moving

Driving along the main road from Port-au-Prince out west, we reach perhaps 40km/h at the best of times. Every few minutes, we veer sharply to the other side of the road, avoiding the crack that has opened up on the tarmac. This remains one of the smoothest routes I know, however, by a long way.

On leaving the urban sprawl of PaP, heading west, you pass through the region of Carrefour. Its an overcrowded, poor community. Half of it is based on the side of a steep hill, access a real problem. the other half on the flatter ground towards the coast. Here, the streets are already flooding - rubble on the hills means water flows down the hill rather than drain away.

Carrefour is famous for its gang activity. Its also the place we are concentrating our programming in Port-au-Prince.

Our Leogane office is essentially a shaded rooftop. From here you can, however, sit and watch the recovery. To my right is an informal settlement, 50x50m covered with plastic sheeting. To my left, a small gathering of people sift through the rubble on a rooftop. The ground floor of that building is still standing, but it clearly had several other floors above that six weeks ago. 

It is easier to get things done here, but I'm quite glad I can work indoors. The heat is oppressive. The breeze helps, but sends papers flying. And the generator seems to cut out regularly. (Thankfully now, two weeks on from having written that, the middle floor of the office has been cleared for use - we still get the noise from the main streets outside, but not the breeze or the oppresive heat.)

South from Leogane takes you to Jacmel, to white sandy beaches. The proportion of houses damaged here is almost as much as Leogane, but the town itself is much smaller. Our team down there are operating on next to nothing, cramming four desks into an area roughly the size of my bedroom back home, variously used by 5, 10, or 20 people. Intermittent water supply, and even in the nice hotel which is the only place they currently have to sleep, any water even slightly warmer than cold is a premium. 

Lack of space also affects vehicles, so vital to almost all of our programming. I have also spent more time in the rural areas surrounding Jacmel than the other offices. Getting there requires some interesting drives. At one point, the road disappeared, but our driver didn't worry. He swung down the slope and into the river. After 200 metres along the opposite bank, at a point with no obvious distinguishing features, he forded the river again, up the bank, and lo and behold the road began again. (Road, here, is being generous. Path that is travelled by vehicles.) If it rains the day you want to travel to these remote communities, you're out of luck. That would frustrate me, if I had carefully planned vehicle movements only to discover many couldn't go anywhere anyway!

Each of the offices we have here have their own challenges. As I travel around the country, I learn to better appreciate creature comforts.

just one of the problems we encounter

Our organisation held a distribution recently and everything went smoothly. About 1% of the beneficiaries we had identified and given tokens to didn't turn up, but that is an acceptable error. We are checking why they didn't turn up through post-distribution monitoring. Such monitoring can also confirm if the items we distributed did actually go to the beneficiaries that we had targeted (rather than being stolen, or people coming to the distribution from other areas, or many other reasons). I await the results, but I remain optimistic. 

Our team leader for Port-au-Prince distributions, Charlie Tango, was driving back from it having cleared up, when he overtook someone walking along the road carrying some of the plastic sheeting we'd distributed. The distribution had taken place in a site very near to the area we were targeting, so finding someone walking away, that far from the distribution, wasn't planned. 

Charlie Tango stopped and undertook a quick bit of post-distribution monitoring on the spot. He was only carrying plastic sheeting. That distribution had been for several other items as well (our standard kit, when we have the supplies to do so, includes at least buckets, jerry cans, hygiene items, kitchen items, and blankets). He hadn't needed anything other than the plastic sheeting, so had discarded the rest. It turns out he had been from the temporary settlement that we had targeted. He'd left several days beforehand, but his friend had told him about the distribution. He'd come back during the day over the last few days, to be registered and to attend the distribution, but didn't sleep there any more. 

I commented on the large IDP camp at the local 9-hole golf course here. I originally wrote that there were 50,000 people camped there. I modified this to be 20,000 when I read the official estimates from the camp management cluster. The NYTimes, in this article*, cites 70,000. Family registration has been undertaken at that camp, and this estimate has been revised to 38,000. (I suspect, given this figure is based on our estimate of five people per family, that this will increase again.)  

We can't get a straight estimate on the people in any one camp. People, like our beneficiary that Charlie Tango talked to, are moving regularly, even now, almost two months after the earthquake. How are we to determine how many people we need to support?

* this editorial has one of the most accurate journalistic depictions of the situation here in terms of shelter that I have seen. It loses all its credibility, however, in those final few paragraphs, in which it suggests the solution is to just move everyone out of Port-au-Prince. The problems with that proposition are greater and more serious than any of the issues Lawrence Downes discusses earlier. 

Hair-raising moments in Haiti

Your security sitrep announces that the power grid is being turned back on in certain areas of town, despite numerous cases of power lines being down and exposed cables being reported throughout the city. 

You are driving along in the dark. 

It starts raining. 

The car driving towards you brakes sharply for some unknown obstacle, much to the annoyance of the vehicle behind it. 

As the distance closes, you see what appears to be a black rope caught in its wheels, stretched back up behind it, away into the darkness. 

Closer still, and then suddenly two metres in front of the windscreen is a more black rope dangling down, obvious now that it is cabling, bare wires exposed. 

You brake, almost alongside the vehicle coming the other way, glad not to have driven through that mass of cabling. 

The other vehicle revs its engine and jolts forward, straining to be free from the cabling. If it breaks loose, the cables dangling down in front of you will also fall. 

***

Thankfully, this was not literally a hair-raising moment.