Steps are being taken by various NGOs to assist families in moving from the camp to something more permanent. Housing has been classified as red (needs to come down), yellow (repairable), and green (safe to move back in). Families can be categorized into three groups: never had decent housing in the first place, has a house somewhere but are too afraid to move back into it, and those who have a green house but who receive greater benefit in the camp (security, food, healthcare, NGO work) than at their home. There is also the question of how to determine land ownership, removal of rubble, finding empty spaces to settle people in the mean time...'transitional housing' is a tent and this is considered the step up from a tarp. Transitional housing is the housing plan for the next
two years.
Needless to say, the camp experienced outburst of domestic violence. Today, I was working with Andy, the team physician for the New York Rangers. A woman arrived with her head wrapped in a towel and she was covered in blood from the top of her head down to her knees. It's Sunday, and we're seeing emergencies only (it's noon and we've already had one 2 year old with severe burns from falling into a pot of boiling beans, one 11 year old with a head injury who fell two floor from a roof onto a pile of rubble, a semi-drunk 21 year man passing kidney stones, a woman in labour who has an eclamptic seizure with a blood pressure of 190/120, and a 9 month old baby with some sort of diffused pneumonia cooking a fever of 41C).
Hubert, a very kind 24 year old translator, explains to Andy that this woman was hit in the head with an iron rod. She's in shock and leans against the guy who helped her walk up to the tent hospital. We unravel the cloth around her head, pick through her hair, and cut some of it off to find the superficial slices on her scalp. Hubert gently coaxes her to tell him what happened. "She said her husband did this, they fought when he wouldn't give her money to buy food for their children." Andy starts to suture her head, and I get out the Domestic Violence Checklist from the hospital protocol binder. I start taking notes, and explain to them that we'll need to call the UN Police. Then this oddly surreal moment unfolds in which Sean Penn arrives with his Glock pistol in the back of his pants, and asks me to ask her for directions to their tent - as of last Thursday, his crew has now been put in charge of security in the camp. I efficiently cross out "Call UN Police" on the checklist and replace it with "Call Sean Penn - head of camp security".
Sean (an American actor) and Bulldog (a Haitian ex-supermarket security guard) leave. Hubert tells me that she won't tell him what she did to deserve this because in his opinion, Haitian men don't hit women. "Hubert," I sigh like an old, tired feminist, "Zanmi, she did nothing to deserve this...don't go there, you'll lose." Andy backs me up. "It's never ok," he confirms.
Later on, we're sending the 9 month old baby by jeep to St. Damien's Hospital, with Bulldog riding shotgun. Whenever the jeep gets slowed down in traffic, 6'6" Bulldog jumps out and starts banging on the hoods of cars to clear a path for the jeep. He got the eclamptic women to hospital through the worst church traffic. Hubert arrives at my side as I wave the jeep off. "Okay, I just have to tell you, she stabbed her husband first - she just told me." I don't know what to say..."See? It was self-defence." "Perhaps, but it's still messed up, don't you agree - why isn't there enough money for food?" He pauses, and then says slowly "I know this probably isn't the right answer, but maybe she spent it on her hair extensions that you just cut off?"
We headed out of Port-au-Prince to ejoy a swim on Saturday with our host Nickel and Soneide, Carl and kids...under a hut on the edge of the concrete pier, young folks hung out together and played competeing music with the next hut. Guys in boats would sell cocout to drink and spear fisherman surfaced with a catch of 4 crab and various fish to sell. Out beyond the edge where the kids play, there was always a dozen couple, spearated by a few metres, grinding and sexing (apparently you put the condom on before you enter the water) where they could get relative privacy compared to their home (?)...our hosts shrugged like 'what the big deal'and Sue and I agreed that we were raised by our mother afterall and why were we so pruddish? So for the NGOs that are focussing their HIV prevention efforts in the camps, they should really do a turn at "the beach".
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Sue’s friend Carl lives in Camp Dadadou, one of the comparatively smaller camps in Port-au-Prince. After the earthquake, people living in the middle-class neighbourhood Delmas 3 moved across the street to the soccer stadium and set up tents…10 000 people. The houses remain under the rubble, along with the deed to their properties and their loved-ones who have passed. Relatively speaking, it is one of the nicer camps since it is surrounded by a high stone wall and barbed wire providing memory of a previous Haitian era when Haiti was represented in the World Cup in 1978. There is a volleyball and basketball court, and folks have started businesses, like cell phone charging stations, Skype phones service to Canada and US, and shops stocked with the Cheetos, beer, cigarettes, rice and beans..jpg)
However, being small means it has been overlooked by the larger NGOs in infrastructure management. They haven’t had drinking water for two months and they have 126 toilets for 10 000 residents. They have 24 orphans who are housed by a tent provided by USAID but are fed by the residents of the camp. A mobile clinic is run by Partners in Health and a Haitian nurse provides emergency care and delivery attendance 24/7. This nurse has attended 126 deliveries in the tents, 3 of which were transported for cesarean. There were no maternal deaths and 5 neonatal deaths.
