By Richard Meares
PORT-AU-PRINCE (AlertNet) Â? Thin sheets and clothes were drying out well in the makeshift camps after Haiti 's first big rain since the earthquake, but the bedspreads, cushions and other luxuries looked set to stay damp for days.
Soggy cardboard Â? used as a bed and a roof by some - was already starting to fall apart.
People with a plastic sheet over their head shared their space with less fortunate neighbours, though all still saw themselves as lucky to have survived the quake a month ago that killed over 200,000 people and devastated the capital.
"My husband and I had to sit through the rain on buckets with two children each on our laps, " said Jeanne Vital, 30, camped out in the town square park in Petionville, a better-off suburb of Port-au-Prince.
The recent downpour just added another layer of discomfort for an estimated 1 million people now living in the city 's streets, and was a reminder that time is not on the side of the relief effort, with rains and hurricanes due in the weeks and months to come.
Emergency medical care and delivery of water and food is now well in hand, but the one thing nearly all the homeless ask for first is shelter.
"Please send us a tent, " asked Senita Mazile, a 43-year-old living in the same camp as Vital with her three children. All her neighbours said the same.
FRUSTRATION SET TO GROW
The United Nations says it has delivered enough tents and tarpaulins to put some kind of a roof over perhaps 300,000 people, with enough rudimentary shelter for all those in need on the way in the next few weeks.
"We 're pumping this stuff out. If we grabbed everything from the warehouse and dumped it in the middle of the road we could do this in a day, " said Mark Turner, spokesman for the U.N. 's International Organisation of Migration.
"But we have to get it to the people who need it. "
Refugees generally expressed gratitude for the outside relief effort, even those who said they had not received anything.
Many are used to hardship and many saw the quake as God 's will, something to be accepted stoically. Yet frustration is sure to grow - the rain prompted an anti-government protest demanding shelter.
Downtown at the Champs de Mars, a landscaped public space between the collapsed National Palace and Haiti 's big museums, pools of rainwater mixed with rubbish and urine began to reek in the hot sun that followed.
"When it rained everyone got up and waited for it to stop. We couldn 't lie down, " said mother of seven Jeanne-Pierre Nourette who now lives there with 16,000 other people in increasingly squalid conditions.
Only four mobile toilets were visible from one side of the area. Fly-covered faeces lay in polystyrene fast-food boxes in growing rubbish mounds, or just on the ground.
Homeless people in Petionville Â? in a camp overlooked by villas of the rich in the hills Â? said they go the toilet in plastic bags which they dump in a ravine.
TARPS OVER TENTS
"The two biggest problems are shelter and sanitation. It 's urgent that we get people with reasonable waterproof shelter over their heads, " U.N. disaster chief John Holmes said on Friday on a visit to Haiti.
He said the U.N. still needed another 25,000 latrines and favoured tarpaulins as a more flexible solution than tents.
They can be used to set up home-made shelters along with ropes, poles and corrugated iron that might, if well built, better survive the tropical rains due in a few weeks, and Â? just perhaps Â? the hurricanes that start to sweep through in June.
"With tents you are back to square one in a few months, " said the IOM 's Turner.
There is no easy or perfect solution, either for the looming problems of the rain and hurricanes that could wash away many shelters, or the longer-term need to rehouse people now destitute after the loss of around a quarter of a million homes.
The 500 or so improvised tent camps that have sprung up across the city Â? some of them on precarious sites on the sides of ravines - may be here for years to come, turning into slums in a city that was already poor, run down and ringed with shantytowns.
The government says it has plans to move their inhabitants to new sites, perhaps out of the city altogether, though finding space for them Â? as well as employment Â? will be a huge challenge.
While an estimated half a million have left already for the provinces, many people will not want to leave their homes far behind.
"The question if they move somewhere else is for Haitians to decide, " said Turner.
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