Spanish Red Cross construction delegates near Leogane assist Haitian builders working on the first Red Cross transitional shelters to be allocated to quake-affected families.
Jean Robert Declerville’s new house near the sea in Petit-Goâve is starting to take shape. The Red Cross selected the people who will get new shelters from among 900 families who took refuge in the yards of three Petit-Goâve schools. They had to move when classes restarted.
High in the mountains above Jacmel, the Canadian Red Cross and Haitian Red Cross Society volunteers have enlisted the help of local officials to navigate a path through the minefield of paperless Haitian land tenure and enable them to build shelters for quake-affected people.
Francois Janes (centre) stands in front of what used to be home for himself and his wife and nine children in Makary, high in the mountains above Jacmel.
A Haitian building worker stands next to a corner post for a new Red Cross transitional shelter in Petit-Goâve.
* By Alex Wynter in Leogane, Petit-Goâve and Jacmel, Haiti. Photos by José Manuel Jiménez
For the first time since the 12 January earthquake that devastated southern Haiti and left at least a million and a half homeless, the Red Cross is this week building “transitional shelters” for people to live in.
The sites being cleared and houses underway in Leogane, Petit-Goâve and Jacmel as part of Spanish, Netherlands and Canadian Red Cross programmes are the first to be allocated to quake-affected families.
The houses will help families such as Mary Yva Desilus, 35, her five children and her husband, Wilnora, who are watching their steel-frame Spanish-designed house take shape alongside the remains of their home in the countryside near Leogane.
“After the quake we slept outside in the street,” says Desilus, 35. “We had to find another way – we have small children....Things have totally changed from the way they were before."
The International Federation of the Red Cross overall has set itself a target of 30,000 shelters as part of its global appeal for Haiti worth nearly 220m Swiss francs.
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