PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — With so much of this capital left in ruins, Haitian and international officials issued an urgent call on Sunday for help putting roofs — even if only temporary ones — over the heads of the estimated hundreds of thousands of people left homeless by the Jan. 12 earthquake.
Jeannette Charles tended to her injured daughter in a critical care tent at the University Hospital in Port-au-Prince. More Photos »
“Tents, tents, tents,” said Niurka Piñeiro, a spokeswoman for the International Organization for Migration. “That’s the word we want to get out. We need tents.”
The call to aid organizations to focus on shelter comes 12 days after the quake, as officials wind down efforts to rescue people from the rubble and begin the gargantuan task of recovery. Crews have already begun demolishing buildings that are teetering dangerously close to collapse. And teams of American surveyors are expected to begin examining the stability of structures left intact so that people whose homes have been spared can move off the streets and businesses can go back to work.
A team of Colombian engineers conducted a similar survey in Jacmel, a coastal city of about 40,000 people where whole sections of the once festive downtown were destroyed.
They painted red circles on buildings deemed to unsafe to re-inhabit, yellow ones on buildings that could be fixed and black on buildings that were undamaged. Red circles far outnumbered any other color. Hazen El Zein, 29, head of the World Food Program for the region who is coordinating relief efforts in the area, said nearly half the homes were destroyed, including the city’s police station.
As for the hundreds of thousands of Haitians with no place to go, Ms. Piñeiro said that Brazilian teams have begun clearing a field in the Croix-des-Bouquets neighborhood that will be used to establish a tent-city for some 10,000 people.
Another temporary settlement will be established on Rue de Tabarre for an estimated 4,000 people who are camped in squalid conditions on the grounds of the prime minister’s home. A third settlement will be built for an undetermined number of people in the city of Leogane.
French authorities have said that they would begin efforts to provide water and sanitation to several thousand people crowded in the Champs de Mars plaza in downtown Port-au-Prince.
The InterAmerican Development Bank has committed to building 10,000 permanent houses in Leogane, Ms. Piñeiro said. Plans for further permanent housing, she said, would be the focus of a United Nations donors conference scheduled for Monday in Montreal.
“May is hurricane season,” she said. “June, there’s floods. So tents are not enough. We have to get people into permanent housing, fast.”
Tents, however, would be an enormous improvement for the majority of people displaced by the earthquake. Most are living in camps made from whatever they can scavenge, including tarpaulins, tin and bed sheets. They have no access to clean water and sanitation. Illnesses are running rampant.
And the official pivot from rescue to recovery, even as another survivor was pulled out alive from beneath a fruit and vegetable stand on Saturday, has distressed families whose loved ones remain buried. Even as they too give up hope, they want at least to have a body to bury themselves.
“Can you imagine trying to say goodbye to your brother with his body still in the concrete?” asked Lindsay Soliman, 24, a law student who was carrying out a funeral service with her family Sunday for her brother, Mikenley Solimon, 21. He was a computer science student whose corpse lies in the rubble of a collapsed home in this city’s Carrefour Feuilles district.
Ms. Soliman’s family decided that it was finally time for her brother’s funeral, even though they used a photo of him instead of his body at the service, which was held at a half-destroyed house owned by the Roman Catholic Church.
Ms. Soliman said that Mikenley had been planning to move to the Maryland this year after attaining a United States residence visa. “My brother dreamed of America like no one,” she said, an occasional tear dropping from her eyes. “He loved the Los Angeles Lakers. His dream was to become a great computer programmer in America.”
She said that Mikenley and three of his friends remained buried under the rubble of a home where they had been watching a soccer game on television.
Steeve Hilaire, 27, a police officer and a cousin of Ms. Soliman’s, said he could not understand why removing rubble and the bodies under it was not a priority. “The bulldozers would be roaring if a government minister’s body or his relatives were under there,” he said. “But when it’s just a regular person no one cares.”
