Haitians’ shoddy ‘transitional’ shelters are becoming permanent

Port-au-Prince, Haiti • On a recent night in Carrefour, a densely packed city of twisted streets outside the Haitian capital, a band of thieves surrounded Roseline Sylvain’s home and slashed the plastic sheet that is the simple structure’s only wall.

The men made off with a lamp, not a huge loss, but significant enough for Sylvain and her family. She’s mad at the thieves, of course, but she’s more frustrated that she doesn’t have real walls seven months after moving into what aid groups billed as a transitional shelter for earthquake victims.

The structure is one of hundreds of wooden frames with steel or plywood roofs that foreign aid groups erected as a temporary fix for people displaced by the January 2010 earthquake, a way station between squalid tent camps and the new homes that will one day be built for the displaced.

But with the reconstruction effort stalled, tens of thousands of quake survivors throughout the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince and its outskirts are resigning themselves to staying in the flimsy shelters for the long haul, even though most of the structures are hardly adequate to withstand an unforgiving Caribbean storm season.

“It’s like being right back in a tent,” the 28-year-old Sylvain said of her shelter, a one-room structure on a concrete slab that she, her husband and two children rent from a local landowner for $63 every six months. “The rain comes down the hills and into the shelter.”

Her neighbor, Marie Micheline Ridore, 35, piled dirt at the base of her shelter to stave off water rushing down the hillside. She also plugged a tennis-ball-size hole in the wall with a wad of plastic.

What Haitians need are inhabitable homes. That they still don’t have them is due to factors ranging from a delayed election to the government’s failure to secure land for housing and lay out a workable plan to clear rubble.

President Michel Martelly, who took office May 14, said his government aims to build 400 homes in his first 100 days of office, a goal he is unlikely to meet given that he still hasn’t even won legislative approval for his Cabinet nominees. On Tuesday, lawmakers rejected his pick for prime minister, meaning he’ll have to choose a new nominee, a vetting process that could take weeks and postpone reconstruction further.