Only a few days ago, Saint-Pierre square was famous for its amateur painters displaying their hundreds of colourful frames all over the place.
All this has now disappeared and left a faded tableau of sad colours instead, those of thousands of homeless people crammed within a few hundreds of square metres.
Tents, makeshift cardboard mattresses, clothes drying in the trees, children, teenagers, youngsters, and the elderly, 6,000 people altogether have gathered in the square. Although 3,000 homeless on the site was a first rough estimate, hundreds more keep coming in everyday.
Claire Lydie Parent, mayor of Pétionville, whom we are meeting this morning to offer our support, explains the situation: “People are scared, they hear tsunami rumours, they fear another earthquake, making those who still have a home run away at times.”
CARE emergency workers Audrée Montpetit and Gary Philoctète came to help this community, which has demonstrated a real determination to help meet to their own needs. We are aiming to implement solutions in coordination with local authorities who have already started to clear away the garbage piles. Evacuating the waste is our top priority, in order to avoid any sanitary risk.
“We also need tools to work properly, especially masks and shovels. We could have all the good intentions in the world, but bare hands alone won’t be enough,” says Ms. Lydie Parent.
We will also need to train teams of volunteers living on the site to implement the work. We are also training hygiene awareness teams to prevent diseases caused by living in such conditions. Involving the people affecting by the quake is crucial as they drop their status of victim to taking charge and being involved in their own recovery.
From this perspective, Ms. Lydie Parent stresses the importance of psychological support as most people do not realise what happened, what an earthquake means, and how everyone needs to rationalise what took place to avoid frensied crowd situations.
We have then agreed to start distributing wheelbarrows, brooms and shovels. We will also install a water tank as, like all city dwellers, they lack water. When?
Story by Loetitia Raymond, CARE worker in Haiti
