Shelter plan returns Haitians to homes

March 28, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti

Aid officials say they have finally figured out where to put hundreds of thousands of Haitians who lost their homes in a cataclysmic earthquake: right back where they came from.

Dreams of vast relocation camps have largely evaporated due to a lack of available land. And nobody wants to leave people living in the streets under makeshift tents of plastic and bed sheets with the official May 1 start of the rainy season looming.

So Haitians such as Marie Carmel Etienne are moving back home, helped by a team funded by the U.S. Defense Department that has promised to remove the debris of shattered buildings in one Port-au-Prince neighborhood if people will dump it in the street in front of their lots.

The 55-year-old stylist in a floppy hat spent better than two decades in Brooklyn and Miami before moving back to Haiti and opening a a beauty parlor in her three-story home. It all collapsed in the Jan. 12 quake, so she has been sleeping under a tree at her mother’s house, dodging falling mangoes at night.

She enlisted neighbors to smash the pink-painted concrete into bits and cart them into the street for the American team to pick up.

“My U.S. taxes coming back to me,” she said, pointing to a U.S. Navy engineer, Melvin Acree. “My Haitian taxes, they do nothing.”

For Acree’s team of bulldozer, Bobcat and dump- truck drivers, the task seems neverending.

“Look at this! We cleared this street out!” Acree said as he stepped into the street blocked anew by broken concrete and twisted rebar.