In post-quake Haiti, rebuilding an education system that was already broken

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Wednesday, February 3, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

PORT-AU-PRINCE — Their classrooms are rubble. So are their houses – scattered around Port-au-Prince, most of them are living “sous les belles étoiles.” Many of their professors are missing or dead.

But in the fissured remains of their university, these would-be teachers are planning a revolution. They sit at desks, taking scribbled notes as their rapid-fire ideas overlap one another over the sounds of 400 families living in tents outside, and one lone, loud rooster by the window. As Haiti’s already inadequate education system lies in ruins – and with it, one of the country’s best shots at sustainable development – these upstart students are among those who hope to reinvent what it means to learn in Haiti.

“We don’t just want to rebuild. We want to begin over again,” says Michel Fresner, a first-year education student at the Centre Formation d’Education Fondemontal.

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Quake left a security nightmare in its wake

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Wednesday, February 3, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

PORT-AU-PRINCE — It’s a strange sight on a traffic-choked downtown street across from a park that has become a crowded tent city: several dozen young men locked behind the wrought-iron bars of a rectangular, birdcage-like structure outside a police station.

The police say the men are looters, caught in the act. An officer gestures over his shoulder to rolls of fabric, building materials and dusty electronics.

A prison it’s not. But for now, and for no one knows how long, that’s where the alleged looters will stay.

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Haitian ‘orphan’ didn’t know where she was going or who was taking her

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Tuesday, February 2, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

SANTO, HAITI — For she knows not how long, Berline Chéry travelled toward the Dominican border in a blue-and-white bus with 32 other children. She didn’t know where they were going or who was taking them there. She knew only that the blans, who spoke French and fed her buttered bread and water, had told her mother they would help her and enroll her in school. Finally, in the dark, the children started to cry. That’s when the police opened the doors and found them.

Ten-year-old Berline and the others are now in the care of SOS Children’s Village, a refuge for unaccompanied youth in Santo, northwest of Port-au-Prince. More than anything else, the compound of 240 children resembles a rustic summer camp. But Berline and two of the boys from her convoy – twins Keler and Volny Toussaint – don’t like it here. The other kids are mean, she says.

“I need to find my maman – tomorrow. Early. She won’t come here.”

She looks away, old enough to be embarrassed by the tears streaming down her face.

“Can I go home now?”

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Help still slow to reach some victims

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Monday, February 1, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

PORT-AU-PRINCE — Marnity Buisson stands, arms akimbo, on pebbled dirt between stacks of bedsheets and a ravine that’s become an open sewer and fly-infested garbage pit.

This is her turf. The house she grew up in is reduced to bits of stone and concrete; her neighbourhood is in smithereens.

In an attempt to take control of the area where she has spent all her life, the 22-year-old joined a seven-member committee struck to oversee the welfare of 75 families living under tarps and sleeping on the ground in this Martissant alley.

In tent cities, refugee camps, mattress-filled streets and courtyards-turned-living rooms across Port-au-Prince, survivors are forming their own organizing committees to provide advocacy, security and co-ordination. Some of them have issued sporadic press releases, following their federal government’s lead in holding news conferences.

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Baptist group accused of child-trafficking in Haiti

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Monday, February 1, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

PORT-AU-PRINCE — At least 10 of the 33 Haitian children a group of American Baptists tried to take across the border into the Dominican Republic have parents, says the group taking care of them while the Haitian government investigates an alleged case of child trafficking.

Ten Americans are in custody and set to appear in Port-au-Prince court this morning, accused by the Haitian government of trying to take the children out of the country without proper documentation.

Aid groups have warned against hasty adoptions or transfers of vulnerable children in the wake of the earthquake that devastated Haiti’s infrastructure.

The church organizing the transfer of the children says the group had only the best of intentions, that it wanted to put the children in a Dominican Republic orphanage and that it was sure all the children were parentless.

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UN revamps Haiti’s aid system

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Anna Mehler Paperny
Globe and Mail Update
Saturday, January 30, 2010

PORT-AU-PRINCE
New distribution program prioritizes women with families in effort to stop chaotic stampedes over food convoys

Port-au-Prince — The United Nations is revamping its aid mission in Haiti after two weeks of chaotic stampedes to reach disorganized food convoys.

The new system, which starts this weekend, will set up 16 fixed aid sites across Port-au-Prince, each of which aims to give rice to 10,000 people a day – about 1.1 million people a week in a metropolitan area of about 4 million.

“[At first] we had to do everything we could, to put as much food out to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible,“ said World Food Program spokesman Marcus Prior.

“But instead of using mobile, quick-and-dirty methods, we need a more organized response.”

It’s aid agencies’ attempt to come to terms with what Mr. Prior described as “the most complex situation we’ve ever faced” – a staggering need in a dense urban area whose infrastructure has been wiped out entirely. Humanitarian workers are used to providing aid to less dense, more rural spaces. In the crush of a devastated, tightly packed city, the logistics are entirely different.

“As part of the operation, we need to have more stable and robust distribution methods in place.”

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Quake has rendered Haiti’s government powerless

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Anna Mehler Paperny
Saturday, January 30, 2010 – Globe and Mail

PORT-AU-PRINCE

As more decisions need to be made about how to rebuild country, it’s becoming clear just how crippled and dependent Haiti’s government has become

Port-au-Prince — Improvised stages under mango trees on the outskirts of a ruined capital are never the most dignified of locations, as far as post-disaster government press conferences go.

But a disagreement over tents and a couple of awkward moments at the Haitian government’s daily press briefings last week highlighted what’s going to become, increasingly, a bone of contention as recovery efforts continue in the wake of the biggest quake to hit Haiti in centuries.

Tents, President René Préval told the assembled crowd, are the single thing the country needs most now – 200,000 of them, to be exact. And quickly.

But the man who spoke directly after him wasn’t so sure.

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Job shortage adds to Haiti’s misery

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Saturday, January 30, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

PORT-AU-PRINCE — In a folding chair among the mattresses and laundry lines outside the wreckage of his family’s house, Olivier Jean-Rénauld is writing his résumé.

The 33-year-old computer science graduate and his friend Chéry Luckson are applying for jobs with Médecins Sans Frontières, which has put out calls for logistics workers to help with the NGO’s massive aid effort. The jobs are part-time, Mr. Luckson acknowledges. But when no one has a job and the country’s already faltering economy has effectively ceased to exist, it’s better than nothing.

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As disease threat rises, vaccination program rolls out

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Friday, January 29, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

PORT-AU-PRINCE — Aid agencies are rolling out an ambitious vaccine program in and around Port-au-Prince in an effort to stem what health experts fear is an impending public-health crisis.

Little by little, the biggest health challenge facing the millions of people displaced by the earthquake is becoming less about treatment for their injuries or even obtaining food and water.

Hundreds of thousands of people are living in an estimated 591 settlements in the Port-au-Prince area. As aid agencies struggle to find a better solution to the strung-together sheets under which people are taking shelter, tent-city denizens are taking matters into their own hands, building more permanent shelters out of scraps of wood and corrugated iron salvaged from the ruins.

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From a golf course to a community

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Thursday, January 28, 2010 – Globe and Mail
PAUL WALDIE AND ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

PORT-AU-PRINCE — When the earthquake hit Haiti on Jan. 12, thousands of people who had lost their homes rushed to Port-au-Prince’s only golf course, the Pétionville Club.

Today, roughly 50,000 people live on the nine-hole course in a collection of shelters made from blankets, sticks, plastic tarps and tents.

The camp could have ended up like many others across the city – dirty, disorganized and lacking food and water. Instead, thanks to the work of the U.S. Army and some determined aid agencies such as Oxfam and Catholic Relief Services, the camp functions as something close to a community.

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