Shelters built in race against hurricane season

In the last two months, aid agencies have built more than 5,000 transitional shelters in Haiti, providing a safe living space for close to 28,000 people.

Despite the huge challenges, the work of the shelter cluster – a group of agencies co-ordinated by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies – is gaining momentum in the race to provide adequate protection ahead of the hurricane season.

In the makeshift camp in Cite Soleil, one of the poorest areas in Haiti’s devastated capital, Port-au-Prince, men from the camp work alongside Red Cross-trained carpenters and volunteers in constructing 300 transitional shelters – small, wood-frame houses with corrugated iron roofs.

These are the first transitional shelters the Red Cross has built in Port-au-Prince. Almost a third of the capital’s population, estimated at 8.4 million, is squeezed into 38 square kilometers.

Lack of space in the highly congested city has been a major obstacle in finding land on which to build temporary homes.

Pascal Panosetti, Federation shelter delegate, said: “For the first time you can see hope in people’s eyes. Even before the quake these people were living in very difficult conditions but now it is worse. They are living in tiny shacks which flood when the rains come.”

After several months of negotiation the Mayor of Cite Soleil agreed to let the Federation build shelters for 300 vulnerable families for an initial period of 18 months. Another piece of land is also under negotiation.

The Red Cross is also building homes outside the capital in Leogane, Jacmel and Petit Goave, on the sites of people’s former homes where they have established land tenure rights.

“We are starting off with people who own or have inherited their land,” explains Celia Pastor, a lawyer working for the Spanish Red Cross. “But we are negotiating with the mayor of Leogane to make available land for those who rented or squatted before and whose houses were destroyed.”

It has been a slow start due to lack of space, land ownership issues and the massive task of removing rubble from the site of collapsed homes.

However, the Haitian government has now agreed to the construction of 800 transitional shelters in La Piste. This is one of the biggest camps housing some 50,000 people, where the British Red Cross is providing sanitation.

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