Rural communities receive little attention

BEACH clubs, resorts and villas lie either abandoned or crumbled to the ground outside of Haiti’s coastal capital.

Tourists, both from the city and abroad, usually fill the bars, discos and ornate manors that dot the route going south outside Port-au-Prince.

It will be a long time before they do again.

While masses of soldiers and charity workers distribute aid in the capital, the suffering of rural isolated communities has received little attention.

Small villages and towns are only now getting food supplies, some two weeks after the January 12 quake.

In the small town of Santo, 25kms outside the capital, hungry villagers yesterday blocked traffic on one of the main routes with rubble in protest at receiving no food since the quake struck.

The leader of a camp for displaced people in the town Pierre-John Francis said they would obstruct NGO trucks driving past.

“We have received nothing and are angry. We need food, tents and toilets.”

Beside the camp a 9-month pregnant woman says she will have no choice but to give birth outside, beside her destroyed house. Mother- of-two Yvrose Yfrene, 24, said: “I’ve no food and can’t afford to get to a doctor. If I can give birth easily, I will. If I have to die, I will die.”

Her husband Jean, a driver, is less calm about the situation. “I’m afraid for her health,” he said.

The local mayor for Santo may have to send out police to stop desperate villagers blocking the aid trucks. More than 1,000 people had died in the area in the quake and many bodies remained under the rubble, explained Paul John Michelet.

Security was also a concern after the rape of a 14-year-old girl on the roadside on Monday night, he added.

“People used to come on weekends to the beach. Now, it’s a dead area.”

Further south in the city of Leogane, Canadian military police food drops in an area where 90% of the homes and buildings collapsed. Most of the city’s 190,000 inhabitants are sleeping outside.

Haiti’s citizens have not entered the water since the quake fearing that bodies dumped in the sea could come ashore.

It will be a long time, maybe years, before the tourists return to this once scenic area.