Haitians in urgent need of tents

McClatchy Newspapers

MONTREAL — Rebuilding Port-au-Prince could take a decade or longer and ultimately completely reform the way Haiti is organized, foreign leaders said at a conference Monday.

Conference members also used the meeting as a microphone for an urgent need now in the quake-shaken nation: tents.

“Anybody who’s got those tents, get in touch with us,” said John Holmes, United Nations under- secretary-general for humanitarian affairs.

Haiti’s prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, told envoys from 19 other countries and international organizations that the Jan. 12 earthquake crippled not just the city of Port-au-Prince, but the entire country. In the future, he said, Haiti’s authority and its resources must be decentralized.

“In 30 seconds, Haiti lost 60 percent of its GDP — gross domestic product,” Bellerive said. “We need to review the whole country.”

Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, urged his colleagues to stay committed to Haiti’s reconstruction.

“It is not an exaggeration to say that 10 years of hard work — at least — awaits the world in Haiti,” Harper said. “We must hold ourselves and each other accountable for the commitments we make.”

Though the conference is focused on long-term reconstruction, Bellerive also passed along a more urgent appeal for immediate assistance from Haiti’s president, Rene Preval.

Bellerive said his country needs at least 200,000 tents to provide shelter to those left homeless by the earthquake.

He also stressed the need for medical care, saying hospitals and clinics in other regions of the country are nearly filled with patients. And he asked for prosthetics and orthopedic specialists to treat the thousands of people who lost limbs to injury.

“I could continue on all of these emergencies; there are many,” Bellerive said. “It is very difficult for me to talk reconstruction when we do not take these other matters into account.”

In Haiti, the Preval government said the need for tents was dire because the country’s first rainy season begins in about 10 days.

It issued an urgent international plea Monday for tens of thousands more six- to eight-person tents to shelter Haitians in and around the capital of Port-au-Prince.

Meantime, the International Organization for Migration, the intergovernment group coping with the homeless crisis, said it has received only about two-thirds of the $30 million it sought in a Jan. 15 appeal.

Holmes, the U.N. official, said about 500,000 Haitians had received food, and an additional 200,000 had received water.

Holmes also said the main water system in Port-au-Prince is now operating again.

However, even before the earthquake, the water system failed to reach much of the city’s residents.

More critically, Holmes said, relief agencies will focus on providing ready-to-eat meals for thousands of displaced people for at least the next two weeks.

He said the food problem has been complicated by the lack of shelter; without cooking facilities, the homeless have little use for staples such as rice.

By Monday morning, IOM estimated, some 692,000 people were living in 591 scattered settlements — tent cities set up, many spontaneously, to shelter people left homeless by the 7.0 earthquake that destroyed many communities Jan. 12.

“It is likely that this figure is much higher, even though many people have left the capital to seek shelter in other towns and villages,” the IOM said.