Hungry, Homeless and Jobless in Haiti

Things are beginning to fray in post-apocalypse Haiti as grim reality sets in. The magnificent international relief effort, while heart-warming, can't reach everyone, and those who can be reached are fed or sheltered only temporarily. The day-by-day struggle for life's basics seems to stretch out indefinitely into the future, for a people traumatized by having lost nearly everything in the sudden violence of the earthquake and its aftermath.

Too grim a picture? Perhaps, but take a cue from the paratroopers of the 2^nd Battalion Combat Team, 82^nd Airborne. Among its 3,000 soldiers are many veterans of grueling combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are a hard-bitten and normally boisterous lot. Riding back from a mission, they sit in stunned silence. "A lot of my guys are going to need help when we get home,'' a young officer told me.

Outwardly, at least, this is a city where people are trying to resume life. Scavengers are scaling the slumped wreckage of collapsed houses and tearing away sheets of tin roofing and other salvage, which they balance in enormous piles on large handcarts pulled away through traffic by men straining with knotted muscles. Others, shouldering bundles of 12-foot-long scavenged lumber, pick their way through crowds. A sidewalk vendor's basket of oranges brightens the grim landscape of gray concrete dust and gray ash that settles from the pall of smoke rising from cooking fires and trash fires.

The relief campaign also is in full swing. Rock stars, celebrity chefs and fashion designers each have fundraising efforts underway; collectively Americans have donated almost half a billion dollars to relief. Here in Haiti, the international flavor of relief is reflected in the colorful flags and logos that adorn relief organizations' camps and trucks: Spain, the European Union, the Colombian Red Cross, the Dutch Red Cross, Scientologists, the World Food Program, truckloads of Israeli soldiers, a brigade (3,000 troops) of combat soldiers from the 82^nd Airborne Division. (Unlike other nation's representatives, the American troops are not allowed to fly their flag above their encampments.)

Good news stories are everywhere: a girl miraculously pulled from the rubble; an American benefactor buying and personally delivering fuel for generators; an organization that has sent tents from Scotland.

Up close, the work is agonizingly slow, a process one aid worker compared to climbing a sand dune: for every labored step up, a half-step slide back down.

On a recent day, in a hillside neighborhood where every second or third concrete home or shop had collapsed into tilted slab and rubble, I watched paratroopers hand out 700 bottles of water, 300 individual packaged meals and 250 radios. The operation took four hours and required three big trucks and two Humvees. Everyone in the crowd that gathered on Nazom Street in the broiling sun got one bottle of water, about enough for one person in the shimmering heat.

The paratroopers pronounced the operation a success: the crowd was orderly and grateful, and everyone got food or water or both.

Yet once the one-liter bottles were drained, there was no other water there on Nazom Street, Alex Pierre, an unemployed 24-year-old, told me. City water mains are broken. Unless the women of the household walk miles for a bucketful, there is no water for cooking or washing, let alone drinking. Over a collapsed cinder block wall behind Pierre I could see a courtyard jammed with colorful orange and white four-man camping tents, the donation of a relief agency. People had strung up bed sheets to ward off the sun and were sitting listless in the stifling shade.

"There is no running water and we have nothing to put in our bellies,'' Pierre said. Bottled water can be found in some places, but the price of a bottle has shot up from 35 cents to $1.25.

What do you need most? I asked. His reply: "Jobs.''

Indeed, everywhere in Port-au-Prince these days, for every hustling scavenger, there seem to be dozens of aimless, idle people who throng the streets by the hundreds and tens of hundreds, wearing brightly colored T-shirts and vacant stares. Any entertainment – soldiers handing out food, or somebody showing up with a front-end loader to shovel rubble – draws a massive corps of kibitzers who will stand and watch for hours. Corpses, which are still scattered around the city, attract no curiosity.

A few men have found jobs as day laborers with CNE, the Haitian government public works agency, shoveling rubble. A lucky handful of shotgun-toting youths are employed to patrol a squatters' camp at Haiti's national soccer stadium, where 2,500 homeless families have gathered in tents and makeshift shelters.

As the initial shock of the Jan. 12 earthquake wears off, crime is growing across the city, according to Haitian police, particularly theft, armed robbery and rape. Some parts of the city are said to be controlled by gangs.

And the exodus from the city continues, Along Dessalines, ancient buses, listing under loads of people and mattresses, tables, boxes and flapping tarpaulins, crawl away belching black fumes: people fleeing the city's wreckage.

There is some hope that international aid will provide jobs that will help in the reconstruction and jump-start the economy As a tool against unemployment and its associated ills, the U.S. military has successfully used cash in Iraq and Afghanistan to hire locals for short-term and limited projects to clean up trash, clear drainage ditches and work on other development projects.

But U.S. army officers here say it will be weeks before they get access to these funds, from the Commanders Emergency Response Program (CERP).

The enormity of the job to be done here, and the inevitable delays, are building frustration. "We don't have much time – the immediate needs are so great,'' said Lt. Col. David Doyle, who commands the 2^nd Battalion, 325^th Airborne Infantry Regiment, in Port-au-Prince.

On another day, I watched the paratroopers and the Salvation Army execute a mission with military precision, distributing 2,500 packages of food that would each feed a family of five for a week. The families, homeless, were camped temporarily in the soccer stadium.

Col. Doyle's planners were pushing to move everyone out of the stadium so it could be used as a central distribution point. Food and water could be brought in by helicopter, bypassing traffic-clogged Dessalines, and eliminating the need for endless small truck convoys to distribute relief. It would mean another traumatic disruption of families already under enormous stress. And there is no obvious place where these homeless people can be safely moved.

While the Army planners fretted, a trucking contractor hired by relief agencies to distribute food showed up with 10 truckloads of rice in 50-pound bags, asking where he should put the stuff. The paratroopers quickly organized a team to provide security and directed him to the nearest place with a huge crowd: the soccer stadium.

Feeding people where they are works as a short-term solution, and for now, short-term is about the only option there is in Haiti.