PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Days after the earthquake killed his little girl and destroyed much of his house, Meristin Florival moved his family into a makeshift tent on a hill in the Haitian capital and called it home. Two years later, they’re still there, living without drains, running water or electricity.
A few miles away, Jean Rony Alexis has left the camp where he spent the months after the quake and moved into a shedlike shelter built on a concrete slab by the Red Cross. But he’s not much better off. The annual rent charged by a landlord who lives in a nearby camp jumped from $312 to $375, and he too has no running water.
“This is misery,” said Florival, whose 4- month-old daughter was crushed to death in the quake-stricken family home.
“I don’t see any benefits,” said Alexis, whose shed is flooded with noise at night from a saloon next door that’s appropriately named the “Frustration Bar.”
The two men are among hundreds of thousands of Haitians whose lives have barely improved since those first days of devastation, when the death toll climbed toward 300,000 and the world opened its wallets in response.
While U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki- Moon, former U.S. President Bill Clinton and others vowed that the world would help Haiti “build back better,” and $2.38 billion has been spent, Haitians have seen hardly any building at all.
The reasons for the slow progress are many. Beyond being among the world’s poorest nations and a frequent victim of destructive weather, Haiti’s land registry is in chaos — a drag on reconstruction because it’s not always clear who owns what land.
Then there’s a political standoff that went on for more than a year and still hobbles decision-making.
After the quake, a disputed presidential election triggered tire-burning riots that shut down Port-au-Prince for three days. Even after the vote was resolved and Michel Martelly was installed as president in May 2011, there were further snags. The former pop star, new to politics, took six months to install a prime minister, whose job is to oversee reconstruction projects.
For six months, Martelly was running a government with ministers of the outgoing administration. Meanwhile government employees could be found napping at their desks while awaiting orders from their bosses that never came.
“It created a situation where it was difficult to take off,” the new foreign affairs minister, Laurent Lamothe, told The Associated Press.
The government and international partners say there has been some progress — 600 classrooms for 60,000 children to return to school, more than half of the 10 million cubic meters of rubble cleared, and roads newly paved in the capital and countryside.
New housing is still the most critical objective, yet the biggest official housing effort targets just 5 percent of those in need, and the encampments of cardboard, tarps and bed sheets that went up to cope with 1.5 million homeless people have morphed into shantytowns.
“I certainly wouldn’t call (reconstruction) a success,” said Alex Dupuy, who has written books about Haiti and teaches at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. “Other than putting a government in place . . . I haven’t seen any concrete evidence of recovery underway.”
Numbers
$2.38 billion Amount spent on reconstruction, but ordinary Haitians have seen hardly any building at all
550,000 Number of Haitians still living in densely packed camps that went up after the quake
