Local Haitian communities take initiative in responding to earthquake

By Allyn Gaestel

24 January 2010 [MediaGlobal]: The 12 January earthquake in Haiti caused huge destruction in the country, as is well chronicled in the international media. But the coverage has focused on Port-au-Prince, the capital city, where 30 percent of the city was leveled and an unverified number of people died. However, small towns have also been severely affected and international humanitarian organizations have been slow to acknowledge and address the needs of the more isolated areas. In their absence, local governments and community organizations have attempted to deal with the crisis independently, but many towns lack the infrastructure to deal with the enormous social and physical changes that have occurred.

Sixty percent of buildings in Petit Goave, a coastal town west of Port-au-Prince were leveled. The power plant was destroyed and the city is without electricity. The hospital, which still stands, does not have the medical supplies or personnel necessary to meet the pressing needs of the population. On Wednesday, 20 January, a full week after the earthquake, four American surgeons arrived. However, with 1,000 local citizens in urgent need of surgery and the hospital unable to fuel the generator, the task before them is enormous. Bodies continue to fill the streets and Mayor Justal Marc Roland called urgently for support to deal with the dead. Roland also has requested food, water, and medical support, and while the US military arrived in Petit Goave on Friday, 22 January, humanitarian assistance has yet to reach the population.

Haitians in Petit Goave work to clear and rebuild the Notre Dame church that was destroyed in the 12 January earthquake. Photo: Heritagekonpa.com/Heritagekonpa Magazine (with permission).

Similarly, Fondwa is a small town southwest of Port-au-Prince. With 8,000 inhabitants it is too small to even be labeled on the Organization for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ public maps (published 18 January 2010), which documents the needs and aid initiatives in Haiti. Katleen Félix, Diaspora Liaison for Fonkoze, an alternative bank for economically disadvantaged Haitians, described to MediaGlobal Fondwa’s dual catastrophes—the earthquake and the silence of the international community. “No one talks about Fondwa in the news, but everything is collapsed. Every building is flattened.”

A local community group, the Association of Peasants of Fondwa (APF) has been working for the last 22 years to develop the town. Yet most of the development projects they have accomplished have been destroyed. They lost their center of operations, the University of Fondwa was leveled, the health center was damaged, and the Cooperative Savings and Credit organization, a community radio station, and water collection projects were all incapacitated. Small businesses, such as a women’s bakery collective, also lost their infrastructure.

Isolated from the international humanitarian missions, and accustomed to self-sufficiency and community mobilization, Fondwa has an Emergency Relief Committee, which has prepared a four-step plan to address the situation. The first step covers immediate needs such as food, water, shelter, communications infrastructure, and the need for heavy equipment. The second step covers the rehabilitation of community centers and the university. The third step is clearing the town of rubble and the fourth is long-term investment and development. While the town is organized, it requires outside assistance to fulfill their goals.

Mayor Justal Marc Roland’s offices in Petit Goave, Haiti. Photo: Heritagekonpa.com/Heritagekonpa Magazine (with permission).

Communities not hit by the earthquake are also nonetheless touched by the repercussions. Mirebalais, a town northeast of Port-au-Prince, was not destroyed. However, they have seen an enormous influx of people fleeing the capital. Because it is relatively inexpensive for people to move from Port-au-Prince to Mirebalais the town size has doubled. Félix described to MediaGlobal her communication with the town’s mayor. He said that people “just get there and so the town is overcrowded and they don’t have any support from international help because they are not on the radar. So they have no tents, no extra food, no extra clean water. They don’t have the capacity to take more and people keep coming. They were saying that nobody is thinking of us in the evacuation plan but they are coming to us and we manage, but we do need some support.” Functional communities are being forced into hosting an influx of people, and while they are open to engage with the evacuation, they are in need of international awareness and assistance to effectively meet peoples’ needs.

Fonkoze, the bank Félix works with, is well placed to play a central role in the national reconstruction process. They have 42 branches across Haiti, many in rural towns that are now receiving people fleeing the destruction in the hardest hit areas. They are also well connected with grassroots organizations, so as people send money to local organizations for relief, Fonkoze facilitates transactions. They opened their branches before the larger banks, and because they are decentralized and interspersed throughout Haiti people can access their money as they migrate and rebuild their lives. In past disasters Fonkoze has created special no-interest loans for a year so that people can invest in rebuilding their lives and gaining self-sufficiency. Following the hurricanes in 2008, Fonkoze gave out 18,000 such loans and 98 percent were repaid within the year. Félix asserted: “I’m talking about the poorest, the people who are sick, the people who really were affected by this earthquake. It will be our role to see how we can help them through finance or programs using financial tools to rebuild their livelihood and generate their own revenue so they can be self sufficient and feed their family, send the kids to school, etcetera.”

The decentralized effects of this disaster beyond Port-au-Prince are underreported in the mainstream media, and while there is tragedy in the extensive destruction that has been overlooked, there is hope also in the widespread grassroots community organizations that are addressing the crisis in their own ways and their own localities. Félix said “nobody is talking about the other places that are not affected and that have grassroots organizations that could be partners. But I hope that at some point someone is going to look at what already exists on the ground. We have to stop saying that everything is destroyed. Everything is destroyed in Port-au-Prince and areas such as Jacmel, but we have all these other towns that are not and we have to start thinking [in terms of] decentralization.”