* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
This post is written by Katie Chalk, Communications Specialist for World Vision in Haiti.
11th April 2010.
Today, as curtains rose on the first large scale relocation of displaced communities in Port-au-Prince, I was in the audience - along with two ragged young boys called Jean-Raymond and Michelaud.
A small group of agencies, including World Vision, had been delivered a challenge - to prepare to house 7,500 people to international humanitarian standards in under a week, on a huge, dusty, bald plot of land called Corail Cesselesse, around 30km north of Port-au-Prince.
I'd come to check on the progress of our promise. So had Jean-Raymond and Michelaud.
"We live just over there," said one of them, pointing to a small settlement of corrugated iron shanties on the other side of the road. "We just came to see. We've come every day this week."
Brothers? No, they said, just friends. Both of them had lost their mothers, and their fathers worked in the city so they hardly ever saw them. Relatives looked after them, but they were in charge of their own entertainment.
"I'm eight, and I'm in Grade 2 at school," Jean-Raymond told me. "But I never go. It's too far."
Michelaud, 11, also considered himself to be at school, though his school is on the other side of town and was destroyed by the quake. "I can't go at the moment because it will take all day to get there, and I don't know if anybody else is going either," he said. "So... there's nothing to do at all right now. It's boring."
"Has much changed this week around here?" I asked the boys. Their eyes widened and they nodded with vigour. "It's been unbelievable!" said jean-Raymond with a broad grin.
We stared for a while at the show, in companionable silence. The first tent had been unwrapped, and a group of workmen were working out how to pitch it. It was big, much bigger than anything I'd seen in the impromptu, crowded IDP camps around town, a white tunnel tent with little opaque windows and hooks on the inside for internal walls.
It took a while for people to work out how the poles fitted together, where the guy ropes needed to be fastened. I took some snaps of the men at work.
The ground here was hard and chalky. Gravel was arriving by the UN truckload to even it out; dust rose when you stepped on it. To our right, the land had been pegged out to show where the tents would go. To our left, latrines had already been dug and shiny walls of corrugated iron built around them. About 100 metres away, a squad of UN bulldozers were grading more ground - the goal was 1,300 tents, the time left around 48 hours.
Everyone had been in agreement since the land was released that there simply was not enough time to do this right. But the rains were coming. A single night of heavy rainfall would be enough to create flash floods in riverbanks and drains. A few nights in a row, and Port-au-Prince could have landslides to deal with. It wasn't hard to recognise which camps were particularly at risk, and they were moving out here as a last resort. There was nowhere else to go.
The boys said they knew that a lot of people were coming to live there. "Not us, though," said Michelaud. "We're not allowed to live in a tent like that. But we think it's a good thing that more people are coming. We can play football with the new boys."
They were interested in the huge bladders of water that had arrived overnight. The water here will be closer to them than where they usually go to get it, and it's free. They want to know if they can use it too.
It's just another question I can't answer. World Vision is providing half the tents, bringing out the WFP food rations, distributing the soap and toilet paper. But so much more is beyond our control. Along with the schools, markets, clinics and water supplies that need to be built, who is linking these existing poor communities with their newly arrived, shellshocked neighbours? Do the boys and their relatives understand that as soon as tomorrow people will actually be living here, on this moonscape?
Michelaud told me he wasn't sure when people were arriving but that it would get even more interesting when they did. He wasn't planning to miss a moment.
"We're going to keep coming and watching," he said. "We have nothing else to do."
For more on Haiti relocations, visit Katie Chalk's photo gallery showing construction at Corail Cesselesse.
