Ian McInnes – Haiti Diary 3 with Images

An article by Frank    No Comments

TEAR Fund NZ’s senior Programme Officer is currently in the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. He is there serving our partner, Tearfund UK, and will be acting as the Director of their Disaster Response Team as they go about establishing their work in the area over the next few months. Ian has kindly agreed to share his experience through regular blog updates. All the images and writing are contributed solely by Ian.

I moved quickly out of the way as the young man swung a wheelbarrow of rocks around me, making his way from a pile of rubble to the workmen behind me.

Tearfund is paying for a road to be constructed, linking two remote villages in the hills behind Leogane, west of Port-au-Prince. The rocks pack down on top of a clay road, making it considerably more durable during the wet season ahead. Donkeys walk along the road, carrying local produce in one direction to the rural market, and consumer goods in the other back to a remote village.

To be precise, Tearfund is not so much paying for a road as injecting cash into a starved local economy where markets fractured and collapsed along with people’s houses and assets after the earthquake.
Each adult worker receives a wage in exchange for a week’s work; the fact that a road is built means everyone benefits. Another benefit is that creating roads from rubble is a great way to clear rubble from sites where new buildings need to go up, not to mention the benefits of bringing people together on a constructive project after such a tragedy.

People who have experienced injuries and are physically unable to work have a wage set aside for them so they are not excluded.

These highland communities were poor before the earthquake. Now, their houses, schools and churches lie in ruins and they are paying more for their basic goods after prices shot up on January 12th – the day of the earthquake.

Many agencies use ‘cash for work’ schemes, like Tearfund’s road building project, to kick-start the economy and create jobs where employment has collapsed.

Rather than make assumptions about what people need, this type of project enables families to make their own choices about how aid money is spent. Studies show that people typically spend the money wisely, for example on housing repairs, education fees or replacing household equipment and essential farm tools. There’s no way that Tearfund could have known the individual needs of each family, or provided for them in the short time since the earthquake, so working like this means each family can make sure their urgent needs are met.