No tarp relief for Haiti's homeless - 600,000 Haitians are still living in tents. Why?

[Pathfinder]

No tarp relief for Haiti's homeless

Individual Americans donated a total of $1.4bn after the 2010 earthquake, yet 600,000 Haitians are still living in tents. Why?

Mark Weisbrot in Port-au-Prince, Haiti
guardian.co.uk, <TIME datetime="2011-08-22T18:32BST" pubdate>Monday 22 August 2011 18.32 BST</TIME>
Article history

Excerpt:

At a sprawling internally displaced persons (IDP) camp of battered tents and tarps, in the Barbancourt neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince, a confrontation was underway. A landlord, who claimed ownership over land on which some 75 families had been living since the earthquake, was very angry. A crowd of hundreds had gathered and a man in his thirties said that the landlord had beaten him and destroyed his tent.
...
Nineteen months after the earthquake, almost 600,000 Haitian people are still living in camps, mostly under tents and tarps. Despite the billions of dollars of aid pledged by governments and donors since the earthquake, there are probably less than 50,000 that have been resettled. And for the 600,000 homeless, the strategy seems to be moving in the direction of evictions ? without regard as to where they might end up.

Full text:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/aug/22/haiti-homeless-tents-aid

 

[Emily]

Re: No tarp relief for Haiti's homeless - 600,000 Haitians are still living in tents. Why?

I think sometimes pledges don't result in actual aid.

http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/oi_hum_policy_funding_0.pdf

Donor pledges of humanitarian aid do not always materialise into actual assistance, with nearly $60m of pledges not honoured in 2006. When a new crisis occurs, instead of new money being made available, it is often diverted from another crisis. Donors themselves want to address this through the GHD initiative

Haiti has suffered a castrophe almost beyond the comprehension of what we consider to be modern societies.

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/727921

It will take decades for them to recover. Certainly there is no 'TARP' for a few to cannibalize there as there is in our country. There are no taxpayer backed loans for rebuilding available, even temporarily as there are/were in this country.