A Post-Earthquake Rapid Assessment of Cité Soleil

Port-au-Prince - March 2010 by The Interuniversity Institute for Research and Development (INURED) - www.inured.org

"...A detailed, well-conceived and executed, and ambitious plan to assess local needs in both quantitative and qualitative terms, a report called "Voices from the Shanties" voices some concerns about security and trauma that are going under the radar.

It also uncovers some practices from individual families to abuse the system by fanning out into many camps (which if neighborhood groups were organizing the distribution would be much more difficult - not to mention less likely for corruption or violence - as grassroots groups constantly point out).

Primary concerns remain sanitation - literally shit - and its health consequences in the U.N. run camps.

As almost every report from the field has shown, Haitian survivors are doing an amazing job of working together, of building solidarity, of organizing neighborhood-level committees.

This comes as no surprise to those who know the Haitian people, but apparently this knowledge seems not to trickle up to mainstream foreign media, policymakers, donors, and large NGOs.

Survivors are excluded from the process.

The U.N. cluster meetings exclude Haitian survivors and even government officials, as Reed Lindsay reported.

Meetings are held in French, a language that 90 percent of the population does not speak and cannot write.

Even progressive solidarity organizations are having conversations in English.

A network of 47 progressive groups in Haiti and other countries met to critique the exclusion of Haitian civil society from this plan, publishing a statement on March 18 signed by 26 groups.

The plan does appear to be more of the same..."

David Schuller for The Huffington Post >

Voices From the Shanties