RH Reality Check
By Amie Newman
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A small group of women in colorful shirts, jeans and skirts stand in a circle, singing and clapping. Some are smiling. All are dancing, shaking their bodies to the sound of their voices strong and loud. One woman dances in the middle, spinning. They are singing in Haitian Kreyol and it could be a celebration of some sort. In a way, it is. It's a celebration of their power, as they unify to protect themselves and all women who live in post-earthquake Hatiian displacement camps from sexual assault, rape and other gender-based violence. Some are members of KOFAVIV (being filmed by representives of sister organization Madre), a Hatiian women's organization working to end sexual violence and seek justice for rape survivors. In conjunction with other women's organizations on the ground, and U.S.-based sister organizations, they are committed to protecting the women and girls living in the displacement camps from gender-based violence, from which the government has been unable or unwilling to do so. As RH Reality Check reported on in July of this year, women and girls have been the target of "skyrocketing" incidences "of rape in the camps" and are suffering from "the lack of a coordinated or effective response to these persistent threats." Up until recently, KOFAVIV and other women's advocates have been effectively shut out of the discussions between aid agencies and the government on how best to protect themselves, in the camps. Slowly, however, things may be changing.
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In late July, a group of organizations including the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, and Madre, issued a report on the sexual violence against women in Haiti entitled Our Bodies Are Still Trembling: Haitian Women Fight Against Rape detailing the current conditions for women and girls in the camps and the lack of an adequate response from government and aid agencies: Conditions in the IDP camps in Port‐au‐Prince are bleak. Overcrowding, lack of privacy, and weakened family and community structures, among other things, render women and girls particularly vulnerable to rape and other sexual violence. Women and girls live in inadequate shelter, often sleeping on the ground under nothing more than a tarp or blanket, with no means of protection and no friends close by. They bathe in public, in view of men and boys. Many young girls live alone or with friends, with no adults looking after them.
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Women and girls are most often attacked at night. One woman reported having been kidnapped from her tent, in the dark of night, gang-raped and beaten. Survivors of the sexual violence are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and a range of physical discomfort including:
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"...stomach pain, headaches, difficulty walking, and vaginal infection and bleeding. At least one woman became pregnant as a result of the rape. Only one woman reported that her attacker wore a condom. Of the few women that had been tested for HIV, results were negative. In addition to the rapes, many women and girls interviewed suffered beatings, stabbings and other injuries in the course of the attacks and had scars and other visible injuries to show."
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Most of the women and girls interviewed for the report had not sought medical care not only because they were unaware of where to locate or how to access services but because rape carries tremendous stigma in Haitian society and women are "embarrassed or...felt uncomfortable. When victims did reach out, they were often shunned or ignored." The report also discloses that some clinics did not offer services such as HIV prophylaxis or emergency contraception to women seeking care, effectively leaving them with no recourse to protect against infection or pregnancy.
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Women who are victims of sexual violence in the camps see virtually no justice, either. Not only has the loss of police officers and police stations affected reporting of rape, but the lack of female police officers has also contributed to the silence around rape. Though each station is supposed to have female officers to whom women can report a crime, that hasn't been the case and it's having a "cascade effect":
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"...in some instances, [law enforcement] officials attributed the problem of rape to promiscuity and domestic violence. This antipathy has a cascading effect; victims perceive law enforcement as ineffective or unsympathetic and, consequently, fail to report crimes. Government officials in turn insist that no such “epidemic” of gender‐based violence exists, and allocate even fewer resources to address it."
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This lack of an efficient tracking system also contributes to criminal cases rarely being pursued, "resulting in a culture of total impunity for rapists and criminal gangs who continue to prey on women and girls in the camps." In the absence of an adequate response from both the Haitian government as well as aid agencies, KOFAVIV, Madre, and other women's organizations have collectively organized to implement strategies, on the ground, to keep women and girls safe from sexual violence. And they are having an impact. For example, most recently, notes Madre, "we delivered a package of donations -- including medical supplies, flashlights and whistles -- to our partners in Haiti, KOFAVIV. Using these supplies, gathered through MADRE's Helping Hands program, they have been able to create local security measures that help prevent rapes in the camps for displaced people in Haiti. They have also been able to provide for the basic needs of women and families." When rape survivors are in need of medical attention or legal aid, KOFAVIV steps in as best they can to facilitate referrals and provide support.
Photo of Haitian women accepting whistles and flashlights courtesy of Madre
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Inadequate lighting in the camps is one factor in the continued sexual violence. The report notes that UN agencies distributed thousands of solar lamps to "ensure proper lighting of latrines and camp facilities." The United Nations "sub-cluster" on gender-based violence offered that the Haitian National Police (HNP) were patrolling camps on foot to improve security measures as a response to the sexual violence. However, this does not jibe with what women and girls in the camps report as a "consistent lack of security and lighting." So, once again, the women of KOFAVIV have organized volunteer security patrols escorting women to bathrooms and showers at night.
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Diana Duarte of Madre told RH Reality Check that the UN gender-based violence sub-cluster, in addition to more foot patrols, has most recently "committed to installing lighting in the camps that are currently without and that are reporting high levels of rape." Given what many have said about a lack of follow through or signficant impact of some of these promises, Duarte is cautiously optimistic, "We're working right now with KOFAVIV to track whether that commitment becomes reality and to demand accountability if it does not." It's not only the immediate committment to improving conditions that are a priority. Haitian women who live in the camps and have been the victims of sexual violence themselves have testified in front of the UN about their experiences and the critical importance of including women's groups in the efforts to prevent and end the violence. Duarte told RH Reality Check that when she was in Haiti, at the end of July, her organization was working with the women of KOFAVIV to also "demand inclusion in the processes taking place, guided by the UN, to address sexual violence in the camps."
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"Up until that point, they had been very much excluded from meetings that had first taken place at a UN base at some distance from the city. Then, when the meetings were recently moved to a closer location, they were still held in French, when most of the grassroots women's groups are most comfortable in Kreyol," says Duarte. Women's organizations - Haitian women's advocates on the ground - have been "shunted to the side" when it comes to agenda setting, in response to the diaster. As RH Reality Check previously reported,
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"In March, the international community came together in a “landmark” donor conference to set an agenda for rebuilding Haiti and women’s groups in Haiti, women’s voices, were nowhere to be seen or heard." In response, the women of KOFAVIV and their allies have made it their business to continue to speak up about remaining a part of the planning. Duarte says that when they [the women of KOFAVIV] were finally able to attend the UN meeting on gender-based violence in Haiti:
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"one of the KOFAVIV leaders (a woman named Eramithe Delva) stood up and made a really strong intervention, in which she spoke about the temporary security measures that women have set up in the camps (including distributing whistles and flashlights and setting up community watch groups) and about the scale of sexual violence these groups have been documenting. In that meeting, she was able to secure an invitation from one of the organizers of the UN group (called a sub-cluster) on gender-based violence to include KOFAVIV and other grassroots groups in future meetings." [emphasis added]
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Whether that will happen remains to be seen but it is a step forward. In the meantime, there are still conflicting reports about just what and how much is actually being done on the part of UN aid agencies, the United Nations sub-cluster on gender-based violence, and the Haitian National Police to prevent more rape and other sexual violence from occurring.
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Women living in the camps and women's advocacy organizations continue to do their part - distributing whistles and flashlights, and medical supplies. When the supplies arrive the women sit, in a circle, on plastic buckets which rest on the dusty ground of the camps, sharing stories and offering support in their efforts to protect themselves from the sexual violence; and they dance, sing and clap in recognition that they are and they have no other choice but to be powerful sources of strength for each other, in the absence of an adequate international response to the unacceptable conditions under which they survive.

by Stephen Lendman
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Some survivors mentioned widespread transactional sex for food aid cards. When coerced, it's rape. When rape crimes aren't investigated or prosecuted, violence is implicitly condoned, making illegal acts normal and justice denied. Most victims are girls under 18. The Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) works with grassroots groups there, in America, and the Haitian Diaspora, developing effective human rights advocacy for some of the world's most oppressed, impoverished, and long-suffering people, over 500 years and counting.
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In late July, it issued a new report titled, "Our Bodies Are Still Trembling: Haitian Women's Fight Against Rape ," a problem Amnesty International (AI) highlighted in March saying: "Sexual violence is widely present in the camps where some of Haiti's most vulnerable live. It was already a major concern (pre-quake), but the situation in which displaced people are living exposes women and girls to even greater risks," the issue IJDH examined in its report, explaining that Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps "exacerbated the already grave problem of sexual violence," two US lawyer delegations and a women's health specialist investigating the problem firsthand in May and June, interviewing over 50 rape or attempted rape survivors.
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IJDH didn't quantify the incidence, but learned that "rapes in the camps are dramatically underreported," women and girls in them extremely vulnerable, dozens of documented cases now known, suggesting the tip of a huge iceberg, worse for lack of security or concern by police, UN Blue Helmets, or Haiti's pro-business, anti-populist government.
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"Rape survivors....told interviewers that reporting rape to the police is an exercise in futility, since they could not identify their assailant or assailants," one survivor saying police told her the problem was President Rene Preval's, not theirs, a shocking indifference to a brutal crime - for most women and girls, their worst ever experience, one they'll never forget or get over. Dismal camp conditions "render women and girls particularly vulnerable...." Overcrowding and inadequate shelter make it easy for predators to take advantage, especially late at night when people are sleeping. Survivors noted the lack of:
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lighting;
privacy even to bathe;
tents; and
police presence or concern.
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When rape crimes aren't investigated or prosecuted, violence is implicitly condoned, making illegal acts normal and justice denied. Most victims are girls under 18 - impoverished, displaced and denied redress under the 2000 UN Resolution 1325 and UN Guiding Principles on International Displacement, requiring a gender-based perspective to ensure their human rights, including preventive measures against rape and other violent acts. According to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), Gen Rec. No. 19, Violence Against Women (1992), gender-based violence (GBV):
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"includes violence that is directed against a woman because she is a woman or that affects women disproportionately. It includes acts that inflict physical, mental or sexual harm or suffering, threats of such acts, coercion and other deprivations of liberty." Structural inequalities pre- and post-quake left Haitians vulnerable, especially women and children - surrounded by rubble, homeless with inadequate food, clean water, sanitation, medical care, and protection, leaving them vulnerable to predators.
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Most traumatizing is lost loved ones and friends, a support network when most needed, exacerbated by extreme depravation, creating a dangerous GBV environment, rape and other sexual violence its most prominent feature, women and young girls victimized. Despite no official figures, the evidence is overwhelming. Post-quake, rape escalated dramatically, the Commission of Women Victims for Victims (KOFAVIV) July 19 Preliminary Report on Rape tracked 230 cases in 15 of the hundreds of Port-au-Prince camps. A University of Michigan March survey found 3% of women and girls sexually assaulted since January, half under 18. Doctors Without Borders reported treating 68 rape victims at one Port-au-Prince facility in April. Haitian authorities downplay it, belying documented evidence. The main issues are overcrowding, lack of shelter and security, AI saying:
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"inadequate protection (and) lack of measures to prevent and respond adequately to the threat of sexual violence is contributing to the humanitarian crisis." Even with a security presence, Haitians say it's "not effective largely because of their lack of coordination and failure to engage in partnerships with neighborhood associations and community," on their own to address what authorities won't. Women's organizations have been especially active, but it's not enough without state and UN aid, their neoliberal priorities other-directed, ignoring vital needs, including security.
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Victims ranged in age from five to 60, suggesting a comparable profile throughout the camps, given "the strikingly similar patterns among the testimonies" gotten. Most women reported being raped by two or more unknown assailants, most armed with guns, knives or other weapons. Though unable to identify them, women believe they're gang members or prison escapees, their motive rape, at times robbery or other crimes as well, mostly committed from 9:00PM - 3:00AM, occasionally during the day. Women repored being attacked in IDP camp tents, under tarps, in latrines, and on nearby streets. One woman was forcibly taken to a house at an unknown location, then gagged and gang raped by an unknown number of assailants for two or three days, repeatedly abused and beaten until she escaped.
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Some survivors mentioned widespread transactional sex for food aid cards. When coerced, it's rape, a topic beyond IJDH's investigation. A March delegation of psychiatrists and trauma victim specialists conducted a psychological evaluation, finding 95.7% of victims suffering from PTSD, including extreme fear, nightmares, suicidal tendencies and depression. Another 53.6% experienced depression alone. Nearly everyone complained of physical discomfort, including stomach pain, headaches, difficulty walking, and vaginal infection and bleeding. At least one woman became pregnant.
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Besides being raped, women were beaten, stabbed, and injured in other ways. Their scars, bruises, and other physical signs bore witness to their ordeal. Most hadn't seen a doctor or other medical professional, for some not knowing about free services, for others fearing retaliation, humiliation and stigma. "When victims did reach out, they were often shunned or ignored." Those getting treated reported quality and type care varied depending on the facility and available supplies. Some offered no HIV prophylaxis or emergency contraception. Waits were excessively long, doctors often not seen. In addition, little privacy and few female health providers were available. Several victims relied on traditional remedies, including special teas and baths.
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With one exception, women reporting rape crimes to police were ignored or mocked, one victim saying "only the rich get the attention of the police." For Haiti's poor, they're more enemy than ally, why most Haitians fear and shun them. Except during Aristide's presidency, government response is hostile. Haiti's long history is infamous for targeting anyone supporting democracy and human rights, women especially vulnerable, including being subjected to gender-based violence, rape its most prominent feature.
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After the 2004 coup, AI said it again "became a political weapon by armed insurgents to instill fear and to punish women believed to have supported the democratic government." A 2006 Athena R. Kolbe/Royce A. Hutson Lancet-published study titled, "Human Rights Abuse and Other Criminal Violations in Port-au-Prince, Haiti" concluded that 35,000 women were raped from March 2004 - December 2006 in Haiti's capital alone, almost 12% of the perpetrators identified as right-wing political supporters.
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More recently, authorities took modest steps to address the problem, including adopting the 2006 - 2011 National Plan to Combat Violence Against Women, its objective being a mechanism to collect data, prevent violence, and other measures. Although progress was made, inadequate resources nor serious concern prevented real change, Haitian women and girls more vulnerable than ever under post-quake conditions, excerbated by a dismissive, pro-business government, rarely ever deploying police inside camps for protection, despite a March 2010 MINUSTAH Human Rights Section "IDP Camp Joint Security Assessment Report," recommending an "IDP Camp Strategic Policing Plan," increasing patrols, especially at night.
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Few female officers is another concern, women generally reluctant to report rape crimes to men, notably when they're mocked, treated dismissively, and at times blamed, accused of promiscuity or involvement in domestic violence. As a result, authorities downplay the issue, allocate few resources, and help the rich, not vulnerable Haitians out of luck and on their own, rapists free to seek other victims or the same ones again. Pre-quake, two women's advocacy organizations took on the issue - Dwa Fanm in New York and ENFOFANM in Port-au-Prince, demanding justice for Haitian rape victims. In late May, the Women's Ministry - Ministere a la Condition Feminine et aux Droits des Femmes (MCFDF), launched a national "End rape in Temporary Settlements!" campaign, encouraging women to come forward and report them to police.
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UNICEF and UNFPA (the UN Population Fund) coordinate a Gender-Based Violence Sub-Cluster, addressing the issue during national emergencies like earthquakes, but, in fact, delivering little aid according to victims. Six months post-quake, "the Sub-Cluster still has not effectively implemented" measures it's mandated to undertake...."in large part, (it's) failed to include the voices of poor women living in the camps in planning and leadership roles," or helping victims. "Haiti's history and the deep fissures within Haitian society between the poor majority and more affluent, educated classes, require attention" so far not provided. In addition, UN officials, like Haiti's police and government, downplay the problem, shirking their responsibility for camp security, leaving it up to grassroots groups like KOFAVIV and others to act in their stead as best they can with limited staff and resources.
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Article 19 of Haiti's 1989 Constitution obligates the State: "to guarantee the right to life, health, and respect of the human person for all citizens without distinction, in conformity with the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man," including protection against rape and other forms of violence, written in law but enforced only for the rich.
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Haiti is also party to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (the Women's Convention), mandating domestic law abide by its provisions. In 2005, Executive Decree No. 60 introduced Haitian Penal Code changes, including the classification of rape and penalties, increasing them to 10 years, 15 if victims are under age 16, and life in prison for gang rape, reasserting a previous provision.
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Yet legal and enforcement gaps remain because of judicial system corruption and indifference, resulting in lighter sentences when imposed. Most often, however, rapes aren't reported or prosecuted, authorities doing little to address them, Port-au-Prince's General Hospital not issuing medical certificates verifying them, calling them a "non-essential service." Yet under Haiti's Constitution and international law, authorities are required to address GBV, "prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of sex, protecting the right to bodily integrity, and guaranteeing the right to be free from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."
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Besides the Women's Convention, Haiti is obligated under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD), and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (Children's Convention). As an OAS member, it must also enforce provisions of the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence Against Women (the Belem do Para Convention) as well as the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR). They're automatically Haitian law under the Constitution's Article 19.
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Article 1 of the Woman's Convention defines gender-based violence to be "directed against a woman because she is a woman or that affects women disproportionately" - including physical, mental, or sexual harm or suffering; threats of such acts, or coercion. Gender-based violence also denies women their civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights, guaranteed under Haitian and international law. The 1993 UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women inspired the OAS Belem do Para Convention to affirm "that violence against (them) constitutes a violation of their human rights and fundamental freedoms, and impairs or nullifies the observance, enjoyment and exercise of such rights and freedoms."
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Other international standards and UN Resolutions address the same issues, all UN members obligated to enforce them, including gender-based violence against women and girls. The laws are clear, standards high, yet Haiti's government doesn't enforce them for its poor, only the rich. Failing to do so "sends a message of impunity - that such attacks are justified or, at a minimum, will go unpunished." Enforcing international law falls mostly on States. However, UN members and international organizations share responsibility, especially when local efforts can't adequately do so in emergencies like earthquakes.
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In recent years, the international community established important principles to maximize foreign aid effectiveness, including for gender-based issues. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), recognized under customary international law, specifically identify gender equality and empowerment as a key goal, its operational framework prioritizing combating violence against women and girls, especially for the poor, and in conflict and post-conflict situations. The OECD developed Guiding Principles for Aid Effectiveness, Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment, endorsing global agreements and conventions addressing them.
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Despite Haiti's obligations under international law and its Constitution, authorities have fallen far short, failing to confront issues as vital as gender-based violence, turning a blind eye to a pressing problem, leaving poor women and girls vulnerable to the worst kind of abuse, doing little to address or halt it, and virtually nothing for victims or survivors, often blaming them, not their violators. America, UN member states, and the world body are more a problem than a solution, Haitian women and girls on their own and out of luck, especially under post-quake conditions when needs are greatest, including security against predatory rapists, what the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, Rashida Manjoo, addressed, saying:
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"If we are to secure women's rights and their freedom from violence, it is imperative that we adopt an integrated human rights perspective that stresses the equal importance of civil and political rights and economic and social rights. Unless women can develop their capabilities and achieve economic independence, the human rights they are promised will not be realized," especially in Haiti, given its violence-plagued history.
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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His blog is sjlendman.blogspot.com.

8/12/2010
By Anastasia Moloney
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Some are ambushed as they return from washing themselves or in their flimsy tents in the middle of the night, others are confronted by two or three attackers at a time. Local and international aid groups have reported a sharp increase in rape and sexual assault against Haitian women still living in makeshift camps sprawled across the capital following the earthquake in January.
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But the Haitian government and international aid community are failing to tackle rising incidences of sexual violence in a country where, even before the disaster, sexual abuse was pervasive, rights activists say. "Women are scared and they live in fear. Women told us how their tents were ripped open with knives and that they were also attacked on the way to or from the bathroom," said Lisa Davis, human rights advocacy director at women's rights group MADRE. Last month, MADRE released a report that said rapes in the camps were dramatically under-reported, and that the Haitian government and international community "have not effectively deployed their resources to provide adequate protection".
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"Though official statistics are lacking, there is overwhelming evidence that the problem of gender-based violence, especially the rape of women and girls, has dramatically escalated in Haiti since the earthquake," the joint report said. "Our bodies are still trembling: Haitian women's fight against rape" was compiled with the TransAfrica Forum rights group, the Universities of Minnesota and Virginia law schools and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH).
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The medical charity, Doctors without Borders, treated 212 patients for sexual violence during the five months following the earthquake while Kofaviv, a Haitian grassroots women's group, reported 230 rapes in 15 of the capital's camps in the first two months after the disaster. But the real figure is thought to be much higher, campaigners say, because many victims are too afraid of the stigma to tell the authorities about their attacks. Few women have faith in the police to hunt down perpetrators.
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Many women report being raped by two or more men, almost always armed and at night. Rights groups point to poor or non-existent lighting, overcrowding, few separate washing areas for women, and little police presence as the reasons behind the rising levels of sexual violence in the capital's estimated 500 camps. "Some camps have 5,000 people living in tents on top of each other and women sometimes have to live with strangers in the same tent," Davis said.
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In June, around 100 Bangladeshi policewomen arrived in the Caribbean nation -- as part of the United Nations peacekeeping force stationed in Haiti, known as MINUSTAH -- to help with community policing and deal with sexual violence in several of the biggest camps. But such initiatives are not enough, say rights groups that are urging the Haitian government to train more police to deal with sexual violence, increase the number of female officers in its police force, and investigate crimes.
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At night, it is rare to find local and or MINUSTAH police patrolling inside the camps, activists say. "By the middle of February, MINUSTAH had stopped patrolling at night. The local police have told us that they have felt afraid to go into the camps at night," said Davis, who recently returned from a trip to Haiti. For many rape survivors, local grassroots organisations provide one of the few sources of solace available in the camps. Local women's group Kofaviv provides counselling and organises escorts for women going to the bathroom. They and other aid agencies have distributed whistles, flashlights and more than 100,000 solar lanterns in some of the largest camps to improve security.
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Some camps have organised their own informal security patrols, involving groups of around seven volunteers working on 12-hour shifts. The Haitian government, which is struggling to rebuild and provide safe shelter to over one million homeless Haitians still living in tents and tarps, is both unwilling and unable to respond, rights groups say.
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"It's a combination of the lack of political will to address the issue and the lack of government capacity, including funds and resources, to deal with the problem," said Davis. She said the national emergency crime number was not working properly and the national rape hotline has yet to be set up. Ingrained social attitudes about sexual violence in Haiti have made tackling the problem only more difficult. Some Haitians believe that sexual violence occurs because women are promiscuous. Rape was criminalised only in 2005. "These stereotypes are ridiculous," said Davis. "We ran into one local government official who believes this. It's infuriating and ties back to Haiti's blame women culture."

New York Times
By Ginger Thompson
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Beechestore and Rosecarline, two Haitian teenagers in the throes of puberty, were not supposed to be adopted. At the end of last year, American authorities denied the petition of a couple here to adopt the brother and sister after their biological father opposed relinquishing custody. Reluctantly, Marc and Teresa Stroot decided to move on.
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Then on Jan. 12, a devastating earthquake toppled Haiti’s capital and set off an international adoption bonanza in which some safeguards meant to protect children were ignored. Leading the way was the Obama administration, which responded to the pleas of prospective adoptive parents and the lawmakers assisting them by lifting visa requirements for children in the process of being adopted by Americans.
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Although initially planned as a short-term, small-scale evacuation, the rescue effort quickly evolved into a baby lift unlike anything since the Vietnam War. It went on for months; fell briefly under the cloud of scandal involving 10 Baptist missionaries who improperly took custody of 33 children; ignited tensions between the United States and child protection organizations; and swept up about 1,150 Haitian children, more than were adopted by American families in the previous three years, according to interviews with government officials, adoption agencies and child advocacy groups.
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Among the first to get out of Haiti were Beechestore and Rosecarline. “It’s definitely a miracle,” Teresa Stroot said of their arrival here, “because this wasn’t going to happen.” Under a sparingly used immigration program, called humanitarian parole, adoptions were expedited regardless of whether children were in peril, and without the screening required to make sure they had not been improperly separated from relatives or placed in homes that could not adequately care for them.
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Some Haitian orphanages were nearly emptied, even though they had not been affected by the quake or licensed to handle adoptions. Children were released without legal documents showing they were orphans and without regard for evidence suggesting fraud. The results are playing out across the country. At least 12 children, brought here without being formally matched with new families, have spent months in a Pennsylvania juvenile care center while Red Cross officials try to determine their fate.
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An unknown number of children whose prospective parents have backed out of their adoptions are in foster care. Administration officials defended the humanitarian parole program, saying it had strict limits and several levels of scrutiny, including reviews of adoption petitions by the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security in Washington and Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital. But they also acknowledged that the administration’s priority was getting children out of harm’s way, not the safeguards the United States is obligated to enforce under international law.
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Matt Chandler, a spokesman at the Department of Homeland Security, said the evacuations were done in the best interests of children who faced “an uncertain and likely dangerous situation that could worsen by the day, if not by the hour.” There is no evidence to suggest that the evacuations were driven by anything other than the best of intentions. And with untold numbers of unaccompanied children in Haiti, the hemisphere’s poorest country, left fending for themselves or languishing in institutions, it is not hard to make the case that those who were evacuated are better off than they would have been in the hemisphere’s poorest country.
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Concerns about child trafficking led China, after its 2008 earthquake, and Indonesia, after the 2004 tsunami, to suspend all international adoptions, despite intense pressure by pro-adoption groups in the United States, according to Chuck Johnson at the National Council for Adoption. After January’s quake, Haiti, though, was hardly able to stand on its own feet, much less push back, Haitian officials acknowledged. Orphanage directors with political connections in Washington said they saw an opportunity to turn the tragedy into a miracle. Some issued urgent pleas, saying that the children in their care had had been left without shelter, and that the orphanages’ limited stocks of food and water made them prime targets for looting.
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In the United States, adoptive parents contacted anyone they knew who might have money, private planes and political connections to help them get children out of Haiti. Evangelical Christian churches, which have increasingly taken up orphan care as a tenet of their faith, were also mobilized. Before long, legislators and administration officials were getting calls from constituents.
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Over the next several weeks, orphanages big and small were nearly emptied, whether or not they had been affected by the earthquake. The staff at Children of the Promise, about 90 miles from Haiti’s capital, barely felt the temblor. But 39 of the 50 children there were approved for humanitarian parole, even though none of them had been affected by the disaster and the orphanage had not yet received the proper license to place children.
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Rosemika, 2; Alex, 1; and Roselinda, 1, offer a look at the typical humanitarian parole case. Rosemika’s mother died before the quake. The other two children were given up for adoption because their parents could not provide for them. Jenny and Jamie Groen, a missionary couple from Minnesota who were volunteering at the orphanage, had fallen in love with the children and decided to adopt them. Under normal circumstances the couple would have had to get special permission from Haiti’s president to adopt because they are both 28, and the government requires at least one of the prospective parents to be older than 35. But after the quake, Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive summarily signed off on their adoption — as he did with all humanitarian parole petitions submitted to him by the U.S. — without checking the Groens’ qualifications.

7/30/2010
UN News Center
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Actress Nicole Kidman, wrapping up a visit to Haiti today in her role as United Nations Goodwill Ambassador, stressed the need to tackle gender-based violence and support initiatives that advance women’s livelihoods as the country rebuilds after the January earthquake. Accompanied by Inés Alberdi, Executive Director of the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), Ms. Kidman visited with people affected by the disaster, which killed more than 200,000 people and caused severe destruction and damage in large swathes of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and other areas.
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They met survivors of violence living in a temporary camp, Haitian and UN officials, and with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working to support women’s needs as part of the recovery efforts. The lack of shelter and security makes them more vulnerable to violence, in particular sexual violence, “During this trip I saw first-hand how this humanitarian disaster is impacting women and girls. The lack of shelter and security makes them more vulnerable to violence, in particular sexual violence,” said Ms. Kidman.
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“Yet, I have also seen the determination and resilience of women and men in Haiti to rebuild their country,” she added. According to UNIFEM, violence against women and girls was pervasive in Haiti even before the earthquake struck, with a 2006 census showing that one in three women had experienced violence. Ms. Kidman and Ms. Alberdi visited a temporary shelter for women and girls who experienced sexual violence or are at risk, where women leaders work to make sure there are medical and legal services as well as counselling and livelihood training. “The women of Haiti are working hard to rebuild every aspect of their life, but they need adequate and sustained support for their safety and security,” said Ms. Alberdi.
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“There is also a critical need to address the longer-term development needs of women, such as income opportunities, and the restoration of schools for their children. Both as a matter of right and as smart development and security policy, women must be centrally included in the planning of post-disaster relief and recovery,” she added. UNIFEM provides financial and technical assistance to foster women’s empowerment and gender equality. It is a part of the recently established UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, to be known as UN Women.

Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH); MADRE (Madre)
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More than six months after Port-au-Prince was leveled by the January 12 earthquake, hundreds of thousands of displaced women and girls live in fear of rape in tent cities that lack lighting, privacy and security. Today, the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) along with partners MADRE, TransAfrica Forum, and the law schools of the University of Minnesota and the University of Virginia released "Our Bodies are Still Trembling: Haitian Women's Fight Against Rape," the first report of its kind to focus exclusively on the crisis of violence against Haitian women and girls that has emerged in the aftermath of the earthquake. The report is the product of a fact-finding delegation to Haiti in May coordinated by IJDH's Lawyers' Earthquake Response Network (LERN).
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Blaine Bookey, Esq., staff attorney with IJDH and coordinator of the LERN delegation on rape and gender-based violence, returned to Haiti this week to continue advocacy efforts for Haitian women's right to live free from violence. Bookey is working in close collaboration with women's grassroots groups, and continues to conduct fact-finding interviews and gather evidence in preparation for filing litigation on behalf of assault victims. She said today, "The findings presented in this report illustrate the crisis of rapes in the camps and the failure of the government of Haiti, the United Nations, and others in the international community to adequately address the problem. The report aims to help these groups implement a more effective response so that these crimes against women will not go unpunished."
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The report released today contains the most detailed and up-to-date information available on the issue of gender-based violence in Haiti, and concrete recommendations for an improved response to the crisis. It tracks the high incidence and prevalence of rape in the camps, the lack of an adequate government or international response, and the courageous work done by grassroots women's groups to address these threats. The findings from this report will be presented to to Haitian government officials, the United Nations and other humanitarian actors, and to donor states including members of U.S. Congress.
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Lisa Davis, Human Rights Advocacy Director at IJDH's partner organization MADRE, said today, "Our partners in Haiti have been tirelessly working, not only to provide urgent care for women who have been raped in the camps, but to forcefully demand that addressing this threat be a priority in disaster response policies. Together, our international human rights advocacy has kept this issue from being swept away and ignored."
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For additional information on IJDH's work to support Haitian women in their efforts to prevent rape, please visit the Rape Accountability and Prevention Project website.
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The Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) fights for human rights and justice in Haiti and for fair treatment of Haitians in the U.S.
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MADRE works to advance women's human rights by meeting immediate needs and building lasting solutions for communities in crisis.

7/23/2010
United Nations News Service
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United Nations Police (UNPOL) serving in Haiti have arrested two men who had escaped from jail and are suspected of being responsible for several subsequent rapes in camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) set up after the massive earthquake that struck the country at the start of the year. The arrests were carried out late Wednesday night in the capital, Port-au-Prince, in a joint operation involving UNPOL's operations office, its tactical intervention group and the Haitian National Police (HNP). Jean Batiste William, also known as Ti Blanc, was arrested in the St. Bernadette camp, after camp residents called an emergency police number to report his presence in the camp.
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Mr. William, who has been tried and convicted of rape, is suspected of being involved in several other rapes in the IDP camps since he escaped from jail. In the second operation, another fugitive was arrested after his apartment in the Croix Deprez district was searched by police. That suspect is accused of several cases of rape. The UN peacekeeping operation in Haiti, known as MINUSTAH, said in a press statement that its police would continue to support the HNP in operations such as those carried out this week as part of efforts to boost security and stability in the impoverished Caribbean country.
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André Leclerc, a communications officer for UNPOL, urged Haitians to keep calling the public emergency number to allow police to locate and arrest criminals. "The acts of rape are unacceptable and cruel," he said. "Thanks to the joint efforts of the police and the public, we can reduce the number of these sexual crimes." Many inmates escaped from prison in the wake of the catastrophic earthquake on 12 January, which killed more than 200,000 people and levelled large swathes of Port-au-Prince.

6/12/2010
UNFPA
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Six months after the 7.0 earthquake that killed more than 200,000 Haitians, an estimated 1.5 million people are still living in temporary camps. Their reproductive health needs, including maternal and neonatal health, are now being met by a range of mobile and temporary clinics in addition to those offered by the city's hospitals that survived the quake. Life in the temporary camps poses a number of health challenges, especially for women and girls. Living in tight, often insecure quarters with minimal access to sanitation can expose women and girls to sexual violence and other dangers.
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Over the past months, UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, has provided maternal health supplies, including birthing kits to serve a population of 2 million people, as well as 22,000 hygiene kits aimed at the female population living in temporary camps, along with nearly 1,000 tents, 2000 mattresses and 17,000 solar lamps. UNFPA is also supporting the Haitian Ministry of Public Health and Population in carrying out a temporary, national health plan developed after the earthquake. The plan includes:
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- Improving the availability of information concerning the reproductive health of displaced persons by gathering information in 130 temporary camps and 250 health centres located near camps in Port-au-Prince.
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- Reviving the National School of Nurses and Midwives by reestablishing midwife training programmes.
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- Working with UNICEF to set up ten clinics to provide skilled reproductive health services especially geared towards basic newborn emergency care.
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- Supporting the Haitian Association of Obstetricians-Gynecologists in establishing a referral service for maternal and neonatal health services.
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- Working jointly with Haitian authorities, UNICEF and the World Health Organization on reducing maternal mortality by strengthening the quality of reproductive health services in a number of hospitals and clinics.
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- Distributing 7 million condoms among the displaced population in order to prevent the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.
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UNFPA is also working with the Ministry of Women's Affairs to promote and protect women's rights in Haiti. This support includes care and counselling for victims of sexual violence, as well as the provision of hospital referrals and reproductive health supplies for victims of violence. The Fund is working with the Haitian National Police to prevent violence against women and to provide legal and psychological support to victims.
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In the weeks immediately following the disaster, UNFPA was instrumental in carrying out – jointly with the Haitian Institute of Statistics and Data Processing (IHSI) and partner UN Agencies - a rapid needs assessment, which used support data from a previous census and recruited university students who had worked with UNFPA during similar exercises in the past. The results helped determine medium and long-term development needs.
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UNFPA has also paid special attention to the needs of young people by helping organize leisure activities for a total of 30,000 11- to 16-year olds living in camps, as well as an educational programme on HIV prevention and family planning methods which aims to reach 35,000 young people this year. The Fund also mobilized young people to assemble tents, hygiene, health and reproductive supplies.
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"The reproductive health needs of the population are often forgotten in the aftermath of a disaster," said UNFPA Representative in Haiti, Igor Bosc. "Our job now is to assist Haiti in rebuilding its health sector so that it can provide better reproductive health services and social protection than ever before."
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For more information, please contact:

In Port-au-Prince: Vario Serant: serant@unfpa.org, +509 37014872
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In New York: Omar Gharzeddine, gharzeddine@unfpa.org,
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In Panama City: Trygve Olfarnes, olfarnes@unfpa.org, tel: +507 6400-6653

7/11/2010
BBC News
By Raphael Rowe
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Six months after a devastating earthquake hit Haiti, authorities are still struggling to cope with thousands of children orphaned or abandoned by their parents. Since the quake, about 500 orphanages and a small army of volunteers have worked to accommodate the children, and reunite some of them with relatives.
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There was a global outcry when a group of US missionaries was accused of trying to smuggle 33 Haitian children out of the country after the quake. The missionaries said the children were orphans - but it later emerged that at least some of the children had parents. That story pointed to a much bigger issue. A recent trip to investigate the plight of Haiti's children revealed that many have fallen through the vast net of aid agencies.
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Despite millions of dollars being donated and aid being flown in to help ease the crisis, many children have ended up living rough on the streets. Michael Brewer is a paediatric nurse who has been working with what he describes as Haiti's "phantom" street children for 12 years. "The kids I work with are the most vulnerable of the vulnerable," he said. "The children on the streets are six to 10 years old and they have no-one, no family.
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"They are totally responsible for their own survival in every way and they are completely out of the system. They are like phantoms." These youngsters depend on the kindness of strangers and are vulnerable to traffickers who might take them across the border to the neighbouring Dominican Republic. Those children are the ones that are going to rebuild Haiti, to be responsible for the Haiti of tomorrow. I cannot just decide that everybody has to flee the country Despite efforts to reunite displaced children with their parents, of the 2,000 who have been registered with Unicef since the earthquake hit, fewer than 300 have been reunited with a parent or relative.
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Until Haiti is ready to take on the care of its orphaned and abandoned children, some believe they should be allowed to go to families abroad. John Leininger, a volunteer at the Haiti Children's Rescue Mission, looks for Christian families in the US willing to adopt. He defended the push by foreign aid organisations to move children out of the country to new lives abroad and said he believed Haiti was decades away from being strong enough to care for its own children. "Until that happens you cannot put children in harm's way by putting them into situations where they have no healthcare, no food," he said. "How can you do that when there are parents in the United States and other countries begging to take them home and care for them."
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Fast-track international adoptive policies agreed between governments had allowed more than 5,000 children who were already in the adoptive process to be taken overseas. But this arrangement has now stopped. Haiti Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told the BBC that the government is not yet able to provide for all unprotected children. But he believes adoption should be done in a "proper way" by following the appropriate legal procedures.
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"Those children are the ones that are going to rebuild Haiti, to be responsible for the Haiti of tomorrow. I cannot just decide that everybody has to flee the country," he said. But some families have become so desperately poor and unable to feed or care for their offspring that they are putting them up for adoption or, in some cases, giving them away to strangers. We met the father of four-month-old twin daughters who lost his wife in the quake and was driven by desperation to give his children to a stranger he met in a tent camp.
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He pretended the babies' family had been killed in the earthquake because he thought they would receive more support as orphans. "I have no choice. I cannot take care of them," he said of this decision. "At the moment I am not in a stable position because their mother is dead and I have six children to take care of." One of the aid agencies traced his story and reunited him with his daughters, who will remain with the Haitian family that took them in after the disaster. But some parents are no so fortunate.
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Six-year-old Judson is one of 40 children waiting to be adopted at Haiti Children's Rescue Mission after his mother gave him up voluntarily because she too could not afford to keep him. She said she wants her son to have a better quality of life with a family overseas. The father of twin girls pretended to be dead so they were better looked after
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"I can't send him to school. I was brought up by parents who couldn't afford to look after me. They never sent me to school. I can't even read or write. I don't want my children to end up like this," she said. Preacher Lelly Laurentus and his wife Manette also gave away their only children, six-year-old Leilla and four-year-old Soraya, in the hope they would find better lives abroad. Their girls were among the 33 children that American missionaries tried to take out of the country after the quake. They were stopped and the missionaries temporarily detained while authorities tried to figure out who the children were and where they were being taken.
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The incident caused a media storm amid accusations of child trafficking. The Laurentus's daughters were eventually returned home. But their mother, Manette, defended her decision and the missionaries' bid to leave Haiti with the girls. She said she was doing the best she could by her children. "I don't regret it because if they had succeeded in what they were trying to do, it would have been a good thing for us. From a mother's point of view, you owe these things to your child," she said.

7/6/2010
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Office of the Spokesman
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Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, who directs the Department of State’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, will travel to Haiti and the Dominican Republic July 7-9, 2010. The Ambassador will discuss opportunities for increased partnership in the global effort to combat modern slavery with government officials, law enforcement, and civil society. In addition, Ambassador CdeBaca will visit an internally displaced persons settlement and an orphanage. Ambassador CdeBaca was appointed by President Obama to direct the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons at the Department of State, where he serves as a Senior Advisor to Secretary Clinton and leads the United States’ global fight against contemporary forms of slavery. The Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons develops and implements the State Department’s policy for the protection of trafficking victims, prosecution of traffickers, and prevention of trafficking.

By DEBORAH SONTAG
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More than five months after the earthquake that killed her single mother, Daphne Joseph, 14, lost her bearings a second time when she was forced to leave the makeshift orphanage where she had felt at home. Immediately after the earthquake, she watched with horror as her mother’s mangled body was carted away in a wheelbarrow from a shattered marketplace. Dropped at the doorstep of a community aid group, she contemplated suicide.
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Yet within a couple of months, displaying a resilience that many in this shattered country exhibited, Daphne righted herself. She found an improvised family in a ragtag group of fellow earthquake orphans and the adults who nurtured them. Skipping cheerily to greet a visitor in March, she announced, “I’m so much better!” In mid-June, however, Daphne was claimed by a relative who is not really a relative — the 23-year-old common-law wife of her half brother’s father — and moved into a squalid tent city. It made her feel unmoored once again. Where did she belong? she wondered.
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What made her questioning especially poignant was that the makeshift, open-air orphanage where she longs to return is an unsteady anchor. The community aid group that runs the place — which is little more than a pair of tents — is caring, but lacks expertise and resources. And neither the Haitian government nor international organizations here have helped it in a lasting way. Like Daphne, the orphanage faces an uncertain future, with an eviction looming.
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“We don’t really know what to do next,” said the Rev. Gerald Bataille, the primary supervisor of the children. “Somehow, the whole world wants to help Haiti, but we feel like we’re on our own.” The lives of Daphne and 14 younger children hang in the balance, although conditions at the makeshift orphanage are far from ideal. On a recent Sunday, the newest arrivals, 11-month-old twin girls named Magda and Magdaline Charles, lay limp and entwined on a urine-soaked rug under a mango tree. They were covered with flies.
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“They arrived naked and dehydrated,” Pastor Bataille said. “Their mother said, ‘If you leave them with me, they’re going to die.’ So although we’re not equipped for babies, we took them.” Pastor Bataille’s organization, known by the acronym Frades, is a grass-roots collective that specializes in microloans. Although it was not a child-care organization before the earthquake, it assumed responsibility for local children who were orphaned or abandoned afterward, about 26 of them at first.
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With the help of the mayor’s office, Frades board members found a place to keep the children: an idle construction site where a foundation had been laid for a nightclub that never materialized. Save the Children provided two large tents, but nothing to furnish them. A Frades board member, through a personal connection, got a two-month supply of water and basic food from Ceci, a Canadian group. Readers of a January article in The New York Times about Daphne and the other children contributed about $1,000 in cash and Medika Mamba, a nutritionally fortified peanut butter, and they formed a support group.
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But Frades needed more: mattresses, latrines, showers, medical care, money to pay cooks and counselors and a continuing water and food supply. And even with so many international aid groups in the country, sustained help was hard to find. Frades board members said they had visited the United Nations logistics base and asked Unicef for beds. They were directed to a supply request form on the Internet, which they filled out. They never received a response, they said. (Contacted by The Times, a spokeswoman for Unicef suggested that they try again, and offered contact information.)
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Next, they sought further aid from Save the Children. In February, they submitted an application for a project they called “For Children to Reclaim Life in Croix-des-Bouquets.” They supplied three versions of a budget, they said, met with Save the Children administrators and followed up with phone calls in which they were passed from one person to another. Finally, this month, a Save the Children administrator sent an e-mail message, which began “I regret to inform you ...” The letter concluded, “According to our current standards and operational criteria, we can’t unfortunately validate Frades’s proposal, as it doesn’t match with the objectives of our internal strategy nor with our areas of intervention.”
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Kate Conradt, a spokeswoman for Save the Children, said the note meant that her group did not serve the Croix-des-Bouquets area; World Vision does. Why nobody told Frades this sooner is unclear. But as a result, the children at Frades were not registered in the program that was supposed to evaluate each stranded child’s situation, assign the child a government caseworker and either arrange interim care or link the caregiver to support.
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The Miami-based landlord of the site is seeking to evict the group, having found a paying tenant — a Christian school — that does not want to share the space. The tents provided by Save the Children, swelteringly hot inside, are still unfurnished but for a few school desks. The children sleep on thin scraps of carpet laid over sandy concrete.
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And their universe of caregivers has shrunk as the organization has run low on money. Mostly, the children, with their runny noses, distended bellies and homemade kites, take care of one another. Thirteen-year-old Michaelle Point du Jour, who lost both parents in the earthquake, cooks for and feeds the younger children. She prepares rice and beans and, while many of the children appear healthier now than a couple of months ago, most if not all are malnourished and have chronic intestinal parasitic infections, said Dr. Patricia Back, a Cincinnati-based family doctor who visited them recently.
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Michaelle is the oldest since Daphne left. Pastor Bataille said that Daphne’s half brother’s stepmother, Manouchca Deravine, came to take Daphne away when he was out. He said he could not go reclaim her because Frades had no right — even if Ms. Deravine had no legal claim to her, either. He has to tread lightly in the community, he said, where some displaced people are suspicious that Frades is using the children to get more assistance than everyone else.
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Pastor Bataille said he did not know where Daphne had gone. But one of the other children and Chantal Dumas, a former school secretary who has been serving as a teacher at Frades, helped visitors track her down. It turns out that Daphne now lives in the tent city directly behind the wall of the Frades construction site. She shares a small camping tent with five others. Daphne sat in her visitors’ car, looking down at her lap at first, with ear buds from a banged-up MP3 player in her ears. “It’s O.K.,” she said about her new living arrangement. When asked if she thought about her mother, she grew animated.
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Right after the earthquake, Daphne had described her mother’s spirit as a wind at her back, pushing her forward. Now, she said, she is plagued by dreams in which her mother tries to smother her with a white towel. Her mother’s spirit haunts her. “She’s a zombie,” Daphne said. She was speaking a few days after she had left Frades, and she said Ms. Deravine was treating her fine. But soon, Daphne said, the woman would probably start mistreating her, as she had in the past. Ms. Dumas, her confidante, said that Daphne feared she would be used as a restavek — a child servant.
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“I lived at Frades since January, and nobody ever talked to me badly there,” she said plaintively, her head leaning on Ms. Dumas’s shoulder. In a brief interview, Ms. Deravine complained that Frades had not sent Daphne to school. She is not, either. When Daphne’s visitors were leaving, she clung to the side of their car. “You’re not going to leave me here, are you?” she whispered anxiously. “Please, take me with you. Please.”

7/6/2010
AFP
By Clarens Renois
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The inmates at Haiti's only women's prison cry out in desperation as warden Marie-Yolaine Mathieu makes her rounds, hoping that she will hear their case and perhaps, help secure their release. "Director, director, I need to speak to you," calls out one woman with matted hair and a blemished face, whose days of incarceration without a conviction turned first into weeks and now months.
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Like so many others, the woman make a futile plea for Mathieu's intervention. "I've been in this prison for six months. I have a 10-year old child who has not been cared for since my mother died during the earthquake," she cried. "I can't take it any more," she screams, beside herself with despair.
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This impoverished Caribbean country's broken judicial system has failed its citizens at every turn. But it has been especially delinquent in prosecuting those who face criminal charges but have never been convicted of crimes. Haiti's main in prison in Port-au-Prince was virtually destroyed by the 7.0-magnitude quake on January 12, and almost all of its estimated 4,000 male prisoners escaped.
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But the women's institution -- condemned years ago by UN officials as "cruel and inhumane" -- still holds its unhappy occupants. Built for around 30 inmates, it houses 300. The prison director said however said she feels for the women, but that she is powerless to improve their plight. "They keep arresting the women and sending them to us," Mathieu said, "and the criminal justice system does not free them. What is one to do?"

The problem is not unique to this facility. The United Nations Mission in Haiti frequently has voiced concern over the years about overcrowding in the country's prisons, where the majority of inmates have not been convicted and are being held in preventive detention. Even before January's massive quake that killed as many as 300,000 people and reduced much of the capital region to rubble, only about one prison detainee in ten had actually been convicted of a crime.
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Like other Haitian prisons, the women's facility in Petionville on the outskirts of the capital makes a practice of keeping inmates in preventive detention, sometimes for years. Even the country's chief prosecutor, Auguste Aristidas, decried the conditions as a "gross injustice that is being carried out against Haitian women." The situation has become only more chaotic since the quake.
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"There is a lot of disorder in the system. Some files are cannot be found, which prevents us from prosecuting their cases," Aristidas said. The human rights section of the UN mission for years has urged the creation of special commissions to study individual cases as a way to ease overcrowding at the country's prisons. None of the proposed reforms ever got off the ground however, and the desperate women here continue to languish while waiting for justice. One woman, about 60 years old, diabetic and suffering from high blood pressure, has been waiting for three years to be charged.
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A 39-year old inmate, who was eight months pregnant when she was imprisoned, lost her baby because of the deplorable prison conditions. Three others were forced to give birth in a tiny ill-equipped prison infirmary. Even the youngest inmates are incarcerated for years at a time, often for minor infractions. A case in point is Sherline, who was locked up when she was 16, and today is 21. "In 2005, I had problems with my brother, who felt that I was coming home too late at night," she recounted.
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"He drove me to a police station, to teach me a lesson. I've been locked up here ever since," she said. Another inmate, Myrline, 19, was arrested for stealing five years ago but has never been seen by a judge. "The minors sometimes wind up here for minor crimes punishable by three to six months in prison, but they sometimes languish five or six years behind bars," Mathieu said. "It breaks my heart to see these children spending the best years of their lives in prison."

Miami Herald
By Jacqueline Charles
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http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/07/04/1714882/out-of-the-ruins-a-new-rol...
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Cendra Guillaume walks into the dusty depot of manly machines, passes fellow female workers, and steps into the front office with a familiar look of determination. Not one to sit around and wait, the wife, mother and heavy equipment operator gets right to the point: ``Where to today?''
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In the months since the Haiti earthquake claimed an estimated 300,000 lives, women like Guillaume have been on the front lines of paving the way for this broken nation's reconstruction. Theirs are the anonymous hands that steered the dead to unmarked graves in black and white government dump trucks, tunneled through the rubble for foreign rescue teams and cleared debris from hundreds of blocked roads. In the process, they are challenging the notion of a woman's traditional role in this machismo society, and restoring what many thought they had lost in the rubble: faith in the future.
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``It's a beautiful thing,'' said Guérino Noël, 44, a father of two daughters who ekes out a living scavenging ruins for copper wire, as he watched Guillaume deftly maneuver her giant yellow excavator. ``As a Haitian male, I was personally offended the first time I saw a woman driving one of those trucks,'' he said. ``But when you are living in such a deplorable situation, where even eating is difficult, and you see a woman sitting behind the wheels of one of those trucks, it means
something in the country is still working.''
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Guillaume works for Centre National des Equipments or CNE, the government's road-building outfit. Formed in 1997, it has deliberately filled its employee ranks with women. They serve in every capacity from dump truck driver to loader to excavator operator to trainer. ``I was first concerned about my equipment,'' said Jude Célestin, CNE founder and executive director. ``We always had a problem with drivers stealing fuel, stealing parts from the trucks. It's a fact that we have this problem in Haiti. With women, it's different.
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``When I give a woman a piece of equipment, I am sure she's going to take care of her family; she will take care of her children,'' he said. ``Women have something else inside them that they don't even realize is there: a need to prove to themselves that they can do the same thing as a man.'' Before the catastrophic quake hit Jan. 12, most of CNE's employees had been working in the outskirts of the capital, building roads as part of President René Préval's effort to transform the lives of farmers.
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Within hours of the disaster, amid the death and chaos, 85 trainees -- 65 of them women -- arrived on foot from the nearby Cité Soleil slum. They immediately climbed into the cockpits and began to clear major roads and downtown of debris. ``They are leading the demolition of the ruined structures and because they are personally living it, they know better than anyone what the reconstruction can be,'' Célestin said. Guillaume had just stepped out of a brightly-colored Tap Tap truck in the city of Carrefour when the ground buckled. Buildings toppled and a mother's adrenaline kicked in as she ran home to her 7-year-old son, Olivier.
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Over the next 24 hours, her husband, a police officer, would try to dissuade her from leaving. She stayed until this radio announcement: All CNE technicians and operators must report to work immediately. ``I said, `No, I cannot stay at home. If I don't go, it's like a doctor who has a lot of sick patients and he's refusing to treat them,' '' she said. ``My first thought, `What if there are people still alive underneath the rubble?' '' She arrived at the worksite less than 48 hours after the hemisphere's worst natural disaster and immediately went to work.
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The evening before, Haitian officials had attempted to document their dead by snapping photos as CNE trucks loaded bodies. The four judges they rustled up to perform the grisly duty barely lasted three hours.
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``They were in shock, traumatized by what they saw,'' Célestin said of the judges who, unable to handle the magnitude of the unfolding disaster, dropped their cameras and ran. Guillaume and the other women sometimes felt like doing the same. ``There were days where I just cried and cried,'' said Guillaume, 39, who was assigned to one toppled building after another. But every morning, she would awaken in her modest home with the washing machine and unfinished second floor, kiss Olivier goodbye, and armor up her
courage before heading out.
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``Even when they said there were no more survivors, I would continue to go,'' she said. ``Even if there were no survivors, there are people who would like to claim the bodies of their loved ones.'' Like the husband of one woman pinned underneath a beam in the rubble of the toppled ministry of foreign affairs. ``I would like to retrieve my wife's body. Can you help?'' Guillaume recalled the man's desperate plea. The smell of death was choking the city. It was 22 days after the quake. She grabbed the controls and moved the excavator's bucket over the rubble.
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``There's her hand,'' the husband yelled, begging her to look. ``I can't,'' Guillaume responded, tears flowing. His pleas grew more desperate. After regaining her composure, Guillaume returned to the controls and lifted the beam. The body was severed in two. ``When they were putting her in the bag, I took off,'' she said. But just like her female colleagues who cried inconsolably one day and lifted the dead with their bare hands the next, Guillaume pressed on.
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``I am lucky enough not to have lost anyone dear to my heart,'' she said. ``I always said, `If God has saved my own, then it's my duty to go and help others.' '' Women have long been the backbone of Haiti's informal economy but lacked real power in this conservative society. Their schooling was often sacrificed for that of their brothers. It's a promiscuous culture where marriage is revered but rare, and where men often support more than one household. Most of CNE's females find their average $312 monthly salary, plus as much as $150 a month in per diem, exceeding their partner's, and Célestin's first warning to all new recruits is that CNE will test their relationships and marriages.
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``I tell them, `All of you will leave your husbands,' '' he said. ``The men develop a complex because the women now have money in their hands.'' Danièle Magloire, a Haitian sociologist and women's rights activist, said women ``are made to feel they have to have a man next to them to validate them.'' Her research has found that Haitian women are highly vulnerable to rape, and sexual harassment in the workplace and that at home they are often battered because they have not ``obeyed'' their mate.
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Magloire said CNE, with its majority female staffing, is a trailblazer and that other companies and institutions need to follow. It has shown that skilled jobs, which Haiti desperately needs, are key to financially empowering women. ``We are not going to develop women in this country through selling foods, and washing clothes,'' she said. ``All you are doing is promoting more misery. We need to teach women skills.'' Guillaume's skills with the heavy equipment have provided her family with a comfortable lifestyle in a country where 80 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day. There was a housekeeper, refrigerator and laptop for her son.
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``I have several games on this,'' Olivier said as his mom looked over his shoulder one Saturday, while watching Tom and Jerry in French on his laptop. But the job carries enormous sacrifice because the women are forced to spend months away in the countryside. ``When we are on the equipment we function as a team as brothers and sisters,'' said Guillaume, a 10-year CNE employee. ``The men agree to have women alongside them and they acknowledge that we are there. But it is not always harmonious. She said Haitian men ``like to belittle women. They like to diminish your importance. For them, a woman is an object. You will see some who prefer to criticize women rather than to compliment them.
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``But whenever I climbed into the cockpit of the machine, I always say to myself, `I want to prove that whatever a man can do, I can do.' And at times, I can even do it better.'' Still, it's not easy being a working wife in Haiti. Célestin's assertions about the toll of the job on marriages hit home last week when Guillaume's husband of seven years cleaned out their joint bank accounts following a violent fight over money, she said. He kicked her out of the house without her son, and she's temporarily seeking refuge at a friend's home. Célestin has offered a transfer to a new job away from the turmoil, but daily migraines and depression have, for the moment, kept Guillaume from accepting. In the ultimate irony, she's unable to perform the job that has for so
long defined her.

6/28/2010
Fox News
By Hollie McKay
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Throughout her incredibly successful career, Angelina Jolie has taken on a wealth of different roles. But, one thing that seems to never change is her world-renowned status as a champion for human rights, with a particular focus on protecting children in Third World countries. Jolie returned to the SOS Village in Santo, Haiti, outside of Port-au-Prince last weekend to evaluate the progress made since her last trip more than six months ago, shortly after the Caribbean country was struck by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake.
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“One of Angelina’s highest priorities is protecting children without family; she was there to meet with Haitian officials to try and figure out solutions,” said Heather Paul, CEO of SOS Children’s Villages, an organization that provides housing and long-term care for orphaned or abandoned children in 132 countries worldwide. Both Jolie and her partner, Brad Pitt, have been longtime supporters of SOS, and, in the past, the 35-year-old star has visited an SOS Emergency Relief Program in Chad, an SOS Children’s Village in Ethiopia, and together the couple also sojourned to the SOS Village in Amman, Jordan.
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And no surprises here – Jolie, who even brought toys to the children on her recent visit, creates quite a commotion whenever she comes to town. “The children are out of their minds. They love her, she’s very hands on and spends time with them and that means a great deal,” Paul said. “Haiti is a hard place right now, our villages are overcrowded. We have 500 children instead of 200 children who are without parental care with us at the moment. We have 800 children in our school in the SOS village, so there are a lot of challenges. But just to have Angelina there recognizing these challenges really brings everybody up. It’s a wonderful thing.”
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On the subject of schooling, another critical component of Jolie’s mission in Haiti is to ensure that as many young ones as possible find a place in the public education system. “I’m sure Angelina was aware of how crowded conditions were, but she had to be inspired by the fact that we have so many children in school, and we are negotiating with the Haitian government now to have them construct more schools,” Paul told us. “I can imagine that Angelina would believe that public education for children in a country like Haiti is absolutely essential to the nation’s future.”
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Jolie’s visit also has been beneficial to SOS in creating a resurgence of attention on the natural disaster zone, and reminding people that while six months have passed, the devastation rages on – but ultimately it is in the hands of each individual to decide where they want their charitable dollars to be spent. “It is always a challenge (to keep up awareness), and now we have our domestic tsunami with the BP oil spill, so it's very understandable that America’s interest is split – we have a lot to deal with,” Paul added. “So each American needs to figure out how best to support the efforts they think are most important … But I always say, there are celebrities, then there are celebrities – Angelina does a terrific job in wearing all the different hats.”

By Deborah Sontag
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The 22-year-old woman, wearing a gauzy blue dress that she had changed into after her release, spoke in a whispery voice. Perhaps the worst part of the whole ordeal, she said, was the place where her kidnappers had chosen to imprison her. That they abducted her was terrifying. That they raped her, repeatedly, was too horrendous to absorb just yet.
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But stashing her in the ruins of a home? Making her crawl on her stomach beneath a collapsed slab into a destroyed house where they hid her in a pocket of rubble? That was torture, she said. “Since I had not slept under any roof since the earthquake, I was so scared I could not breathe,” said the woman, Rose, who requested that her full name be withheld.
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Rose’s kidnappers told her brother-in-law, who delivered the ransom of about $2,000, that they would kill her if she talked. She had no intention of doing so. But police investigators showed up at the family house in the Delmas 33 neighborhood shortly after her release, and a reporter from The New York Times happened upon the scene, later accompanying Rose to a women’s health clinic at the family’s request.
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Being present when Rose and her family were grappling with the horror of her ordeal offered a firsthand glimpse inside the vulnerability that many Haitians, and particularly women, feel right now. Sleeping in camps, on the street and in yards, many feel themselves at the mercy not only of the elements but of those who prey on others’ misery. So many cases of rape go unrecorded here that statistics tell only a piece of the story. But existing numbers, from the police or women’s groups, indicate that violence against women has escalated in the months after the Jan. 12 earthquake.
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Kidnappings are rare, but they, too, have increased, and “the threat is constant,” said Antoine Lerbours, a spokesman for the Haitian National Police.
Malya Villard, director of Kofaviv, a grass-roots organization that supports rape victims, said that the presence of thousands of prisoners who escaped during the earthquake aggravated an environment where insecurity and despair feed on each other. “It’s an ideal climate for rape,” she said. Ms. Villard said that Kofaviv’s two dozen case workers, in Port-au-Prince, had counseled 264 victims since the earthquake, triple the number in an equivalent period last year. Arrests for rape are fewer — 169 countrywide through May, but more arrests have been made in the last few months than during the same period last year.
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Since the earthquake, international relief groups have expressed concerns about violence against women, especially in the camps under their watch. Poor or nonexistent lighting, unlockable latrines, adjacent men’s and women’s showers and inadequate police protection have all been problems. Recently, security in eight big camps has improved, with joint Haitian-United Nations police posts or patrols; about 100 Bangladeshi policewomen arrived late last month to deal with gender-based violence at three of them. But there are about 1,200 encampments throughout Haiti, and this city’s battered neighborhoods are largely left to their own defenses, too.
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Rose and her relatives recently moved back to their properties when the owner of the property where they were squatting threatened the tent city residents with eviction. Their homes have been marked with a yellow stamp by surveyors, meaning they are damaged but fixable. Rose and her relatives sleep outside them, fitfully. They were scared of the “young thugs in Mafia sunglasses,” Rose’s cousin said, even before Rose’s abduction. On May 10, Rose, a statuesque woman who is learning to be a beautician, went out to buy some cookies. A police officer whom she knew beckoned her to sit in his unmarked car, she said. She did. Then two men ordered the officer out of the car, taking his gun and driving off with Rose.
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The men shoved her into the back, and made her lie face down. She does not know what neighborhood they took her to; it was empty and rubble-filled, and had many destroyed houses. When she protested entering one, they slapped her, she said, and forced her to squeeze through the collapsed entrance. They pushed her into a crawl space beneath a fallen ceiling. “I was scared mute,” she said. “Only when they raped me did I scream. It hurt.” Clutching her pelvis as she talked, Rose said that the men had taken turns, raping her seven times. “Or maybe eight,” she said, shutting her eyes.
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The police officer showed up at Rose’s house the morning after she was kidnapped to tell the family what had happened. “He waited all night while we lay awake terrified,” her brother-in-law said. “He was looking for his car. We said, ‘What about Rose?’ He said, ‘We’ll look for her, but, you know, you will hear from them first.’ ” The kidnappers used Rose’s cellphone to call. They put it on speaker phone and hit her repeatedly so her family could listen to her cry out in pain.
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“They demanded $50,000 American,” her uncle, a vendor, said. “That’s crazy. I don’t have 10 gourdes to my name. But they said, ‘Don’t bother going to a voodoo priest. He can’t help you. Don’t bother calling Obama. He can’t help you, either. Just give us money, or we will kill the girl.’ ” Over the next few days, the family managed to raise $2,000 in gourdes, the Haitian currency, from neighbors. The money was left at a drop site on Sunday evening. At 3 a.m. Monday, Rose was blindfolded and put on the back of a mototaxi. When she arrived home, she collapsed into a fetal position at the door to her house and knocked weakly.
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Several hours later, the police investigators arrived. Family members encircled Rose as she answered questions in a monotone. Occasionally they peered out at the street through the cracks in their home, fearful that the kidnappers were watching. Rose had already changed her clothes and bathed, which she did not know would frustrate the collection of evidence. But the police did not raise the issue, anyway, her family said. When the police left, Rose rode in the back of a car to a Doctors Without Borders clinic, wincing in pain as it bumped over rutted roads. At the tented clinic, she was instructed to take a seat on a bench. Another woman, slim and poised, entered the open-air waiting room and told a nurse she needed to see a gynecologist.
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“Infection?” the nurse asked. “A case of rape,” the young woman answered, in clipped French. She had been invited to a “literary circle” in a tent city the previous evening, she said. “No books were discussed,” she said. The two victims sat side by side and stared straight ahead. The nurse said that the clinic had treated about 60 victims in May. When Rose was called into an examining tent, she stumbled, woozy from hunger. The nurse gave her a couple of packages of crackers. Rose said, “I don’t have any money for those.” The nurse told her they were free. Rose offered one of the packages to a Times reporter, who declined and left her to be examined privately.
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Rose was discharged with an armful of condoms and pill boxes: antibiotics for sexually transmitted diseases, anti-H.I.V. treatment, pills for vaginitis and over-the-counter painkillers. As she emerged, her uncle — whom Rose calls Papa — watched her from a distance, tears streaming down his face. “Beautiful child, oh beautiful child,” he said. “Look into my eyes and you will know how I feel. When is this all going to end? Haven’t we suffered enough?”

By Oliver Luft
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ITV News will next week broadcast the first in a series of reports filmed by Haitian children about the aftermath of January's earthquake. Six children from Leogane, the epicentre of the earthquake, have been encouraged to make films documenting their lives since the disaster struck and destroyed their hometown.
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The first two instalments of the series "Filming Their Future" will be broadcast on ITV News with further reports from the children broadcast later in the year for ITV News programmes and online at ITV.com/news.
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The reports are the result of a partnership between Save the Children and ITV News, whose cameraman Dave Harman helped train the children. The films has been planned, recorded, produced and directed entirely by Jean (11), Derchine (13), Olwine (13), Manoushka (15), Sophia (16) and Nenel (17).
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Emma Murphy, ITV News correspondent, said: "When Dave Harman and I were in Haiti for ITV News in the days after the quake we were anxious to show just what it had done to people's lives. "However when you are covering such a huge disaster the individual stories can be lost. This project lets you see what life is like in Haiti now. What makes it so special is the resilience and enthusiasm of the children.
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"They are desperate to tell their stories their way so that no one can forget about Haiti."

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI

Weeks after the 1-year-old was found in a dumpster, his father showed up. The baby wriggled in his cot, smiled and held up his arms. When the father didn't touch him, the baby started to cry and kick his legs.
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The man left moments after he arrived, never to be seen again, according to a report written by a social worker at the Saint Catherine Hospital in the Cite Soleil slum, where the child was taken.
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The catastrophic earthquake that left at least 1.3 million of Haiti's 9 million people homeless was the final push over the edge for families that could barely afford to feed their children before. Now stuck in leaky tents with dwindling aid handouts, Haitian families are abandoning their children
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A toddler who was orphaned in the recent earthquake is lifted on to a couch by one of his adoptive family members in the living room of one of several dozen homes for orphans at SOS Children's Village outside Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Founded in 1949, SOS operates children's villages tasked with providing orphaned and abandoned children with healthy childhoods in 132 countries, and saw the number of children under their care triple to a current 459 following the recent earthquake. in the hope that rescue organizations will offer them a better life, aid workers say.
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A 4-day-old baby girl was left in a cardboard box outside a hospital. Toddlers are being found alone in hospital waiting rooms. Outside a private clinic, volunteers discovered a 3-year-old holding a bag of carefully folded underwear. A note pinned to his shirt asked those who found him to look after him.
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Even before the magnitude-7 quake, poor parents left children at orphanages where they would at least receive one meal a day. Now the number of abandoned children has skyrocketed, said 37-year-old Tamara Palinka, who helped coordinate logistics at the University of Miami-run field hospital on the grounds of the airport.
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"I personally talked a lot of mothers out of giving up their children," said Palinka, who cordoned off a space inside the field hospital's pediatric tent for abandoned children, including another toddler found crawling on a garbage heap. Orphanage workers say their facilities are swelling with children who are not orphans. At Mother Teresa's orphanage behind a tall wall covered in concertina wire, nuns in white saris hover over the cribs of children whose arms are attached to drips. They don't take in orphans, only malnourished children who will be returned to their families after they put on weight. They require the mothers to stay on the grounds because otherwise they might not come back.
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"We don't let them leave," said Sister Genova, a diminutive woman who weaves between the cribs, reaching out to stroke the head of a twig-like child with bright orange hair, a sign of malnutrition. Nadine Jean-Baptiste, a 35-year-old with AIDS, recently left her 2-year-old daughter Christine at an orphanage down the street from the storage shed where she now lives. Before the Jan. 12 quake, she was barely able to pay for her medication and look after her daughter. Then her husband, a cook, was buried inside the restaurant where he worked. She heard his cries from beneath the concrete but could do nothing.
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With him gone and her house destroyed, she is weighing a terrible decision: An American couple has expressed interest in adopting Christine. The sick mother lies awake at night trying to decide whether she should sign over her child, a chubby little girl with hair bunched into pigtails. "I love my child. Giving her away is not my wish," she said, her voice choked with sadness, her body thin as an ironing board from the disease. "But I have nothing to feed her. I have no choice but to give her away."
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The United Nation's Children's Fund set up a toll-free hot line in February for abandoned or lost children who had been separated from their families during the quake. The call center has registered 960 children so far. "We don't call them orphans because they could have family," explained Edward Carwardine, UNICEF's spokesman in Haiti.
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UNICEF gave the hot line number only to agencies and aid workers—not the public—for fear of an avalanche of calls from desperate families trying to unload their children. The SOS orphanage saw what happens when such an offer is made known to the public at large. Their tidy campus is an oasis in the rubble-strewn capital, located on a leafy lot crisscrossed with walkways. Children live in "families" inside cottages overseen by a doting house "mother." Their days are a carnival of activities, from soccer and painting to one-to-one sessions with psychologists who use art to get at the trauma of the quake.
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In the week after the quake, SOS announced on the radio that the orphanage had room for more orphans. The next day, the orphanage nearly doubled in size after staff found around 120 children lined up outside the gate. In the three months since, the orphanage has tripled in size. But SOS quickly realized that most of the new arrivals were not in fact orphans, said spokeswoman Line Wolf-Nielsen. One mother posed as a stranger dropping off three of her own children, whom she claimed were 'orphans' found after the quake. Others sent in their children with neighbors or friends, making it more difficult to find the family. One family instructed three boys to memorize a fictitious last name to complicate efforts to find their real parents.
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Haitian law requires that orphanage authorities do everything they can to reunite children with their birth families. Post-quake, that has often involved reuniting kids with families that do not want them back. SOS is sifting through the roughly 300 children they took in since the disaster, sending workers into the camps to look for parents. "It's very tough, but we need to concentrate our efforts on the neediest cases. Obviously if you have family, your situation is less needy than that of a child that has no one," says Wolf-Nielsen.
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On a recent afternoon, two boys waited on a bench, with dread on their faces. Their clothes were carefully folded in a Winnie the Pooh bag between them. A few paces away, in the office of the SOS orphanage, their adult older brother was reluctantly signing a Family Reunification Act. The boys, ages 10 and 13, as well as their 3-year-old cousin had been dropped off two months earlier. The family friend who brought them lied, telling orphanage workers that their parents had died in the quake. She gave them a fake last name—Milscent—and coached them not to reveal their real names if questioned about their family. In fact, their mother is alive but, like tens of thousands of others, is living in a tent city.
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"They left me here because they don't have money to take care of me," said Ridial, the 13-year-old. "If I leave, will I still be able to go to school?" Organizations helping abandoned children are even offering supplies to families that take back their kids. In the case of the three boys, their family received three sleeping bags, a tent and a one-month supply of food. They were driven back to a muddy alleyway that leads into a maze of tents where children play with kites made by tying a discarded plastic bag to a piece of string.
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The family sleeps in a space the size of a jacuzzi tub inside a tent fashioned from a sheet wrapped around an enclosure of sticks. Their bed is a piece of cardboard. It's gotten wet so many times from rain pouring through the sheet that it lies crumpled in a heap over a broken chair. "I don't have a job," said Jean-Phillipe Turenne, the children's 22-year-old brother. "I can't afford to take them back, but I have to. I think it's better for us to have left them there (at the orphanage)."
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He said if only the boys had not revealed their real last name, the orphanage workers might not have been able to trace them. Ridial fought back tears. He said he tried to keep up the lie but couldn't keep his facts straight, and finally crumbled and told the truth. There is very little aid workers can do to find the family of the baby found in the dumpster, who was too weak to cry when he was first rescued. He has not yet learned to speak.
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Months later, the baby, named Erode, sat on his bottom playing with a styrofoam letter at the state-of-the-art Enfant Jesus orphanage, where children are tended by a bevy of attentive nannies. He extended the letter C to one of the nannies—only to pull it back as soon as she reached for it. He exploded into a burst of giggles. He is fed two healthy meals a day and sleeps in a crib with gleaming white bars. The nannies take turns cuddling him and have been trained in the importance of eye contact as well as 'reciprocal play,' where they coo at him to mimic the attention he would receive from his mother.
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"These children have won the jackpot to get to be here," said Indiana-based child psychologist Mary Kate Bristow, who flew in to offer her service. "If I was living in a tent, I too would try to get my child here." Next to Erode is a toddler whose leg had to be amputated. His mother begged the orphanage to take him, saying she couldn't care for him, said executive director Gina Duncan.
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In another crib is a baby girl who spent three days under the rubble. By the time they got her out, the ants had started eating her eyes. She isn't an orphan either—her grandmother was in the hospital recovering after the house collapsed on top of her. And then there is 13-year-old Simon, who was left at the orphanage shortly after the quake. For the first time in his life, he ate until he felt full. He began attending school.
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He recently sat inside the orphanage's main office next to his older sister, who had come to reclaim him. He tried to hide his tears by pulling up his T-shirt over his nose. When he couldn't hold it in any longer, he laid his cheek on the armrest of the couch, and his tears pooled on the imitation leather.
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"If I go back with my big sister, I won't be able to go to school. She's going to make me sell water in the street—like I was doing before," he said. "I'll go back to a hard life." Sniffling, he was led out of the orphanage.

With children laughing and chasing each other, playing with balls and pet guinea pigs, the sunny courtyard could be mistaken for an ordinary afterschool daycare program. But this is no ordinary childcare program, and the children are not living under ordinary circumstances.
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The Haiti earthquake injured hundreds of thousands of people and damaged hundreds of buildings throughout Port-au-Prince, including what was to very soon become one of the busiest medical facilities in the city—the General Hospital. Living in one of the wards within the hospital’s pediatric unit were 48 children—ranging from two weeks to 21 years old, some without parents, many living with either physical or developmental disabilities.
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In the aftermath of the quake, it was clear that these unaccompanied minors and vulnerable children could not remain at damaged and over-crowded General Hospital. The hospital’s medical director contacted PIH and its Haitian sister organization Zanmi Lasante (ZL) to help find the group a new home.
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PIH/ZL facilitated the children’s move to a new long-term care facility in Croix-des-Bouquets, a city located about eight miles northeast of Port-au-Prince. The facility, named Zanmi Beni – “blessed friends” in Haitian Creole, is the result of a partnership with Operation Blessing International—a nonprofit organization that provides disaster relief and community development in 98 countries. PIH/ZL also received support for this project from the General Hospital, the organization Nos Petits Freres et Soeurs, and the Haitian Ministry of Social Affairs.
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With safe and sunny wards, space for the children to run and play, books and toys, and a dedicated 75-person staff to care for them, the children are happily flourishing. Some of the children who had before been bedridden are now beginning to walk—they simply needed the opportunity and a little attention to help them take their first steps. Others study their lessons in a small tent-school room. Staff ensure that each child is given special attention to help foster learning and development—from feeding themselves to speaking skills.
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Zanmi Beni will provide the children with ongoing educational, emotional, and psychosocial support; and will have access to a broad range of educational, developmental, and recreational tools—including equine therapy and a swimming pool for physical therapy. In addition, pet guinea pigs, goats, birds, and a friendly little puppy named Fani help make Zanmi Beni into a home.
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An experienced staff of physical therapists, occupational therapists, nurses, social workers, teachers, cooks, cleaners, and community health workers care for the children. The majority of the staff were locally hired in the weeks following the earthquake. The center also has two pediatricians on staff. Construction and renovations on the building are still underway and are expected to finish this summer.

5/8/2010
AFP
By Clement Sabourin
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They've been forced to swap school books for pistols, homework for hold-ups and drug-dealing: with no parents, some of Haiti's earthquake orphans have turned to slum gangs as ersatz family in a hard-scrabble bid to survive. Square meals and the comforts of home are part of the past for thousands of youngsters who lost their mothers, fathers and other relatives in the January 12 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince and traumatized the country.
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And for some orphans in the capital's desperately poor shantytowns, roving gangs are filling the void. In the notorious Cite Soleil, or Sun City, a clutch of youngsters trail behind a scruffy gang leader named "Toutou Soleil 19" and members of his band, darting around makeshift huts and clotheslines strung across filthy alleyways in the capital's biggest slum.
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Toutou, a 31-year-old who still carries knives but says he gave up his guns in a 2006 amnesty, stops and points across a sewer to a crude sheet-metal cabin on a mound of trash at the seafront. "There are eight or nine orphans who have been sleeping here since the quake," Toutou told AFP, eager to show off the deplorable conditions on his home turf where he says "no one has come to help". Outside the hut's door, the children crouch around a radio held by Jef, a 14-year-old boy with angelic eyes and a checkered shirt. Toutou hands him a can of condensed milk, which he quickly shares with the others.
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"There are a lot of kids like them, they are all throughout Cite Soleil," said Toutou. Though he couldn't give a figure, he said they were "many" and rattled off their most urgent needs -- "a soup kitchen, a mobile clinic and water". In the absence of any non-governmental organizations or local officials in this slum of at least 300,000 residents, the gangs hold de facto authority. So after the catastrophe, the new orphans turned to the gang lords.
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"They come to us because they have no one else. We try to help, but there is nothing here," said Toutou, a wool cap pulled down on his head. Jef said his parents were killed when their house collapsed in the earthquake, which claimed 250,000 to 300,000 lives in all. He now carries out "hold-ups" and burglarizes homes at night to survive.
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"We do that with other children," he admitted, saying he stopped going to school after the quake. "I would like to go, but I don't have the money," he said, lowering his eyes. "At any rate, all the schools in Cite Soleil have collapsed," added Jimis, 25, a rapper and member of Toutou's gang.
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Ads for rum and automatic rifles and pornographic photos cover the walls of the orphans' cabin, where they sleep in old boxes placed over a floor of rubble.
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Throughout Toutou's tour of the slum, children come up to salute their "godfather". Many of these youngsters have been caught committing offenses since losing their parents. "Some of them sell drugs, a lot of them have pistols the gangs give them," said one social worker with years of experience in the shantytown. The United Nations recently started investigating the plight of these slum orphans, but a UN worker in charge of the project who asked not to be named said "at this stage, we have no information".
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Ironically, it's the Cite's gang leaders and criminals who now find themselves in the role of savior and spokesmen, pleading for aid. "We need help so that these children don't become like us, so that they don't become a danger to society," said a convict named Ea who said he escaped from Port-au-Prince prison during the earthquake, as did some 4,500 prisoners. A bastion of violent gangs, Cite Soleil was virtually in a state of war from 2004 to 2007. An intervention by UN troops and a disarmament program have calmed matters somewhat, and a curfew remains in place.
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At a hospital run by the international aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), there has been a recent spike in the number of gunshot victims "but not enough to worry about... yet," said the facility's director Karel Janssens.
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Gang leaders, however, are unhappy. "If aid does not arrive, we will prepare a revolt," said one named Patrick. Toutou echoed the call. "We will fight until the end -- until we receive some support, until we receive justice," he said. "We live here like we're in prison."

5/5/2010
Christian Science Monitor
By Kathie Klarreich
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Two weekends ago, 15-year old Rosemadette Aijais stayed out late with friends, trying to distract herself from the daily grind of life in one of the many tent camps that now dominate Haiti’s capital. Just minutes after she zipped up her tent flap to turn in for the night, she heard it unzip. Five men she’d never seen before entered and told her that her evening was just about to begin.
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When they were done beating and raping her, Rosemadette crawled to a friend’s tent, but her friend told her it wasn’t safe to stay, so, bruised and frightened, she inched her way back home. Only at the urging of others did she eventually seek medical attention. The bite on her face is fading, but the psychological scars she has suffered may be harder to heal. Rosemadette’s case is not uncommon in Haiti’s postquake atmosphere, where security for women is tenuous at best. Women make up more than half the population, 67 percent of whom are single heads of household. Daily rituals such as collecting water can be a risk since the rule of law is all but absent now. Lack of legal rights, inadequate support services, impunity, and dependency – all issues before the earthquake – have become exponentially worse since the Jan. 12 temblor leveled the capital, Port-au-Prince, killing more than 200,000 and displacing more than 1 million.
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The precise number of rape and domestic violence victims is difficult to determine, even with the increased presence of foreign and international medical organizations working in the camps. Just two months after the quake, outreach workers tracked some 230 cases in 15 camps. Today there are more than 1,300 camps.Doctors from International Medical Corps say they see at least one rape victim a day in the camps where they work.
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“We’ve seen over 200 cases ourselves since the quake,” says Eramithe Delva, program director of a grass-roots organization known as KOFAVIV, the Commission of Women Victim-to-Victim. “And for every one case reported, there are multiple others that are not.”More than 200 organizations, part of the Gender Based Violence (GBV) cluster from the United Nations, are working to improve conditions for women.
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During their weekly meetings at the UN compound, seated under a tent flanked by fans and two refrigerators, dozens of representatives report on their week’s activities: problems with the Haitian National Police, how to connect groups doing GBV work outside Port-au-Prince, what to do about the virtually nonexistent judicial system.
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Most of the participating groups started their programs after the quake, unaware of the gains made in the movement to prevent rape, due in large part to three pioneers conspicuously absent at the table: Magalie Marcelin, Myriam Merlet, and Anne Marie Coriolan. They were killed in the quake.
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The organizations which they founded, Women’s House (Kay Fanm) and Solidarity with Haitian Women (SOFA), continue to provide multiple services, including psychological support, medical aid, and safety.
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Along with the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), they are training the Haitian National Police (often suspected perpetrators of gender-based violence) on protocol for receiving victims and will be providing them with transport needs for rapid response. They are also working with students from the state university who hold self-defense clinics in the camp.
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In partnership with the Haitian government and other groups, they have distributed thousands of postcards that list places to go for psychological and medical follow-up support. Their biggest challenge, says UNIFEM’s Andrée Gilbert, is being able to respond to the increased need. “We are working on collecting data on the number of victims," she says. "But if what we are hearing is correct, we don’t have the capacity to respond.” Rosemadette knows that all too well. She’s still looking for a place to sleep.

Womens eNews
Women's E-News
By Amy Lieberman
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A female U.N. police force from Bangladesh is bringing hope of better protection to Haitian women in makeshift camps for those displaced by the earthquake. Women's activists in one camp say it's not enough. They need help urgently. A Haitian woman and her baby stand outside their tent at an internally displaced person camp in Croix des Bouquets, Haiti.
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Marie Eramithe Delva's 17-year-old daughter narrowly escaped a rape attempt in one of Haiti's largest internally displaced persons camps at the beginning of March. The 42-year-old mother and grassroots activist tried to report the assault and the attacker's subsequent threats. A police officer just laughed and told her it was the problem of Rene Preval, president of the country that on Jan. 12 suffered an earthquake that killed approximately 230,000 people and left upwards of 1.3 million homeless.
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"They did nothing," Delva told Women's eNews in a phone interview, assisted by a Creole translator from the camp Champ-de-Mars, in Port-au-Prince, home to roughly 50,000 people. "The only help we found came from members of the camp." Today or tomorrow an all-female policing unit is journeying from Bangladesh to protect and serve as allies to Haitian women, said Gerardo Chaumont, police commissioner of the U.N.'s Stabilization Mission in Haiti.
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Exactly how they will accomplish that, however, is hard to ascertain from official interviews. The Haiti U.N. mission's police spokesperson Fred Blaise said the new female policing unit will be stationed at the U.N. headquarters in Delta Camp, in Tabarre, just north of Port-au-Prince. The policewomen will work on a rotating basis inside the U.N.'s approximately 700 makeshift camps for internally displaced persons, where they will be responsible for crowd control, disturbances and other regular duties, just as their male counterparts, he said in an e-mail interview.
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That doesn't necessarily mean immediate or direct help for Delva, a co-coordinator of KOFAVIV, a Haitian grassroots female empowerment organization. "What we need is security," Delva said. "Right now we have none and the rapes are happening not only at night, but in the daytime." She and her partner, Malya Villard Appolon, 50, both say they will continue tracking victims of sex assault in Champ-de-Mars and other camps for displaced Haitian women and girls. Delva and Villard live together with 18 extended family members, including their six and eight children, respectively, in one tent. They work daily to document reports of sexual violence in the crowded, poorly lit camps, which lack private bathing facilities. They then guide the women to medical clinics and police posts to report the crime, a vain effort they often find.
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"Almost every day we are taking testimony of someone who has been raped," said Delva through translator Beverly Bell, an American social justice activist who has worked closely with the activist group for years. "Every day in the hospital we find someone who has been raped." Chaumont denied that Haitian police are unwilling to aid civilians and report and follow up on cases of sexual assault.
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"Many police also suffered the loss of families so at the beginning, following the earthquake, they were focused on saving their own relatives and helping themselves" the police commissioner told Women's eNews. "But that isn't the case anymore. Security is under control. We have police posts stationed, with women there, where you can go and report these crimes."
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When pressed about Delva's case specifically, Chaumont said he has not heard of any such disregarded incidents, but that doesn't mean they don't exist, he conceded. Relief and reconstruction efforts are underway, but sexual violence has worsened in the temporary housing camps, U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Asha Rose-Migiro said in an April 15 press conference in response to a question from Women's eNews.
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Amid the deteriorating situation, Bangladesh's mostly female U.N. policing unit--130 women supported by 30 men--is raising cautious hope. Edmond Mulet, head of the Haiti U.N. mission, said he hopes the Bangladeshi troops will prove as helpful as the U.N.'s first all-female unit, which came from India, was in Liberia, where rape was used as a systematic weapon of war during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
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Bangladeshi troops will be operating in a post-disaster zone, not a post-conflict zone as was the case in Liberia. But officials say that in addition to sex assault in the camps, Haiti has a rooted history of sexual assault that merits increasing women's protection.
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The three-year-old all-female units in Liberia are widely credited with encouraging women to report on sex assault. "It's a whole world of difference for women who have been victimized to see women police, and we see the reporting of cases of gender-based sexual crimes increase when they are there," said Lea Angela Biason, a gender affairs associate for the U.N. Department of Peacekeeping, in a recent interview.
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The Liberian all-female deployment has also been credited with providing women with a positive role model. An example of that is the slight but significant increase in women's participation in Liberia's national security forces. In 2008 women constituted almost 13 percent of Liberia's national police force and by the following year, 2009, the figure was up to 15 percent, according to the U.N. mission in Liberia.
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Female peacekeepers from Austria, Rwanda and Nigeria, as well as an additional female unit from India, are slated to be deployed to various countries in the coming months, Biason said. Women currently make up 6.5 percent of U.N. peacekeeping forces, but a recruitment effort aims for 20 percent by 2014, Biason said. At Delva's Champ-de-Mars camp, KOFAVIV organizers--all victims of sexual assault themselves--found in a recent informal survey an average of 15.3 incidents of rape in the two months, per camp, following the earthquake.
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Bell, the American activist, noted that almost none of the organizers are literate and that their work cannot replace formal documentation, which does not exist. The earthquake destroyed the formal data system for tracking and reporting cases of gender-based sexual violence that the United Nations Development Fund for Women, or UNIFEM, was developing.
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Bell said it's hard to know how these numbers would compare to an intensive assessment, but the testimony of girls and women she recently met reveal an overwhelming atmosphere of fear in the camps.
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"I spoke with a woman who sleeps with a machete under her blanket, in case men come after her 18-year-old daughter who sleeps next to her," Bell said. "I heard from a woman in the general hospital of a 1-½-year-old baby whose mother's boyfriend raped her."
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Delva says her group is continuing its difficult work in the camps, as she also tries to find a way for her family and herself out of the tent city. Appolon, her co-coordinator, said they have a responsibility to defend girls and women who are living in the camps. "The police are crazy and laugh when we tell them these things, but we cannot stop doing what we are doing. There is no other way," she said.
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Amy Lieberman is a journalist based out of the U.N. Secretariat, where she writes primarily for a Brazilian newswire.
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For more information:
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Lambi Fund of Haiti:
http://www.lambifund.org/
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Other Worlds:
http://www.otherworldsarepossible.org/

The Examiner
By Christine Nyholm
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CNN's Soledad O'Brien is bringing life inspiring stories about the innocent children of Haiti to to life with Rescued. O’Brien reports a powerful one-hour CNN documentary on Haiti’s children’s before, during and after the earthquake. The CNN special features Creole translation by music artist Wyclef Jean. Rescued premieres on CNN on Saturday, May 8 at 8pm ET & PT.
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CNN was the first news organization on the scene following the devastating earthquake in Haiti. The January, 2010 earthquake devastated the tiny Caribbean country. That is when CNN anchor and special correspondent Soledad O’Brien began a journey reporting on Haiti’s remarkably inspiring children. The story of the Haitian children is told through the eyes of two abandoned children and two American missionaries,
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Soledad O’Brien stated in a CNN press release, "From the moment I met the children at the Lighthouse orphanage, I knew I had to return to Haiti to help put a face on the hundreds of thousands of orphans living there. Not only are they incredibly strong and inspiring, but they tell the larger story of Haiti and its struggles before and after the devastating earthquake."
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After viewing an initial screening of the documentary and being powerfully moved by what he saw, hip hop music artist and philanthropist Wyclef Jean, a son of Haiti, will provide voice-overs of the Creole translations in the program, along with award-winning Haitian novelist Edwidge Danticat
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The two children, six year old Cendy Jeune and former child slave Marc Kenson Oliphi are Haitian orphans abandoned years ago by their parents. They represent the children whose faces appear on the worldwide appeals for charity. But Cendy and Marc Kenson are among the lucky. They survived some of the worst poverty imaginable and escaped their hardship when they were taken into an orphanage of an American missionary family. Bright, strong and full of faith, the innocent children offer promise to represent the future of Haiti. These innocent children could one day could rewrite this small nation’s unfortunate history. That is, until the January earthquake erupts and hands the children the biggest test of all.
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Susette and Bill Manassero, who manage the Lighthouse Orphanage, are the American missionaries who have devoted their lives to Haiti’s children. They are part of an expansive and controversial missionary community that shelters thousands of Haiti’s abandoned children. The missionaries live in Port-au-Prince with their family so that the young Haitians they care for do not have to leave their homeland. Haiti has 380,000 children living as orphans, though O’Brien learns, in a country with unbelievable capacity challenges, the term ‘orphan’ has a complicated meaning.
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More information on Rescued can be found on CNN.com/Haiti. Viewers can continue to contribute to Haiti relief through CNN’s Impact Your World webpage by visiting CNN.com/Impact.
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Geraldine Moriba is the executive producer for Rescued; Rose Arce is the senior producer.

Security at the hundreds of makeshift refugee camps in Haiti's capital continues to be of concern, more than three months after January's earthquake.
While officials insist that the situation remains under control, the head of the United Nations mission has announced that he wants the Security Council to send an extra 800 police officers to provide safety.
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Mr Mulet said that the next 12 to 18 months will be "critical" as UN forces help local officers to provide "a more visible presence" in the camps. This would be in addition to other duties to support the holding of elections, the coordination of "post-disaster" humanitarian aid and eventual reconstruction. Concerning security, one key issue is the fear that the number of sexual assaults against women and girls may increase because of inadequate security in the camps.
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Rape was only criminalised in Haiti in 2005, and the country has experienced some of the highest rates of it in the world. Last month, rights group Amnesty International said sexual violence was widespread in the shelters in Haiti. It said: "Authorities in Haiti must prioritise strengthening the police presence in camps, especially at night, including capacity to protect women and girls from sexual violence and to respond adequately to reported cases."
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The UN said they were concerned about privacy in Haiti Speaking after a visit to Haiti this month, the Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations, Asha-Rose Migiro, admitted that she was troubled by the lack of privacy in many of tents. Ms Migoro said she had seen tents crowded together and where sometimes two makeshift shelters were supported with only one pole, leaving one side open.
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Worried about security, refugees themselves have organised security patrols. Martine Jocile, who set up a team of volunteers, told the BBC: "The members of the community came together and created a posse of sorts to protect the women in the camp.
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"They were sleeping in long trousers and long shirts to prevent attacks so we patrol to prevent people from other areas coming in and raping them." However, General Geraldo Chaumont, Police Commissioner of the UN mission in Haiti, has insisted that there has been no noticeable spike in reported sex crimes.
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He said: "The number of rapes that have been recorded during the recent period do not surpass the average number of rapes prior to the earthquake.
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"On the other hand, I would like to emphasize that we have arrested over 15 rapists so it's not as though the crime is going unpunished." The police chief said the major problem in Haiti was not crime and security but trying to provide proper shelter for the tens of thousands before the rainy season arrives.

4/18/2010
NY Daily News
BY Christina Boyle
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Cassandre St. Vil, 19, was raped by four men who broke into her tent after the Haiti earthquake. Months later, sexual violence remains a major concern in tent encampments.
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PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI - The four armed men came looking for Cassandre St. Vil in the dead of night.The 19-year-old was asleep in the street under a canopy of sheets that had been her makeshift home in the two nights after the Jan. 12 earthquake."I couldn't fight back," said St. Vil, now living in a camp in Port-au-Prince. "They came in - we didn't have a door - and they asked my mother and grandmother to leave.
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"My mother said, 'Don't do that to my daughter,' but they were armed and held a gun to my mother's neck. They threatened to kill her if she called for help. "It took place in front of my mother and grandmother," she continued in a whisper. "Four people raped me. "I didn't have the chance to scream. They covered my mouth," she said, leaning in close. "While one had sex with me, the three others stood with my mother and grandmother."
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St. Vil is a bright, articulate young woman who was attending a university in Port-au-Prince. The quake shattered dreams of completing her studies, finding a good job, getting married. She has joined the growing ranks of women who have been sexually abused after the quake, which collapsed the Port-au-Prince jail and unleashed criminals into the streets.
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"They took my virginity," she lamented. "I always dreamed of getting married a virgin - it was very important to me." After the rape, she and her family moved to the sprawling Champs de Mars camp near the Presidential Palace. There, she sought help from a local women's group, KOFAVIV, which gives support to rape victims. A founder, Eramithe Delva, says the group has helped 180 women raped since January. In the three months before the quake, there were just 25 cases. The group has staked a claim to a small section of the Champs de Mars camp, a sanctuary for victims who hope there is safety in numbers.
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Still, it's hard to feel too secure. Many women sleep outside or in cramped quarters next to strangers, without a husband, father or brother as protector. A few shelters away from St. Vil is another victim, Helia Lajeunesse, 49, gang raped with her daughter during sexual depravity that accompanied the 2004 coup. Her daughter became pregnant. The child was a girl, now 5 years old. She, too, was raped - in late January in the provinces where her mother fled after the quake. "[The girl] was going to buy a cup of rice," LaJeunesse said. "A young man took the rice from her hands and she ran after him.
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"He took her into the cemetery and a woman passing by saw him lying on top of her ... She shouted at him and he ran off. "Now she doesn't eat, she has no appetite," Lajeunesse said, wiping tears as the girl stared ahead vacantly. "Each night you hear the cries of the rapes, almost every night."
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When dark settles over the camp, women dare not venture to the toilets alone, using small buckets instead. Aid groups are installing bright lights in the dark corners of some tent cities to deter attacks. Doctors Without Borders has midwives and clinical psychologists ready to treat rape victims at one of its clinics in the city.
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Each camp also has a committee charged with maintaining order and security, with the authority to call on the National Police and United Nations guards. Mario Joseph, a Haitian lawyer who is working to prosecute rapists, is hoping to set up a rape hotline and distribute whistles to women to call for help. He says most of the attacks go unpunished, so perpetrators have little to fear.
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"Judges are scared because prisoners are in the streets," he said. "We need to build files against people and when we have the chance, bring them to court. But the priority now is to get the camps more secure."

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900sid/EGUA-84FMUS?OpenDocument&em...
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Progress, Gaps and Plans in Humanitarian Action
Supporting a Transformative Agenda for Children
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
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The earthquake that devastated Haiti on the 12th January 2010 killed over 220,000 people, injuring over 300,000 and causing up to 4,000 amputations. Three million people, or 30 per cent of the population, have been affected; almost 1.3 million are living in temporary shelters in over 400 spontaneous sites in the Port-au-Prince area, while more than 600,000 have moved to outlying areas, including some 300,000 children.
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This disaster has been a children's emergency: nearly 1.5 million children have been directly affected by the disaster; many more remain at risk and continue to require assistance and protection. Girls and boys, who make up almost half of the population, are among the most vulnerable groups.
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Already before the earthquake, Haiti's children were up against unfavourable indicators: one in every 13 infant died before the age of five; over 30 per cent of Haitians under the age of five were chronically undernourished; 55 per cent of school-aged children were out of school; 50,000 were in some 600 residential care facilities; an estimated 2,000 girls and boys were trafficked across borders annually.
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In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, the logistical, communication and coordination challenges were massive: the capital was debilitated with damaged and destroyed infrastructure, including key Government buildings and entry points into Port-au-Prince like the seaport. UN capacity was weakened by the loss of lives under the collapsed building, while UNICEF staff lost family members and homes. Despite this, the mobilisation of international humanitarian assistance in support of the Government of Haiti has been on a scale rarely - if ever - seen in the past, thanks to the generosity, commitment and support of governments, partners, and the public.
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UNICEF's global response to this rapid-onset emergency has been unprecedented. UNICEF has taken extraordinary measures to mobilise some 300 staff and consultants from around the world to work on the Clusters response, programmes and operations. There were visits from the Executive Director and Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF, senior management, and from various National Committees.
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To help address the unprecedented devastation and the subsequent logistical constraints, the UNICEF Country Office in the Dominican Republic established a support hub of a fluctu-ating 20 – 25 staff, called Lifeline Haiti (LLH). The hub has sup-ported the needs of Haitian earthquake victims in delivering services at the border, facilitating relief efforts and the flow of supplies into the country.
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UNICEF, in line with its Core Commitments for Children and with its partners, has been delivering life-saving assistance to Haitian children in the sectors of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), nutrition, and health. As part of its commitments, UNICEF has been providing children with a sense of safety and normalcy through designated spaces and materials for education, recreation, and early childhood development. UNICEF has also been working towards building and strengthening systems to protect girls, boys and women from violence, exploitation, abuse and neglect.
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In accordance with its inter-agency commitments, UNICEF, in close partnerships with respective Ministries, is leading the Clusters in WASH, Nutrition, Education together with Save the Children, and the Sub-Cluster in Child Protection. UNICEF is also working with WHO and the Ministry of Health on resuming and expanding primary health care services.
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It is clear that the humanitarian action taken over the past three months has averted a post-earthquake crisis. There have been no outbreaks of diseases or epidemics so far. Much however, remains to be done. With the upcoming rainy and hurricane seasons, the relocation of displaced people to safer shelters, along with the provision of basic services and the protection of children and women, remain a priority.
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UNICEF, with its partners, will continue to support the relief operations and assist in the reconstruction and recovery phase. Children must re-main at the forefront of the reconstruction, recovery, and development processes. It is important that children's voices are heard, their rights are upheld, and their needs are addressed. UNICEF Haiti's three priorities for 2010 include:
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1. Ensuring that children are in school;
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2. Preventing and addressing the threat of under-nutrition in chil-dren;
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3. Protecting the most vulnerable from violence, exploitation, abuse and neglect.
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UNICEF's response has been possible due to the generous support pro-vided by donors, including Governments, National Committees, and indi-viduals. Implementing partners have been central to ensuring that ser-vices and supplies have been delivered to beneficiaries. UNICEF acknowl-edges the tremendous efforts undertaken by voluntary organizations and individuals. Particularly commendable is the courage and commitment demonstrated by Haitians inside the country and abroad, within UNICEF, among displaced persons, in camp committees, and all those who have dedicated their efforts to assisting the country.
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The challenge now is to build a Haiti with a transformative agenda to make it a better place for all children and youth. We are taking a step further: as an example, we are going beyond the "back to school" ap-proach to an "all children in school" approach. Haiti's recovery must be-gin with its children and their communities. Only with children at the centre of the reconstruction effort can we build a new Haiti – a Haiti Fit for Children.

CBS News
By Katie Couric
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It was 13 weeks ago, just before 5 in the afternoon, when the earth shook violently under the feet of some of the poorest people on the planet -- the people of Haiti. Two hundred thirty thousand died. Three hundred thousand more were injured. More than 2 million lost their homes or were forced to leave them.
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Among them was a 13-year-old boy we first met shortly after the quake hit. For him, and the entire nation of Haiti, it is a long road back, CBS News Anchor Katie Couric reports. Three days after the earthquake, the boy's scream seemed to capture the anguish of an entire nation. It's hard to imagine what was more difficult for 13-year-old Pierre Larousse to bear: the doctors trying to set his broken leg or the knowledge that both his parents were dead.
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After the earthquake, Larousse ultimately ended up in one of the 26 makeshift hospitals set up by Doctors Without Borders. With the help of our colleague in Haiti, Sebastian, we found Larousse last week in surprisingly good health and good spirits.
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"How are you?" Couric asked. "I'm fine," Larousse said. "Does your leg still hurt?" Couric asked. "No," Larousse said. Larousse's nurse said there are no lasting effects of the head injury he sustained, and the cast he's wearing comes off Friday. Brigitte Guerber-Cahuzac of Doctors Without Borders said she believes he is doing very well. "You believe he'll be like a normal 13-year-old boy?" Couric asked. "I'm sure," Guerber-Cahuzac said. "He wants to play football."
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But where, and with whom, Larousse will live is uncertain. His grandmother, already caring for two older children and a niece, lives in a tent. When we asked if she could care for Larousse, she offered an unassuring yes. "Oui, oui," the grandmother said.
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And school? Larousse said he wants to go back, but his was destroyed, so this year is lost. Larousse's plight is all too common throughout this ravaged country. Some 2 million children were traumatized, injured or left homeless by the quake, according to Save the Children. Thousands have been separated from their families, according to the International Rescue Committee. With as many as 4,000 schools reduced to rubble, nearly 3 million children are being deprived an education, according to UNICEF.
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Some believe the earthquake might actually change Haiti for the better. "Hopefully now they will build more schools, and we'll be able to learn a profession," Ganahelle Pierre, a 10-year-old displaced student, said through a translator.
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At Sacre Coeur, or Sacred Heart, it's the first day of school for hundreds of students, at least since the earthquake. Last week, classes resumed under tents next to the vacant lot where the school once stood. "It's a little sign of hope," UNICEF's Eddie Carwardine said. "We're not claiming this is going to change the lives of everyone. There are huge challenges here, but it's the little steps that you take, which for young kids are big steps and changes in their lives."
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Carwardine said one big change is this: Sacre Coeur was once exclusively private, but not anymore. "They've invited kids from public schools here free of charge, so they can also learn in this temporary environment," Carwardine said. "That's a sign of Haitians helping Haitians. That's a positive symbol for the future."
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But it also highlights a blemish on Haiti's past. Even before the earthquake, Haiti was a country in which nearly half of all children never attended school. There aren't enough public schools, and 85 percent are private. With most families earning less than $2 a day, education in Haiti has been a privilege, not a right. "Can the public school system be bolstered somehow so that children who can't afford to pay for a private school can at least get some kind of an education?" Couric asked.
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"I think that's a question for the government here," Carwardine said. "They have to make that decision in terms of their education policy. I think what we have now though is the opportunity of international attention on Haiti, international interest. The challenge is how do we make sure the voice of children and the face of children is really in the middle of the development agenda and the reconstruction agenda here?"
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Making the most of an opportunity is a lesson the high school seniors Couric met seem to have already learned. "We're the future of the country," student Annie Coutard said. "We're like the next prime ministers, presidents, big lawyers of the country, so we need to have big ambition." Yet for so many of Haiti's children, the goal is simply survival, which means grieving has to wait.
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"Part of what they have to do, in order to keep living, is to shut down a lot of the feelings, a lot of the grief especially," said Dr. Jim Gordon, a psychiatrist. Gordon has seen his share of post traumatic stress working with children in wartorn areas like Bosnia, Israel and Gaza. He's in Haiti trying to literally draw out children whose feelings are buried as deep as Haiti's landscape.
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"Do you find that many of these children draw a house that's been destroyed?" Couric asked. "Yes," Gordon said. When they're not drawing, Gordon's got them dancing, but one boy named Rinaldo refused to participate and not even his drawing revealed the extent of his loss. "I lost my aunt," Rinaldo said through a translator. "In the earthquake?" Couric asked. "Yes," Rinaldo said.
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Rinaldo is 10 years old. His parents live in Guyana. His aunt was his caretaker. "How does going through this experience make you feel, Rinaldo?" Couric asked.
"I don't feel anything," Rinaldo said as he cries. "I keep thinking about my aunt who passed away." For Larousse, that January afternoon, when his world literally came crashing down, is simply too painful to think about.
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For now, a tented community is providing a safe haven, albeit a temporary one where the staff tries to encourage friendships among the people living here, bonds they hope will continue once they leave. It will be a long road back for Haiti and its children and hardest of all for those who will have to walk it alone.

3/9/2010
Your Ottawa Region
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Next stop: Port-au-Prince. Three Canadian crime fighters will head to Haiti on April 8 to help that nation prevent child exploitation. From left, RCMP Sgt. Lana Prosper, specialist Gilbert Labelle and operations manager Luc Vidal say children are at greater risk of becoming victims of sexual predators when a natural disaster such as Haiti's earthquake occur.
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Natural disasters draw emergency and aid workers, but they also attract sex offenders. According to the RCMP, the 2004 Pacific tsunami made orphaned children easy prey for sex offenders. “They’re what we call travelling sex offenders,” said RCMP Sgt. Lana Prosper. The federal government announced on April 7 that three members of the Canadian Police Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (CPCMEC) will travel to Haiti in an effort to prevent sexual predators from turning children in that country into victims.
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Prosper said some predators will offer to enter a country faced with a disaster to help with the recovery. “But really what they want is access to the children,” she said. CPCMEC’s victim identification unit comprises four members, and three of them will be in Haiti for about a month. Prosper said it’s the first such international mission that the RCMP is aware of.
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Prosper and two civilian members of the victim identification unit – specialist Gilbert Labelle and CPCMEC operations manager Luc Vidal – expect to fly to Haiti on April 8. In the short term the three Canadians will assist Haitian police with identification of children who are at risk of exploitation. Over the long term, the side-by-side work is expected to improve the Haitian police force’s own ability to prevent sex crimes.
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“The Haitian National Police are stretched to their limits,” said RCMP Supt. John Bilinski during an April 7 press conference at the RCMP hangar near the Ottawa airport. “They are focused on providing the basic needs for the Haitian people.” Nepean-Carleton MP Pierre Poilievre announced the deployment of the team at the press conference on behalf of Minister of Public Safety Vic Toews.
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Poilievre called child exploitation “a borderless crime,” that requires co-ordination between many police forces. Prosper said Haiti’s recovery from a Jan. 12 earthquake is a critical time to help prevent sex crimes. The three Canadians in Haiti will start their work at orphanages because they hold the most vulnerable children. She said the team will take cameras to catalogue children so they can identify them if they show up in child pornography at a later date.
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Prosper said she travelled to Haiti a few weeks ago to meet some of the police officers the victim identification unit will work alongside. “The intent is to bring them up to the level of the international community,” she said. The Canadian unit has had many successes, identifying more than 100 children in Canada who have since been rescued from exploitation. The unit has also helped identify more than 2,000 children in other countries who may have appeared in child pornography.
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Prosper said the unit has in the past handled cases that originated in Haiti, involving children from that country. The victim identification unit will travel to Haiti with computers, cameras and other gear. The team will take extra provisions with them due to the lack of supplies on the ground since the January earthquake.
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Prosper hopes the publicity surrounding the trip will help prevent potential child sexual abuse. “Maybe when (predators) hear about this they will be less likely to travel to those places,” she said.

Three Canadian police officers are heading to quake-ravaged Haiti to help protect children from sexual exploitation on the Internet. The month-long deployment is a project of the Canadian Police Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.
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The officers will be based in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince and will help the country's national police force develop their capacity to protect children from online sexual exploitation.
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The centre says operational experience and intelligence confirms children orphaned or displaced by natural disasters are extremely vulnerable to sexual exploitation. In past disasters like the tsunami of 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, kids were sold to brothels, used in the production of child pornography or put to work as sex slaves, it says.
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The risks include the posting and trading of images on the Internet. Dubbed Operation Sentry, the Haiti project will gather baseline information such as photographs and biographical data of children at risk and their surroundings. "This information will enhance efforts to identify child victims from Haiti should images depicting their sexual abuse surface on the Internet," says a statement.
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Information gathered by the three Canadian investigators will be maintained and safeguarded by the centre until Haitian police can take over. Ottawa is investing $71 million over five years in international efforts to protect children from online sex predators.

Associated Press
By MIKE MELIA
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Stranded since the earthquake, 9-year-old Ana toes the dusty concrete outside her orphanage and tells a social worker she wants to go back to live with her half-sister. Within hours, the aid worker hits pay dirt, finding the adult sister in a sprawling shantytown. But there's a problem. The sister, an impoverished woman with two children of her own, was the one who dropped the girl at the orphanage in the first place.
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"This is going to be difficult," sighed Mario Marcellus, a Haitian caseworker for World Vision - one of five international aid groups working to trace children living in orphanages or homeless camps since the earthquake and return them to their families.
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The aid groups have already found 700 children they believe were separated from their families by the earthquake, and they expect the number to rise dramatically because of a new hot line set up to report cases of separated children. The work is tedious, especially for younger children who can't give phone numbers or details of their families in a city where hundreds of thousands have been forced from their homes into makeshift camps. And too often, days of sleuthing lead not to joyful reunions but to parents and guardians too overwhelmed to take the children back.
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World Vision has managed to find families for only 12 of its 300 cases so far. And only five children have been reunited with their families. In seven other cases, the families did not want them back. "We have appreciated the conditions of the parents are not the greatest, but we have been shocked to learn the parents have not been looking for them, or they have not expected them back," said Noah Ochola, the leader of World Vision's Children in Emergencies program.
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The magnitude-7 earthquake that the government estimates killed 230,000 people proved the breaking point for many families that could barely afford to feed their children before. The World Vision team found Ana on Monday at a partially collapsed orphanage in the Tabarre flatlands on the northern edge of Port-au-Prince, sleeping with 17 other children in a tent rigged from bed sheets.
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She has a rash covering her face and body that is going untreated, and orphanage director Idalia Supreme said the girl is so traumatized that she has no memory of the earthquake. Wearing a pink embroidered dress and blue plastic sandals, Ana huddled in an alley with Marcellus, the caseworker, who gently prodded for clues about her life before the Jan. 12 quake: What does your house look like? What do you remember about your neighborhood?
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Supreme took Marcellus aside and warned him that a reunion may not be possible for Ana and her half-sister. "She brought her here because times are hard," Supreme said, spreading her palms out toward the toppled concrete homes nearby. The girl's mother died when she was younger. Her father, who lives nearby, visited after the earthquake and complained that she does not belong in an orphanage. But he offered no alternative, Supreme said.
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Even amid the dire conditions since the quake, the guiding principle of the aid groups is that children's best protectors are their families. To that end, they have developed strategies to win over reluctant guardians like Ana's sister.
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Aid groups refer parents and guardians in the desperately poor country to earning opportunities such as the U.N. work-for-food program. To make the children seem less of a burden, they are sent home with parcels of rice, sandals, toothpaste and cooking oil. World Vision also provides $60 to $150 in cash, depending on how many children the family has.
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"It gives them room to think, to see beyond another two or three months what kind of work they can be engaged in," Ochola said. The smallest aid can make a difference. Ramsey Ben-Achour, the Haiti director for Heartland Alliance, another of the five groups under UNICEF, said he met one man who did not want to take two of his children home from a field hospital. He had two other children, his wife died in the earthquake and their house collapsed. But after the aid group gave him two mattresses, tent tarps and food rations, he agreed to take back the children.
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"He thinks he's going to be giving them a better life by leaving them there (at the hospital)," Ben-Achour said. "But what's actually going to happen is they're going to turn into street children, they're going to end up trying to wash cars, they're going to join gangs or be exploited sexually." The disaster heightened an existing problem: the institutionalization of children in a country where roughly 40 percent of the population is under age 14. Most of the 50,000 children who lived in orphanages before the earthquake had at least one living parent, said Andy Brooks, the UNICEF child protection chief.
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As many as 250,000 other children were living in a form of slavery - the so-called "restaveks" sent to live in more affluent households, where many suffer abuse - in exchange for shelter and sometimes schooling. Marcellus, a psychologist, said he dedicated his career to children because they are among the most neglected in Haitian society. Since the quake, he said, he feels more needed than ever.
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"I have to work twice as hard and make more sacrifices for my job," he said. Brooks said he hopes the outpouring of global assistance will help create a better-regulated system for tending to unwanted children. "I think the most important thing is really to use the opportunity, if I can say that, of the resources and the increased capacity ... to develop with the government creative and innovative ways to get children to stay with their families," he said.
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The vast number of discarded children has complicated aid workers' efforts, but their loose mandate is still to focus on those separated since the quake. The less time that has passed since the separation, the easier it is to reunite families. In Ana's case, there are already signs of progress. Marcellus called her sister, who seemed wary over the phone.
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But he explained how Ana was traumatized and living in poor conditions, and she agreed in a later conversation to meet with him and Ana at the orphanage next week. Marcellus is hopeful: "The only reason she doesn't want to take her sister back is because she doesn't have money."

Reuters
By Katherine Baldwin
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The Haiti earthquake offers an opportunity to improve the protection of children in a country where they have been routinely abandoned, trafficked and exploited, a senior United Nations official said on Tuesday. Susan Bissell, head of child protection at U.N. children's fund UNICEF said increased attention and funding for Haiti could help transform a troubling landscape for children in the impoverished country. She pointed to the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia's Aceh province as evidence that an emergency can be used as a launch pad for a better child protection system.
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"We've seen systems strengthened in countries where they were weak before," Bissell said in an interview. "I think it is possible (in Haiti)."
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In Haiti, 50,000 children were in institutional care -- for example in centres for abandoned babies or orphanages -- before the earthquake, according to the government. Some centres had questionable standards and the entire sector was unmonitored, UNICEF says. Large numbers of children in the centres had families who visited them but had given them up in the hope of providing them with a better life. Before the earthquake, UNICEF, working with the government and local partners, had already put systems in place to improve child safety.
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They had set up a community-based network of volunteers, and child protection brigades had been created within the Haitian national police. These efforts must now be stepped up, Bissell said.
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"We need people, we need social workers, people who can do psycho-social support, we need community mobilisers who can get children into schools, we need to quadruple the number of police who are trained in child protection," she said.
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"We need to step all this up and that's going to take sustained interest and sustained financial support." In the near-term, however, UNICEF's focus is on registering separated and unaccompanied children, which will take months.
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So far, 600 such children have been identified and provided with safe temporary shelter. Once they are registered, UNICEF and its partners trace the children's family members by encouraging them to draw pictures and recall aspects of their family life. But changing social norms in a country where parents often put children into care because of poverty will take many years, Bissell added.
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Government statistics show there are 12,500 children aged between five to 14 in child labour, 173,000 in domestic service, up to 4,000 living on the streets, and 2,000 trafficked out of the country annually.
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"When we look at the social norms -- I give up my child because I know someone else is going to take care of him and give him a better life -- we can't just throw money at that. "It can take up to a generation to address these kind of practices," Bissell said.

United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF)
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On the eve of an international donor's conference for Haiti at the United Nations, Save the Children, SOS Children's Villages International, Plan International, World Vision International, Oxfam and UNICEF have stressed the importance of ensuring children, young people and their families are at the centre of all rebuilding efforts.
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Haitian children and young people aged 5 to 24 shared their views on issues affecting them such as gender, disabilities, violence and abuse, disaster risk reduction, and their own rights and responsibilities post-earthquake as their country emerges from recent earthquakes at a series of focus group discussions held throughout the country between 26 February and 5 March. Humanitarian organizations working on children's issues maintain that providing Haiti's youngest citizens with a strong voice in the discussion around the future of their country and enabling them to actively participate in all aspects of it will be crucial for a successful transformation of Haiti.
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In a recent post disaster risk assessment study with more than 1,000 children, many said that their priority was to return to school and continue their education as soon as possible. "I want the rights of children to be respected and all children to know what their rights are. I also want everyone to have access to education," says quake survivor Daphmika, 15, in Port-au-Prince.
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Children and adolescents under 15 make up nearly 40 per cent of the population in Haiti and young people from 15 to 24 account for another 20 per cent. Even before the earthquake the needs of many Haitian children were not met. Nearly one in every fourteen children did not live to see their fifth birthday and children who survived were afflicted by high rates of malnutrition. About 50 percent of all Haitian children did not attend primary school and only 18 per cent of boys and 21 per cent of girls attended secondary school.
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The government of Haiti has indicated its commitment to prioritizing the needs of children and youth, but the earthquake has dramatically complicated the difficult task of assuring the well-being of Haiti's youngest citizens. Many of the more than one million children in the earthquake zone were already in vulnerable circumstances and now face increased risks due to loss, separation from, or displacement of their families, malnutrition, illness, psychological trauma and abuse.
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Save the Children, SOS Children's Villages International, Plan International, World Vision International, Oxfam and UNICEF stress that Haiti is a children's emergency and have been providing children and families with emergency relief supplies including shelter, food, medical supplies, water and sanitation supplies, and child protection services. The establishment of tent schools has given children the opportunity to continue their education and experience a sense of safety and normalcy.
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If Haiti is to emerge from disaster as a place where children and families can survive and thrive, a holistic and sustained internationally-funded response that creates a strong child protection system and provides access to quality health care and education will be needed. Children and young people must be acknowledged as resourceful, as agents of change and as protagonists in their own development.
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Save the Children, SOS Children's Villages International, Plan International, World Vision International, Oxfam and UNICEF are closely collaborating on the ground and internationally to provide consistent and coordinated support to Haiti's children and its future.
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For more information, please contact:
Janine Kandel, UNICEF New York,
Tel: + 1 212 326-7684,
E-mail: jkandel@unicef.org
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Tamar Hahn, UNICEF Panama,
Tel: + 507 301-7485,
E-mail: thahn@unicef.org
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Jenessa Bryan, SOS-Children's Village International,
Tel: + 1 917 208-3472,
E-mail: jenessa.bryan@sos-kd.org
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Amy Parodi, World Vision,
Tel: + 1 253 815-2386,
E-mail: aparodi@worldvision.org
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Nicole Widdersheim, Oxfam International,
Tel: + 1 212 687-3018,
E-mail: nicole.widdersheim@oxfaminaternational.org
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Robin Costello, Plan USA,
Tel: + 1 401 829-2796,
E-mail: Robin.Costello@planusa.org
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Kate Conradt, Save the Children,
Tel: + 1 202 640 6631,
E-mail: kconradt@savechildren.org

AFP
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Haiti's earthquake victims are still reliving the horror of the January 12 disaster, and the trauma is forcing out suppressed memories of rape and years of domestic abuse. At the front-line of the battle to stitch up the emotional scars of a shattered Port-au-Prince populace, the impressive 28-year old Haitian psychologist Djenane Marhlen Jean Charles sets about mending tortured minds.
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Calm and professional, she runs a team of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) trauma specialists at a tent city for more than 40,000 quake survivors that has sprung up at the Petionville Golf Club. "A lot of people are anxious and frightened of reliving the earthquake. They have physical complaints, headaches, palpitations, stomach cramps," Jean Charles told AFP.
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"People who lost family or friends feel guilty because they didn't die with their relatives or they didn't do enough to save them. A lot of them didn't see the bodies of their dead relatives so it's difficult for them to get over it." Many are overwhelmed by their surreal post-quake existence, they have lost everything, they are uncertain about the future, they have no idea how long they can stay at the camp, they don't know how to cope.
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"They feel completely lost in this situation and it takes time to work with them so they can get over it and see the light again," explained Jean Charles. The camp is at high-risk from floods as the rainy season approaches and the United Nations is trying to get people to move back to their homes or relocate to safer sites in and around the capital.
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The UN may be providing people with options, but Jean Charles said the majority of survivors feel helpless, lack initiative and are waiting for someone to tell them what to do. "The people don't know what will happen to them, they have not been informed if they can stay or not, if they will be displaced or not."
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There is increasing concern about rape in the camps and human rights group Amnesty International published a stark assessment this week, saying thousands of women were being abused. "Sexual violence is widely present in camps where some of Haiti's most vulnerable live," said researcher Chiara Liguori. "It was already a major concern in the country before the earthquake but the situation in which displaced people are living exposes women and girls to even greater risks."
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Jean Charles knew of only one rape at the Petionville Golf Club, but said many young women had suffered domestic violence within their families for years. One girl broke down during counseling as she recounted how she had been raped, abused and hit for years before the quake by family members.
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"She came back a second time and gave feedback from the first session, saying she was very grateful and relieved that she could finally speak with somebody. She is still coming," said Jean Charles. "I am used to seeing victims of sexual violence. It's important to give them space so that they can speak and so that there is somebody who is not judging them so they feel comfortable."
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MSF teams have started going around the camps with loud-hailers and placards to summon people to tent sessions where they can share their experiences. At an MSF-run hospital in the Cite Soleil slum, 33-year-old psychologist Katarina Brock said a lot of people were coming and more and more survivors were willing to talk.
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"It's very good that people are willing to share their experience, especially in groups," said Brock. "Others have been in a similar situation and they can share different ideas on how to cope and what you can do. "If they are having nightmares of flashbacks, they are just normal reactions to what they've been through, and to hear others that have the same problems, it helps them realize it's not just me that's crazy."
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The head of the criminal intelligence unit for the UN police, Michel Martin, said it was extremely difficult to clamp down on abuse in the camps. "This is a very unique, particular situation where you have thousands of people camping in an area where it is difficult to move around. You've got ropes, you've got poles. At night, especially, it is very, very difficult."
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At the Petionville Golf Club, Jean Charles prepared her team for the next round of patients, smiling as she said that despite all the nightmares there was still hope. "There is the dream that there will be a new Haiti, that all Haiti's problems will be resolved, with good schools, without violence, with basic social services."

By JESSICA LEEDER
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It was close to midnight and pitch dark in Martine's sheet-cordoned section of the mass tent when she opened her eyes and saw the shape of a man locked on top of her second-youngest daughter. The willowy nine-year-old was lying motionless on her thin cot.
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"What are you doing to my child?" The sound of Martine's panicked voice didn't break the trance of the man, who she recognized as an adult friend of her son. The darkness spared her a detailed view of what was happening to her daughter, but she knew anyway, and she started to scream. That startled the attacker, who fled the tent, sprinting through crammed Pinchinat, the walled school soccer field that is Jacmel's largest and most notorious camp for the displaced.
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Minutes later, the man was caught and pinned down - not by police, but by a team of civilians assigned to night-time patrol by the camp's citizens committee, a grassroots group devoted to better security for the tent city's 5,000 residents.
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Most sex-related crime and violence takes place at night inside the camp, a sprawling field that has only two gas-powered light standards. The cavernous military tents, donated by Venezuela's army, are both a blessing and a curse: They provide shelter from the rains, but they are dark and dangerous at night. As well, the communal nature of the tents violates international shelter standards, which advocate single-family tents whenever possible. Experts prefer to enforce the separation of men from women and children when families cannot live alone, to avoid the kind of insecurity and violence that has developed at Pinchinat.
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With only two Haitian police officers assigned to the camp at a given time, the citizens' committee, called Voluntaires mixte du village Pinchinat, focuses on ensuring the well-being of the most vulnerable residents - women and children. The welfare of both groups seem to have slipped through the cracks of the patchwork aid system that has been stitched together in meeting rooms across Haiti since the Jan. 12 earthquake.
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While there are international meeting "clusters" appointed to deal with broad issues such as shelter, education and logistics, none have focused on the welfare of Haiti's women, who were immersed in a deeply entrenched battle for equality, rights and sexual autonomy long before the earthquake.
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Since the disaster, the vulnerability of women and their children has increased noticeably. In Jacmel, sexual assaults and domestic violence have been rising in the city's larger camps for displaced people and families, according to statistics collected by Fanm Deside ("Women Decide"), the only women's rights group in the city.
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On Friday, Amnesty International issued a report imploring the aid community in Haiti and police officials to turn their attention to the rising sexual violence against women and girls in camps. "Sexual violence is widely present in camps where some of Haiti's most vulnerable live," said Chiara Liguori, an Amnesty researcher who was part of a team that visited eight camps in Port-au-Prince, Jacmel and Leogane. "It was already a major concern in the country before the earthquake, but the situation in which displaced people are living exposes women and girls to even greater risks."
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In Jacmel, as in other parts of Haiti, women living in tent encampments still bear the burden of providing food for their families, even though they have no work and few supplies. With the economy stalled, a growing number of desperate women are turning to prostitution for food, or allowing their daughters to do so. At Pinchinat, a sexual act earns about 25 Haitian gourdes - less than one Canadian dollar - according to Charlotte Charles, director of the camp's citizens committee. It was she who decided, out of frustration and disgust, that combatting sexual crimes against women and children would be the committee's priority, ahead of the many other problems that plague the camp.
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"The parents here accept for their children to be prostitutes," Ms. Charles said, adding that a condom distribution program run by the United Nations at Pinchinat after the earthquake only exacerbated the situation by appearing to condone promiscuous behaviour. "Normally the distribution of condoms is good. But when I give them out here, prostitutes come," she said. Ms. Charles's ultimate aim is to run classes for the camp women to help train them to support themselves and their families. "If children are well kept, when they come of age, they'll have intercourse based on their own choices, not because they have nothing to eat," she added.
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For now, there is no money for such a program. So Ms. Charles is working with Fanm Deside, whose members recently began patrolling the camp's crowded rows of tents to talk with women. They also set up a tent on the soccer field where they conduct daily support group meetings. So far, turnouts have been small; meetings are open to all, but aimed at those who have experienced sexual violence, assault or prostituted themselves, said Marie-Ange Noel, the group's director. "Normally at Pinchinat, the females are embarrassed to come forward," she said. "They're afraid they're going to be ridiculed by the other females."
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Ms. Noel and her field workers have been building a cache of reports from women in the camp who report that middle-aged and elderly men with money have been visiting Pinchinat to buy sex. They are also tracking several cases similar to that of Martine's daughter; most have not resulted in arrests. "The tents have no light at night. It's difficult for them to be detected," Ms. Noel noted.
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Martine said that, two weeks after the attack, her young daughter still wasn't sleeping, talking much, or acting like herself. "He was trying to rape her," Martine said in an interview, as the little girl sprawled mutely on her lap. "She has bruises," Martine said, pausing. "If I had another option, I would leave. We don't feel safe here."

3/26/2010
AFP
By Andrew Gully
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Among the cracked colonial houses and shattered dreams that litter the beautiful Haitian beach resort and carnival city of Jacmel, a resilient people dare to hope as they rebuild for the future. Disaster struck just as Haiti, a popular jet-set destination in the 1960s and 1970s for rich Americans and Europeans, was beginning to get back on the tourist map after years of political turmoil.
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A Conde Nast Traveller piece in September boasted of its "ravishing natural assets, thrilling history, and magnetic culture," and there was talk of opening up direct flights from Miami to Jacmel, the jewel in Haiti's tourism crown. The January 12 earthquake ended all that, killing more than 220,000 people, leaving 1.3 million homeless and relegating Haiti to near the bottom of anyone's travel list.
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Jacmel was hit particularly hard. Almost 500 people out of a population of 40,000 perished. The quake struck during the southern city's vital January-March carnival, devastating the local economy.
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"During the carnival period we normally make enough money for the rest of the year, for our children, for our families," said Jules Andre, an artisan who fashions the exquisite papier-mache masks and decorations Jacmel is famous for. Locals, who call themselves Jacmellians and are fiercely proud of the city's reputation as Haiti's cultural heart, had created a safe atmosphere here that was in marked contrast to the crime-ridden streets of the capital.
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The city was largely unaltered from the 19th century when wealthy coffee merchants lapped up luxury in their mansions, looking out over wrought-iron balconies forged in Spain and France. But many facades now lie in ruins and it is hard to imagine that this haven of relative tranquility, less than three hours by car or a 15-minute hop by plane from Port-au-Prince, will ever be restored to its pre-quake splendor.
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A quarter of Jacmel's 700 hotel rooms were destroyed and some establishments, like the optimistically named Peace of Mind, were completely flattened. Other attractions did emerge unscathed. At Cyvardie beach, turquoise Caribbean waters lap a natural lagoon ringed by soft white sand. A death-defying drive into the hills reveals Bassin Bleu, a secret world of stunning waterfalls and shady rocks to plunge from.
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"Jacmel is very important for tourism because we have a lot of places to visit, the architecture, nice beaches, nice people," said Georges Metellus, who grew up here and runs an art foundation for children. "My dream is to see Jacmel as I knew it before, to see a lot of tourists come, to rebuild our beach communities, our houses."
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Unlike the painfully slow progress that is hard to measure in the capital, Jacmel is making strides down the road to recovery, harnessing all its Jacmellian spirit to dream that a future is still possible. Energized by an ambitious young mayor who has created cash-for-work programs, teams in green hard-hats busily clear the river-beds where debris was dumped after the quake. Culture ministry officials say they still hope those Miami flights will one day roll in and that Jacmel can add substantially to the 25,000 tourists it saw in 2009.
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For Annie Nocenti, an American journalist and filmmaker who teaches in Jacmel at the Cine Institute, where students have collaborated on remarkable post-quake film clips, the key is safeguarding the architecture. "The draw of the tourism was because of these beautiful buildings. If they don't restore at least those facades, that's really going to hurt tourism here."
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Jacmel residents reacted furiously when the local authorities put red dots on all the buildings they wanted to tear down because they were considered structurally unsafe. "There's a certain paranoia that someone is going to take advantage of the leveled areas to put in monster hotels," said Nocenti. "I doubt it because who would invest in Haiti right now considering there has just been an earthquake.
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"The local economy has been devastated. It's going to take years to get people to feel safe enough to come to Haiti again," she said, pointing out that the rich weekend crowd from Port-au-Prince had deserted Jacmel's beaches. Bayard Jean-Bernard, a 28-year-old student at the Cine Institute who worked as a tour guide before the quake, said the spirit of Jacmel was dying without the carnival, which was canceled because of the disaster. "We like to have that feeling, we like to have that atmosphere. We are missing this atmosphere this year."

3/26/2010
AFP
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The UN has started daily radio announcements to help women at risk from rape in Haiti's squalid camps that house hundreds of thousands of quake survivors, a spokeswoman said Thursday. "Three spots on how women can improve their security will be aired in the morning and three spots on how women can protect themselves in an assault will be aired in the afternoon," said United Nations spokeswoman France Hurtubise.
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The public service announcements in Creole will be aired on seven radio stations nationwide for 60 days straight, said Hurtubise, spokeswoman for the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
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Michel Martin, head of the criminal intelligence unit for the UN police UNPOL, dismissed rumors about large numbers of rapes in the camps and said less than 10 had been investigated since the January 12 earthquake. UNPOL is working closely with the Haitian police and MINUSTAH, the UN military force in Haiti, to crack down on any violence in the 460 camps dotted around Port-au-Prince, Martin said.
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"This is a very unique, particular situation where you have thousands of people camping in an area where it is difficult to move around," he said. "You've got ropes, you've got poles. At night, especially, it is very, very difficult. We have got to make sure that our people are tracked all the time." UNPOL, which has a 350-strong presence in Port-au-Prince, is working with local leaders inside the camps and has an emergency number they can call if they spot any criminal activity or something unusual.
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"People who have been victim of a crime don't come very easily toward the police. We cannot patrol these camps, at this point, 24 hours a day at the same time. It's a step-by-step process," said Martin. Hurtubise said 100,000 solar lanterns had been distributed to some of the most high-profile camps like Champ de Mars and Petionville Club to try to improve security.
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And Martin said UNPOL had requested more female officers to act as the main interface with women in the camps and that they were encouraging the Haitian police to do the same. The presence of women "is one of our main objectives because it is easier to establish contact," he said. Violent crime figures in Haiti are down on pre-quake levels from 402 reported in February 2009 to just 174 this year, but this could easily be due to the very visible international military and police presence in the country.
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Michel warned people to be savvy about the risk of kidnap and said the latest incident -- two local children abducted early on Tuesday morning -- showed everyone had to be on their guard the whole time. He urged people "to be careful, to avoid being isolated at night, to stay together." Most relief organizations in Port-au-Prince have self-imposed night-time curfews.

3/24/2010
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Thousands of women living in temporary camps around Haiti are threatened by sexual violence and have inadequate protection from any authorities, Amnesty International said today after concluding a three-week visit to the country. Sexual violence is widespread across the hundreds of spontaneous camps that sprung up in the capital and other affected areas of Haiti following the massive earthquake that struck the country in January.
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Amnesty International said that the lack of measures to prevent and respond adequately to the threat of sexual violence is contributing to the humanitarian crisis and urged the Haitian authorities to take immediate and effective measures to curb sexual violence and protect women living in the camps.
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"Sexual violence is widely present in camps where some of Haiti's most vulnerable live," said Chiara Liguori, Caribbean researcher at Amnesty International from Port-au-Prince. "It was already a major concern in the country before the earthquake but the situation in which displaced people are living exposes women and girls to even greater risks." Insecurity, overcrowding and inadequate sanitary facilities are putting women and girls at great risk of abuse because they are exposed and without protection. The lack of capacity of the police forces and the justice system in the aftermath of the earthquake means that perpetrators are unlikely to be punished.
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"Authorities in Haiti must prioritize strengthening the police presence in camps, especially at night, including capacity to protect women and girls from sexual violence and to respond adequately to reported cases," said Chiara Liguori. There is a general feeling of insecurity inside and around the camps, particularly at night. Women and girls living in makeshift shelters feel vulnerable and are afraid of attacks. Most victims of sexual violence interviewed by Amnesty International were minors. One 8-year-old girl was raped when alone in her tent at night. Her mother had gone out of the camp to work and did not have anybody to look after her daughter during her absence. A 15-year-old was raped when she went out of the camp to urinate, as there were no latrines within the camp.
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Lack of adequate protection mechanisms for women and girls is discouraging them from denouncing the violence. A local women's organization reported 19 cases of rape in just one small section of Champ-de-Mars, one of the biggest camps in Port-au-Prince. None of the women and girls had reported the attacks to the police for fear of their aggressors and instead moved out of the camp. "There are no shelters in the country where victims of sexual violence can be protected and have access to services. Shelters for women and girl victims of violence must also be part of the emergency response and the international NGOs, massively present in Haiti, can only make this possible with the coordination of the Haitian authorities," said Chiara Liguori
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Background Information: Amnesty International's delegation visited eight camps of displaced people in Port-au-Prince, and the cities of Jacmel and Lascahobas, some of them more than once. Amnesty International's delegates met government authorities, including the President of the Republic, René García Préval, and Prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive. They held talks with the head of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) and with various UN agencies operating in Haiti, local and international human rights organizations and the ambassadors of Brazil, Canada, and France.
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For a full copy of Amnesty International's briefing on the main human rights concerns for women and children in Haiti, please contact our press office.

Amnesty Internationa
By Gerardo Ducos
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http://livewire.amnesty.org/2010/03/15/the-daily-struggle-in-haitis-camp...
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Two months after the earthquake, thousands in Port-au-Prince and elsewhere still await a first glimpse of humanitarian aid. In the four makeshift camps we visited during our first days in Haiti, life is a daily struggle and conditions are dire to say the least. People are without water, food, sanitation or shelter. Resilience and solidarity with each other are the only things these camp-dwellers can rely on.
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There are camps everywhere. Every single open space, on public or private land, is occupied by hundreds or thousands of people. They are sheltered mostly under sheets and towels, in tents, under tarpaulins or, for the most industrious, in structures of recycled wood and tin. In the camps we visited in Cité Soleil, Delmas and Champ-de-Mars, local committees have been created, improvising and taking charge of basic camp management tasks: coordination, security during the night, registration of families, activities for children, digging latrines or demarcation of common space.
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However, women’s participation and representation in the committees is limited. That said, most women are out and about in the streets of Port-au-Prince selling goods and trying to earn what they can to feed their families. At some distribution points, other women are patiently forming orderly queues to receive rice or other items from humanitarian organizations under the watchful eye of the heavily armed US soldiers or UN blue helmets.
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The destruction in the city is vast and most of the government institutions have collapsed or are damaged beyond use. The authorities, like thousands of other Haitians, are literally camping and working off the road. The Port-au-Prince police station is located a few hundred meters from what was the Presidential Palace and overlooks Champ-de-Mars, one of the city’s open spaces – now occupied by more than 12,000 people.
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This police station hosts one of the few units set up to respond to violence against women. It so now reduced to a dusty table on the pavement and is manned during the day only. Since the earthquake, several pages of a log book have been filled with complaints of sexual abuse and violence from women and girls, while in the camp on Champ-de-Mars, just across the road. The day we visited the police station, a male officer on duty at the table unwillingly counted for us the number of cases registered in the log book: 52 cases of physical and sexual violence since the earthquake.
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He said that many victims were minors, aged between 11 and 16, and that most of the assaults took place at night. Although he knew where to refer victims for medical attention after a sexual assault, he was unable to explain why, on the previous night, a mother seeking police assistance in the attempted rape of her 17-year-old daughter by four young men, was told that the police could not do anything and that the security in the camps was the responsibility of the President of the Republic. Quite a blow for the population’s confidence in the police…
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Wilson, a baby boy, was born the night before our second visit to Cité Soleil, a makeshift camp of 272 families. The mother gave birth in the most unsanitary conditions imaginable: on the dirt, a few metres away from a canal of stagnant and putrid water, clogged with garbage and covered with flies and mosquitoes.
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Another woman from the camp assisted Wilson’s mother in what was described to us as a difficult delivery, without clean water, towels or sterile tools to cut the cord. The one-day-old Wilson rested calmly in his mother’s arms, unperturbed by our presence and the swarm of mosquitoes that invaded the space under bedsheets tied up with strings. That’s the home where he was born.
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This improvised shelter provided little more than some shade, with no protection at all against other hazards. It leaves three children and their widowed mother exposed to the rain and the recurrent flooding in Cité Soleil and vulnerable to infectious diseases.
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The rainy season looms and all the people we talked to fear the worst. Shelter is what they need and what they ask for. That is their priority.

Associated Press
By MICHELLE FAUL
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When the young woman needed to use the toilet, she went out into the darkened tent camp and was attacked by three men. "They grabbed me, put their hands over my mouth and then the three of them took turns," the slender 21-year-old said, wriggling with discomfort as she nursed her baby girl, born three days before Haiti's devastating quake.
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"I am so ashamed. We're scared people will find out and shun us," said the woman, who suffers from abdominal pain and itching, likely from an infection contracted during the attack. Women and children as young as 2, already traumatized by the loss of homes and loved ones in the Jan. 12 catastrophe, are now falling victim to rapists in the sprawling tent cities that have become home to hundreds of thousands of people.
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With no lighting and no security, they are menacing places after sunset. Sexual assaults are daily occurrences in the biggest camps, aid workers say — and most attacks go unreported because of the shame, social stigma and fear of reprisals from attackers.
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Rape was a big problem in Haiti even before the earthquake and frequently was used as a political weapon in times of upheaval. Both times the first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was ousted, his enemies assassinated his male supporters and raped their wives and daughters.
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But the quake that killed an estimated 200,000 people has made women and girls ever more vulnerable. They have lost their homes and are forced to sleep in flimsy tents or tarp-covered lean-tos. They've lost male protection with the deaths of husbands, brothers and sons. And they are living in close quarters with strangers. The 21-year-old said her family has received no food aid because the Haitian men handing out coupons for food distribution demand sexual favors.
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Sex-for-food is not uncommon in the camps, said a report issued Tuesday by the Interuniversity Institute for Research and Development in Haiti. "In particular, young girls have to negotiate sexually in order to get shelter from the rains and access to food aid." At the camp on Monday where the young mother was gang-raped, a woman in shorts tried to bathe discreetly. Stripped to her waist, she faced her blue tarp tent, her back to the rows of other shelters. Nearby, a teenage girl squatted behind a pile of garbage, trying to avoid the stench and clouds of flies around tarp-covered latrines that provide the only privacy, but also are places where women are attacked.
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In this camp, some 47,000 people live crowded into what used to be a sports ground in a neighborhood that always has been dangerous. Residents include a dozen escaped prisoners, among them a man accused of a notorious murder, according to Fritznel Pierre, a human rights advocate who lives at the camp. "But nobody says anything because they're scared, scared of the criminals and scared of the police," he said.
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Pierre has documented three other gang rapes in the camp, including of a 17-year-old who says she was a virgin before six men attacked her and raped her repeatedly. "I really worry about the teenager because she has no one to look out for her. She says she sees her attackers but is afraid to report them because she would then have to leave the camp and she has nowhere to go," Pierre said.
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Investigators for Human Rights Watch reported the first three gang rapes to U.N. officials. Then, two weeks later, on Feb. 27, the 21-year-old mother was gang-raped. Only a week later did U.N. police officers begin patrolling. "For me it seems completely bizarre that for this one camp that everyone knows is unsafe, it's taken them three weeks to get a patrol going," said Liesl Gerntholtz, executive director of the agency's women's rights division. "It's unrealistic to expect patrols in camps all the time, but I think they can identify hotspots and provide security to those spots."
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Pierre complained that the U.N. patrols are ineffective. "They only drive their cars down the one road that covers only a small portion of the camp. They never get out of their cars," he said. In the hilltop suburb of Petionville, where plush mansions look out over slums on hillsides and in ravines, a 7-year-old rape victim was being treated Monday in the hospital of a tent camp set up on a golf course. Another child, a 2-year-old, had been raped in the same camp two weeks earlier.
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The toddler is taking antibiotics for a gonorrhea infection of the mouth, according to Alison Thompson, who is the volunteer medical coordinator for a Haitian relief group created by Sean Penn. She helped treat both children. "Women aren't being protected," Thompson said. "So when the lights go down is when the rapes increase, and it's happening daily in all the camps in Port-au-Prince."
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Besides sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy, victims face possible HIV infection. Haiti has the highest infection rate for the virus that causes AIDS in the Western hemisphere, with one in 50 people infected. Among the many rape victims is an 18-year-old girl who lost her parents, grandmother, a sister and three cousins to the quake. She was roaming the streets distraught when a man approached her, promising her his wife would look after her, she said. The middle-aged man took her to a house, then left and came back with two men. The three raped her repeatedly until she managed to escape.
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The teen is among dozens of rape victims who have sought help from KOFAVIV, a group of Haitian women who survived political rapes in 2004. Their offices were destroyed in the quake and they now operate from a tent. They brought the victims to American volunteer lawyers who came to Port-au-Prince a week ago to identify Haitians who may qualify for humanitarian parole to live in the United States.
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"I've been here five days and have spoken to 30 (rape) survivors including a dozen under 18. Their stories are horrific. I would be catatonic," said San Francisco lawyer Jayne Fleming. Few rapes are reported because women often face humiliating scrutiny from police officers who suggest they invited the attacks and even nurses who contend young girls were "too hot" in their dress style, according to Delva Marie Eramithe, a KOFAVIV leader.
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Her own 18-year-old daughter was saved from an attacker who dragged the girl into a dark alley between tents at the downtown camp sprawling across Champs de Mars plaza. The assailant did not see the teen's three sisters, who had been walking behind her, and all four of them managed to beat him and run him off. Soon after, he returned to their tent with three other men and a gun, Eramithe said.
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While a male neighbor argued with the men, Eramithe and her daughters went to a nearby police station to report the attempted rape. "We told them the man who attacked her was right there at our tent, just two blocks away," Eramithe said. "But one policeman said they had received reports of nothing but raping, thefts and domestic beatings all day and there's nothing they can do. The other police officer said the only person who can do anything is President (Rene) Preval."
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When she insisted, they gave her the license plate of a police van patrolling the camp perimeter. Eventually she found the patrol car but that officer "told us to go and get the attacker and bring him to them." Police spokesman Gary Desrosiers said only 24 rapes have been reported to Haitian authorities this year. Several suspects were detained, but many escaped when prisons collapsed in the quake, he said.
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Police Chief Mario Andresol blamed the attacks on the more than 7,000 prisoners who escaped. "Bandits are taking advantage to harass and rape women and young girls under the tents," he told reporters two weeks after the quake. "We are aware of problem ... but it's not a priority," Information Minister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue said last month.
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Haitian police officers with stations minutes from some of the largest camps do not patrol — a fact that spokesman Desrosiers blames on the loss of dozens of officers killed in the quake, as well as scores who remain missing and more than 250 who were injured. Still, that leaves some 9,600 Haitian police officers and 2,000 U.N. police officers.
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The first signs of action came when U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon arrived Sunday, and a contingent of female U.N. and Haitian police officers set up a tent at the camp. Ban promised the camps will be "safe and secure." He praised the security offered by Haitian and U.N. police and told the women officers: "We must protect these women and girls. ... If they are sexually abused and attacked and raped, that is totally unacceptable and intolerable, and we must stop it."
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On Monday, a man with a bullhorn was at the camp during a food distribution, saying "We don't want men raping women, do we?" No, the women waiting in line yelled back. Still, the fear was palpable among the most vulnerable. The 18-year-old orphaned rape victim was nervous about the time, even though it was only mid-afternoon. "I have to find somewhere to sleep, near some people who might help me if there's trouble," she said. "It scares me, the way the men look at me, and they know I'm all alone."

CNN
By Sara Sidner
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Carine Exantus should be sitting in her college communications class. Instead, the 22-year-old is teaching herself how to avoid being attacked by the men who live in her new neighborhood -- a maze of makeshift shelters spaced so close together that it is hard to get between them but easy to get inside.
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"I, like everybody else, live in a very precarious situation," said Exantus, who was forced to make her own shelter when her home was crushed in Haiti's January 12 earthquake. "As a young woman," Exantus said, "I am afraid because I notice a lot of young men being aggressive toward women at night."
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In her camp, there has already been trouble. The camp leaders told CNN that two cases of attempted rape have been reported in the past few days and one suspect has been arrested. "When the guys don't have no money, their brain is not good," said camp leader Jean Joseph Rudler. "When they have no work or food and just sit around, it is bad. When a guy is drunk, he will do anything [to a woman]."
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Women can be easily preyed upon when their four walls consist only of bed sheets or thin tents. But camp conditions, a government official said, isn't the underlying problem in Haiti when it comes to violence against women. "I'm gonna be blunt," said Aby Brun, a member of Haiti's Commission for Reconstruction. "Promiscuity resulting in absolutely condemnable violence and abuse against women is something that has been going on in the slum areas and other levels of society for years. It's a cultural problem." Exantus says she is often jarred awake by what she hears through the thin shelter wall. "There are some men who beat their girlfriends at night," she said.
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During the day, women from the camp bathe topless in an outdoor fountain, their naked children trying to make a game of bath time by skidding around on the wet tiles in the blinding sun. Men sit nearby -- watching and sometimes make lewd comments.
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Before the earthquake, Haiti was in the midst of implementing what the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) called an impressive five-year plan to curb violence against women and change the culture.
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"It was a very ambitious achievement for Haiti to create a five-year plan," which began in 2006 and was to be complete by 2011, said Lina Abirafeh, the UNFPA gender-based violence coordinator in Haiti. "It looks at response to cases, data collection, monitoring and prevention. It really is a very robust plan."
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Abirafeh says the quake destroyed many of the services for women, such as rape counseling centers and Haiti's Ministry for Women's Affairs. It also took the lives of three of Haiti's most revered female leaders. Steps are being taken to safeguard women in the camps now. Solar flashlights are being handed out, proximity to bathrooms and lighting are being worked on, and security patrols increased.
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Authorities point out that rape is by no means an epidemic in the camps. Citywide, police say, they have received 20 reports of rape and made 10 arrests. But it is common knowledge among experts that most of these types of incidents go unreported.
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"Figures for sexual violence are underreported everywhere in the world. Every country has an issue with this, and the figures are only the tip of the iceberg. They tell us very little," said Abirafeh. "As far as I'm concerned, even one rape is one too many." Whatever the numbers, young women like Carine Exantus say it's hard to sleep well at night. "We have to be afraid," she said, "because we don't know when somebody may have bad intentions."

UNICEF
By Roshan Khadivi
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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, 9 March 2010 – At the Automeca Hyundai lot, tents, tarpaulins and cloths slung across wooden sticks compete for space with the damaged shells of sedans, pick-up trucks and SUVs. What was once a car dealership is now an encampment for more than 15,000 Haitians, many of them children.
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Seven weeks after Haiti's earthquake, which affected more than a million children, UNICEF is working with partners to support and engage young children living in such makeshift settlements by supplying them with Early Childhood Development (ECD) kits.
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ECD kits take a holistic approach to child rights and needs. Each kit, which serves up to 50 children, contains supplies to set up safe play spaces; materials for age-appropriate early learning; basic items for hygiene; and an illustrated activity guide for caregivers.
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The kits, already in use in some 40 countries, are designed to provide children – primarily in emergency situations - with activities that address their specific social, emotional, physical, cognitive and developmental needs. In the aftermath of Haiti's 12 January earthquake, ECD kits have been distributed to residential care centres, child-friendly spaces and young child feeding centres, as well as paediatric centres, orphanages and preschools. UNICEF has also formed an ECD working group to coordinate early-childhood activities with other UNICEF programmes and with non-governmental partners.
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At the Automeca Hyndai camp, dozens of children formed a line as UNICEF Child Protection and Gender-Based Violence Specialist Catherine Maternowska opened the camp's first ECD kit. One by one, crayons, scribblers and brightly coloured building blocks appeared. The children clapped excitedly; the younger ones jumped up and down.
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UNICEF is working to distribute kits like these nationwide, and as quickly as possible. With most schools still closed, Ms. Maternowska said each kit both addresses a need and creates new opportunities.
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"These games help provide a secure space," she noted. "It offers us a chance to do informal education, to brush up on math skills or reading skills … or talk about issues such as gender-based violence, and how [children] can protect themselves."
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UNICEF is also working closely with the Haitian Ministries of Health and Education, the Institute of Social Welfare and Research, and others to keep children's needs at the centre of national recovery and development efforts.

3/9/2010
By Jennifer Bakody
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JACMEL, Haiti, 9 March, 2010 – Women have been hit hard by the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on 12 January. But they are not alone. As the world celebrated International Women's Day yesterday, Haitian authorities and leaders from the international community reiterated their support for the women of this quake-scarred country.
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Haiti's Ministry for the Status of Women and Women's Rights marked the day by honouring the tens of thousands of mothers, sisters, wives and activists who lost their lives in the disaster.
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On Sunday, 7 March, at least 500 supporters – many of them the members of small women's collectives from neighbouring communities - took to the narrow streets of the southern port city of Jacmel as part of a public march organized by Famn Deside (Women Decide), a locally based organization with a 20-year history of promoting women's health and human rights.
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Marie-Ange Noel, coordinator of Famn Deside, walked with a cardboard sign that read: '100 years we've been working to give the women's movement strength.' She noted that the devastation wrought by the earthquake will test the strength of Haitian women and girls as never before. "Women are engines of development in this country," said Ms. Noel. "They form a majority in many key sectors – in business, at the markets, as teachers and as health professionals."
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In addition to the march, Famn Deside organized what it called a 'pause for reflection.' One by one, participants who had gathered in a local hall offered testimony about their lives, losses and struggles following the earthquake. They shared messages of hope, as well as their ideas on advancing women's rights. UNICEF is working with Famn Deside to distribute emergency supplies for women and children in Jacmel, including cooking and hygiene kits, and tarpaulins for shelter. Along with its partners, UNICEF is also advocating for women's and girls' rights through improved access to health care, psycho-social counselling and legal assistance in cases of rape and sexual assault.
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"Supporting the women's movement in Haiti is essential to sustainable development," said UNICEF Gender-Based Violence Specialist Catherine Maternowska. "By doing this, UNICEF provides the funds needed to build strong gender-based violence prevention and treatment programmes." Providing support to women in the quake's aftermath gives a voice to more than a 100 years of social movement-building, she added, "but also to the girls and women of Haiti who are left to rebuild this shattered country."
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The government, the UN family and its partners, including many grassroots women's organizations, have also honoured the longstanding work of three prominent Haitian feminists – Anne-Marie Coriolan, Magalie Marcelin and Myriam Merlet – all of whom died in the earthquake.

By Liesl Gerntholtz
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NEW YORK – As Obama meets with Haiti's president, the aftershocks of the Port-au-Prince earthquake are hitting especially hard among displaced women, who face an outbreak of sexual violence. Liesl Gerntholtz on the awful toll—and how to help.
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Driving through Port-au-Prince’s Parc Jean Marie Vincent camp, the first thing I notice is how massive and congested it is. After that, the smell and the heat hit me. I had come to the camp to interview a young rape survivor, as part of a Human Rights Watch mission to Haiti to investigate sexual and other violence against women in the aftermath of the earthquake. Sexual violence often increases in emergencies, when normal structures have broken down and women struggle to meet basic needs for food, water, shelter and hygiene.
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As one emergency worker told me, referring to sexual violence, “You can just feel it when you walk into those camps.” In Parc Jean Marie Vincent, some 27,000 people had crammed themselves and their meager belongings into what was formerly a concrete sports park. Squalid shelters are built of sheets and other pieces of material slung over sticks and anything else that might hold them up. I wondered where women washed, changed sanitary pads and fed their babies, as these shelters so obviously provided no privacy. As we parked our car, my first question at least was answered: a young woman, naked from the waist down was trying to wash herself. I was conscious of many young men watching her.
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I met “Gentile” in an empty tent that had been left at the camp by one of the humanitarian groups, giving us at least a little privacy. We sat in the oppressive heat, and she quietly described how, a few nights earlier, she had been grabbed by five men and taken into a nearby house. There she was raped, forced to perform oral sex, and brutally beaten. When she finally managed to escape, the men chased her and beat her in the street, where a man finally rescued her and took her to his home. Later that morning, she returned to the streets, as she literally has nowhere else to go.
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Gentile, whose name I have changed for her protection, was lucky, if that is the right word, to meet up with a human rights advocate whose home had also been destroyed in the earthquake and who was now living in the camp. He took her to a hospital, where she received some medical treatment. She was not sure what medication she had been given, as the doctor who helped her did not speak Creole and there was no one to translate what he was saying. As Gentile told me, “I really need somebody to be with me in this suffering … I am not sleeping … I feel weak.”
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On top of the catastrophic earthquake that has left more than 200,000 dead and 1.2 million people homeless, the sexual violence felt to me like an unimaginable betrayal of humanity. But once you’ve seen the camps for Haiti’s displaced, it is easy to understand how the abuse of women and girls can happen. During our mission, we were in 15 of the largest camps for displaced Haitians, and we documented four gang rapes in Parc Jean Marie Vincent camp alone. The camps are unsafe places, and many women live with strangers, having lost contact with family members and friends. Their access to food and water is compromised. They bathe and wash children in public places. Although some latrines have been provided, there is no separation of facilities for women and men—and no lighting—so these are unsafe after dark. Three weeks after the quake, Parc Jean Marie Vincent camp had not received any food, contributing to an atmosphere of anger and anxiety. There were no police or U.N. forces patrolling. The camp is on open ground, allowing anyone to enter the camp and the shelters.
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Violence against women was a problem in Haiti long before the earthquake, with rape only recognized as a crime in 2005. The earthquake has only increased the dangers for women and girls, though, and they will live with that increased risk for many months, if not years, to come. No reliable data is available, in part because the quake has disrupted existing reporting and care systems for rape and gender-based violence, undermining the capacity of local organizations to help women and delaying access to essential medical and mental health services. But new reports from Human Rights Watch and Refugees International leave little doubt that the tide of sexual violence is rising—and the need for help is real.
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However, much can be done to protect women from sexual violence, both immediately and during the coming reconstruction of Haiti. Aid agencies have already taken some steps to address these concerns: highlighting the need for lighting and security in the camps, safe food distribution, private washing facilities and latrines, and access to health services for women who are assaulted and raped. All of these measures, if adequately implemented, will contribute to making women safer.
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In the longer term, we need to make sure that Haitian women’s rights are protected in the reconstruction phase. After security needs are met, it will be most essential to re-build the capacity of local women’s organizations that can lead the struggle against violence. Many have lost key activists and other staff members, and the remaining members have personal losses and their offices have been destroyed. Strengthening these groups and individuals will be key to protecting Haitian women and girls during rebuilding.
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While we were in Haiti, Human Rights Watch’s top objective was to press for greater safety for women and girls in the camps. This week we were advised by the UN mission in Haiti that at last there will be regular security patrols at camp Parc Jean Vincent. I hope that this means that Gentile and the thousands of women and girls in the camp will sleep a little better tonight.
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Plus: Check out more from Giving Beast, featuring news, video, and amazing photographs of people, places, and issues that need our support.
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Liesl Gerntholtz, the director of Human Rights Watch’s women’s rights division, has just returned from a research mission to Haiti.

Many women at the Jean-Marie Vincent site for displaced people (IDPs) in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince wash themselves inside their makeshift tents because the only alternative is to do so out in the open. Given the overcrowding and meagre security, this exposes them to the risk of attack or rape.
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Going to the site's latrines is also risky, especially at night, for there is no lighting and some toilets are isolated. “We have not yet reached a standard of organization that respects women’s rights,” Smith Maximé of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) in Haiti told IRIN. “We have registered rape cases that occurred when women were in the latrines. When toilets are not secured – as in many of the camps – women are often attacked there,” he added.
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“We are not safe here,” one woman in the Jean-Marie Vincent camp told IRIN, holding her two-month-old baby. “Three men attacked me as I walked to a latrine. They covered my face and my mouth and raped me.” Initially she said nothing but her pain was so intense, after three days she told some relatives.
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The failure to meet established minimum disaster relief standards is “creating serious security, privacy and dignity concerns”, according to the Gender in Humanitarian Response Working Group*.
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“Increased lighting surrounding those latrines should be an immediate priority to ensure the safety of women and girls using sanitation facilities at night,” the Group said in a statement issued in late February. “Increased attention must be paid to the provision of dedicated and private bathing facilities to reduce women’s current vulnerability to sexual violence. Though many women and girls bathed outdoors prior to the earthquake, the nature of many IDP sites (crowded living conditions, living near strangers) is creating new vulnerabilities to violence and exploitation, in particular at night, that did not necessarily exist before,” it said.
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Overcrowding and lack of lighting in camps are part of the problem. In many camps there is no space between tents. Aid organizations and the government plan to move people from 21 of the most congested sites either back home, to host families or to land recently allotted by the authorities. In the meantime aid agencies are putting some security measures in place, such as installing lights.
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“Protection is one of the major issues of concern when sites are over-congested,” Sara Ribeiro, protection coordinator with the International Organization for Migration, told IRIN. IOM is the lead agency for the group of agencies collectively tasked with organizing the management of camps for displaced people.
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The Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), a group of UN and non-UN organizations that since 1992 has worked to harmonize humanitarian best practice, stipulates that humanitarian actors must ensure that the route to water and sanitation facilities is safe and that latrines are well lit and lockable from the inside.
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Ribeiro said another major problem was a lack of camp management agencies. As of 4 March just one-fifth of the 400 camps for displaced families had such agencies in place, she said. “More agencies… need to take over site management,” she told IRIN. “That is the only way to prevent these things from happening. Because no amount of service delivery [medical care, food rations, water] is going to be able to respond to what happens when the sun sets.”
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Community watch groups are forming in many sites; OCHA states in a 4 March report that these groups will need training to increase the protection of women and girls. UNFPA is working with the authorities and local NGOs to revive a system of reporting sexual violence cases. “But our immediate focus is to disseminate information on available medical and psycho-social support, and to [put first] the rights and choices of the survivor,” Lina Abirafeh, GBV coordinator for UNFPA in Haiti, told IRIN.
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The agency is compiling a list of hospitals and NGOs that provide medical and counselling services for distribution in the camps. UN aid workers say no comprehensive statistics of rape in the camps are available but rape and impunity have long been widespread in Haiti, as IASC notes. In 2008 Amnesty International reported “shocking levels” of sexual violence against girls.
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* The group comprises representatives of MINUSTAH-Human Rights, MINUSTAH-Gender Unit, UNIFEM, UNFPA, World Food Programme, IOM, UN Children’s Fund, and several NGOs, including the International Rescue Committee, American Refugee Committee, and International Medical Corps.

3/9/2010
IRIN
By Nancy Palus
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Josephine*, 17, was living alone on the streets of Port-au-Prince when the earthquake hit. She lost the few belongings she had - mostly clothes. She now stays at the Jean-Marie Vincent camp for displaced families. She has no family members in the camp. One night around midnight, she told IRIN, she was looking for somewhere to sleep when two young men - one with a machete, the other with a wooden club - grabbed her.
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"They came towards me and then I realized there were four others with them. They dragged me into a tent. They held my mouth closed and blindfolded me. They took off my underwear. I was on the ground and one by one they raped me. "Each time I tried to scream they pressed even harder on my mouth. They hit me.
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"At about 2am they put me outside. A young man found me and helped me find somewhere to go. "Now whenever I see the youths who raped me they whisper and point at me. I avoid walking by the tent where they did this. "I want to leave this camp but before that I want to have these men arrested. The day I see policemen in the camp I will bring them to where these men live. I know about bringing people to justice because in cases of violence in my neighbourhood I have seen police come and arrest people. "I used to go to church but I no longer go because I don't have nice clothes to wear. I miss it a lot but one must look nice to go to church."

The Organization of American States (OAS) and the Inter-American Commission of Women (CIM) on Friday held a special session in the framework of the Inter-American Year of Women at OAS headquarters in Washington, DC, to welcome Marjorie Michel, Haiti’s Minister of Women's Affairs.
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During the meeting, the goal of which was to publicize the needs of women and girls in Haiti, the minister submitted a detailed report on the situation of women, emphasizing that after the earthquake “the living conditions have deteriorated significantly and it is women and girls who daily care for the injured and sick.”
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According to information from the Haitian government, violence against women has grown in the camps, there has been a rise in rapes, and prostitution is often the sole means of obtaining food. For his part the Secretary General of the OAS, José Miguel Insulza, said that “we want to make real the idea that gender issues should be a priority in our organization, and Haiti is a real opportunity to show it, not only with words but with actions.”
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“Gender must be taken into account in all emergencies, what happens to women and girls cannot be left to chance. We must care for the most vulnerable and keep them in safe places,” Insulza said. CIM President Wanda Jones thanked the Secretary General for his quick response after the January 12 earthquake, “committing the OAS, taking its resources and working with other organizations for the reconstruction of Haiti.”
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“Our success at CIM has been in large part in your hands over the last couple of years and your presence here represents the commitment of the OAS to collaborate in the reconstruction of Haiti,” she said. It is worth noting that at the beginning of the meeting the President of the Permanent Council and Representative of Costa Rica to the OAS, Ambassador José Enrique Castillo, asked for a minute of silence in memory of women and girls who did not survive the earthquake and added that “we have the responsibility of making sure that our efforts of support and cooperation respond to the rights, needs and demands of the women of Haiti.”
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Information about the initiatives of various agencies in the reconstruction of Haiti was also presented during the meeting, including those of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) and the Pan American Development Foundation (PADF).

Associated Press
By PAISLEY DODDS and JONATHAN M. KATZ
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A heavy downpour sent the throngs living beside Haiti's shattered national palace cowering under tarps early Thursday as the rush of water made much of the camp of earthquake victims impassable — an ominous foretaste of the rainy season to some.
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Amputees struggled to maneuver through mud on crutches and wheelchairs. Many in the makeshift tent cities housing nearly 600,000 people in Haiti's capital still live without even plastic tarps, which the international community is trying to get to everyone by May 1. So when the rain comes, bed sheets spread on sticks as protection from the sun quickly get soaked and people move in temporarily with neighbors who have waterproof tents. The lucky actually have beds off the ground.
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"It's hard to keep my kids clean. There's too much rain, too much dirt," said Joseph Dukens, 25, at the camp beside the national palace. He pointed to his baby daughter, who had her leg amputated below her hip. "It's only going to get worse."
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The government, aid groups and foreign governments have been wrangling for five weeks over how to housing earthquake survivors, but neither the weather nor the people are waiting. Makeshift camps have hardened into shantytowns, adding a new dimension to the capital's teeming slum life with an extra helping of disease, hunger and misery brought on by the Jan. 12 disaster, which killed more than 200,000 people.
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While the camps blossomed, officials debated what to do with the 1.2 million people left homeless by the disaster nationwide. In the meantime, people are planning to stay in some very dangerous places: at the bottom of hillsides they know will collapse in a heavy rain or near riverbeds that are bound to flood. They are crowded into polluted areas where sanitation is limited and disease is already starting to spread.
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"The government has said for weeks that they have identified sites, but time is getting short and there has been little progress," said Ian Bray, an Oxfam spokesman. And the delay has caused complications, as evident on a former landing strip-turned-boulevard called Route de Piste, where a cluster of ramshackle villages has taken root.
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Row upon row of corrugated tin and wood shacks stand against the wind as dusty men walk between them carrying saws and hammers. Children look for the snow cone man at the crossroads, near where a lottery dealer named Max has set up his booth. In a shack marked "Boulangerie Pep La" — the people's bakery — the smell of dough wafts from the oven.
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The new neighborhood is very densely packed; some 27,000 people live there, according to Haitian Red Cross workers. U.N., foreign and local officials are directing aid to the site, while also designating it a "priority for decongestion" — meaning some people must move out. The overcrowding is a chief reason officials say they don't want to give people the waterproof tents. But people in the shantytown are making their own space, pushing out neighbors who arrived later so as to expand their tarp-and-pole shelters into more permanent homes.
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And people simply do not want to go far from where they always lived and worked. With property hard to come by, aftershocks continuing and 38 percent of Port-au-Prince's buildings destroyed by the magnitude-7 quake, according to U.N. satellite imagery, their options are limited. On Thursday, a group of U.S. senators sent a letter to President Barack Obama urging the immediate relocation of displaced Haitians to higher ground before the rainy season begins in earnest.
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"Tragedy will strike again when the rain comes. We urge your administration to stress this point with President (Rene) Preval and Prime Minister (Jean-Max) Bellerive," they wrote. Senators George LeMieux and Bill Nelson of Florida, Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota also encouraged long-term investment, micro-loans for small businesses and seeding commerce outside Port-au-Prince.
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Meanwhile eight of the 10 American missionaries detained while trying to take 33 Haitian children into the Dominican Republic without adoption certificates arrived in Miami late Wednesday night. The two remaining detainees, Laura Silsby and Charisa Coulter, went to a Port-au-Prince courthouse on Thursday to be questioned by the judge but Judge Bernard Saint-Vil said he had to cancel the session because the translator didn't show up.
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"Everything is going well," Silsby told reporters, though she added, "I don't know the exact day we are going to be free." Coulter, who has diabetes and was taken to a hospital the previous day, said she was feeling better. Defense lawyer Aviol Fleurant said the judge rescheduled the questioning for Friday and was seeking to arrange a visit to the orphanage that Silsby, the missionary group's leader, had hastily arranged in Cabarete in the Dominican Republic.
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Associated Press Writer Evens Sanon contributed to this report.

Associated Press
By M.J. Smith
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Heavy rain Thursday in Haiti's capital worsened squalid camps and highlighted the urgent need for shelter after last month's quake, as the UN called for a record 1.44 billion dollars in aid. More than a month after what some experts say could be the worst natural disaster in modern history, aid workers are racing against time to try to distribute enough tarpaulins to the more than one million left homeless. Even those will provide only basic protection when the rainy season begins around May, aid officials say.
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"Everything was wet," said Joseph Jean-Luc, 30, as he helped a friend build a shelter by nailing together branches at a massive tent city that used to be a country club golf course overlooking Port-au-Prince. Many spent Thursday washing mud-caked clothes, drying out mattresses and waiting in line for vaccinations. Others dug small trenches around makeshift tents in a bid to keep them from flooding again.
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Reflecting the massive needs in what was already the poorest country in the Americas before the quake, UN chief Ban Ki-moon launched the world body's largest ever appeal for humanitarian aid. The request for 1.44 billion dollars to assist earthquake victims, a year-long appeal, includes a 577-million-dollar request made in the aftermath of the devastating quake.
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"As the rainy season is coming to Haiti, it will be extremely important to provide on a priority basis shelters, sanitation and other necessary humanitarian assistance," Ban said in New York. He spoke at a ceremony attended by his special envoy for Haiti, former US president Bill Clinton, and UN humanitarian chief John Holmes.
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"We are with you," Ban said to the people of Haiti. "We will help you to recover and rebuild." Clinton stressed the need for donors to follow through with their commitments. "Pledge less and give it. And do it sooner than later," he said.
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The former US leader also vowed transparency in the use of donated funds by posting how the money is spent at the HaitiSpecialEnvoy.org website. Previously, the largest natural disaster appeal -- 1.41 billion dollars -- was issued in 2005 in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami. Distribution of shelter material got off to a slow start following the massive earthquake, in part due to debate over the best strategy, and aid workers are now rushing to hand out tarpaulins ahead of the heavy rains.
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UN officials say only about 272,000 people have been reached with shelter materials so far following the disaster that killed more than 217,000 people. Canadian Deputy Commanding General Nicolas Matern of the Haiti Joint Task Force said tarpaulin deliveries were being ramped up to try to reach all of the homeless with some form of shelter before the rainy season.
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Officials are hoping to carry out a similar effort being done with food distribution, though the problem is vastly more complicated because of camp conditions, among other issues. After a stumbling start, aid workers launched a major food distribution push at the end of January, and a total of more than two million people have now been reached with some kind of food, UN officials say.
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Many Haitians, however, still say they have received nothing, while some of those that have benefited from distributions say they have only been given a limited supply of rice. Matern acknowledged tarpaulins were only basic protection in the rainy season, but said it was the best strategy to try to reach everyone since the needs were so daunting. "There is an impression out there that we will be able to turn around and build transitional shelter with framing and all that by the rainy season. Forget it," he said.
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"It ain't going to happen. We don't have the resources nor the time to do it." In the case of 10 Americans charged with kidnapping in Haiti, the two still being held here were sent back to jail Thursday after the judge said he would visit the orphanage where they claimed they planned to take the kids. Related article: Judge sends two Americans back to jail
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The other eight were released Wednesday and returned home, but the charges have not been dropped. Haitian authorities arrested them three weeks ago as they tried to cross into the Dominican Republic with a busload of 33 children they said they believed to be orphans. It later emerged many of the children had parents.
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Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, who earlier said the Americans' case was distracting from his country's urgent needs, said he hoped the judge's decision to free eight of them would shift the focus. "We don't want to focus on the Americans' case," he said.

By Martha Mendoza
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Washcloths arrived before water, and senators before surgeons. In the first chaotic days after Haiti's earthquake, some vital aid was forced to wait because the U.S. military took relief flights at the Port-au-Prince airport on a first-come, first-served basis, according to landing logs.
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The logs, reviewed exclusively by The Associated Press, document who flew in before and after the U.S. Air Force assumed control of the landing strip that was the sole lifeline for relief. They largely disprove accusations from some humanitarian groups that the U.S. held up aid in favor of military flights. The Air Force did initially give priority to military units that were sent to secure the airport, distribute aid and keep the peace. But then it started taking flights according to a reservation system open to anyone.
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Because of that, key aid was delayed in some cases while less-critical flights got in. Nearly all the groups sending in aid insisted their load was urgent, said Air Force Capt. Justin Longmire, who has been coordinating the flight schedules and is helping prepare the airport to reopen for commercial flights on Friday. "Could I take the list of all the flights and put it in order of most important to least important? Water? Food? Digging equipment? Doctors? I don't think so," Longmire said.
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The result: Church of Scientology ministers landed, as did AP reporters, CNN's Anderson Cooper and diapers from Canada. But a French portable hospital and planeloads of doctors with medical supplies were diverted to the Dominican Republic.Planes carrying half of a Norwegian field hospital landed in Port-au-Prince, while those carrying the other half were diverted to the Dominican Republic and had to be trucked in over the mountains, delaying the opening of one of Haiti's first post-quake field hospitals.
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"It was extremely frustrating," said Norwegian Red Cross spokesman Jon Martin Larsen. When the quake hit, the global crush of compassion turned the Haitian capital's airport into a virtual baseball catcher with "pitchers throwing balls from all directions all at the same time," as Air Force Lt. Gen. Glenn F. Spears put it.
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Before the quake, the single, 10,000-foot runway had handled 20 flights a day without radar, with pilots landing visually with the help of controllers on radios. Afterward, traffic on the runway soon rivaled that of any at Chicago's O'Hare Airport on a busy afternoon, with planes landing or taking off every two minutes. With the seaport in ruins, hundreds of planes loaded with missionaries, medical teams and military forces dashed to Haiti without designated landing times and only 10 spaces for large planes to park. There was no room on ramps for planes to unload their cargo, and some planes didn't have enough fuel to leave.
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The traffic snarls in the air were exceeded by utter chaos on the ground. For days the airport was packed with aid workers, journalists, airport employees and others with nowhere else to go. They slept on luggage carousels, fought over space for their equipment and dodged rats. "It was a madhouse," said Air Force Brig. Gen. Bob Millmann, an adviser on airlift operations in Haiti. "We saw a situation that was untenable, like stuffing 5 pounds of sand into a 3-pound sack."
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Air Force controllers started guiding air traffic a day after the quake and assumed official control from Haitian authorities three days later. They used a system developed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It requires pilots to dial an Air Force telephone bank to get an assigned landing time.
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"When the Air Force took over the tower, things made a marked turn," said Jon Fussle, a pilot for the nonprofit coalition Haiti Relief Group. Rescuers, countries and aid groups complained early on of a bottleneck that kept lifesaving equipment, medical care and supplies from Haitians who were trapped, injured or made homeless by the quake.
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They blamed the Air Force as five planes carrying 85 tons of medical and relief supplies from Doctors Without Borders were diverted to the Dominican Republic, and three charter planes carrying water and tarps from the Christian relief organization Samaritan's Purse were turned back. Doctors Without Borders claimed that the diversions cost lives and forced the organization to buy hardware-store saws in Port-au-Prince for amputations. However, most of the problems occurred before the Air Force took full control. And the AP review found that at least one Doctors Without Borders plane headed for Haiti without a landing slot, and circled as controllers unsuccessfully tried to squeeze it in.
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U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes commended the U.S. for the system it set up. "The Americans taking over the Port-au-Prince airport was absolutely crucial," he said in an interview Wednesday. "Clearly there were some glitches. But I don't think there was any intention to favor military flights over humanitarian flights. It was simply quite difficult to set up a system that included genuine real-time priorities."
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The waiting list for a daylight landing slot is now about a month long, with about 1,000 planes in line, although those willing to land between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. can get in much sooner. Pilots said the phone lines are frequently tied up. The AP reviewed restricted federal logs from Jan. 16, when the Air Force began managing air traffic, to Feb. 8. It also had exclusive access to logs from Jan. 12 to Jan. 16 through FlightAware, a Houston- and New York-based company that tracks air traffic in the United States.
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Those logs show that on the first day of Air Force management, 48 flights from the U.S. and 25 from other countries landed. More than half of the American flights were military or government. But the Air Force defends that decision in the name of security, adding that many of the flights also carried aid. "No one knew what the response of the Haitian people would be to this terrible event, but we knew we had to secure the airport to save lives," Spears said. "So yes, we did send in men and women with guns, and we have not needed to use them."
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In the days that followed, the balance shifted toward aid: Logs show that 52 percent of planes that landed were from U.S and international non-governmental agencies, primarily the World Food Program but also such organizations as the Mormon Church and the American Red Cross; 22 percent were from the U.S. military, including security personnel and medical teams, and 18 percent were requested by the Haitian government, which gave access to cell phone companies and private planes carrying the president and his wife.
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As of Jan. 18, the U.N. World Food Program was put in charge of assigning landing times for non-governmental organizations. While countless flights were diverted early on, only 17 - including six from the U.S. Defense Department and one from Doctors Without Borders - were diverted between Jan. 16 and Feb. 8, according to the logs. That is less than 1 percent of the 2,318 flights allowed to land during those weeks. Meanwhile, 336 aircraft failed to show up for their assigned slots.
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Even as the Air Force required pilots to book landing slots, many worked around the system and flew in without them, the AP review showed. On Feb. 8, only 140 flights had landing slots. As many as 400 - from helicopters to Pipers - arrived in Port-au-Prince. "I'm not going to sit there and turn anybody in, or turn myself in, but they told us, 'If you guys come in and can park in the grass, just identify yourselves and land,'" said Carlos Gomez, whose Miami charter company shuttles medical supplies, food and other relief for $28,000 a trip.
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The system has had its glitches: Controllers recently lost track of a Learjet they thought was circling while waiting to land. They stopped all landings before discovering the jet was already on the ground. At night, when a runway bulb goes out, the whole string of lights goes dead, forcing crews to stop all landings until they can figure out which bulb blew. But Air Force officials note that there have been no accidents.
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In an interview, Millmann, the brigadier general, gazed at an electronic board showing hundreds of planes heading toward Haiti from all directions, and said proudly: "We want people to know how we've done this - the good, the bad and the ugly. In the end, this is the whole world coming together to help those in dire need of help."
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Associated Press news researcher Julie Reed and AP Writers Jonathan M. Katz in Haiti and Charles J. Hanley in New York contributed to this report.

2/17/2010
Yes! Magazine
By Beveral Bell
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http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/beverly-bell-in-haiti/gender-and-justic...
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"A loss for the whole nation.” That is how one of Magalie Marcelin’s friends described the death of this women’s rights leader in Haiti’s earthquake January 12. Magalie was at the forefront of the birth of the contemporary women’s movement in Haiti in the 1980s ("contemporary" because recorded actions for gender equity go back as far as 1820). She started Kay Fanm, or Women’s House, Haiti’s first shelter for battered women, which was also a hub of feminist and anti-violent activities. She was instrumental in passing laws to recognize women’s equal rights in marriage, and to criminalize rape and domestic violence.
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Magalie’s political activism started as a teenager during the rule of Jean-Claude Duvalier. She was arrested along with others in a group that used grassroots theater to raise political consciousness. The government then expelled her, and she settled in Canada and studied law. After the dictator fell in 1986, she returned to Haiti and began advocating for women and for political rights. During the 1991-94 military coup, Magalie lived in hiding. Even then she never stopped organizing, hosting secret Kay Fanm meetings at her underground residence.
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Though she was a lawyer, Magalie didn’t argue cases herself, but helped women in trouble find lawyers and create defenses. She managed to get a fair trial for a woman who, after having been beaten for many years, killed her husband. On another occasion, according to the feminist sociologist Carolle Charles, Magalie organized women to pack the courtroom during the trial of a man who battered his wife, to offset the man’s political influence. The woman won.
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Magalie lived at Kay Fanm, sleeping on a thin foam mat on the floor. That way she was available 24 hours for the needs of the domestic violence survivors taking shelter there, though she sometimes stepped away for a night when she was too worn down. She was not paid for any of this work. It was all volunteer; she supported herself through doing sociological investigations in the countryside as a consultant for an international NGO.
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Magalie was also an actress and free spirit. When she was very young, she appeared in the full-length film Anita, about a rèstavek, a child slave. She always hoped to get back into theater, but never found the time; there were too many women to defend and support. Her email moniker was tilangdeng, or "mischief." Part of her philosophy was that, to do this work decade in and decade out, she had to keep her spirit nourished. She spoke of how her hometown of Jacmel provided that nourishment for her.
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Magalie wouldn’t play political games and told it like it was. She alienated some people as a result, but she didn’t care. She particularly angered people with a statement she made on the radio: “A penis is not a weapon.” In Haiti, synonyms for penis are ‘machete’ and ‘baton’, and having sex is sometimes called ‘to crush’ or ‘to cut’. One extended study in Cite Soleil found that, for 100 percent of surveyed women, their first sexual experience was rape. This was the context in which Magalie chose not to worry about others’ opinions.
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Many of her gestures were quiet and unseen. She continually helped people find jobs, money, or whatever they needed to survive and be safe. She also helped women who wanted to start grassroots women’s groups. This is where she died, in a meeting with a woman in Port-au-Prince who wanted to launch a women’s organization. She was in the woman’s home when it collapsed during the earthquake. Three others who were inside were rescued, but Magalie was not.
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Jacques Bartoli, a close friend of Magalie, tells the rest of the story. “The morning after the earthquake, Delano Morel, another of Magalie’s good friends, found out where she was. I got together a sledgehammer, other hammers, and heavy picks they use for construction, and we headed down. The street was blocked so we walked and walked until we reached the house. Magalie’s daughter Maïle and her husband Andy met us there. We got together a couple of volunteers and some other people I paid. We extracted her five hours later but she was already dead.
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“Two other women that Magalie had just helped the day before, women who were having trouble with their mates, joined us to go to the morgue. But the morgue had collapsed. There were people trapped there, too. So Magalie’s daughter said, ‘Let’s take things into our own hands.’ We took her body back to Kay Fanm and we laid it out there with ice. We knew she wanted to be buried in her land in Jacmel, on the other side of the river, but the road was broken. I said, ‘Let’s exhume her body in a year and take her to her land.’ So Magalie’s daughter found a place in Port-au-Prince and buried her the next day.”
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Three other founders and shapers of Haiti’s women's movement died in the earthquake: Anne-Marie Coriolan, Mireille Neptune Anglade, and Myriam Merlet. So, too, did an untold number of women who worked every day without professional title, office, or resources to make Haiti a more just and equitable place. They were all part of a thriving tradition of women’s activism to bring about social, economic, and gender justice. Their work does not appear in the media depiction of Haiti, in which the reports of sporadic street violence have been blown up until Haiti looks like a nation of barbarians. (Curiously, this reporting has largely left out one form of violence which is prevalent today: rapes against women and girls who, since the earthquake, have been forced to sleep in the streets.)
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No one will ever know how many women activists died in the earthquake. Many of the bodies were quickly dropped from bulldozer scoops into shallow mass graves, or remain in the buildings that are crushed like sandwiches throughout Port-au-Prince and its environs. Nor will anyone ever know how many of them died needlessly, not from the quake itself but from not receiving the medical care, food, and water that the U.S. government repeatedly turned away from the tarmac so that its soldiers and weapons could land instead. For those women who died in this way, it was the final injustice in a lifetime of injustices.
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The battle against more lifetimes of injustice will require everyone. It will require Magalie, too. Good thing she’s on the case, present and accounted for, inside all who care about rights and justice.
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- Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She authored the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives, and is associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Miami Herald
By KATHLEEN McGRORY
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Gina Pierre laid on her back in the dusty tent, crying out in pain and clenching her older sister's hand. She was about to give birth to triplets.
Two days earlier, the concrete walls of Pierre's home had collapsed around her. Now, there was no place to deliver her babies -- only the tent made from scrap metal and bed linens where she and her family were sleeping. ``Please, God,' she prayed. ``Let my babies live.' Pierre is among the hundreds of Haitian women who have gone into labor following the Jan. 12 earthquake.
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Many, like Pierre, are giving birth in the tent cities that have come to dominate the Port-au-Prince landscape. The women have almost no privacy, and doctors and midwives are scarce. Garbage and human waste are everywhere. Other pregnant women are crowding the hospitals and medical clinics that were established by the international aid community. It's putting a strain on the relief organizations, many of which did not bring obstetricians or the proper equipment for delivering babies.
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Earlier this month, the University of Miami field hospital had to turn away pregnant women. There weren't enough doctors or supplies. ``We came here with earthquake specialists -- orthopedics and surgeons,' said Cristian Morales of the World Health Organization.
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``In an emergency, they can deliver babies. But we need to replace adequate facilities for obstetrics and gynecology. . . . If we don't act, we are foreseeing an increase in the already obscene maternal mortality rate.'
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Maternal mortality has long been a pressing issue in Haiti. Roughly 670 of 100,000 mothers die in childbirth -- compared with 150 in the neighboring Dominican Republic and 11 in the United States, according to the most recent figures from UNICEF and the World Health Organization.
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There are new concerns for the 63,000 pregnant women now living in Port-au-Prince. More than 7,000 are expected to give birth this month.``People here are giving birth under the absolute worst conditions,' said Dr. Jonathan Evans, a pediatric gastroenterologist volunteering at the University of Miami field hospital. ``They can't find access to midwives. Little problems become big problems.'
In the sprawling camp at the city center of Champs de Mars, where the fruit flies are unrelenting and the stench of human waste inescapable, Antoine Toussaint worries about the health of her unborn child.
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Toussaint, 27, is nine months into her pregnancy. She lost her last baby, a son, in childbirth two years ago. This time, Toussaint will have only the help of her family if complications arise.
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``This is where I am, this is where I am going to give birth,' she said, sitting outside the cream-colored tent that houses the seven members of her family. ``It's not going to be good for the baby. It's cold at night. It's not an appropriate place to give birth.' Before the quake, most Haitian women gave birth at home. About one in five delivered in the hospital -- and often only when there were complications, said Dr. Jean-Edouard Viala, the chief of staff in obstetrics at the Port-au-Prince General Hospital.
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In the month since the quake, the general hospital has delivered more than 100 babies in its maternity tent, Viala said. The surgeons have performed more than 27 Cesarean sections. Joanne Désir, 26, rushed to the hospital in a rented red pickup truck when her water broke in a nearby tent city. She gave birth to a baby girl in the truck bed, just outside the hospital.
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``I'm glad I came [to the hospital],' she said, lying on a cot inside the maternity tent with her baby in her arms. ``I want the doctors to look at her.' Still, doctors say even the hospitals and clinics are far from ideal for delivering babies.
At the University of Miami field hospital near the Port-au-Prnce airport, doctors didn't have access to a baby incubator.
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They were able to deliver one preemie by emergency Cesarean section. But when the baby's temperature dropped -- a potentially life-threatening condition -- there was no way to warm her. Thinking quickly, the doctors used ready-to-eat meals to raise the child's body temperature. She was later transferred to a hospital in Haiti with an available incubator.
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Marjorie Michel, the Haitian minister in charge of women's affairs, said her office is working to address some of the concerns. She said the government will set up special tents where pregnant women can give birth in sanitary conditions. Her office is also trying to provide pregnant women with nutritious food, and new mothers with diapers, sheets and blankets.
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Additionally, the World Health Organization is sending more obstetricians into Haiti, a spokesman said. But even despite the challenges, there is a silver lining: These women are bringing life into a city where death has ruled since Jan. 12. Miriam Seguie, 23, went into labor in the street two days after the quake. Her aunt, her only female relative to survive the disaster, dragged a tattered gray carpet and a fraying blue-and-white blanket into the street and assisted with the delivery.
Still, Seguie said she felt blessed.
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``I did not die,' she said. ``I made life.' Gina Pierre gave birth to triplets Carline, Carlheinz and Carly in a makeshift tent two days after the quake. The mother swaddled her 8-pound babies in stained bath towels, and kept them warm by pressing them against her chest.
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Five days later, the newborns stopped taking fluids. They looked weak, and their cries were labored. Pierre took the babies in her arms and walked a mile to the UM field hospital, where doctors nursed the babies to health. The afternoon before the babies were discharged, Pierre rocked the smallest of the three in her arms. Her older sister Guerbine Pierre cooed over the other two, who wore tiny hats and rested quietly in baby blankets and bath towels. ``They're miracle babies from the earthquake,' said Nicole Kalinowski, a pediatric nurse from New Jersey volunteering at the field hospital. Said Guerbine: ``It's God's work.'
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Miami Herald staff writer Frances Robles contributed to this report