Haiti seeks to control ‘city’ that emerged from quake

CANAAN, Haiti: Before the January 2010 earthquake destroyed much of Haiti’s capital, the only occupants of the arid hills near the city’s northern edge were skinny goats foraging amid the cactus and scrub.
Today, hardware stores sell wood and rebar to a flood of homesteaders and children lug water up dusty paths between rows of cinderblock homes and tin-and-tarp shacks. The government estimates that in 5½ years, some 250,000 people have settled in the unregulated sprawl called Canaan, named for the biblical land of promise and prosperity.
Already considered Haiti’s fourth-largest urban district, Canaan, could reach 1 million people in a decade, and alarmed authorities are moving to exert some semblance of control. Regularizing the informal metropolis, however, won’t be easy.
People displaced by the devastating 7.0-magnitude quake have built up Canaan on their own, using an estimated $100 million of their personal money, some of it sent from abroad by relatives, and instilling a streak of independence of which they are proud.
“Outsiders have not provided anything to us,” Fabienne Bosquet said at her family’s scrap-wood shelter as her younger siblings stacked small bags of charcoal for sale. “It is Haitians like us that have made something out of nothing.”
Some of Canaan’s neighborhoods boast food and barber shops, churches, motorcycle taxi stands, and daycare centers. Residents are a mix of desperately poor Haitian families and better-off but still struggling workers, including professionals who commute to Port-au-Prince some 12 miles away.
But life here is not easy. Water can be a long walk away, meals are cooked over fire pits and bathrooms are just a hole in the ground.
After years of looking on in dismay at the fast emerging city, the Haitian government is introducing a pilot program to install basic services in a central section of Canaan while a master plan is developed for the entire area.
With $14 million from the American Red Cross and USAID, the program plans to put in paved roads, schools, water and power in one zone while collaborating with residents to ensure their houses meet minimal construction standards.
Both aid groups have been criticized for failing to build housing after the quake, a shortfall directors blamed in large part on muddled land tenure issues, logistical nightmares and struggles cutting through bureaucracy. The experience has resulted in “some pretty tough lessons” for everyone involved, said John Groarke, until recently USAID’s mission director in Haiti.
“It really hasn’t been as efficient and cost-effective as any of us have hoped. And what we’ve learned is that ordinary Haitians, even poor Haitians, have the resources and the resiliency to start building their own houses,” he said from his office in the US Embassy, shortly before leaving for a new posting in Pakistan. “What we want to do is get out of the way and let them do that.”