Haiti’s plea to world: We need tents now and long-term aid

MONTREAL — Rebuilding Port-au-Prince could take a decade or longer and ultimately completely reform the way Haiti is organized, foreign leaders said at a conference Monday.

Haiti’s prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, told envoys from 19 other countries and international organizations that the Jan. 12 earthquake crippled not just the city of Port-au-Prince, but the entire country. In the future, he said, Haiti’s authority and its resources must be decentralized.

“In 30 seconds, Haiti lost 60 percent of its GDP (gross domestic product),” Bellerive said. “We need to review the whole country.”

Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, urged his colleagues to stay committed to Haiti’s reconstruction.

“It is not an exaggeration to say that 10 years of hard work — at least — awaits the world in Haiti,” Harper said. “We must hold ourselves and each other accountable for the commitments we make.”

While the conference is focused on long-term
reconstruction, Bellerive also passed along a more urgent appeal for
immediate assistance from Haiti’s president, Rene Preval.

Bellerive said his country needs at least 200,000 tents to provide shelter to those left homeless by the earthquake.

He also stressed the need for medical care, saying
hospitals and clinics in other regions of the country are nearly filled
with patients. And he asked for prosthetics and orthopedic specialists
to treat the thousands of people who lost limbs to injury.

“I could continue on all of these emergencies, there
are many,” Bellerive said. “It is very difficult for me to talk
reconstruction when we do not take these other matters into account.”

In Haiti,
the Preval government said there was a dire tent shortage in the
country before the year’s first rainy season begins — in about 10 days.

It issued an urgent international plea Monday for
tens of thousands more six- to eight-person tents to shelter Haitians
in and around the capital of Port-au-Prince.

Meantime, the International Organization for Migration, the intergovernment group coping with the homeless crisis, said it has only received about two-thirds of the $30 million it sought in a Jan. 15 appeal for tents and other aid.

By Monday morning, IOM estimated, some 692,000
people were living in 591 scattered settlements — tent cities set up,
many spontaneously, to shelter people left homeless by the 7.0
earthquake that destroyed many communities on Jan. 12.

“It is likely that this figure is much higher, even
though many people have left the capital to seek shelter in other towns
and villages,” the IOM said.

In other developments, Monday:

—The United Nations said it had so far hired 5,000 Haitians in quake-torn areas, at $4
a day plus food rotations, to sweep roads and crush debris into smaller
pieces. About 40 percent of the workforce was women. The U.N. planned
to hire another 5,000 by week’s end.

—Aid continued to flow to the country. A pair of Miami Herald reporters headed to the Dominican Republic Monday morning spotted a steady flow of food and other goods coming into Haiti in containers stacked on semi-trailers.

—The International Committee of the Red Cross said life was returning to the streets and camps of Port-au-Prince. “Hospitals are still overcrowded and often short of supplies,” said Simon Schorno, ICRC spokesman in Haiti, “but the long lines one saw in front of their gates only a few days ago have disappeared.”

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(c) 2010, The Miami Herald.

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