Back to Normal Life?

By Adam Koons, Director of Relief, International Relief and Development

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI -- On the streets of Port-au-Prince, everyone who has a few tomatoes to sell, or books of matches, or even cups of flavored shaved ice, is trying to sell them. The streets are alive and bustling with commerce. It sometimes seems like everyone is trying to sell something to everyone else. In tiny little quantities, that do not require much money, enough for today, or the moment. Spilling over into the street. Clogging the already traffic-jammed streets . To those of us who have spent time here before (I lived in Haiti for four years), it seems so very normal………….almost.
Look a little closer and the façade is ruined. Behind, or nearby, or down the street, you will see crushed and ruined buildings. Businesses and homes. A great many of them in which people died. Some have not yet been extracted.

And look again a bit further beyond the commerce, a few feet further back into the chaos. We can see that many people have erected their “temporary” shelters there. They are now living just off the curb, beyond their micro street businesses, in open-sided structures that are lucky to have something partially resembling a roof.

Everyone on the street has most likely recently lost family or friends. So how can they be out talking, and negotiating, and arguing, and sometimes laughing? How can they be acting so normal? Well, what choice do they have really? They have to live, somehow. And so they have to continue doing whatever business they can do. Yes they are still in shock. But that will not change their need for survival. They must continue, and to some extent they must push aside the recent past and focus on the present and the future, and that results in the street scene we see.

And it is truly remarkable, the forced resilience. Even in the teeming shanty-filled soccer stadium we visited in the ground-zero town of Leogane, where IRD is working. Walking along the shadowy three foot wide alleys between the rows of shelters we see tiny little piles of onions, or bouillon cubes, or soap for sale. There is even a solar powered cell phone recharging business.
Watching the street life, and the shanty-settlement life carefully, there is something else.

What’s wrong with this picture? It’s nice to see the kids playing around, and smiling, and trying to cope. But that’s it, there are so many children around. They are not in school. In Leogane all of the schools were destroyed. At the moment, since survival is foremost in the actions of all, there is little capacity, or attention, or ability to address this critical issue. Simultaneous to all of our other activities in water, sanitation, hygiene, shelter, and agriculture, IRD intends to help rebuild the schools of Leogane. We have the technical skills and capacity, and we now need the financial resources to do so.