World Report 2015: Haiti

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World Report 2015: Haiti

The Haitian government and international community made limited progress in 2014 to address the devastating impact of recent natural disasters and a deadly cholera epidemic. Political stalemates, resource constraints, and weak government institutions continued to hinder the Haitian government’s efforts to meet the basic needs of its people and address long-standing human rights problems, such as violence against women and inhumane prison conditions.

For the fourth consecutive year, Haiti failed to hold constitutionally mandated elections, leading to a deteriorating political environment. The terms of another one third of the Senate and a number of deputies were due to end in early 2015, leaving almost all elected national and local positions in Haiti (with the exception of a remaining one third of senators and the president) open or filled by appointees.

As of June, 103,565 internally displaced persons (IDPs) were living in camps established in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, according the International Organization for Migration, down more than 90 percent since 2010. The United Nations estimates that some 70,000 of the remaining IDPs have no prospect of a durable solution.

The cholera epidemic has claimed more than 8,500 lives and infected over 700,000 people in four years. Nevertheless, 2014 marked a significant decrease in the number of suspected cases and a dramatic reduction in deaths, down to 51 deaths for the year as of September, compared to over 4,100 deaths in the first three months of 2010.

Criminal Justice System and Detention Conditions

Haiti’s prison system remains severely overcrowded, in large part due to high numbers of arbitrary arrests and prolonged pretrial detentions.

The weak capacity of the Haitian National Police (HNP) contributes to overall insecurity in the country. While the government and the United Nations Stablization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), the UN peacekeeping operation in the country, have made police reform a priority, there have been difficulties training sufficient numbers of entry-level cadets. The latest report of the UN secretary-general on MINUSTAH estimated the police-to-population ratio by the end of 2014 would likely be half the minimum recommended number.

Accountability for Past Abuses

Former President Jean-Claude Duvalier returned to Haiti in January 2011 after nearly 25 years in exile. He was charged with financial and human rights crimes allegedly committed during his 15-year tenure as president. From 1971 to 1986, Duvalier commanded a network of security forces that committed serious human rights violations, including arbitrary detentions, torture, disappearances, summary executions, and forced exile.

In 2012, the investigating judge in the case found, contrary to international standards, that the statute of limitations prevented prosecuting Duvalier for his human rights crimes. An appellate court heard testimony in a challenge to the ruling in 2013, with Duvalier appearing in court and answering questions posed by the court and victims’ attorneys. In a historic ruling on February 20, the Port-of-Prince Court of Appeal found that the statute of limitations cannot be applied to crimes against humanity and ordered additional investigation into charges against Duvalier. However, Duvalier died on October 4 without having been brought to trial for his crimes. At time of writing, a reopened investigation into crimes committed by Duvalier’s collaborators was still pending.

Violence against Women

Gender-based violence is a widespread problem. A draft law on combatting violence against women that would bring Haiti’s criminal code in line with international standards has been discussed among members of parliament, but not officially introduced for debate.

A council of advisers to the president was reviewing two pending draft revisions to Haiti’s criminal code that include acts of gender-based violence, such as rape and sexual assault, not currently in the code, with the expectation that a conciliated version would be presented to parliament in early 2015.

Children’s Domestic Labor

Use of child domestic workers—known as restavèks—continues. Restavèks, the majority of whom are girls, are sent from low-income households to live with wealthier families in the hope that they will be schooled and cared for in exchange for performing light chores.

Though difficult to calculate, some estimates suggest that 225,000 children work as restavèks.These children are often unpaid, denied education, and physically or sexually abused. Haiti’s labor code does not set a minimum age for work in domestic services, though the minimum age for work in industrial, agricultural, and commercial enterprises is 15. Most of Haiti’s trafficking cases are restavèks. In May, Haiti passed legislation outlawing many forms of trafficking, including hosting a child for the purpose of exploitation.

Human Rights Defenders

Human rights defenders continue to face threats of violence. Malya Vilard Apolon, co-founder of Komisyon Fanm Viktim Pou Viktim (KOFAVIV), a women’s rights organization, left Haiti in March after repeated death threats, harassment, and the poisoning of her family dogs. Marie Eramithe Delva, KOFAVIV’s other co-founder, reported to police in May that she received death threats by text message from a woman in police custody, and provided screenshots of the threats and phone number. To her knowledge, there was no further investigation into her claims and she received no protection from police, prompting her also to leave Haiti in June.

In February, Daniel Dorsinvil, the general coordinator for the Platform of Haitian Human Rights Organizations (POHDH), and his wife Girldy Lareche were killed while walking in a Port-au-Prince neighborhood near the POHDH offices. In the days after the murders, government officials claimed that the crime occurred during an armed robbery and was unrelated to Dorsinvil’s human rights activities or criticism of the government. This claim was not substantiated by a thorough investigation, according to local civil society representatives.

Pierre Espérance, executive director of the Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains (RNDDH), received a death threat in April accusing him of reporting false human rights claims in an effort to destabilize the government. The handwritten threat also included a bullet and stated “this time you won’t escape,” referring to an incident in 1999 when Espérance was shot but survived.

Key International Actors

The UN mission, MINUSTAH, has been in Haiti since 2004 and has contributed to efforts to improve public security, protect vulnerable groups, and strengthen the country’s democratic institutions. The UN Security Council extended MINUSTAH's mandate through October 15, 2015.

There is mounting evidence that the cholera epidemic that began in October 2010 is likely to have been introduced by UN peacekeepers. A member of the UN’s Panel of Experts on the outbreak, stated that “the most likely source of the introduction of cholera into Haiti was someone infected with the Nepal strain of cholera and associated with the United Nations Mirebalais camp.”

Responding to the UN’s dismissal of claims for compensation from 5,000 victims of the epidemic, the victims’ representative, the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti and the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux filed a lawsuit before a US court. At time of writing, a motion to dismiss was pending. To date, there has been no independent adjudication of the facts surrounding the introduction of cholera and the UN’s involvement.

According to figures from the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services, at least 93 allegations of sexual abuse or exploitation have been made against MINUSTAH personnel in the last eight years, including 11 in 2014, as of September 30.

In February, the UN independent expert on Haiti, Gustavo Gallón, called for “shock treatment” to significantly reduce the number of persons in pretrial detention.


In May, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights called on all Organization of American States (OAS) member states to make their archives and official files on the human rights abuses committed under Duvalier open for use as evidence in the investigation. It was unknown whether OAS member states had complied with the commission’s request.

Why Things Continue to Go Wrong in Haiti, and How U.S. Policy Is Responsible

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Why Things Continue to Go Wrong in Haiti, and How U.S. Policy Is Responsible
Washington has been meddling in a country it doesn’t believe should be allowed to chart its own path.

The industrial park in Caracol, northern Haiti, never receives tourists. It’s a collection of factories producing clothes for some of America’s leading retailers including Walmart and Target. The opening of the facility in 2012 saw then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, actors Sean Penn and Ben Stiller, and fashion designer Donna Karan attend and celebrate the establishment of a center that was advertised as producing 65,000 jobs. “We had learned that supporting long-term prosperity in Haiti," Hillary Clinton said, “meant more than providing aid.”

Today, it’s clear the promises were empty. “People unfamiliar with the area [Caracol] may see the people standing in front of the park looking for jobs and think the Caracol Industrial Park was a great idea,” Castin Milostène told me recently. He’s a coordinator of AREDE, a campaign group of Haitian grassroots organizations working with vulnerable Haitians to influence aid accountability after the devastating 2010 earthquake. ActionAid is the convener. “You may see the need and think we should have many more parks," he continued. "But the people standing at the doors of the park looking for work have nothing, they don’t even earn on average 58 gourdes (US$1) a day — they are living in extreme poverty.”

I visited Caracol in 2012 and found few signs of employment. Many poor Haitians loitered outside the main gates looking for work and complaining about low wages. Prime agricultural land was taken with farmers left landless and given little compensation. The US$300 million investment in the South Korean-run factory has quickly become yet another failed attempt to boost Haiti’s economy. The Financial Times headlined a story about the situation this year, “Haiti’s economy held together by polo shirts and blue jeans.”

This tragically captured the precarious nature of America’s close neighbor, a situation exacerbated by Washington’s 100-year meddling in a country that it doesn’t believe should be allowed to chart its own, independent path. Many Haitians know that United States Marines landed in Haiti in 1915 and occupied the nation for 19 years. The commercial interests that contributed to President Woodrow Wilson sending a military force have changed little in a century. One of the architects of the occupation, Marine Corps General Smedley Butler, infamously admitted in 1935, “I helped make Haiti…a decent place for the National City Bank Boys.”

Haiti is undergoing profound political trauma. Recent elections were flawed with millions of citizens feeling disempowered from the process of government. More than five years after the earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of people and left the capital Port-au-Prince like a war zone, the nation is wracked with an administration that is incompetent and corrupt and a government installed by the Obama administration in 2011. Only 11 elected officials remain in Haiti and President Michel Martelly is one of them.

The country is facing huge challenges. Cholera continues to ravage the population (and the United Nations, which brought the disease to the country, refuses to take responsibility for it), neighboring Dominican Republic seems determined to expel its Haitian immigrants back to an economically volatile state and billions of dollars in foreign aid has either disappeared or been stolen by foreign contractors or local officials. The American Red Cross stands accused of incompetence and dishonesty over the money it raised after the 2010 earthquake.

“Haitians often use the proverb, Lave men, swiye ate[wash your hands, dry them in the dirt] to describe the often contradictory US policies towards Haiti, and the proverb applies more than ever to the Obama administration,” explained Brian Concannon Jr., executive director of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti based in the United States.

Timothy Schwartz, an American anthropologist and author with decades of experience in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, speaks scathingly of American complicity in Haiti’s malaise. He argues that Washington simply doesn’t try to understand that throwing more unaccountable and privatized aid at the problem isn’t going to solve the structural issues. He targets Cheryl Mills, a trusted appointee of Hillary Clinton, who was intimately involved in working with the former Secretary of State.

“She [Mills] tried to force programs on Haiti that didn’t fit,” Schwartz told me. “One example is that rather than repairing damaged houses after the earthquake, she disregarded advice from USAID and those on the ground in Haiti and tried to build massive new housing complexes, something that failed over and over because of the primacy of the informal land tenure system — there essentially are no ‘legal’ titles and hence the projects would collapse under legal scrutiny - and the egregiously corrupt construction companies that operate in the arena of international concessions…To this day that housing disaster that Mills created goes on with homes being built that should have cost 3 to 5 thousand dollars running into the 30s and 40s of thousands.”

It’s the same mindset when building more industrial parks. Local Haitians are barely consulted. During my two trips to Haiti over the last years, a constant refrain from locals was how many of them were ignored when they had warned to anybody who would listen about the economic and environmental destructions caused by clothing factories. In place of a sustainable policy that would create long-term jobs with fair pay, Haitian politicians and their American masters advocate policies to benefit foreign corporations.

According to research undertaken by the Solidary Center, an American non-profit organization aligned with the labor movement, Haiti’s garment industry is beset with low wages, arbitrary firings and poor conditions. Although there are over at least 32,000 clothing workers registered nation-wide (and around 5000 employees at Caracol), employers constantly set unrealistic quotas and low prices per piece assembled, making it impossible for workers to earn the production minimum wage in a standard eight-hour day.

The Center’s Haiti co-ordinator gave me examples of workers being discriminated against in Caracol and elsewhere: “One union reported that its members must show up to the factory on Saturdays and wait in line for hours to receive their earnings. For instances in which the employer does not have exact change, the workers are shorted what they are owed.” Workers can barely afford to pay for lunch and transportation to and from the factory.

Viewing Haiti as a repository of cheap labor defines Washington’s relationship with Port-au-Prince. Padilla Peralta, author of the book, Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League, and lecturer in humanities at Columbia University to previously incarcerated adults, told me that he completely rejected the uneven dynamic between the two nations. “Why should Haitian bodies have to be subordinated to the imperatives of global capital?”

He urged the Obama administration to reverse a century of domination. “The US should commit itself to providing as much efficaciously disbursed humanitarian aid as possible — and resist the temptation to tip the scales in favor of specific candidates most likely to be pliable to American geopolitical-corporate interest (but I know better than to hope that it will).”


The proposed presidential election in October is not guaranteed to take place. Political uncertainty surrounds the entire process. This could be a unique opportunity for Washington’s to change its relationship with its neighbor if only there was the will.

Haiti sees spike in cholera deaths

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Haiti sees spike in cholera deaths

As cholera continues to spread, clinics are struggling to cope with the deluge of patients

Death toll jumps to 917 as international organisations appeal for funds to fight epidemic.

The death toll from Haiti's cholera outbreak has soared to 917 as officials struggle to contain the growing epidemic threatening the quake-ravaged country.

The previous official toll announced two days earlier was 796.

Authorities on Sunday said 14,642 people had been treated in hospitals since the disease took hold in the desperately poor Caribbean nation.

Officials fear the scale of the epidemic could increase exponentially if cholera infiltrates makeshift camps in the capital city of Port-au-Prince, where hundreds of thousands of earthquake survivors live in cramped and unsanitary conditions.

A January earthquake flattened much of the capital, leaving more than 250,000 people dead and an estimated 1.3 million of Haiti's 10 million population displaced.

Public plea

Haitian officials have taken to the airwaves with a major televised campaign to communicate information on the cholera outbreak to the public, but Al Jazeera's Cath Turner, reporting from Port-au-Prince, said it was not clear how many people were able to watch the special broadcast.

"There were communal television sets, set up at markets, on the sides of the streets, where people gather around and watch," Turner said. "The first three TV sets that were set up had no electricity, so they didn't even have any power, which speaks to the conditions here in Haiti at the moment."

The only working communal set Turner saw was broadcasting a football game.

In addition to having difficulty reaching the public, Turner also reported that officials must also tackle their image problem, as the public views any official statement with "general suspicion and distrust".

Haiti's priests and religious leaders, she said, have the most power in terms of reaching people.

"Many Haitians we spoke to say, 'Maybe Jesus will protect me from this outbreak. If Jesus was meant to give me this cholera, we will face it - we will face this adversity,'" our correspondent said.

Government officials, Turner said, have contacted religious leaders, asking them to talk about cholera in their sermons and services.

UN appeal

International organisations have stepped up appeals for funds to bring in more doctors, medicine and water purification equipment.

The United Nations is asking for $164m to fight the epidemic, which has gained strength over the past week.

"We hope we can get this, otherwise all our efforts will be over-run by the epidemic," Elisabeth Byrs, a spokeswoman for the UN office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in Geneva on Friday.

The outbreak, the first in Haiti in more than a century, was  confirmed on October 22 in northern Haiti where the Artibonite River  is believed to the conduit of the disease.

Since then, thousands of people have been sickened, swamping tiny, overwhelmed and ill-prepared hospitals and clinics, according to the health ministry.

Can Microlending Save Haiti?

A Fonkoze client’s business.

Linda Boucard of Fonkoze met with clients.

More than a million Haitians live in tent cities, like Léogâne’s, shown in June

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Can Microlending Save Haiti?

Since the earthquake, microbanks have been working to keep credit flowing to businesses like this fabric store.

Muhammad Yunus was microcredit’s pioneer.

VENANTE LINO, a small-business owner who lost nearly everything in the devastating earthquake in January, stood in line here along with dozens of other impeccably dressed women, all waiting to pay the latest monthly installment on the emergency loans they received to rebuild their businesses.

Mrs. Lino approached a folding table in the courtyard of one of the few remaining buildings in this town, located near the quake’s epicenter. She emptied her pockets of cash and gave all $40 to the loan officer.

“Every day, I wake up and ask God to make this better. Many days, I don’t think he’s listening,” says Mrs. Lino, a 63-year-old grandmother who lives under a tarp in her backyard with three grown children and four grandchildren, surviving on the meager income from a small food and cooking-oil business she reopened this summer with loan money. “Without this help, I don’t know where my family would be.”

Here in this once-bustling coastal town about 20 miles west of Port-au-Prince, more than 30,000 people — a third of the population — died as a result of the quake. Throughout Haiti, the toll may be as high as 250,000, and the economic effects have been staggering. The country’s economy is expected to contract by as much as 9 percent this year, and more than a million residents live in tent cities. And an outbreak of cholera, as well as a hurricane early this month, have left the nation even more vulnerable.

Especially hard hit are the tens of thousands of small-business owners, known as ti machann, who sell everything from heating oil to school uniforms from their homes and are often the sole breadwinners for their families. Because Haiti’s credit markets remain frozen, people like Mrs. Lino would have had almost no chance to rebuild if it weren’t for microbanks like Fonkoze, Haiti’s largest, which gave loans to the women in Léogâne.

In the best circumstances, sustaining a “bank to the poor” is no easy feat, but in Haiti after the earthquake, the challenge has been extraordinary. Even before the quake, 80 percent of the population lived on less than $2 a day. Today, while some 50 nations and organizations have pledged a total of $8.75 billion for reconstruction, less than 15 percent of the total promised for 2010-11 has arrived. (The United States has not yet paid all the $1.2 billion in reconstruction funds it pledged.)

Haitian microbanks provide a crucial lifeline to the poor, but their financial situations are sometimes nearly as precarious as those of their clients. Moreover, the banks are operating in a country that lacks many of the basic building blocks for businesses — reliable transportation, communication and supply networks — thus making the challenges all the more complex.

Their importance to hundreds of thousands of Haitian borrowers and savers gives these little institutions an outsize importance, making them “simply too big to fail,” said Greta Greathouse, a consultant with the United States Agency for International Development’s microsavings and lending program in Haiti.

“You are dealing with a very vulnerable and fragile population,” she said. The banks “need to get stronger on a permanent basis so they can offset the operational risks that come with Haiti because of the earthquake and the inherent risks that are unfortunately a way of life for the country and its people.”

MICROCREDIT banks, or microbanks, were pioneered by Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank, which started 40 years ago by giving loans of a few dollars each to poor entrepreneurs in Bangladesh. In 2006, Mr. Yunus received the Nobel Peace Prize for this work.

In most cases today, microcredit clients start off with loans of as little as $25 to start a small business. The loans are often given to women who tend to spend their earnings directly on their families and communities. Many borrow in groups of five or more, and all members of the group work together and are responsible for repayment.

Some microlenders provide only loans, while others also offer education and health services. Partly because costs are so high, effective interest rates are often significantly steeper than those at traditional banks. In Haiti, rates range from 30 percent to 55 percent a year.

“Haiti is one of the most complicated environments for anyone to do business, let alone a small lender with an extremely poor clientele,” said Alex Counts, president of the Grameen Foundation, a nonprofit in Washington that fosters microlending. “Appropriate levels of interest are important, but it’s also essential these organizations continue to do the important work they do.”

One of the largest of Haiti’s microcredit groups, Finca Haiti, wrote off almost a third of its portfolio after many clients died in the earthquake or lost their homes and businesses. A staggering 53 percent of its borrowers were late on their payments. After losses of its own, ACME, another Haitian microbank, raised additional capital this summer.

Fonkoze, Creole for “shoulder to shoulder,” was started by the Rev. Joseph Philippe, a Haitian priest, in the mid-1990s. It has 45,000 clients and 43 branches across the country, but it lost $2 million in the three years before the earthquake. In 2008, after losses from a particularly bad hurricane season, the organization considered closing its for-profit bank and incorporating that division’s 24 branches.

Over all, the share of microcredit clients in Haiti who have defaulted or are at risk of doing so has risen to 18 percent, more than double the rate of a year ago. The international standard is 2 to 3 percent. Several of the Haitian microbanks, particularly some very small ones, could close or reduce their operations if their portfolios don’t improve, according to microbanking experts in Haiti and elsewhere. It’s likely that some will have to consolidate in order to survive.

Microbanks in other countries are increasingly aiming to become self-sustaining so they don’t need to continually raise funds to pay operational expenses. Some have transformed themselves from nonprofit into for-profit banks, raising questions of whether altruism and capitalism can co-exist. India’s largest microlender, SKS Microfinance, went public this summer, raising $358 million, and other banks may do the same.

While most microbanks in Haiti remain nonprofits, and have less financial transparency, Fonkoze started a for-profit bank (in addition to its nonprofit arm) in 2004 and reports both divisions’ earnings. It operated at a loss for three years but has stabilized after $15 million in donations this year.

Haiti has had natural disasters before, of course. But the earthquake’s impact on the nation’s banks was staggeringly high, in no small part because of the damage in Port-au-Prince, the capital, which accounts for 60 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. The banking sector, already fragile, was crippled. Out of 1,800 microbank employees in the affected region, 600 lost their homes. A quarter of the $38 million in outstanding microcredit loans in the region could end up defaulting, according to an analysis by Ms. Greathouse.

Despite the risks and financial costs, several Haitian microbanks are expanding, saying their loans are one of the only paths to self-sufficiency for the growing number of poor people in Port-au-Prince and the countryside.

For example, after losing a third of its 12,000 clients after the earthquake, Finca added back 1,000 clients this summer with the help of a grant from the Citibank Foundation. It’s a risky move: the percentage of Finca Haiti clients who are more than 30 days behind on their payments, a standard known as portfolio at risk, remains at 35 percent.

In July, after its director was ambushed in an attempted robbery, the bank moved its headquarters from the capital to a nearby coastal city, Saint-Marc, according to Rupert Scofield, the president of Finca, which is based in Washington and operates in 21 countries.

When it comes to doing business, “Haiti is probably the hardest place in the world right now outside maybe Afghanistan,” Mr. Scofield says. “It always seems just as things get stabilized, something else happens to pull the country back.”

Anne Hastings, Fonkoze’s co-chief executive, has become something of an international aid celebrity: she was a high-profile attendee of the Clinton Global Initiative conference this fall in New York. (The bank’s profile rose significantly in the days after the earthquake, when it was one of the only banks operating outside Port-au-Prince, and Ms. Hastings secured American military assistance to airlift $2 million in cash to desperate clients.)

Soon after the quake, Fonkoze wrote off 10,000 loans — almost a quarter of its total number — with funds from the Red Cross and others. The bank then gave each client a new loan and a one-time cash payment of $125, at a total cost of $8.5 million.

In recent months, the bank has broadened its health program and aggressively stepped up its operations, particularly in rural areas where poverty rates are highest and seem to be growing.

The bank has enlarged a loan program, called Ti Kredi, or Little Credit, to reach poor families that are not ready for larger loans. Ti Kredi offers loans of just $25, shorter repayment periods, additional support from loan officers, and literacy and health classes.

In another program, clients are offered goats or chickens so they can sell milk or eggs, as well as a weekly stipend of $7 to help with expenses, and to ensure that they don’t need to kill the animals because they are hungry.

SINCE the summer, Fonkoze loan officers have canvassed the lush, mountainous region on motorcycles, in pickup trucks or on foot to sign up as many as 3,000 new clients and to meet with existing ones to monitor their progress and to collect loan payments.

One recent rainy day, Steve Werlin rode for more than an hour on the back of a pickup truck outside Mirebalais, a small, central plateau town two hours north of Port-au-Prince. Mr. Werlin, a regional Fonkoze director, was on his way to meet Marie Ange Joute, a 30-year-old mother of two. Ms. Joute joined Fonkoze in September and lives with her children, mother, sister and niece (who was sick with a severe eye infection) in a small mud house with a tin roof on a 20-by-20-foot parcel of land. The house, which Ms. Joute inherited from her father, is her only asset, and she said the family had sometimes gone without food and medical care over the last year.

She has no business background but recently received two chickens and a goat from the bank and started selling eggs and heating oil from her house. To save enough money to expand her inventory, she joined a savings club with 10 local Fonkoze clients. Each woman saves a third of her weekly stipend so that once every 10 weeks, they get a lump-sum payment of $20 for larger purchases.

Clients are required to do many things on their own, and face penalties if they cannot meet certain goals. On the day of the visit, Ms. Joute had yet to build a shed for her goat, which could become sick in the rain. So she was told she wouldn’t get her stipend the next week unless the shed was built. (Fonkoze gave her materials and training to build the shed, and she complied.)

“I want to make my own money and care for my family,” she said. “I want to provide for us if something goes bad. I know how to work.”

AFTER the upcoming presidential elections, Haiti’s government is expected to issue new banking regulations, including rules for microlenders. They aren’t regulated now, though they have appealed for years to the government for rules that could bring more certainty to the industry. If a microbank went out of business, for example, it is not clear what would happen to the many clients who deposit their savings in the bank.

Fonkoze has 200,000 savings accounts, totaling $14 million. Currently, it uses those funds to make new loans, and it says that all of its accounts are secure. Because it was able to write off risky loans early this year, according to James Kurz, a senior Fonkoze financial adviser, its portfolio at risk has fallen to 5 percent in recent months.

If Haiti’s economy doesn’t improve and the country cannot stem various other problems, even some people who have managed to eke out a living with the help of microcredit could face more difficulty.

Sainte Anne Louis sells sodas, canned goods, clothing and homemade peanut butter outside her home in Mirebalais, yards away from a construction site for a new rural teaching hospital. She says her sales have fallen by nearly half this year, in part because it has been hard to secure enough inventory.

Mrs. Louis, 54, supports her entire family, including her husband, two daughters and their families. She worries about what will happen if things don’t improve soon. “We are grateful for what we have today,” she says, “but we pray tomorrow will be better.”

796 dead in Haiti's cholera outbreak

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796 dead in Haiti's cholera outbreak

Boys are treated for cholera Thursday at a Samaritan's Purse medical clinic in the Haitian town of Bercy.

(CNN) -- Three brothers recuperated Thursday afternoon in a once-open field now speckled by the bright blue tarps of a cholera rehydration clinic in the Haitian town of Bercy, where an outbreak has sickened hundreds of people.
A cousin brought the young boys to the clinic, set up by Samaritan's Purse, said Roseann Dennery, a spokeswoman for the Christian charity. They plopped down on cots, drained by severe diarrhea and vomiting.
What they did not know yet was that the night before, their father had frantically tried to find a motorcycle so he could bring in their mother for treatment. He could not find one in time.
So while the boys were regaining their strength with the help of an intravenous drip, their father was making funeral arrangements for their mother.
They had survived the earthquake, but this family was ripped apart by a disease that is now feared to be spreading rapidly.
The death toll in Haiti's cholera outbreak climbed Friday to 796 people, according to Haiti's Ministry of Public Health and Population. Another 12,303 people have fallen sick with the intestinal infection.

Epidemiologists predict the outbreak could last for months and say the entire nation of almost 10 million people is at risk because they have no immunity to cholera.
The United Nations warned that Haiti is facing one of the most severe outbreaks of the disease in the past 100 years. It appealed to international donors for almost $164 million in response money.
Of grave concern now are four confirmed cases that originated in the tent cities of Port-au-Prince, camps that sprang up to shelter those left homeless by the earthquake last January. Health officials fear that infection could spread quickly in congested, unsanitary conditions and in impoverished neighborhoods where clean drinking water is at a premium.
Symptoms of cholera, an acute, diarrheal illness caused by infection of the intestine, can be mild or even nonexistent. But sometimes they can be severe -- profuse watery diarrhea, vomiting and leg cramps, which can cause rapid loss of body fluids and lead to dehydration and shock.
If left untreated, a person can die within hours.
Aid workers like those of the American Red Cross have been going tent to tent in Haiti's makeshift camps, telling people of the importance of drinking clean water and outlining practices that can help avoid contamination.
Spokeswoman Julie Sell said Red Cross workers also have been handing out bars of soap. "Wash between your fingers," they tell the camp residents. "Don't dry your hand with a dirty towel."
"We find among many people there is very little understanding on how you prevent it," Sell said.
People are anxious, she said, as the death curve has crept steadily higher and the health minister has proclaimed the cholera crisis a matter of national security.
"Haiti has had more than its share of bad luck," Sell said. "This is another crisis that this country does not need. It's heartbreaking."
Complicating matters is the fact that Haiti has not seen cholera in more than 50 years -- it's yet another unfamiliar hardship for citizens and medical personnel. Also, the country's public health system, already strained before the earthquake, was virtually wiped out after January 12, according to the United Nations.
"Now you have the prospect of tens of thousands of cholera patients streaming into the system," Sell said. "That will be difficult."
Aid agencies already working on the island to help quake survivors have rushed to set up cholera treatment centers.
Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) was erecting another 320-bed facility in the Sarthe neighborhood. Samaritan's Purse planned to enlarge its clinic in Bercy -- about an hour's drive north of the capital -- to 100 beds by Thursday night. Dennery said the group was anticipating a need in nearby Cabaret as well.
In the meantime, the government has been telling people not to panic; only to remain vigilant. And health workers have been spreading this word through cell phone texts, pamphlets and loudspeakers: Prevention is key.
On Route 9 in Cite Soleil, Dennery's team looked more like political candidates than medical personnel when they passed through in their white "tap-tap" truck with large speakers mounted on top, she said. Crowds of people rushed to get a cholera flier, as though it were money.
The important thing, Dennery said, is that the word is getting out on how to stay alive.

Haiti cholera toll goes up to 724

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Haiti cholera toll goes up to 724

Death toll in the cholera epidemic in Haiti has risen to 724. The disease has infected a total of 11,125 people nationwide, according to the government figures.

PORT-AU-PRINCE: The toll in the cholera epidemic in Haiti has risen to 724, authorities said.

The disease has infected a total of 11,125 people nationwide, according to government figures released Thursday.

The maximum number of fatalities, 497, has been in the northern province of Artibonite, where the cholera outbreak began.

Nine deaths have been reported in Port-au-Prince, where thousands of people have been living in refugee camps since the Jan 12 earthquake that killed 300,000 people and left one million homeless.

According to tests performed by the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, the disease has been caused by bacteria found in south Asia.

Haiti advises evacuation of all earthquake camps

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Haiti advises evacuation of all earthquake camps

More than 1 million people were advised to leave earthquake homeless camps in Haiti's rubble-choked capital as disaster officials watched the approach of Tropical Storm Tomas.

But few of the earthquake survivors who have spent nearly 10 months alternately baking and soaking under plastic tarps and tents have anywhere to go.

Painfully slow reconstruction from the quake, prior storms and the recent committing of resources to fight a growing cholera epidemic have left people with few options and overtaxed aid workers struggling to help.

"We are using radio stations to announce to people that if they don't have a place to go, but they have friends and families, they should move into a place that is secure," said civil protection official Nadia Lochard, who oversees the department that includes Port-au-Prince.

Concerns are even greater in the western reaches of Haiti's southern peninsula, where heavy flooding is predicted.

Disaster officials have extended a red alert, their highest storm warning, to all regions of the country, as the storm is expected to wind its way up the west coast of Hispaniola through storm-vulnerable Gonaives and Haiti's No 2 city, Cap-Haitien, sometime Friday.

The US National Hurricane Center in Miami announced a tropical storm warning for Haiti, along with tropical storm watches for Jamaica, the western Dominican Republic, eastern Cuba and the southeastern Bahamas as well as Turks and Caicos.

The storm, which strengthened from a tropical depression during the day, was 490 kilometers south of Port-au-Prince with maximum winds of 75 kph. It began to make an expected right turn toward the Greater Antilles, moving north-northwest at 9 kph.

Jamaican soldiers will evacuate hundreds of people in the island's eastern region today and move them into emergency shelters ahead of the storm, Information Minister Daryl Vaz said.

"We will be going all out to make good sense prevail," he said at a news conference yesterday.

Most of the people who will be evacuated are squatters living along unstable gullies that often flood during heavy rainstorms.

Kareen Bennett, a forecaster with Jamaica's Meteorological Service, said heavy rains will lash the eastern region by tomorrow morning.

Jamaica is still struggling to recuperate from floods unleashed by Tropical Storm Nicole in late September that killed at least 13 people and caused an estimated USD 125 million in damage.

Cholera in Haiti Matches Strains Seen in South Asia, U.S. Says

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Cholera in Haiti Matches Strains Seen in South Asia, U.S. Says

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — A cholera outbreak that has killed more than 300 people in Haiti matches strains commonly found in South Asia, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday.

Researchers identified the strain by analyzing DNA patterns that can be compared with those from other regions of the world, according to Dr. Christopher Braden, a C.D.C. epidemiologist.

The finding does not identify the source, nor does it explain how cholera — a disease never confirmed to have existed in Haiti — suddenly erupted in the vulnerable country’s rural center. But it eliminates some possibilities, including any connection to a 1990s South American outbreak.

The finding also intensifies the scrutiny of a United Nations base built on a tributary to the Artibonite River. Cholera has been detected in the waterway, and most of the cases have been among people who live downriver and drank from the Artibonite.

Speculation among Haitians has increasingly focused on the base and troops there from Nepal, where cholera is endemic and which saw outbreaks this summer before the current contingent of troops arrived in Haiti. Most people infected by the microbe never develop symptoms but can still pass on the disease.

On Friday, hundreds of demonstrators waving tree branches and carrying anti-United Nations banners walked from the central plateau city of Mirebalais several miles to the gates of the base. “Like it or not, they must go,” they chanted.

The United Nations has defended its sanitation practices and denied that the base could be a source of the infection. A spokesman said the agency was looking into the matter on Monday following the C.D.C.’s announcement.

In the coming weeks, additional laboratory testing, including whole genome DNA sequencing, will be conducted, but investigating officials note that such testing may never fully explain how cholera was introduced into Haiti.

“Our primary focus here is to save lives and control the spread of disease,” said Dr. Jordan Tappero, the epidemiologist who is leading the C.D.C.’s cholera response team in the country. “We realize that it’s also important to understand how infectious agents move to new countries. However, we may never know the actual origin of this cholera strain.”

Official: Haiti cholera deaths rise above 330 as hurricane approaches

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Official: Haiti cholera deaths rise above 330 as hurricane approaches

Doctors receive hundreds of Cholera patients per day at the hospital in L'Estere on October 26, 2010

CNN) -- The death toll from a cholera outbreak in Haiti has risen to more than 330, and officials believe Hurricane Tomas may worsen the situation as it approaches, a U.N. spokeswoman said Saturday.

The number of confirmed cholera cases has climbed to 4,764, with 337 deaths, said Imogen Wall, spokeswoman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Haiti, citing information provided by the Haitian government. Those numbers represent the people that were able to make it to the hospital, she said.

Another 200 cases are suspected in the nation's West Department, or province, she said.

What is cholera?

Tracking maps show Hurricane Tomas nearing Haiti on Thursday as a Category 3 hurricane.

U.N. peacekeepers said Thursday that preliminary tests on a suspected source of the cholera outbreak were negative.

The U.N. mission in Haiti is testing waste and sewage water at the back of a Nepalese military base that is part of the U.N. operations. The first tests showed no signs of cholera, officials said earlier this week.

The mission said it "has taken very seriously the allegations that sewage water coming from latrines at the back of the Nepalese military base in Mirebalais could be the source of the cholera outbreak in Haiti."

Cholera cases up worldwide

Suspicions about the Nepalese base arose from reports that water was collecting at the back of the base. It was believed to be overflow from the latrine or a septic tank.

U.N. engineers examined the base and concluded that the standing water was not from the latrine of septic tank, but from a soak pit that receives water from the kitchen and the shower area, the U.N mission said.

"This soak pit is located three meters from the latrines, hence misleading passers-by into believing that the soaked ground close to latrines is caused by the overspill of human waste," it said.

All human waste from the camp is collected in seven septic tanks that are emptied out and discharged in a local landfill as authorized by the local government, the United Nations said.

The agency also noted that all 710 Nepalese soldiers underwent medical tests, and tested negative for cholera, before deployment to Haiti earlier this month.

135 dead, 1,500 sick from cholera in Haiti: Official

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135 dead, 1,500 sick from cholera in Haiti: Official

A cholera epidemic in Haiti has claimed 135 lives and infected 1,500 people over the last few days.

ST. MARC: At least 135 people have died in a suspected cholera outbreak, and aid groups are rushing in medicine and other supplies Friday to combat Haiti's deadliest health problem since its devastating earthquake.

The outbreak in the rural Artibonite region, which hosts thousands of quake refugees, appeared to confirm relief groups' fears about sanitation for homeless survivors living in tarp cities and other squalid settlements.

``We have been afraid of this since the earthquake,'' said Robin Mahfood, president of Food for the Poor, which was preparing to fly in donations of antibiotics, dehydration salts and other supplies.

Many of the sick have converged on St. Nicholas hospital in the seaside city of St. Marc, where hundreds of dehydrated patients lay on blankets in a parking lot with IVs in their arms as they waited for treatment.

Catherine Huck, deputy country director for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said the Caribbean nation's health ministry had recorded 135 deaths and more than 1,000 infected people.

``What we know is that people have diarrhea, and they are vomiting, and (they) can go quickly if they are not seen in time,'' Huck said. She said doctors were still awaiting lab results to pinpoint the disease.

The president of the Haitian Medical Association, Claude Surena, said the cause appeared to be cholera, but added that had not been confirmed by the government.

``The concern is that it could go from one place to another place, and it could affect more people or move from one region to another one,'' he said.

Cholera is a waterborne bacterial infection spread through contaminated water. It causes severe diarrhea and vomiting that can lead to dehydration and death within hours. Treatment involves administering a salt and sugar-based rehydration serum.

No cholera outbreaks had been reported in Haiti for decades before the earthquake, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Haitian officials, including President Rene Preval, have been pointing to the lack of severe disease outbreaks as a hard-to-see success of the quake response.

With more than a million people left homeless by the disaster, however, experts have warned that disease could strike in the makeshift camps with nowhere to put human waste and limited access to clean water.

At the hospital, some patients including 70-year-old Belismene Jean Baptiste said they got sick after drinking water from a public canal.

``I ran to the bathroom four times last night vomiting,'' Jean Baptiste said.

The sick come from across the Artibonite Valley, a starkly desolate region of rice fields and deforested mountains. The area did not experience significant damage in the Jan. 12 quake but has absorbed thousands of refugees from the devastated capital 45 miles (70 kilometers) south of St. Marc.

Trucks loaded with medical supplies including rehydration salts were to be sent from Port-au-Prince to the hospital, said Jessica DuPlessis, an OCHA spokeswoman. Doctors at the hospital said they also needed more personnel to handle the flood of patients.

Elyneth Tranckil was among dozens of relatives standing outside the hospital gate as new patients arrived near death.

``Police have blocked the entry to the hospital, so I can't get in to see my wife,'' Tranckil said.

The U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince issued an advisory urging people to drink only bottled or boiled water and eat only food that has been thoroughly cooked.

In Haiti, Rising Call for Displaced to Go Away, In Haiti, Rising Call for Displaced to Go Away

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In Haiti, Rising Call for Displaced to Go Away, In Haiti, Rising Call for Displaced to Go Away

Louise Romelus, the wife of the leader of the Palais de l’Art camp, with her daughter in June. Humanitarian efforts there helped delay evictions after a conflict arose between the property owner and the camp leader

 

 

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — As tent camps go, the one on the 28-acre Church of God property overlooking the Valley of Bourdon is almost bucolic, with hundreds of canvas-draped shelters under leafy shade trees and a cohesiveness among residents. But panic is building there.

The Church of God is planning to evict the encampment in the near future. While the church relented on a Sept. 30 deadline under pressure from humanitarian officials, it still wants its Haitian headquarters rid of a population that church officials have come to see as a freeloading nuisance.

“This used to be a beautiful place, but these people are tearing up the property,” said Jim Hudson, a Church of God missionary living at the site. “They’re urinating on it. They’re bathing out in public. They’re stealing electricity. And they don’t work. They sit around all day, waiting for handouts.”

Increasingly, property owners here are seeking to dislodge tent camps, saying they are tired of waiting for the government to resettle the people or for the people to resettle themselves.

Almost nine months after the earthquake that devastated Haiti, eviction threats have increased markedly and have become an urgent humanitarian concern, international groups say. Some 144,175 individuals have been subject to threats of eviction since March, and 28,065 have been actually evicted, according to data collected by shelter experts here.

Humanitarian officials have asked the government to consider a moratorium on evictions and to address the issue publicly, urging compassion. They worry that the evictions could increase conflict, lead to the mushrooming of smaller sites without services and force people into locations that are unsafe.

“It’s a huge problem that could exacerbate lots of other problems,” said Lilianne Fan, the housing, land and property coordinator for the multiagency shelter cluster. “The bottom line is that the vulnerable become more vulnerable, and you get into a situation of continual displacement without a long-term solution.”

Many landowners, fearing that the tent cities will become entrenched slums, say that they need to reclaim their properties sooner rather than later for their intended uses.

Their eviction practices vary, from sudden and violent to mediated and planned. In some cases, landowners have sent thugs to slash or burn tents; in others they have offered cash payoffs to expedite expulsions.

But whatever the method, the evictions increase the instability of the displaced population for whom few alternatives exist, given the slow pace of the cleanup and reconstruction effort.

Humanitarian officials are working with the government to develop a comprehensive strategy for handling camp closings based on the now scattershot efforts to help people clean up and move back into their neighborhoods.

At the same time, they are mediating these tense situations case by case, seeking to buy time from landowners while they look for solutions for each family. Sometimes an inducement works — for example, the construction of permanent latrines on a property. Other times, a multipronged approach is needed — negotiations, cash and peacekeeping troops.

That was the case at the Palais de l’Art compound in the Delmas municipality this summer after a conflict between the landowner and a leader of the tent camp there built to a peak with mutual threats and reports to the police.

The owner, Joseph St. Fort, said hundreds of families had fled to his land on the day of the earthquake: “I said to myself right then, ‘Uh-oh. You’re in trouble.’ I started feeling panic because I knew it would be very difficult to get rid of them.”

Before the earthquake, Mr. St. Fort had rented out his large property for events. After, he himself moved into a tent inside the compound with the other displaced people. But by March, it was time to restart his business, he said, so he wrote the first of many letters to the government.

“Mr. Minister,” he wrote to the interior minister, “the leadership of the Palais has to notify you that we will be obliged to evict the 320 families who have occupied this terrain since Jan. 12. The leadership regrets that it will not have the assistance of state authorities in evacuating the disaster victims.”

The minister, writing back, requested Mr. St. Fort’s patience — “knowing you are aware of the risks to public security of a premature expulsion.”

Mr. St. Fort waited months, but tensions built with camp residents, who knew he wanted them gone, and especially with one man, a camp leader. In June, Mr. St. Fort ordered the man to leave, and the man refused. So Mr. St. Fort cut off water and sanitation services for the camp and locked the gates, shutting in — or out — the hundreds living there, including amputees and elderly people.

“We feel like prisoners,” Jean Robenson, 17, said at the time as he tended to his grandmother in her wheelchair.

For weeks, AMI, a Portuguese humanitarian group, struggled to mediate. Finally, with the help of Haitian officials, the International Organization for Migration and United Nations troops, they persuaded Mr. St. Fort to let the tent camp remain if the leader was escorted to another site. In a tense meeting, a Haitian humanitarian official urged the camp residents to reject the leader, Reynald.

“Raise your hand if you don’t want Reynald,” the official said.

The crisis was averted, or deferred.

Interviewed in September, Mr. St. Fort said that the Haitian government had paid him $25,000 to let the people stay until December. But, he said, that was not enough. He maintained that he could have earned $150,000 over the same period from evangelical conventions and political party assemblies. “I don’t intend to keep this arrangement going at the price the government is offering,” he said.

At the Church of God site, church officials are also impatient. Where the people go next should be the government’s concern, they say. The church’s land — with a school, Bible college and air-conditioned houses under construction for the missionaries rebuilding churches in the disaster zone — is private property. The homeless are in the way.

Edner Villard, 33, a camp leader, knows that church officials feel that way, and he resents it. He said that he was shocked when he overheard a pastor, his voice raised in anger, tell United Nations officials about the camp residents: “They give me nothing but trouble!” Mr. Villard said his heart starting beating quickly. “We are so peaceful here!” he said. “I didn’t challenge him, and say, ‘You lie,’ because he is the national representative of the Church of God in Haiti. Who am I? But he should have more compassion. He’s a man of God, and a Haitian.”

After the disaster, the church was providing meals to its neighbors, which drew thousands of people to the site. When the rainy season began, humanitarian officials moved those camping on the church site’s steep slopes where landslides were a risk. Other families left of their own accord, renting new homes if they could afford it, or migrating to the countryside. “The people who are left here now are those who have no options,” Mr. Villard said.

Mr. Villard, a former supermarket supervisor, was the only person to survive when the market collapsed in the earthquake, killing dozens. The two-story house he owns in the Valley of Bourdon crumbled, too, and he moved his family to a grassy hillock on the church estate because it was “the closest and most logical place.” He would love to move back home, he said, but his house has been stamped red by government inspectors, meaning it is unsafe. He has no means to demolish it himself, and no materials with which to rebuild it.

“Can’t they provide tools or some kind of assistance?” he asked. “What are we supposed to do? Move into the debris with our raggedy tents?”