Build it and they will come...

In the coming week this story will appear on CNN: "Earthquake victims relocated to camps". Obviously the press will love the story because the optics will be dramatic: buses! police! tents! and! poor! desperate! people! Agencies like Shelter-In-Box will dash about here and there gathering more tags, more tents, more tarps. Here's a side story you won't hear...

Four days ago I was standing outside a meeting tent with a colleague. We were chatting about something and she mentioned the word 'engineer'. IOM guy overhears her: you're engineers? No, we just live with some. Next thing you know our engineers are designing an IDP camp for IOM. Its a rather short chain of causation: Gov't squeezes UN, UN squeezes IOM, IOM squeezes as many NGOs as needed (most of whom know better, but... whatever). The Haitian gov't wants to (finally) appear to be doing something (anything!), and camps provide a great distraction. From a humanitarian standpoint, camps are the worst choice they could have made. Almost anything else would have been better.

Studies show IDP camps, on average, last 4-5 years (unless you're Palestinian, of course!). They are overwhelmingly composed of the very poor and rarely are they accompanied by prudent forethought (consider the trailer camps still existing post-Katrina) in terms of livelihoods and recovery.  Now, our engineers are no dummies. They immediately realized the site was too far from the city--impossible for the displaced people from the camp to trade or continue livelihoods.  Even if they leave room for spontaneous markets, etc., what they're essentially creating is an interment camp (their words, not mine). The sad truth is that there will be one class of people in these camps: the very poor. Anyone else will avoid them like the plague (likely because at some point the camps may, indeed, contain the plague).

So the engineers set to it, bearing in mind the only parameter they were given: cram as many people in the space as possible (no, I'm not kidding). However, thank goodness for minimum standards to prevent overcrowding, right? SPHERE calls for 45 meters squared per person, including tents and public/communal spaces, etc. According to my colleague: 'this guy comes over and literally picks the SPHERE book out of my hands and tossed it onto the ground'. And there go the minimum standards in disaster response. Tossed into the dirt. 

The total space can accommodate 600 people according to SPHERE. Even I will admit that in 10 years I have yet to see a camp built to those standards. But they're guidelines for best practices--the intention is to aim for them. Yet guess what number of people will soon be packed into that same space? Double? Triple? No, the engineers tell me they were able to maximize the space available and accommodate 5000 people.

Bear this in mind when CNN arrives to film it all.

PS - Waiting for my driver to arrive and I take a seat next to a Haitian guy about my age. He asks me about Vancouver and I ask him about Jacal. Then families: neither of us married, no kids, but both siblings with children. Are they ok? Yes, we are all ok. Where are you staying? Dans le cimetière. Excuse me? Oui. And, you sleep there? Sur les tombes. So, there his family, along with many families, sleep on the mostly flat tombs (that, I'm told, have already been crammed full of additional corpses). We're quiet for a moment. In a few seconds my air-conditioned SUV will pull up and whisk me home to a warm meal and comfy mattress. I have nothing for him. Is it safe there? He shrugs, then smiles, and punctuated with a loud laugh: dépend des zombies! 
Goodnight.




(For those of you on LinkedIn, here's a good discussion on camps: http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers&discussionID=10803977&gid=1887804&commentID=9574329&trk=view_disc)