Housing projects have brought dignity to some made homeless by the 2010 earthquake, but cholera is still present and the recent political protests signal the frustrations of many

The diggers and rollers laying the road at the foot of Village Solidarité groan and roar as they stir up clouds of dust that powder the air and leave the trees a spectral grey.



In her hilltop home, high above the noise and grime, Miliana Delvard sets a cup of tea on her lap as she recalls the events that took place five years ago in Haiti’s capital, 50 miles away.

She and her four children were in the home they rented in east Port-au-Prince when the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck on 12 January 2010 rattled the city to pieces. “The house started to shake, and I didn’t know what was happening,” she says. “I saw other people running out, so we ran out too. All we could see was dust and smoke and people screaming. It still rings in my ears.”

Delvard, 56, has been back to Port-au-Prince once since the quake, the trauma of which left her with migraines and high blood pressure; she will not set foot in the capital again. “I’m too scared. If I need to buy things, I go to the border with the Dominican Republic instead.”



Loud noises still frighten her 16-year-old son, and the idea of her children returning to live or work in the city quickly brings tears, which she wipes away with her blouse.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Miliana Delvard, 56, now lives in Village Solidarité, near Lascohabas on Haiti’s central plateau. She supports her four children by selling ice and lollies. Photograph: Sam Jones/The Guardian

She and her family are now well settled in Village Solidarité, a housing project built by Christian Aid and the Haitian NGO Garr (Le Groupe d’Appui aux Rapatriés et Réfugiés) for some of those displaced by the quake. A chest freezer in Delvard’s living room holds bags of ice and lollies, sales of which bring her $10 (£6.61) a week. The sloping garden behind the house is planted with papaya, bananas and aubergines.

Further down the hill, in the two-bedroom house she shares with her husband and four children, Gabriella Pierre likewise remembers the dust and the screams. Her younger sister – the family’s breadwinner – died in the earthquake, as did her aunt, who had come to visit from France.

Like Delvard, Pierre has no intention of returning to Port-au-Prince. “I lost too many people and saw too many others lose limbs and eyes,” says the 35-year-old teacher. “I can’t cope with the thought of it: there were lots of robberies and rapes in Port-au-Prince before the earthquake, and it got even worse afterwards.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Teacher Gabriella Pierre, 35, and her daughters. She left Port-au-Prince after the earthquake and now lives in Village Solidarité, near Lascohabas on Haiti’s central Plateau. Photograph: Sam Jones/The Guardian

Things are far better in Village Solidarité. “This is my kingdom,” says Pierre, only half-jokingly. “I feel safe here. We don’t have everything but it’s a nice place.”

Similar contentment is scarce in Port-au-Prince, where violent anti-government protests last month led to the resignation of the prime minister, and where the effects of the quake – which is estimated to have killed between 90,000 and 316,000 people and displaced more than 1.5 million – are still inescapable.



Piles of rubble and cracked buildings fringe the Champs de Mars, where the national palace once stood, and the four-wheel drives favoured by the UN and NGOs are almost as ubiquitous as the garish, home-welded “tap-tap” buses that crawl past the shoeshiners and women selling toothpaste, cigarettes and bottles of rum on the steep streets.

There are also unmistakable signs of recovery. New ministries, their concrete shells caged in wooden scaffolding, are rising in the city centre where their quake-razed predecessors once stood. A new Marriott hotel nears completion, and souvenir sellers hover by their stalls hoping to glimpse a tourist.



But while reconstruction is slowly progressing, the country faces a growing political crisis. Towards the end of last year, hundreds of Haitians took to the streets to protest against President Michel Martelly’s administration and his delay in holding legislative and municipal elections that were due in 2011.

The demonstrations turned violent, with UN peacekeepers firing on the crowd, and the prevailing mood remains one of discontent. On Saturday, about 1,500 anti-Martelly protesters burned tyres and threw missiles at riot police in downtown Port-au-Prince. The authorities responded with tear gas and water cannon.

In December, against this backdrop of violent unrest, the Haitian prime minister Laurent Lamothe bowed to calls for him to step down. Lamothe, who took office in May 2012, said he was resigning “with a sense of accomplishment” after seeing the country experience “a deep and dynamic transformation and a real change in benefit of its people”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Demonstrators in Port-au-Prince perform a voodoo ceremony before a protest against the government of Michel Martelly last November. Photograph: Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images

Not everyone agrees with that analysis. Graffiti on the wall of a downtown school sets out the protesters’ simple manifesto – “Lamothe’s gone, Martelly’s next” – while Pierre Esperance, executive director of the National Human Rights Defence Network (RNDDH), says it is impossible to predict what will happen now.

The fifth anniversary of the earthquake also coincides with the end of the terms of members of Haiti’s senate and chamber of deputies. If a deal to extend the terms is not thrashed out soon, Martelly will rule by presidential decree.

“The situation in Haiti now is out of control,” says Esperance. “When you look at what the president has done since he was elected, there’s arrogance, corruption, impunity and no respect for Haitians and the key state institutions. If the president can’t fix the situation, people get angry – and that’s why they’re on the streets.”

Still, he says, not all the blame can be laid at Martelly’s door. If many foreign agencies and NGOs had been less arrogant and had consented to work with Haitians, Esperance believes money would have been spent more wisely and the country would be in better shape.

“When foreigners come to third world countries, they think they know everything; they think they’re experts,” he says. “Yes, you can be a humanitarian aid expert, but you can’t be a humanitarian aid expert in every country. Each country has its own reality and you need to work with local actors to learn about that.”

Lamothe, meanwhile, argues that Martelly has faced a near impossible task in trying to rebuild the country after the “Armageddon” of an earthquake that “literally set us back 50 years”.

Not only was there no money to invest in reconstruction when Martelly assumed office in May 2011, says Lamothe, but the president also quickly found he had no support in parliament and among the traditional political class despite “a vast social mandate”.

Given all that, he believes the government has done remarkably well.

“Most of the 1.5 million people who were displaced by the earthquake and who found themselves living in makeshift tents now live in acceptable housing that has restored their human dignity,” he says. “Haiti’s reconstruction programme has been fully under way. Throughout Haiti, massive infrastructure programmes are visible including roads, bridges and social housing.”

The former prime minister points to the fact that school enrolment rose from 55% to 95% during his period in office, and to the construction of the industrial parks that now employ thousands of Haitians as further proof of his legacy.

Perhaps most boldly of all, Lamothe says that police reforms have increased public confidence in the institution and made Haiti “among the safest countries in the Americas”.

The homeless families evicted by police from their shacks in the shanty towns that have sprung up on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince would doubtless take issue with the last claim, but it would be a mistake to assume all the anger that Haitians feel is directed at the ruling class.

Many blame the UN for the cholera epidemic that has killed nearly 9,000 people since October 2010, and which infected more than 21,000 people last year. A report published four years ago said the evidence “strongly suggests” that UN peacekeepers from Nepal brought a strain of the disease from their home country, and it subsequently spread through the waterways of the Artibonite region and elsewhere in Haiti. Lawyers seeking compensation for Haitian victims of the epidemic have filed three lawsuits against the UN in US courts, but the organisation has refused to accept responsibility.

It is little wonder, says Esperance, that the UN mission has a bad reputation in the country. “It costs $33m a month but it has done nothing,” he argues. “UN soldiers have been involved in rapes and human rights violations and they brought cholera to Haiti, so the UN is not popular … They say they’re here to improve things and work on the rule of law, but there’s been no impact.”

Pedro Medrano, an assistant UN secretary general and the man responsible for coordinating the organisation’s cholera response, admits that such issues pose a challenge to its operations in Haiti.

Asked whether he agrees with Lamothe’s statement that the UN took “moral responsibility” for the outbreak, Medrano’s reply is characteristically diplomatic: “[There’s a] moral responsibility in the sense that there’s a major humanitarian challenge and we are bound by our mandate to deal with this … The secretary general has said that, as an international organisation facing humanitarian challenges like those in Haiti, we have a moral obligation to be part of the response. But not in the legal sense.”

The assistant secretary general, who is a defendant in one of the cases, is keen to remind the world that the poorest country in Latin America is still in the throes of a massive health crisis.

“In Haiti, we have perhaps the highest number of cases of cholera in the whole western hemisphere,” he says. “[And yet] for many donors, it’s not an emergency – and that’s something that’s reflected in the funding. When you have the view that it’s not an emergency, the international community focuses on other emergencies around the world. But any country with this many cases would consider this an emergency.”

The latest UN statistics show that a lack of funding is leading partners to withdraw and resulted in the closure of 91 of the 250 cholera treatment facilities in Haiti in 2014.

According to Medrano, the situation has been exacerbated by Haiti’s turbulent past: decades of neglect and a lack of investment in water and sanitation are manifested in the country’s malnutrition and child mortality rates, which are the highest in the region.

If Haiti is ever to catch up with its neighbours’ development levels, says Medrano, it desperately needs both stable national institutions and $2.2bn from the international community to eliminate cholera and fund a “Marshall Plan for water and sanitation”.

As of last month, donors had pledged $407,046,770; 18.3% of the total.

While familiar theories about US involvement in the political unrest do the rounds in Port-au-Prince, from the markets to the smart bars and restaurants of Pétionville, one man takes an even longer view of Haiti’s troubles.

Pasteur Clément Joseph, secretary general of the Mission Sociale des Eglises Haïtiennes, a network of evangelical churches, believes that 60% of the population lives in terrible poverty because of a 200-year-old structure of social and economic and social injustice.

For him, the world’s first black republic remains a country of slavery and socioeconomic apartheid to this day.

“When black Haitians have enough money, they behave like the colonials and want to keep the rest of the country in chains,” he says. “There’s a lack of basic moral leadership, and there always has been. People here can buy a $100,000 car in a country where there are no roads. They buy a $100,000 car to drive over piles of rubbish and mosquito-infested puddles. That is immoral.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pastor Clément Joseph, secretary general of Mission Sociale des Eglises Haïtiennes, believes social and economic injustice in Haiti is rooted in the country’s past. Photograph: Sam Jones/The Guardian

Joseph returned to Port-au-Prince from his hometown two days after the quake to find a dog chewing the corpse of a friend, and respect for law and life ebbing away. Yet he still feels hopeful about the future. “We are a peaceful and hardworking people and we are generous,” he says. “Who supported Haiti most after the earthquake? Poor rural Haitians.”

The cautious optimism is shared by Prospéry Raymond, Christian Aid’s country manager for Haiti and the Dominican Republic. With 10-15 years of sustained investment in housing, healthcare, water and sanitation, education and food production, he says, Haiti could get back on track to development.

Raymond, who spent two hours buried in the rubble of his office after the earthquake before local teenagers dug him free, finds inspiration in Haiti’s history. “The world isn’t quite sure where Haiti fits in, but back in the 19th century we were a black republic in the middle of the western hemisphere,” he says. “We got our freedom; we didn’t buy it. In 200 years we’ve managed to create a language – Creole – and a religion: voodoo. And we’ve managed to be tolerant and to help other countries win their freedom – look at South America and Simon Bolívar.”

In the Village Solidarité community centre, with its five internet-connected computers and posters for the local youth club – “We are the future of this country” – 10 villagers are contemplating their own futures. Ask how many of them would return to Port-au-Prince, and no one says anything. Ask who wants to stay, and 10 hands shoot into the air and laughter erupts. But it soon subsides into seriousness.

“There’s no one dying in the streets here,” says one villager. “Why would we want to go back?”

