NY Times - Rural Haiti Struggles to Absorb Displaced

March 16, 2010

Rural Haiti Struggles to Absorb Displaced

By DEBORAH SONTAG

FOND-DES-BLANCS, Haiti — Before the earthquake that changed everything,

Chlotilde Pelteau and her husband lived a supremely urban existence. A cosmetics vendor and a mechanic, they both enjoyed a steady clientele
and a hectic daily routine, serenaded by the beeping cars and general
hubbub of Port-au-Prince.

Now, as roosters crow and goats bleat, Ms. Pelteau, 29, toils by day on a
craggy hillside in the isolated hamlet of Nan Roc (In the Rocks), which
she had abandoned at 14 for a life of greater opportunity. At night,
she, her husband and their two children sleep cheek-to-jowl with a dozen
relatives in the small mud house where she grew up.

“With everything destroyed, what could I do but come back?” said Ms.
Pelteau, wearing a floral skirt as she poked corn seeds deep into arid
soil unlikely to yield enough food to sustain her rail-thin parents,
much less those who fled the shattered capital city to rejoin them.

Life has come full circle for many Haitians who originally migrated to
escape the grinding poverty of the countryside. Since the early 1980s,
rural Haitians have moved at a steady clip to Port-au-Prince in search
of schools, jobs and government services. After the earthquake, more
than 600,000 returned to the countryside, according to the government,
putting a serious strain on desperately poor communities that have
received little emergency assistance.

“There has been a mass exodus to places like Fond-des-Blancs,” said
Briel Leveillé , a former mayor and founder of the leading peasant
cooperative in this region, which includes Nan Roc. “But the misery of
the countryside is compounding the effects of the disaster. I’ve heard
people say it would be better to risk another earthquake in
Port-au-Prince than to stay in this rural poverty without any help from
the government.”

Indeed, some have already returned to the capital seeking the
international aid that is concentrated there. But if the reverse flow
continues, it could undermine a primary goal of the Haitian government
and the international community: to use the earthquake as a catalyst to
decentralize Haiti
and resuscitate its agricultural economy, said Nancy Dorsinville, a
special adviser to Bill Clinton,
the United
Nations special envoy to Haiti.

“If we really mean what we say about decentralization, then we have to
think fast about a more robust distribution of food to the countryside,
cash-to-work programs there, and assistance to agriculture,” Ms.
Dorsinville said.

Decentralization has long been championed by many advocates for Haiti
because the countryside endured decades of neglect while the
Port-au-Prince area gained dysfunctional congestion. Now, with the
capital city battered, it has become a policy buzzword, even as food is
growing ever scarcer in the countryside.

“It is only a matter of time before we start seeing severe malnutrition
in Fond-des-Blancs,” said Conor Shapiro, director of the St.
Boniface Haiti Foundation, which runs a 60-bed hospital and
community development organization here.

So far, there has been nothing less than a welcome mat provided for
the returnees, who are family. Jacqueline Jerome, Ms. Pelteau’s wizened
mother, who does not know her age, said, shrugging: “They don’t have
anything now, so it’s up to me to take care of them. Like if God gives
you a good harvest, you share with those who were not so blessed.”

Fond-des-Blancs is a remote mountainous area 75 miles southwest of
Port-au-Prince, accessible only by a rocky road impassable by vehicle
after heavy rains. Community leaders say the population, counted at
45,000 by a government census in 2001, has swelled by at least a third
since the quake.

The growth is hard to measure, but the community leaders point to a few
indicators. Some 300 needy families surveyed reported taking in an
average of five earthquake victims each. St. Francois Xavier, a
secondary school, has seen its student body increase by half with 150
displaced teenagers. And another 500 to 600 earthquake refugees are
seeking to resume their studies although Fond-des-Blancs only has two
government schools (and neither goes beyond the ninth grade).

The post-quake transformation of Fond-des-Blancs is palpable. At the St.
Boniface Hospital, earthquake survivors with spinal cord and traumatic
brain injuries fill the wards, while their relatives live in the
courtyard. The hospital, which did not even have an X-ray machine until
one was donated after the quake, volunteered to take the patients from
the American naval hospital ship, the Comfort, that pulled up anchor
last Tuesday.

In the center of town, the influx from Port-au-Prince has created a
night life where none existed before. The sole lamppost draws an evening
crowd, and earthquake refugees jokingly call the dusty gathering place
the Champ de Mars after the bustling plaza in the Haitian capital.

Near that lamppost, Ronange Buissereth has set up a small fresh-air
restaurant, trying to mimic the busy one she lost in Port-au-Prince to
the earthquake. But, she said, sighing, her relatively small hometown
cannot produce a very steady clientele for her fried bananas, potatoes
and pork, so her labor is really just a way to pass the time.

Several dozen members of Ms. Buissereth’s extended family have returned
to a scrubby plot of land that her generation abandoned decades ago.
Some, like her sister Rosemen Buissereth, 37, are happy to be back, if
anxious about making ends meet.

“It’s like you become a Communist here because you never touch money,”
she said. “But it’s not so bad. Even though I left 25 years ago,
Fond-des-Blancs is still the place that I call home.”

Her cousin, Monique Alexandre, 45, is already laying down new roots.
Last weekend, with rainbow-colored rollers in her hair and pigs rooting
through the dirt at her feet, she oversaw the laying of a foundation for
a new house — “with a tin roof that cannot crush us!” she said.

“If I somehow scratch together some money, I’ll go back to
Port-au-Prince and rebuild my business,” a food store, she said. “If
not, I’ll stay here and work the land. You have to adapt.”

Missoule Alexandre Pierre, 54, was not so sanguine. As her listless
daughters leafed through magazines and stared at their nails, she
expressed considerable frustration that her children’s education had
been interrupted.

“These three girls were all university students, and now their future is
uncertain,” she said. “They don’t know what to do with themselves here.
Every morning they wake up and say, “Mama, take us back. We’d rather
sleep on the street.’ ”

Fond-des-Blancs has a long history of migration, with residents fleeing
to Cuba, New York and French Guiana even in the best of times.

“Until 1963, it was beautiful country with all kinds of birds, plentiful
rainfall, big old trees and coffee plantations,” said Mr. Leveillé ,
62. “But that year, Hurricane Flora devastated our environment in a day.
International companies like Dupont began replacing sisal, which we
grow, with synthetic fibers. And people started cutting down trees to
make charcoal.”

By 1982, Fond-des-Blancs, deforested, was at its nadir and the exodus to
Port-au-Prince got under way. At the same time, help began arriving: a
relatively successful reforestation program and a health clinic started
by a Catholic parish in Quincy, Mass., which became the St. Boniface
Hospital.

Projects like the crossbreeding of scrawny local goats with large
Dominican studs breathed some life into the economy (with
Fond-des-Blancs aspiring to be known as the goat capital of Haiti), but
the area still struggles.

Worried about the impact of the returnees, local leaders have decided to
unite their myriad community groups to figure out how to absorb the
newcomers while using the earthquake to draw attention to the plight of
rural areas. At a recent New England-style town meeting, they summed up
their resources succinctly on a blackboard: “Public health:
nonexistent; electricity: nonexistent; water: insufficient.”

The former mayor, Mr. Leveillé, his face weathered under a straw hat,
told the crowd, “It is time to force the international community and our
own government to focus on us, too.” And heads nodded.

0 members like this