Broken
and collapsed buildings remain in every neighborhood. Men
pull oxcarts by hand through the street. Women
carry 5 gallon plastic jugs of water on their heads, dipped
from manhole covers in the street. Hundreds of thousands
remain in grey sheet and tarp covered shelters in big public
parks, in between houses and in any small pocket of land.
Most of the people are unemployed or selling mangoes or
food on the side of every main street. This was Port au
Prince during my visit with a human rights delegation of
School of
Americas Watch � more than a year
and a half after the earthquake that killed hundreds of
thousands and made two million homeless.
What
I did not see this week were bulldozers scooping up the
mountains of concrete remaining from last January�s earthquake.
No cranes lifting metal beams up to create new buildings.
No public works projects. No housing developments. No public
food or public water distribution centers.
Everywhere
I went, the people of Haiti
asked, �Where is the money the world promised Haitians?�
The
world has moved on. Witness the rows of padlocked public
port-o-lets standing on the sidewalk outside Camp St. Anne.
The displacement camp covers a public park hard by the still
hollow skeleton of the still devastated St. Anne church.
The place is crowded with babies, small children, women,
men, and the elderly. It smells of charcoal smoke, dust
and humans. Sixty hundred fifty families live there without
electricity, running water or security.
I
talked with several young women inside the camp of shelters,
most about eight feet by eight feet made from old gray tarps,
branches, leftover wood, and pieces of rusty tin. When it
rains, they stand up inside their leaky shelters and wait
for it to stop. In a path in front of one home, crisscrossed
with clotheslines full of tiny children�s clothes, a group
of women from the grassroots women�s group KOFAVIV told
us Oxfam used to help administer the camp but quit in May.
When
Oxfam left, the company that had been emptying the port-o-lets
stopped getting paid and abandoned the toilets. Some people
padlocked them and now charge a couple of cents to use the
toilets, money most residents don�t have. There is no work
to earn the money for pay for toilets. The Red Cross had
just visited the camp that morning, telling them they would
be evicted October 17. Where will they go, we ask? We have
no idea, they told us. Jesus will provide, they told us.
Where
has the money raised for Haiti
gone? What about the Red Cross? What about the US government? What about the money raised in
France,
Canada
and across the world? What about the pledges to the UN?
Where is the money? The people of Haiti
continue to be plagued by the earthquake of more than 20
months ago. They are our sisters and brothers. They deserve
answers. They deserve help.
BlackCommentator.com
Columnist, Bill Quigley, is a human rights
lawyer and law professor at Loyola
University, New Orleans. He has
been an active public interest lawyer since 1977 and has
served as counsel with a wide range of public interest organizations
on issues including Katrina social justice issues, public
housing, voting rights, death penalty, living wage, civil
liberties, educational reform, constitutional rights and
civil disobedience. He has litigated numerous cases with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund,
Inc., the Advancement Project, and with the ACLU of
Louisiana,
for which he served as General Counsel for over 15 years. Bill is also legal director of the Center for Constitutional
Rights and a long time human rights advocate. He volunteers
with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti and the Bureaux des
Advocats in Port au Prince. Click
here to contact
Mr. Quigley.
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