Full circle for Haiti's quake refugees

Published on Saturday 20 March 2010 18:08

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 chickens crow and goats bleat, Pelteau, 29, toils by day on a craggy hillside in the isolated hamlet of Nan Roc, which she had abandoned at 14 for a life of greater opportunity. At night, she, her husband and their two children sleep cheek-by-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 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 been drawn 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 Leveill, 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 decentralise Haiti and resuscitate its agricultural economy, said Nancy Dorsinville, a special adviser to former President Bill Clinton, the United Nations special envoy to Haiti.

"If we really mean what we say about decentralisation, then we have to think fast about a more robust distribution of food to the countryside, cash-to-work programmes there, and assistance to agriculture," Dorsinville said.

Decentralisation 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 a local charity hospital.

Jacqueline Jerome, Pelteau's wizened mother, who does not know her age, said: "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 south-west 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.

Some 300 needy families surveyed reported taking in an average of five victims each, and an additional 500 to 600 earthquake refugees are seeking to resume their studies at one of the town's two state schools.

In the centre of town, the influx from Port-au-Prince has created a nightlife where none existed before. The sole lamppost draws an evening crowd.

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

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 town meeting, a blackboard summed up the situation: "Public health: nonexistent; electricity: nonexistent; water: insufficient."

The former mayor told the crowd: "It is time to force the international community and our own government to focus on us, too."