2 months after quake, housing is hard to find

March 13, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti

Trash and sewage are piling up at the squalid tent camps that hundreds of thousands have called home since Haiti’s devastating earthquake — and with torrential rains expected any day, authorities are not even close to providing the shelters they promised.

Two months since the Jan. 12 quake, the government has yet to relocate a single person, despite a pledge that people would be moving into resettlement areas by early February.

Aid groups say they’re ready to build but don’t have the land. Government officials insist they are making progress on finding sites in closed-door negotiations with private landowners.

But time is running out for 600,000 people living under tarps, tents or simply bed sheets as the rainy season has the makings of a second major crisis. Heavy rains typically start around April 1, and there already have been deadly floods to the west of the earthquake zone.

“It really is desperate,” said Alex Wynter, a spokesman in Haiti for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. “It’s got the makings of a major disaster.”

People in the crowded camps — mazes of rough shelters where the air is thick with flies, mosquitoes and the stench of overflowing pit latrines — say they can’t wait much longer for better conditions.

“I need the government to move me somewhere,” said Jean-Claude Saintil, 55, who lives in the front yard of a Roman Catholic high school with his wife and six children.

Daphne Gerlaine, 21, said her family has received no food aid, and she fears for her newborn. She lives under a blue tarp distributed by the Red Cross at a sprawling camp for 47,000 homeless set up on a former airfield.

Aid organizations have plans to build at least 140,000 shelters — but only plans.