For three days after the quake we looked for somewhere to take refuge,” says Luma Ludger, 30, the head of the Bizoton 6 camp committee.

“There was no open space at all, so in the end on 16 January we came here. It was a last resort.

“Now the camp is actually growing again. People who’ve been evicted from other quake sites are coming here.” The central strip is packed with shelters from one end to the other.

Clearly the Bizoton 6 residents need to be moved as urgently as any quake-affected people in Haiti. But asked what their most urgent daily needs are, Ludger says only, “protection from the rains”, which are intensifying, and “a safe place for children”.

“There’s just no peace,” says 31-year-old Jean Kempez, yelling above the tyre roar he and his neighbours live with round the clock.

Community

“We live like animals,” he says, with considerable understatement as there is no developed country in which animals could legally be kept in the conditions that prevail at Bizoton 6.

Pierre Betty, 26, says that last week a car left the road and demolished a shelter that was mercifully empty at the time. “People just ran in all directions, but thank God no one was killed.”

Somewhat miraculously the camp from hell has retained a sense of community, even though there is no place to gather safely; people wander up and down the line of shacks dodging cars and trucks to meet and talk.

“My husband would like to find a job that would pay enough for us to be able to leave this place,” says Judith Sinnew, 38, who shows off the huge scar covering much of her calf muscle from the messy fracture she suffered in the quake.

What can be done?

Equanimity

“The first priority is to get them some proper family supplies,” says Jens Poul Madsen, “but we don’t want to provide full shelter kits because these people have to move from here – it’s just too dangerous to stay.

“The logistics of distribution will be very difficult,” he adds. “We can’t stop the traffic or assemble beneficiaries near their homes, so we’ll have to find some neutral territory where we can set up.”

Bizoton 6, it has to be said, slipped through the humanitarian net. Anyone who’s been working in Haiti for any length of time will have driven past it at some point.

Yet even here, in this nightmarish place, people smile, are welcoming to outsiders, and patient with each other.

In Bizoton 6, probably not for the first time, the foreign aid worker cannot but wonder: surely the equanimity of the Haitian people must be deceptive?

ps: this post originally appeared on ifrc.org with more photos - for some reason blogger won't let me post more than one photo here - gotta find a new blog platform methinks, too many glitches /PC

Haiti: Enormous challenges remain, three months on

Recent heavy rains and their mud-soaked aftermath have once again turned the spotlight back onto Haiti.

Along with the immediate shock at the continuing human suffering, the images we’re seeing are also provoking another reaction; why, when so many of us around the world have given so much, are those affected by the earthquake still living in such appalling conditions?

Why, when the world knew that the rainy season was coming, are people still forced to shelter under tarpaulins? Where are the new houses for the homeless? Where, in short, is the relief effort which might seem to have dissolved under the rains?

In truth, aid agencies in Haiti are working harder than ever to provide relief and protect people from the rains.

So far, shelter distributions led by the International Red Cross have reached close to 1.2 million people. Haiti represents one of the fastest distribution operations ever undertaken. This in spite of well-publicised problems including a port too damaged to operate, blocked roads and a clogged airport.

Some obstacles undoubtedly persist, but humanitarian agencies in Haiti continue to perform logistical miracles to get aid to those in need.

In the United States, one of the the richest countries in the world, with teams of the most well equipped experts on earth, it took two years to clear the rubble of the World Trade Centre.

Haiti, it hardly needs to be pointed out, is not the United States. Rubble clearance and reconstruction is an enormous task, and to achieve long-term, sustainable recovery we have to be realistic about the size of that task and how long it will take.

That is why emergency shelter has been the focus. We have to reach the most vulnerable people with the most effective forms of aid possible within the time available. In Haiti that means mass distribution of waterproof tarpaulins to get shelter to as many people as possible. Gradually, as rubble is removed and new land made available, families will receive metal roof sheeting and timber and steel frames to construct more durable shelters.

We need to help people as quickly as we can, but must not let pressure to increase the speed of our response lead to errors of judgement which could undermine recovery, and jeopardise people’s lives, in the long term.

All aid agencies are working round the clock to make sure people are protected in the short-term and ensure a safer future in the years ahead but it is a sad reality that, with the rains coming, the situation for people living in the camps will get worse before it gets better.


/PC

Poverty Poem by Fred Taban from South Sudan

Please take 1 min and 50 seconds to listen to "Poverty poem" by Fred Taban which was recorded last week in South Sudan. Fred is a theology professor at the Episcopal Church Sudan Seminary in Kajo Keji county. He has been a refugee for most of his life. When Fred speaks of poverty he knows what he is talking about. 

Fred Taban’s poem on poverty is a thoughtful and universal meditation on the bitter predicament that is faced on a daily basis by ever greater number of people on this planet. On HDEO we have written frequently about the need to use or global presence and access to new technologies to allow people to speak for themselves (as opposed to international organiaztions "speaking on their behalf") - examples are here and here. Fred's poem captured on camera and posted on Vimeo is a good example where the persons who knows, the person who matters is speaking directly to those of us who need to hear, who need to act or be moved to act. 

Thanks to our good friends at A developing Story and photographer-storyteller Stephen Alvarez for bringing Fred's words directly to us. FYI: this was recorded on a canon 7d with sound on a zoom h4n recorder through Sennheiser wireless.

/PC

Climate Voices: directly to you, for you.

I feel passionately about aid organizations such as ours, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent, using their vast grassroots network and global reach to provide a platform for people to directly voice their concerns - as opposed to 'speaking on behalf of' or 'in the interests of' marginalized or invisible people struggling and battling against poverty, migration, violence, conflict, human rights abuses, HIV, stigma, the real and present danger of climate change ... you name it (the photo shows Wang Hui Min, sitting on a makeshift raft that he uses to visit his submerged house, seen behind him. Wang now lives on a dyke with his family of six).

The embedded video here was produced specifically for the Copenhagen Climate Conference with this same purpose in mind i.e. to give a voice to the people whose lives and livelihoods are right now being seriously threatened because of the consequences of climate change in their communities. The idea was to bring them directly into the Copenhagen conference center so that they could speak directly to governments and delegates making decisions that have a very real impact on their survival and the future of their children and communities - this is not a cliché but a fact.

In record breaking time - three weeks from concept to delivery - we dispatched almost a dozen tv crews, all locally hired, to meet with and interview ordinary people trying to cope with climate change - a genuine attempt to use our global presence to give a voice to the voiceless. This has been screened all over Copenhagen and is just now uploaded onto YouTube whose motto "broadcast yourself" has never been so relevant.

The next step or the next challenge is to really really really make it possible for people to broadcast themselves and tell their stories directly without any obvious involvement from organizations such as ours. For this we are putting the finishing touches on a partnership with Thomson Reuters and others built around empowering communities affected by disasters to communicate directly to the outside world without need for meddling intermediaries - the intermediaries will simply build capacity and facilitate pushing out the message of the people who are too rarely heard.

As Rupert Murdoch correctly predicted when he first came across MySpace "For fuck sake - the people have taken control"! Right you are Rupert - power to the people. Exciting times have just kicked off. This vid is only 5 mins but we have hours of footage which we will repackage and reversion to influence the decisions beyond Copenhagen. Its a drop in the ocean I know, but what an ocean .... really interested to hear what you think, not just of the video, but of the aspiration.

/PC

"They love us at night. They hate us the rest of the time”

In the run up to World AIDS day on December 1st my colleague, Jean-Luc Martinage, has been busy putting together a report highlighting the extent of the pandemic in Latin America - a region not normally associated with HIV/AIDS. The report was released yesterday together with a number of web stories about the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS. Head Down Eyes Open would like to feature one of these stories here.

Her name is Pamela. She is one of the dozens of transgenders selling their bodies in what the locals call “Calle del Pecado” (The street of the sin”) near the historical centre of Cali, Colombia’s third largest city.

We meet Pamela at a snackbar near the place she lives. “Housing is one of the first problems transgenders like myself keep facing”, Pamela explains. “Nobody wants to rent a flat to a transgender”.

Even if she officially became “Pamela” only a few years ago, since the age of 6, the boy that she was at that time immediately felt that he was different from the other boys and wanted to be considered as a “she”.

From stylist to sex worker

Pamela became a stylist and a hairdresser. However, she had a serious accident that left her slightly disabled and she could no longer do her job. “At the age of 35, I became a sex-worker”, she explains, telling us also about the long legal battle she had to face with the authorities to allow her to change her name to Pamela. “The civil servant who received my request just laughed at me and said he would never allow such a change”, she recalls. However, she took the matter to the Supreme Court who finally allowed her to change her name to Pamela. But on her identity card, she is still considered as a “male”. Pamela had thought about a change of sex but she gave up when she was told she was told that after all she might not be allowed to have surgery despite living as a woman for at least 10 years and having faced dozens of medical and psychatric appointments.

However Pamela kept her fighting spirit by creating a network of support for all transgender people. From just a dozen at the beginning, her small NGO called “Transmujer” now gathers around 700 people.

Tripling the price for unprotected sex 

“We need to help each other because we are faced with a high level of stigma and discrimination” says Pamela. “Men love us at night but they hate us during the day”, she sums up, explaining how besides being insulted on the streets, they also need to face numerous requests from men ready to triple the price to have unprotected sex. “I always say “no” because I am fully aware of the danger of being infected by HIV and other sexually-transmissible diseases. However, some transgenders need money so badly that they say “yes”, putting themselves into a highly dangerous situation.”

“Most of my customers are actually heterosexual men”, she says, “so in a way we are sometimes even more protected than our costumers’ wives who have no control at all on their own sexuality. I have seen terrible things like a girl who was providing sex without condoms against money while she was already infected with HIV. I managed to convince her to finally use condoms but my other concern is especially to make sure that transgender people who are not infected don’t catch the virus through unprotected sex”, she adds.

Pamela fought very hard to get access to condoms she could distribute to the other transgender sex workers. However, she never managed to have her status as an activit fully recognized. A while ago, she held a sensitization meeting in Cali and it happened that a Colombian Red Cross volunteer attended. The connection between her NGO and the Red Cross was quickly established and they are currently developing projects to provide a better access to condoms, to promote safe sex and voluntary testing as well as developing new prevention tools.

Working with the most vulnerable groups

“We won’t have a lasting impact on HIV infection if we don’t reach the most vulnerable groups such as the transgender sex workers,” says Dr. Yacid Estrada, coordinator of the Colombian Red Cross HIV programme. "Not only we will try to support Pamela in her prevention initiatives but we are even thinking of developing specific tools that will take into account the specificities of transgender sex. By doing this, we are in no way encouraging sex work but we believe no lasting breakthrough in reducing HIV infection can happen unless we take care of people such as transgenders who are highly affected by stigma and discrimination".

When asked how she sees her future, Pamela remains quite vague. She would like to become a full time activist for her community but her status is still not recognized by the authorities. 

But for the time being, Pamela is back in the “Calle del Pecado” facing an uncertain future. With several packs of condoms she can share with other sex workers who now are even looking for her at night since they know she has a better access to condoms.


/PC

Zimbabwe: Where Cops are Robbers

The demise of the all-but-worthless Zimbabwe dollar and its replacement with foreign currency is being mirrored by a rise in violent crime, perpetrated particularly by police officers.

Rampant inflation, unofficially estimated at trillions of percent annually, saw the local currency withdrawn from circulation in April 2009 and officially replaced by foreign currencies, such as the South African rand, Botswana pula and US dollar.

A serving Zimbabwe National Army officer reported (anonymously) that junior soldiers and police officers were being driven to crime by desperation, as they suffered the same economic hardships as most of the population. However, unlike non-uniformed Zimbabweans - 94 percent of whom are thought to be unemployed - soldiers and police, like all public servants, benefit from a US$100 monthly wage.

"They have observed how senior security officers drive luxury cars, get free fuel for their multiple farms, and other benefits. Soldiers and police officers have no other skills which they can use to raise extra money - all they can do is to use guns, but when they get used to that lifestyle, they can easily become warlords," the army officer said.

"From a security point of view, what this means is there are underground armies, which can even be a danger to national security because nobody knows how many there are, and how many weapons are in their hands," he commented.

In late 2008, at the height of hyperinflation, soldiers embarked on a looting spree in the capital, Harare, over poor pay and non-payment. They were being paid in local currency, but maximum daily bank withdrawals were pegged at Z$500,000 (US$0.25). Soldiers also attacked Roadport, a regional bus station in Harare used by money changers, and robbed them of local and foreign currency.

Expensive goods

Political journalist Dumisani Muleya says that since the beginning of 2009, local newspapers have been awash with headlines like: "Four detectives face robbery charges", and "Bank Heist: Two cops in court", which illustrated the trend among security force personnel to resort to crime.

The dollarized economy has made goods and services more freely available, but at high prices, which was "causing some rogue elements within the security ... [forces] to use armed robbery as a way of raising extra income ... and that creates a climate of insecurity and instability," he said.

The numerous wars fought in the region, such as in the Democratic Republic of Congo and neighbouring Mozambique, have made it easier for criminals to access weapons, as have the policies instituted by President Robert Mugabe's government prior to the power-sharing deal that led to the formation of the unity government in February 2009.

Giles Mutsekwa of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), who heads the home affairs ministry with a counterpart from ZANU-PF as part of the deal, claims that rogue elements are using government-issue guns to commit armed robberies, but the government was "getting on top of the situation, and there is no need for the population or visitors to get worried".

Handing out guns

During the violent 2008 presidential election period, guns were issued to government security personnel to intimidate people into voting for the ruling ZANU-PF.

"We have started a process to ensure that all guns that were issued are brought

back, and that a complete inventory of the guns in the country is carried out. We believe that when all the guns are surrendered, then we will be able to manage and control the upsurge of armed robberies involving serving and ex-servicemen and -women.

Mutsekwa said there were also concerns about National Youth Service graduates, a pro-ZANU-PF youth militia who received "national values" education and military training, which was believed to include firearms instruction.

"We long identified the potential danger posed by former members of the youth service to communities if they continue to be unemployed while living in abject poverty, and those are areas that we are also looking into as a security ministry."

/PC

Source: IRIN

Gaza: 1.5 million people trapped in despair

Last March, as the international community grandly pledged an impressive U$4.5 billion dollars for the reconstruction of Gaza, HDEO welcomed the support but - based on a long list of previous and direct experiences - cautioned against optimism. Why so skeptical? Because recent history has shown the detached intransigence of Israeli authorities to allow the transit of vital goods and materials to meet the needs of long-suffering Gazans. Regrettably, we were not wrong.

Gaza: What is essentially a political problem has been converted – through restrictions, blockades and military operations - into a pitiful humanitarian crisis. And of course, it is sadly ironic that while Israel prevents the rebuilding of family homes and businesses in Gaza, it is at the same time at loggerheads with the Obama administration on what it perceives as Israel's 'right' to continue building illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian lands in the West Bank. And build it does; nearly U$260m allocated in Israel's budget for settlement expansion according to a recent report from Peace Now, an Israeli NGO.

The people of Gaza are steadily being deprived of basic necessities and the densely populated coastal strip is being transformed before our eyes from a once bustling mercantile centre into a barricaded sewage-covered refugee camp. Perfect if you want to project Gaza as 'only' a humanitarian crisis which can be remedied with plastic sheeting and dried milk.

Not so very long ago, during the upbeat days of the Oslo peace negotiations, Gaza was being championed as the ideal setting for a free trade haven a la Dubai. How their dreams have been splattered in the rubble. As one prominent Palestinian politician said to me privately: "They promised us Singapore and what did we get? We got Somalia". And he's not wrong. Today, instead of living in apartments with clean running water, families are forced to build mud huts and survive under tents and tarpaulin amidst the stench of untreated waste because essential raw materials are withheld on the dubious pretext that they will be dual-purposed into home made rockets.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has released an excellent report to mark the six months since the Gaza conflict escalated at the end of December last year. It recalls how more than 1’300 lives were lost and tens of thousands injured, many of them severely. In the words of an ICRC surgeon, "we treat very few combatants here, most of the patients are civilians".

Tens of thousands of homes and businesses were damaged beyond repair. This has "ripped the economic heart out of Gaza" which was already shattered by decades of conflict and deprivation.

The heavy restrictions on goods entering Gaza means that prices of scarce commodities in the Strip are extremely high, pushing people further and further into debt and poverty. As one man says in the video embedded in this post: "We are exhausted and drowning in debt".

More than six months since the recent escalation in Gaza and some three months since U$4.5 billion was 'pledged' but not spent, is there real political will to ensure that the people of Gaza are not battered back to stone age conditions, living in a sewage-filled environment, without adequate shelter, health care or education (the list is long)?

Urgent measures called upon in the report include easing imports of medical equipment, allowing the entry of building materials such as cement and steel, lifting restrictions on exports from Gaza, reopening terminals to improve the flow of people and goods into and out of the territory, allowing farmers access to their land in the buffer zone, and restoring safe access to deeper waters for fishermen.

Antoine Grand, a colleague at the ICRC who runs the Gaza operation, puts it best: "Israel has the right to protect its population against attacks, but does that mean that 1.5 million people in Gaza do not have the right to live a normal life?"

And this just in: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8127145.stm

And this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8127144.stm

/PC