Six months have passed since the earthquake in Haiti, and we’ve begun running out of adjectives to describe the scale of destruction, suffering and hopelessness.
Little has been done to address the most dire need here, which is shelter. More than a million people are still homeless, most living outside in tents or shacks or under tarps, which are showing the strain of continuous use after six months of tropical heat and rain. The IOM, the organization responsible for coordinating shelter efforts, says it has only constructed just over 3,000 transitional shelters– only enough to house a handful of the people who need it.
Daily life in the camps is wearisome for their residents, and beyond description, really. Most tents and shacks are built directly onto the ground, meaning mud seeps through whenever it rains. There is poor sanitation in many camps, with not enough toilets or showers, and never enough privacy or quiet. The mental stress alone of living in the camps is almost unimaginable.
Thousands of tons of rubble have yet to picked up, and progress is made slower by narrow, unpaved streets in many areas, and a lack of heavy machinery. Making the overall situation even worse is that a majority of funding pledged by the international community has yet to be actually given to Haiti.
The progress in Haiti feels like it’s at an impasse, and reporting that nothing much has changed, that the situation is stagnating, begins to sound repetitive and old. But it’s all true– hundreds of thousands of Haitians are stuck in a stale, degrading and deteriorating situation. What will it take to change something, anything?
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