LONDON (AlertNet) Â? Providing shelter for the hundreds of thousands of Haitians displaced by the Jan. 12 earthquake is fast becoming one of the biggest challenges for the aid community.
Hundreds of makeshift camps have sprung up across the capital Port-au-Prince and, while it is difficult to obtain accurate figures of the number of tents that have arrived, relief workers say far too few have been handed out. Haitians continue to take shelter under sheets, blankets and curtains, often in squalid conditions.
With the rainy season due to start in April or May and the hurricane season after that, local authorities and aid agencies are racing against time to arrange more permanent shelter, but the challenges are enormous.
"We cannot come up with tents for up to 700,000 people - we simply do not have them at hand." Jean Phillippe Antolin, with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), told IRIN, the United Nations news agency.
The IOM is coordinating UN efforts to provide shelter. It estimates that 900,000 to 1.1 million people are in acute need of emergency shelter assistance, most of them in the capital.
In the absence of enough family-sized tents, the IOM is distributing stocks of tarpaulins and plastic sheeting. The goal is to improve living conditions for thousands of people living in makeshift settlements until there are enough tents on the ground.
"Tents are a three-five month option in the midst of the dry season. But emergency and transitional shelter solutions sufficiently durable to last at least two years need to be found before the heavy rains arrive in a few months," said Vincent Houver, IOM Chief of Mission in Haiti, in a statement.
The Haitian government has identified at least 30 sites to turn into temporary tent communities in the capital, most in areas where people are already informally camped out, but longer-term solutions must be found, relief workers say.
However, for some of the proposed areas, heavy equipment is still needed to bulldoze the ground, the IOM said. Surveyors and engineers are also needed to ensure camps have adequate drainage and sanitary conditions.
"We need engineers to assess the land and heavy equipment to prepare the space. We do not have either," said Antolin. "Without those two, we cannot even start worrying about the shortage of tents because we will not have anywhere to place those tents."
SMALLER CAMPS
The government is also assessing how many people can be relocated to a new settlement planned for the Croix-de-Bouquets neighbourhood, some 15 kilometres east of Port-au-Prince. The settlement is funded by the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) and is intended to house some 20,000 quake survivors.
The IOM, however, sees out-of-town settlements as a last resort. The organisation believes it is best to allow people to remain close to their former homes and communities. From experience, out-of-town settlements bring their own problems: creating dependencies, social problems and insecurity.
Organised transitional settlements not exceeding 10,000 people are more viable and manageable, the IOM said, allowing for government ministries and relief workers to provide services such as water, sanitation, health, food, education and security
The organisation said it was working with French relief group ACTED to create a settlement at Tabarre in the capital for a maximum of 3,500 people. They hope to finish the site by the end of this week.
The U.N. has proposed alternatives to housing all the displaced in tents, given the magnitude of the problem. These include giving support to local host families to give homes to the displaced, providing materials to improve safety and comfort in areas where people have gathered, and checking homes that survived the quake to see if they are safe for reoccupation.
The possibility of future earthquakes also has to be taken into account in settlement and reconstruction plans, relief workers say. President Rene Preval said
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
