A rooster crows, and two street preachers stand near
the gates of a new tent city. They are both women, both wearing black
kerchiefs over their hair. One shouts hoarsely into a bullhorn while
the other sings sweetly from a “singing bible,” a book of hymns. The
sounds clash and blend, grate and harmonize, and the result is,
incongruously, achingly beautiful, a sort of Haitian hip-hop gospel.
It is
“God is looking for you!” the first preacher shouts
in Creole. “God needs you! … Give him your life! Give him your life!
Because he lets you borrow it, he can take it whenever he wants!”
The other woman sings: “The world is not easy. The
world is not easy. But God is with us, God gives us grace, for he is
looking at you.”
About 20 yards away, a group of teenage girls are in
line at the one portable toilet in this camp of some 8,000 refugees
from the
“You have to listen to them,” one is telling another, nodding toward the street preachers. “You have to have faith.”
That might seem hard, two weeks after the
7.0-magnitude quake shattered the world of everyone in this camp and
killed at least 150,000 of their fellow Haitians, including many close
relatives and friends. Life is not easy here at the Daihatsu Camp,
which is named for an adjoining car dealership and marches up a rocky,
snake-infested hillside not far from the
With the sun rising, people stir in their makeshift tents, most of them patched together out of spare linens and plastic sheets.
Louis Enord, 54, washes his face in a small plastic
wash basin while still lying in bed, building up a good lather before
rinsing vigorously.
“Life is not good here, but this is the only refugee
camp we could come to,” says Enord, whose concrete block house in the
Simond neighborhood collapsed. “We have no choice. We have to live
here.”
Enord is an affable man who broke his leg in a car
accident before the quake, costing him his job as an electric company
meter reader, an occupation he can’t do on crutches. His new dwelling
is about as good as it gets here, a waterproof tarp spread over a
superstructure of random-length sticks. It measures about 6 feet-by-8
feet, and houses his family of four — a much better ratio of people to
space than many families have.
Enord is at the very bottom of the hill. Looking up,
the eye takes in a patchwork of homemade tents that are so close
together as to appear to be an unbroken quilt, lightly billowing in
hues of whites and blues and reds and yellows.
Since the earthquake, an estimated 500,000 people have moved into such camps in and around
About 50 were designated by the government after the disaster, but the
vast majority are like Daihatsu — spontaneously created by individuals
who had no place else to stay but the streets.
In the case of Daihatsu, people noticed the empty
land and began pitching their homemade shelters the night of the
earthquake. There were about 500 that first night, scattered
haphazardly around the site, according to
Emile helped organize some young men into a
leadership committee, and has become the de facto mayor of the camp,
helping to organize it into some semblance of order, creating security
and cleanup details and arranging the tents into rows, more or less,
with passable walkways. Volunteer security guards patrol until
The organizers have divided the field into five
quadrants, each with its own leaders, and even given the tents street
addresses. One sector, which sits next to a government bus yard, is
known as Barack Obamaville because, people say, the U.S. government
provided money for the buses.
Roberty Mirese, 42, is a resident of Obamaville. She
sweeps the dirt around her tent and then, for good measure, sweeps
around her neighbors’ tents. She is here with two of her five children;
she sent the three younger ones to stay with a relative in the
countryside.
The floor of her tent is swept as clean as a dirt floor can be.
“It’s not bad,” she says. “I’m lying in the dirt, the mosquitoes bite us all night, but we have no choice. We have to be here.”
Hers is a common attitude in a country where people
have little in the best of times, and don’t expect much. Still, as the
days have stretched on, a new mood of anxiety, even anger, has begun to
slip into the tent city. Although it is one of the larger ones in
A few medical volunteers from
came one day to briefly care for children, but admitted that they only
were able to scratch the surface. After seeing 20 children, including a
boy whose skull was split open in the quake and had only a crude
bandage covering it, Dr. Sarigiannidis Miltiadis of Medicins du Monde
of
“I didn’t see a child who wasn’t in need of
medicine,” he said. “So I suppose there are hundreds of them in there
who have no one to turn to.”
The Turkish Red Crescent Society sent volunteers to
assess the needs of the camp, presumably for future aid. Asked what was
needed most urgently,
What they mostly need, residents say, is food.
The Red Cross brought in a 10,000-liter water tank,
which is refilled daily and provides enough fresh water for the camp.
But there has only been one food delivery, camp organizers say: 200
plates of rice and beans.
“Two hundred plates for 8,000 people!” says
an out-of-work accountant who is in charge of Sector 4 at the camp.
Anyway, he says, people don’t want prepared food: They want the raw
ingredients so they can cook themselves.
People “are getting worried,” Milord says. “They’re feeling pressure. They’re hungry. It’s hurting them.”
The day at Daihutsu has no discernable rhythm. Most
people have nothing to do. They lounge around, clean their tents, talk.
If they have money, they buy food from one of the vendors who have
congregated near the entrance to the camp. But few have much money.
The afternoon is hot, and tempers sometimes flare.
At one point, residents angrily confront Emile and accuse him of
favoring some families with donated, waterproof tarps. With most tents
built of bedsheets or tablecloths, people worry about rain.
“None of what he is saying is true,” Emile insists.
The two men begin insulting each other. Emile suggests that Jean-Pierre is uneducated.
“I went to 12th grade; I finished school,” Jean-Pierre screams.
“Well, I’m glad for you,” Emile retorts, sarcastically.
For all that, people get along remarkably well most of the time. Food is shared; songs are sung; prayers are prayed.
When night falls, the camp takes on a gentle glow
under a charcoal sky. Candles turn the motley tents into radiant lace
lanterns. At either end of this newly formed community, people gather
for evening church services, praying with a fervor and a beauty that
belies their plight.
“Help us, Jesus, and feel sympathy for us,” they
sing, arms outstretched skyward. “Even if we die, prepare a place in
heaven for us. Hallelujah, Jesus. Hallelujah.”
—
(c) 2010, Los Angeles Times.
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