More Than a Million Remain with No Shelter in Haiti as Rains Loom

PORT-AU-PRINCE - It was a flash flood, and a portent
of the rains and devastation to come. The day after, Bernard Seraphin
was collecting clothes for her three children from the remains of her
house on Port-au-Prince's Route de Delmas 30.

A month after the
earthquake wrecked her neighbourhood along with large parts of
Port-au-Prince and surrounding towns, she is living in an emergency
camp next to K-Dis supermarket, under a stretched cloth roof.

"The
rain came in last night. We put a bed cover on four poles. We were
completely drenched. The rainy season will be coming soon. We need some
possibility to be dry."

The storm was brief and furious. But for
the hundreds of thousands still living on the streets after the
catastrophe, fears are now turning to what the next few months of
torrential downpours will bring. There is a fear of disease.

But
in the Haitian capital, and still more in the countryside, there is the
simple imperative of viable shelter. Around the corner from where
Seraphin lives, a road was blocked. Neighbours said the street had been
made impassable to cars because people still living there were sleeping
in the open. "We need shelters," an elderly man shouted angrily. "Tell
them we need cover from the rain."

The issues confronting those
without shelter - estimated by USAid at between 1.1 and 1.5 million
people - were underlined last week by Care, a Christian charity, which
warned that the international community will not be able to supply
enough family tents before the rainy season begins in late-March.

Instead,
the charity said, the rescue effort should concentrate on providing
tarpaulins that can be used to construct waterproof shelters.
"Shipping in enough family tents for all the people in need would take
months," Care said in a statement. "Most people crammed into
overcrowded camps are huddled under bed sheets strung between poles or
sticks - hardly enough to block out the sun, but useless against the
torrential downpours of Haiti's rainy season."

At
the beginning of the month, only 272,000 out of those displaced had
been provided with emergency shelters. While the relatively lucky ones
have been given proper tents, the majority have been left to improvise.

The
consequences in the countryside and the city have been different. In
Port-au-Prince, the cloth covered shantytowns in places like Champ de
Mars - with its statutes and ruined presidential palace - are visibly
being hardened. By the day, new wooden shacks are being constructed in
the city's main urban space, creating a more permanent encampment. In
the countryside, thousands are essentially living in the wild.

In
areas like Leogane, an hour and a half's drive from the capital, the
challenge for most is to find protection from the elements. Many are
refugees from the city, with raw foods more easily available in the
countryside.

The camps strung along the coastal road are often
pathetic affairs, with walls made from netting, bed sheets and thin
pieces of fabric - often so thin that those living inside are visible
through the material.

Orelien Joseph, who sold alcohol in
Port-au-Prince before the earthquake, lives in one camp in a sugar cane
field close to the road. "What all the people want - what we all need -
is proper shelter. People don't care about food, we can find that here
- what we really care is about is being protected from the weather.
This area has only poor people who fled from the city. Everybody here
lost where they were living. I am living here with my wife and four
children. What we need is a proper tent."

One of the luckier ones
is Pierre Andre Janvier, 38, who lives in Leogane. A maternity
supervisor at the hospital, he has managed to build a one-room hut not
far from the ruins of his home.

"You know, I've never asked the
government for anything. I work for the government, and I didn't ask.
They do very little for me. They took my name for a food distribution.
But I haven't heard anything since. That was two weeks ago." Janvier's
shelter contains some of the a few things he managed to rescue from his
home, a sideboard with the glass still intact, and bedding. The floor
has been made from breeze blocks salvaged from the house. Janvier is
wearing the only shoes he could recover - one brown, the other black.

"[After
a month] I'm angry now. I can't force the government to help. But all
that I ask is for a tent and a piece of carpet. But the problem is that
I don't know where to go and ask."

Back in Port-au-Prince,
Seraphin is hopeful that she might be helped to find somewhere dry to
sleep. "My home is not safe to sleep in. The foreigners said they would
help us. That was a week ago. All we ask is somewhere where we can
sleep. Somewhere we can be dry when the rains come."