Both Oars In Exposed

Jul 9, 2010

The two most influential groups in deciding what will happen next in post-earthquake Haiti are not the Haitian government and the International Community, nor the UN’s multi-national security force and the large supra-national NGOs, nor even the movie star led groups and grass root missionary organizations. The two groups that will decide where we go from here are the camped, the Haitians who by necessity or choice occupy the half dozen large intra-urban tent villages around Port au Prince, and the uncamped, those Haitians who either chose not to enter the camps or were fortunate not to have to relocate at all. It is the emerging interaction between these two groups that will decide whether Haiti sinks or swims.  

Even an informal survey of young adult Haitians who did not relocate to the tent villages will reveal that there is a commonly held belief that a significant number of the people living in the camps are there by choice, not necessity. The young uncamped are  not shy about asserting that a significant percentage of people their age are in the camps to take advantage of the freedom from parental controls, cash-for-work programs, entertainment, business opportunities, free rent and/or free resources. The uncamped young adults, particularly those who have managed to navigate the difficult educational system in Haiti to the university level, argue that there are alternatives and necessity is by no means the real driver of the continuing population growth in the camps.

These uncamped young adults, who are from the same impoverished to extremely modest neighborhoods as many of those living in the camps, will just as firmly state that they would never live in a camp, not even as a last resort. That may seem easy for them to claim given they have not been forced into one by necessity; however, they rattle off a pretty convincing set of alternatives: live with family or a friend, go to the provinces, rent another place, clear the debris and stay put, live at work, etc. Their declaration seems authentic and the options plausible. 

To their credit, many Haitians who lost their residences, private or rented, did choose options other than the ad hoc camps. However, for what happens next in Haiti, it may not be as important if they are right about why the camp occupants are choosing to remain, as it is that they have this particular opinion and hold to it in debates.   

For the most part, the young adults in the camps do not talk much about past alternatives; they talk about future options. In these conversations, they are very open about sharing their belief that foreign NGOs have more to offer them than their own government. Reportedly, local government representatives are largely ignored when they come to the camp while foreign NGOs appear to be Pied Pipers. Again, whether right or wrong, it is important to recognize that this is the common belief of the camped, especially the young adults. 

In candid, unmonitored conversations, camped young adults, especially 17 to 25 year old females, do talk about their tents like they are houses of their own—an opportunity to get out from under their parents. They point out that they have water and food and their men have access to jobs. They seem myopically unconcerned that both the tents and the cash for work programs are temporary.  

I recently spoke with an uncamped twenty-one year old woman who felt compelled to see for herself if it was true that the open parties in the camp and easy access to tents was likely to ensure that much of the population so sadly lost in the quake would be quickly replaced - a callous joke that had begun circulating among her peers. She got her answer within a few moments of embarking on a self-tour of one of the larger camps in Port au Prince. Six months was plenty of time for the outward sign of this new “domestic independence” to manifest itself and prove the talk is more than bravado and the joke, sadly, a truth said in jest.

Older women in the camp are even more critical of the camps’ inadvertent facilitation of young women prematurely entering into family life, pointing to girls as young as fourteen who had also become pregnant, most certainly against their will, to bolster their case. In the camps, people, especially the young, are exposed to many more hazards than rain to be sure. Given the familiarity of this oft-reported horror story of rape in refugee camps, one would think that the NGOs who trot the world running camps would know the real threats of camps are internal and would have offered a woman-and-children-only camp option. 

I am neither camped nor uncamped; however, after fourteen years I am sufficiently rooted in Haiti to know when a storm is brewing. Historically, new social constructs in Haiti have created two byproducts: change and violence. Dictatorship produced clean streets and the murderous tonton macoutes; populism brought socio-political freedom and the chimères - erratic groups of young thugs for hire. With more focus on creating permanent housing, maybe the attention that the earthquake has brought to the housing issue in Haiti does not have to have a violent counterpart. Everyone could just go to their house in peace.