A thickening hopelessness hangs over the 1.5 million displaced people who await more durable shelters. 'I hope the international community can keep our hope alive, because it's fading,' one said
Reporting from Corail-Cesselesse, Haiti —
It was when lightning struck her tent the other day that Marie Vernita Lysius realized that the 6-month-long chain of calamities was not going to end.Lysius' home was crushed by the Jan. 12 earthquake, sending her into a teeming encampment of flimsy stick-and-tarp shelters. She was later bused to a better-equipped tent city on this windblown plain 15 miles north of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital.
Then the lightning bolt hit a support, spraying holes in her tent and injuring two family members, during a severe storm that blew down more than 300 shelters. The storm reminded the displaced that the hurricane season is upon them and that they have nowhere else to go.
"This is an example of what a hurricane can do," said Lysius, 46, surveying a landscape pocked by collapsed tents. "Are they going to leave us out here?"
More than six months after Haiti's catastrophic quake, a thickening sense of hopelessness hangs over the estimated 1.5 million displaced people who await more durable shelters.
"At first we thought that the way the international community was coming together that in six months we'd be off the street. But we're still here," said Stella Nicholas, one of 12 people crammed into a cluster of tarpaulin shelters near downtown Port-au-Prince that felt as hot and airless as the inside of a giant mitten.
"Our government is incapable of getting us out of this situation," Nicholas said. "I hope the international community can keep our hope alive, because it's fading".
The earthquake triggered a massive international relief effort and inspired avowals that this was the opportunity to fix the chronic poverty and desperation that had made Haiti the most miserable corner of the Western Hemisphere. Many Haitians, though mindful of previous promises unmet, took those words to heart.
Today, spray-painted graffiti calling for the ouster of President Rene Preval have multiplied as impatience grows. National elections are scheduled in November and the earthquake response stands to be a central issue, at least in the capital. (Preval won't be on the ballot)
With forecasts for a potentially severe hurricane season, the most worrisome short-term problem is where to house the displaced scattered among scruffy, sunbaked tent villages, converted schoolyards and thousands of scrap-wood shacks that look like the sprouts of tomorrow's shantytowns.
Planned transfers to more weather-resistant transitional shelters are running up against a shortage of available land.
Los Angeles Times
