Haiti: One Year Later

On January 12, 2010, one year ago today, Haiti's main city of Port-au-Prince was the epicenter of a massive earthquake that left millions of already poverty-stricken Haitians homeless and living in tent cities. Her Blueprint reported on Haiti throughout the past year with stories of hope from Human Rights Watch; reports of displacement and tuberculosis from public health expert and the United Nations Special Deputy Envoy to Haiti Paul Farmer; cited the publications created to voice the taboo: sexual violence against women mounting in the tent cities; then, finally the start of a cholera epidemic that according to the Huffington Post's Cholera in Haiti: A Look from the Trenches remains present. Pictured here are a mother and child being cared for by a female health worker in June 2010. As I write this, I wonder if they are alive. If so, their chances of still being displaced within a tent city are almost certain.

In a press release, Joia Mukherjee, Chief Medical Officer at Partners In Health, an organization leading the post-quake recovery that Paul Farmer founded, shared that current conditions remain rather "grim."

Today, we stand with our friends and colleagues from our Haitian sister organization, Zanmi Lasante, and with millions of Haitians in Haiti and abroad to remember that terrible day -- to remember both those who died, and those who suffered and continue to face the painful reality of a Haiti post-January 12, 2010. This is particularly true for over a million internally displaced people living in crowded Port-au-Prince camps. Yet while there should be righteous indignation about the conditions in the camps, we must continue to highlight the plight of the urban and rural poor throughout Haiti whose struggle against poverty and injustice pre-dated the earthquake and has been made immeasurably more difficult by the disaster. The cholera epidemic -- due to lack of access to clean water and sanitation against a backdrop of malnutrition and inadequate health services in much of the country -- is a graphic illustration of the ongoing need. It is easy to understand that optimism would be in short supply. There are, however, glimmers of hope.

Along with the Haitian Ministry of Health and many partner organizations, Partners In Health calls for an international movement of solidarity, similar to the one that brought an end to South Africa's Apartheid. They also call for Haitians to become actors in rebuilding their country alongside the 10,000 NGOs and foreign-government projects so as to create "development of large-scale public infrastructure including health, education, water and sanitation that will reverse the impoverishment of the Haitian people."

One year later vast work remains to be done for those still living in abject poverty and far worse. Glimmers of hope need to be replaced by strategic long-term plans and bold action. Partners In Health one year report on Haiti is available here.

Photo credit: Doctors of the World UK

Haiti Post-Quake: The Past Ten Months and Counting

On January 12, 2010, Haiti was ravaged by a catastrophic 7.0 earthquake that extensively damaged the country's main city of Port-au-Prince. By January 24, over 52 aftershocks were recorded that measured at least 4.5. Ten months ago exactly, on January 20, the New York Times published Aftershocks, by Évelyne Trouillot sharing those first days post-quake.

The family has set up camp in my brother’s house. I live just next door, but it makes us feel better to be all in the same house. My brother, a novelist, is writing his articles; I am writing mine. From time to time a tremor will make us pause and run back outside, just in case, to be safe. I wonder how long we will have to be so cautious, and I long for normalcy.

We sleep; we listen to the radio; we exchange information. Mostly, we have been trying to stay alive and sane since that Tuesday afternoon a week ago when the earthquake changed our lives forever. It doesn’t help that the earth continues to convulse. Just this morning, we felt another tremor, the most violent since the earthquake itself. Let us hope it did not cause more deaths and damage.

In an already impoverished country, the level of displacement due to this cataclysmic environmental disaster escalated to epidemic proportions. With 230,000 deaths at least, 300,000 injured, and 7.8 billion dollars in damages, in August Her Blueprint published Haiti: Displacement, TB, and Progress?, which cited over 1.2 million people were living in tent cities and that safety and health concerns for women and children were fast-becoming a highly relevant issue post-earthquake. Although Évelyne Trouillot's eloquent Aftershocks calls in vain hope for the short-term aftershocks themselves to not bring more death and damage, what kind of long-term aftershocks are the country facing and what kind of strategies are evolving to protect the most vulnerable?

Six Months Post-Quake

Recently, I spoke with Joanne Blakemore who arrived to Port-au-Prince, Haiti on June 12, the quake's six month anniversary. With a background in third-world travel, humanitarian causes, and relief work, Joanne had done Katrina hurricane relief work as well in Mississippi.

"I was in Haiti pre-hurricane season. Commercial enterprise seemed to be functioning. Children seemed not to be starving. But, I thought it made Biloxi, Mississippi [post-Katrina] look like West Chester. The tents these women and children are living in are miniscule. You can’t stand up in them."

Outright distress, post-traumatic stress disorder, and health and safety concerns was the tone coming out of the camps when Ms. Blog broke the story along with AWID of MADRE's report, Our Bodies Are Still Trembling: Haitian Women's Fight Against Rape, and its findings regarding rape in the tent cities.

"Six months after the earthquake in Haiti, we see a continued crisis of safety and security in the displacement camps that has exacerbated the already grave problem of sexual violence. We found that women are being raped at an alarming rate-every day-in camps throughout Port-au-Prince. The Haitian Government, the UN, and others in the international community have failed to adequately address the situation. Women, especially poor women, have been excluded from full participation and leadership in the relief effort."

Enter acknowledgment of one of the biggest challenges of Haiti along with eviction, education, and myriad health concerns: the safety of women and children.

Nine Months Post-Quake

In September, the tent cities were still just as large as ever with around 1 million people displaced, and the weariness of those contained within them were again being expressed by major news outlets as were the overt safety concerns for women and children. On September 19, the New York Times published Haitians Cry in Letters: ‘Please — Do Something!’. The title of the article is culled from a direct quote from Ms. Saint Hilaire, 33, who shared in a letter posted to the boxes put up by the International Organization for Migration, about how she and her children are "stranded in a camp annex without a school, a health clinic, a marketplace or any activity at all."

"Please — do something!" she wrote from Tent J2, Block 7, Sector 3, her new address. "We don’t want to die of hunger and also we want to send our children to school. I give glory to God that I am still alive — but I would like to stay that way!"

Ten Months Post-Quake and Counting

On October 7, 2010, Bloomberg published Haiti Earthquake Camps Expose Women to Sex Violence, which cites that as a country Haiti had significant problems with sexual violence pre-quake, but that post-quake the numbers are staggering. “Living in squalid, overcrowded and spontaneous camps for a prolonged period has aggravated levels of violence and appalling standards of living,” the Refugees International report said. The humanitarian response to the earthquake “appears paralyzed.”

In fact, the title of the Refugees International October 6 report, Haiti: Still Trapped in the Emergency Phase, shares the exact issue at hand: long-term strategies are not taking shape or evolution. The report explains in detail how "enhancing proper leadership, enhancing the security for displaced women, improving camp management, bridging the communication gap, and decentralizing resources to promote recovery" are integral to moving past the emergency phase into effective long-term strategies for the country's recovery.

Photo credit: Ms. Magazine Blog

Pakistan's Humanitarian Crisis at Scale

During July and onward, Pakistan was devastated by a surge of flooding that now encompasses one fifth of the country. That amounts to a mass of water larger than the size of England. In consequence, the response teams initially called in attempted to assess just how extensive the physical damage, which was readily apparent from the broken bridges, destroyed homes, and 20 million displaced people. Yet, as time passes the shift from immediate emergency response to effective, long-term strategies is essential. In a country where gender issues were already highly prevalent pre-flood, now they are even more pressing, if not dire.

When the Pakistan floods began, I looked at victim photos in the same way I did when Haiti experienced its massive earthquake almost ten months ago. In both situations where environmental and climate crisis created extensive displacement, there were also unique threats facing women and children.

In August, Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID) released a statement on the post-flood humanitaran crisis that clarified some of the harsher realities for Pakistani women. "Many of the flood-affected areas of Pakistan have spent years in conflict marked by rising religious fundamentalisms. Reports from the ground indicate that fundamentalist groups are mobilizing aid and providing relief services in areas unreachable by the government with potentially dangerous implications for women’s rights."

The acquisition of women's rights in daily life are a struggle for most Pakistani women, but how extreme must these challenges become when faced with urgent disaster? Pakistani women already experience myriad religious and social inequities. As such, AWID's statement acknowledges that even while government outreach is not enough for a disaster of this proportion, that the rise of organizations functioning within the country in the relief effort that have incentives which are not human rights-based, much less in any way working toward positive outcomes for women and children, need to be halted.

Along with reports of missing women and children as well as women having significant issues accessing relief support and health care, AWID makes a call to action by inciting, "the government of Pakistan and the international community to take immediate action to ensure that the very much-needed aid is committed and actually delivered in a timely and effective fashion. Also, the well-being of women and girls has to be ensured through the provision of both emergency relief and significant longer-term support for reconstruction and development that responds to the gender-specific needs and circumstances of Pakistani women and girls. In particular, we [AWID] call for the full participation of women at all levels of reconstruction and for sustained efforts to be centered on the long-term development needs of women and girls and the promotion and protection of their human rights."

Any effectual response to Pakistan post-flood must encompass the strategic knowledge that human rights and women's rights are even more essential during times of disaster, because they were already extremely vulnerable pre-crisis.

Photo credit: Guardian

Read Kate Stence's article Haiti Post-Quake: The Past Ten Months and Counting about Haiti's struggles with displacement and the challenges to support women and children in long-term strategies of relief.