Without a Home: Hundreds of displaced struggling at outdoor camps

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Title: Without a Home: Hundreds of displaced struggling at outdoor camps http://www.internationalreportingproject.org/stories/detail/1498/ Former IRP Fellow Trenton Daniel just returned from covering Haiti for the Miami Herald. The below is one of a collection of stories from his trip PETIONVILLE, Haiti -- Frances Etienne stirred a pot scavenged from her shattered home, bending over the small meal, her son's lime green T-shirt tied around her waist. Her boy -- Marcus, age 9 -- perished a week ago in the earthquake. But three other children depend on her, so she has set up a makeshift home on a small patch of land in a chaotic tent city of displaced people, all squeezed onto a public plaza in the hard-hit city of Pétionville. She doesn't know her neighbors here at Place St. Pierre, the way she did along the narrow lane where she used to live, less than a mile away. But she knows their spirit and her own. "I realize I must take care of the kids, " said Etienne, 39. "Since they have life, we must take care of them." The tent city where Etienne now lives is one of more than 320 such camps that Haitian authorities say have emerged in Port-au-Prince and its suburbs since a 7.0 quake pummeled Haiti last week, killing tens of thousands and displacing even more. One camp, in the Delmas neighborhood, has an estimated 15,000 people living on a nine-hole golf course next to the U.S. ambassador's home. Government employees say the Place St. Pierre camp swells to 10,000 people at night -- and no one can say how long they'll remain. The camps are a microcosm of the post-quake ills that have befallen Haiti. The flimsy tarp and tent constructions, rigged together with twine, rope, clothing strips, even seat belts, are crammed with people. They pad the hard concrete paths or muddy grass with blankets, rugs and Astro Turf. Children play with plastic juice bottles, using lids as wheels. Bags of human waste and garbage are everywhere. This is where the homeless must mourn their dead and struggle to heal, a place with almost no privacy and little dignity, where hope is as hard to find as food and water. The arena-size camp at Place St. Pierre sprouted up the day after the Jan. 12 quake. The plaza is ringed with the signs of pre-earthquake life: City Hall, a shuttered postal office, a cathedral, a police station and a gingerbread-trimmed hotel. The government is trying to move people out. On Wednesday, it dispatched 11 buses to carry people from the plaza to relatively untouched cities, such as St. Marc, Gonaives and Les Cayes. International relief agencies are seldom seen. On Tuesday afternoon, employees from a Haitian phone company tossed plastic bags of water from a pickup truck. Later, a pizza restaurant announced free meals, giving preference to children, and the hungry jogged downhill for a bite of hot food. By day, residents leave to scrounge money or work or food, or seek confirmation of the dead. At night, the plaza fills with people -- lying down, cooking, smoking. There are moments of normalcy. Children dribble a soccer ball next to a broken fountain. Women sing church hymns. Though a police station is across the street, the new residents fear thieves and rapists. United Nations troops circle the park periodically in armored vehicles. Tuesday night, a trio of shotgun-toting police officers patrolled the park in masks. "We're looking for fugitives, " said officer Frantzy Sanon, 29. Two days after the quake, Etienne buried her son, Marcus. Unlike so many others in Haiti in the last week, the boy got a dignified goodbye: burial in a cemetery. The family paid $256 for an adult-size coffin. The small size for children was sold out. Etienne mourns her boy in the plaza surrounded by strangers. "He was a beautiful boy. He was an active boy, " she said, a scarf of autumnal colors covering her head. "Everyone felt his presence. Every second we think about him." She keeps his shirt tied to her body, even when she sleeps, and her common-law husband, Eric Estira, 29, wears Marcus' pink backpack on his shoulders. "I feel like my son is still with me when I wear this, " Etienne said. Others in the park don't know if their missing relatives are dead. With bodies still in the debris or buried in mass graves, many just assume the worst. "They told me my husband died but I never found the body, " said Evelyn Nycasse, 28, a street merchant. "It's been seven days and I haven't heard from him." Nycasse, a resident of Port-au-Prince's Nazon neighborhood, found her way to the plaza after rumors of a tsunami the night after the quake sent Haitians scrambling. Now she lives alongside thousands, with no running water and four portable toilets that reek so badly people cover their noses when they go by. "I cannot have potable water, and I cannot eat well, " said Nycasse, clad in a long-sleeve plaid shirt. "Water to bathe? Maybe. But using the toilet is a mess." But amid the dirt and despair, a flicker of resourcefulness has begun to surface. On a stone ledge, a tattered piece of cardboard reads: "Isit la nou chaje telefon pou selman 15 goud, " offering to charge cellphones for 15 gourdes, the Haitian currency. Down the path, competition has sprung up. Orelus Zoro Babel wired an inverter battery to a generator. A wooden table is covered in cords, wires and cellphones. Babel scribbles numbers on masking tape, his record-keeping system. "I needed to charge my cellphone but couldn't, " said Babel, 24, a waiter at a now closed restaurant down the street. "So I came up with this idea." Babel said he earned between $18 and $24 Tuesday afternoon. But many of the people in plaza just sit. Some are injured. "We just sit here, watching people, and then wait, " said Beatrice Auguste, 26, her cheeks scraped and her head wrapped in a blood-soaked bandage. A neighbor from her old neighborhood helps bathe her when she's not worrying about contaminated water infecting her wounds. Wednesday morning, a 5.9 earthquake rattled Haiti again. The park's squatters, with nothing left and no place to run, lay down and prayed. "I thought, 'the same thing is happening again, ' " Auguste said. "I was ready to die." Nearby, Jean Lordeus, 51, tallies his few possessions: the clothes on his rail-thin body, a carpet and pillow for sleeping, and a bamboo cane he uses to help him to the overflowing toilets. His wife, a maid, went to work Monday but never came back. Lordeus, whose leg was injured in the quake, has no place to go so he waits for his son to help him. "I sit here, waiting for my son to bring me something. If he does I'm happy, " Lordeus said. "If he doesn't, I just wait for the next day."