Concern Blogs

Tabarre - Tabarre Issa. January 10, 2012

By Ed Kenney, Communications Officer

Ed was in Haiti on the two-year anniversary of the earthquake that devastated the country’s capital and surrounding areas on January 12, 2010. A member of Concern Worldwide’s Emergency Response Team to Haiti, Ed reflects on what is different on the ground two years later.

Kethlyne St. Previl, 40, is beaming.  She is talking about her Concern-supported business selling food in a kiosk on the main access road into Tabarre Issa.  Her table is piled high with a bounty of Haitian street food – small fried pastries, plantains, meat patties, chicken, hot dogs.  “Business is very, very good,” she announces, smiling broadly.  Then she looks at some of the Concern team gathered around and adds, “And these are some of my best customers!”  Laughter all around.

The eating habits of Concern staff notwithstanding, Kethlyne is doing a steady business among her 2,650 neighbors living in 527 transitional shelters at Tabarre Issa.  The shelters are basic, but they are safe – resistant to hurricanes and earthquakes, and fireproof.  When we first met her in October 2011, Kethlyne had just moved into her new house, and had a few days earlier opened business just next to it.  She’s expanded, and moved into a higher traffic area.

“I am making it and I am getting my ideas together about continuing my business when I leave here,” she says.

Sanon Dominique - (l to r) Mercile Sanon, 74, Gerdriche Dominique, 44, and Valencia Louis Dominique, 22 in their new home near Camp Oscar. January 10, 2012

She is speaking to the fact that Tabarre Issa was constructed as a temporary settlement, designed to bridge the gap to more permanent housing.  Most residents, like Kethlyne, came here from Valle de Bourdon, a Port-au-Prince neighborhood where homes were built on steep ravine walls — it sustained an unbearably heavy toll in lives and homes on January 12, 2010.

It would be reductive and profoundly wrong to take the smiles and easy laughter shared with Kethlyne St. Previl as any sort of symbol of Haiti’s recovery.  The truth is that I can remember sharing easy laughter with Haitians in the first days after the earthquake.  Context, of course makes all the difference.  Perhaps then it was a defense mechanism based on the human instinct to reclaim normalcy in the face of a world turned upside down.  And maybe now it comes out of that same instinct, but in response to a growing sense of standing on safe, stable ground where hope can grow.

Where Kethlyne and her neighbors will go after Tabarre Issa, or where any of the Haitians living in temporary shelters will go, is the next big question facing the government and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) here in Haiti.  The fact that the land on which Bourdon residents built their homes before the earthquake is not safe is just one of the myriad challenges complicating the process.

Such a complex problem requires a multi-pronged response, and Concern’s “Return to Neighborhoods Program” is that.  In 2011 the approach was piloted at Camp Oscar, a gravelly football pitch that became a tent camp immediately after the earthquake, with 192 families, close to 1,000 people living in unimaginably cramped quarters. Entering the camp in 2010 or early 2011 was like entering a maze, the narrow spaces between crudely constructed shelters allowing just one person to pass at a time.

Today Camp Oscar is no longer. The field is completely clear. You can find schoolchildren taking wide looping spins across the expanse on a shared bike during recess, and young men playing spirited matches there in the early evening.

St Previl - Kethlyne St Previl shows off her handiwork at her foodstand at Tabarre Issa. January 10, 2012

How did it happen?  Concern’s team got to know every family at Camp Oscar, each of whom had a different story.  Some homes had completely collapsed, some were damaged, some were still standing but landlords were not reachable or rental terms had changed.  In all cases, people had been out of work or out of business for over a year.  The team took all of these stories, all of the data and used them to formulate a recipe of options to be made available: assistance with home repair for damaged houses or provision of a one-year rental subsidy to help families get into homes once beyond their reach; training and cash transfers to help with small business start-up and income generation; and education vouchers to help children get back to school.

By the end of 2011, all 192 families had been resettled into homes, mostly in their original neigborhoods.

One such family is presided over by Mercile Sanon, 74, now living with her daughter, granddaughter and great-grandson in a second floor apartment on a hill above Camp Oscar. Mercile opted for the rental subsidy which has enables them to pay their landlord as daughter Gerdriche Dominique,44, gets her business off the ground, selling drinks, snacks and phone credit at a kiosk along Delmas 16, the main street nearby.

They welcome us into their apartment, and the only way I can characterize the sensation upon entering is ‘home.’ Smiles and laughter come easily. Baby Woodney, a month old, sleeps peacefully on one bed.  We are welcomed to sit and talk on the edge of another.  When we ask them how it feels to be here instead of in the camp, Mercile says, “It feels safe. Before we never knew what could happen, what was in the future.  Now we can sleep.  It feels normal.”

Concern is now rolling out its “Return to Neighborhoods” approach at Place de La Paix, where 5,300 people will be assisted in the return home.  In all, the program intends to reach 14,000 people by the end of 2012, and it has been recognized as best practice by the government and partners.  In fact, many of the core elements of the approach have been incorporated into the national return strategy.