26287: (news) Chamberlain: Haiti-One Year After Jeanne (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

   By ALFRED de MONTESQUIOU

   GONAIVES, Sept 19 (AP) -- A year after catastrophic floods unleashed by
a tropical storm swallowed this gritty city in Haiti's barren northwest,
residents are still struggling to recover from one of the impoverished
country's worst natural disasters.
   Tropical Storm Jeanne brushed a corner of Haiti's heavily deforested
Artibonite region last Sept. 18, causing floods that killed 1,900 people
and left 900 others missing in Gonaives, the third largest city.
   About 200,000 of the city's 250,000 residents were left homeless and a
large international humanitarian effort to bring food and medical aid to
survivors was hampered for days by gangsters and looting.
   Life has improved little since.
   A huge lake sits where fields of scrubland once lay on the city's
outskirts, sewers overflow with putrid, black sludge and thousands of
people cram into a makeshift shantytown that sprang up to house survivors.
   Jeanne's devastation was reminiscent of the destruction wrought by
Hurricane Katrina along the U.S. Gulf Coast, but Haiti's smothering poverty
has prevented many in Gonaives from learning of the disaster.
   "I never heard about it," said Rosy-Claire Zepherin, who lost all her
meager possessions during the floods. "Jeanne took all I had, my job, my
home. Now I beg for food at the market."
   Zepherin, 55, stood outside the tiny, wood-and-tin hut she shares with
her five children and four grandchildren. Built with the wreckage from her
destroyed home, Zepherin's shack is part of a new slum dubbed "Cite Jeanne"
by its inhabitants, French for City of Jeanne.
   The U.N. World Food Program had been supplying beans, flour, oil, rice
and high-protein biscuits to 160,000 Gonaives residents each day but ended
distribution in March, deeming the emergency mission completed.
   Stagnant pools of water still dot the makeshift community, the remnants
of old salt fields that were swept away by the floods, depriving the area
of a key source of income.
   Now, residents like Zepherin who once earned a living from the salt
fields walk an hour to the market along rutted, muddy alleys to beg vendors
for their rotten vegetables.
   "At the beginning, charities gave us food, but now we're all alone,"
Zepherin said, a shy smile spread across her deeply lined face.
   Anne Poulsen, spokeswoman for the World Food Program in Haiti, said the
agency was focusing on long-term aid projects, and noted it was providing
one meal a day to some 850,000 Haitians, or about 10 percent of the
population, mainly through clinics and schools.
   But that food doesn't reach Cite Jeanne, where there are no clinics and
parents can't afford to send their children to school.
   Many children in the slum spend their days playing amid mounds of trash
and puddles of fetid water, their bellies distended and their hair reddish
from severe malnutrition.
   Other aid sent after the floods was slowed by gangs who blocked relief
convoys in demand for payment or unscrupulous customs agents who wanted
bribes to let goods through to the city, a five hours' drive north of the
capital on a rocky, spine-jarring dirt-and-gravel road.
   Some aid simply never arrived.
   Dumarsais Simeus, a Haitian-born U.S. businessman who is running for
president in the country's November elections, said he shipped a container
of shovels and medicine to help victims. Almost a year later, it hasn't
left Port-au-Prince's shipping port.
   "It's still stuck at customs because of some civil servant who wants a
bribe!" said Simeus, who rose from poverty to become a wealthy owner of a
Texas food services company. "It's outrageous."