Americas
Money goes elsewhere, aid workers flee, Haitians endure on their own
By
The Washington Post May 2, 2024
Widlore Mérancourt and Amanda Coletta
The Washington Post May 2, 2024
Airmen from the 482d Fighter Wing and Special Operations Command South (SOCSOUTH) join forces with the 317th Airlift Wing, who provided their C-130 Hercules, to load pallets of medical supplies and electrolyte solution at Homestead Air Reserve Base, Fla., on April 26, 2024. This humanitarian aid, contributed by NGOs including Hope to Haiti, Medicine for All People International, and Lift Logistics, was delivered to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, under the coordination of the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) through the Denton Program. (Lionel Castellano/U.S. Air Force)
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Almost all the beds at the La Paix University Hospital are occupied. Critical medical supplies, including blood collection tubes, are running low. Doctors are operating without blood; they fear they’ll soon run out of anesthesia, too.
The stream of patients, meanwhile, is unrelenting. There are those who have been attacked by the armed gangs that control 80 percent of the capital. Stroke patients. Women in labor. People with kidney failure who need dialysis — and are turned away because it’s not available.
Once, the staff at La Paix was augmented by international doctors, director Jean Philippe Lerbourg said, helping their Haitian counterparts after the 2010 earthquake that killed 220,000 people here.
Now, as Haiti confronts what aid workers say is the worst humanitarian crisis since then, there’s far less international help. The hospital’s Haitian doctors and nurses — many of whom have themselves been forced from their homes by the criminal paramilitaries who kidnap, rape and kill with impunity — are on their own.
“The staff understands that help won’t come from the outside, so they come to work,” Lerbourg said. “The current situation falls on us. It’s quite a heavy burden that we can’t just drop and leave.”
Under skies throbbing with helicopters carrying diplomats and aid workers away, as the world responds to crises in Gaza and Ukraine, Haitians are banding together through political chaos, rampant violence and endemic poverty to keep themselves and each other alive.
Jacky Lumarque, the rector of Quisqueya University in Port-au-Prince, remembers a “spirit of [international] solidarity” after the earthquake. It’s absent today.
“Haiti has no friends,” Lumarque said. “We are alone in the world.”
The United Nations has appealed to donors this year for $674 million in aid for Haiti. They’ve contributed $97 million — 14 percent. Last year, the request was $720 million; only 35 percent was met.
There’s “a lot of competition at the moment” for aid, according to Carl Skau, deputy director of the World Food Program. The crisis in Haiti, meanwhile, is “complex” and “requires an equally complex response.”
“But it’s really unacceptable, frankly, that Haiti is at the state it is at the moment,” Skau told The Washington Post. “The Haitians deserve that the world pay attention and step up support.”
More than 2,500 people here have been wounded or killed in the first quarter of 2024, most of them by gangs, the U.N. office here has reported, the most violent period since it started tracking such attacks in 2022. More than 90,000 people in the capital alone have been forced from their homes.
Growing gangs have filled the power vacuum here opened by the still-unsolved assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021. In recent months, they’ve busted open prisons, laid siege to police stations and shut down the international airport.
More ominously, they control the main roads in and out of the capital, have attacked the main seaport and assaulted a key fuel terminal, prompting fears of shortages and stranding supplies. The violence has spread to the countryside — Haiti’s breadbasket — as half the population faces acute hunger.
Armed gang members control many displacement camps and force young people to have sex with them for aid, said Guerda Previlon, who helps children and young mothers who have been forced from their homes.
“There is no life in these spaces,” said Previlon, the founder and executive director of the Haiti-based Initiative for Youth Development. “It’s not a living environment for children.”
Ariel Henry, Haiti’s embattled prime minister, resigned last week and a transitional government was sworn in. Standing up that council of Haitian leaders was a condition for the deployment of a U.N.-approved, Kenyan-led international police force, but it’s unclear when it will get here.
The U.N. mission here, meanwhile, has reduced its presence to essential personnel and could shrink further amid concerns over continued access to clean drinking water and fuel.
U.S. Southern Command last week coordinated four military flights to Port-au-Prince to bolster embassy security and deliver privately donated aid including oral hydration fluids and medicines.
There’s much about the response to the 2010 quake that Haitians are keen to not repeat. Billions of dollars in aid was allocated to international organizations, but much was mismanaged. U.N. peacekeepers were blamed for a cholera outbreak that caused almost 10,000 deaths.
Still, aid workers and Haitians say the response today is grossly insufficient.
“I do not see the mobilization of donors in proportion to the seriousness of the crisis,” said Jean-Martin Bauer, the World Food Program’s Haiti director. “I have been working at WFP for 23 years. When I started, there was not Yemen, Sudan, Ukraine [and] Gaza burning at the same time.”
The Center for Peasant Animation and Community Action, a nonprofit in Port-au-Prince that collaborates with WFP and other aid groups, has provided more than 300,000 meals to displaced people here since February.
On a recent visit, cooks prepared rice, peppers and sardines. Benita Isidore Tranquile was one of them. She was chased from her home by gangs in 2015, she said. The violence has prevented her husband from driving his taxi, so she’s now the family’s main breadwinner.
“This work brings me a lot of joy,” Tranquile told The Post.
The crisis has forced the group to hire more workers, according to Herns Francemy, the assistant to its program manager. It struggles to procure supplies, he said, including fuel and water.
“Some people depend on the food we provide every day. We face resource problems to cover the people in need,” Francemy said. “Nevertheless, I feel proud to be able to meet the needs of those people. Some people say they would have starved to death if it wasn’t for us.”
Lerbourg, the hospital director, grew up dreaming of becoming a teacher or a lawyer, but his mother discouraged him. His parents have since left Haiti, but Lerbourg stayed behind with his wife and son because he felt he could be useful. He didn’t want to be “just another social security number.”
“I love medicine, and I can’t see myself doing anything else,” Lerbourg said. “As soon as I pass the hospital gate, my mood changes. I forget my personal problems and grievances regarding the situation. I’m here to save lives.”