Homeless Haitians will not be given tents

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Ask any of the hundreds of thousands of earthquake victims living outdoors in Haiti's shattered capital and you're apt to get the same plea: "Give us a tent."

Few will get them. Aid agencies and Haitian officials have given up plans to shelter the homeless in tents, even if that means many will likely face hurricane season camped out under flapping sheets of plastic.

Tents are too big, too costly, and too inefficient, aid groups say. So Haitians must swelter under flimsy tarps until fixed shelters can be built, though no one believes nearly enough will be up in time for spring storms.

"A tent would give us more space. There are too many people in here," said Marie-Mona Destiron, sweating under her family's donated plastic blue tarp. When it rains, she said, water slides through the gaps and turns the ground to mud.

Destiron, 45, got her tarp from U.S. soldiers with the 82d Airborne Division. Her husband, Joselin Edouard, tied it to a thin mahogany tree on a dusty slope below the country club that the soldiers use as a forward-operating base. It is home to them and their six children.

The Destiron family's site is atop what passes for good real estate in post-quake Port-au-Prince. The family is near where soldiers distribute food, though when helicopters land, they're blasted with dirt and leaves. They moved in the day after the Jan. 12 catastrophe shattered their concrete house.

But their space is prone to floods and mudslides. And come the spring rains - not to mention the hurricanes of summer and fall - they and many other Haitians will be vulnerable.

International aid officials at first announced a campaign to put the homeless in tents and appealed for donations from around the world. About 49,000 tents had reached Haiti when the government announced Wednesday it was opting for plastic sheets.

With an estimated 1.2 million people displaced by the earthquake - 770,000 of them still in the capital - officials say there is no room for family-size tents.

In addition, the tents are bulky and do not last long enough to justify their cost, the aid community has decided.

The cluster of foreign and Haitian officials in charge of shelter decisions also does not trust the mishmash of aid organizations involved to buy the right ones.

It has issued a warning that only those with "existing expertise in the procurement of humanitarian tents" should buy them, saying that after the 2005 Pakistan earthquake, 80 percent of tents distributed were not waterproof.

The officials are mobilizing a plan they call the "shelter surge":

By May 1, one plastic tarp will be given to each of about 250,000 displaced families.

Transitional shelters of 194 square feet with corrugated iron roofs will then be built. They will have earthquake- and storm-resistant frames of timber or steel and are supposed to last three years.

But putting up such shelters will take time and effort. Land must be procured. Money - at least $1,000 per shelter - must be found. And desperate people who just weeks ago lost their homes must be persuaded to move yet again; getting them to abandon neighborhoods and friends will not be easy.

"This is a big problem. We need to move people and they need to agree to move," U.N. Undersecretary General of Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes said after visiting tarp cities in the quake-decimated city of Leogane.

Getting even the bulk of that done before the June 1 start of hurricane season seems unlikely.

The European Union said Thursday that it would mount a military operation - including heavy equipment and engineers - to level the ground for the shelters and put them up. It did not say how many troops would be sent, by which nations, or when.