Haiti diary 2: At the marketplace
10 February 2010
Karri Goeldner Byrne is the IRC's director of economic recovery programmes and is based in London. She has flown out to Haiti to work on a market mapping analysis designed to help speed recovery and independence for communities after a disaster.
Day 2: Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Day one in Haiti is coming to a close and I can't believe how much has been packed into one day. It is just past 9pm and the house is still buzzing with work. Last night it was midnight before many of us got to bed.
I'd slept out on one of the balconies, up high enough that there was a good breeze that not only pushed away mosquitoes, but kept me several degrees cooler than if I'd slept in the house. The rooster started at 5am. By about 6.30am, the kitchen was swarming with people trying to rush out the door to make it to UN coordination meetings. Traffic is so bad here that you have to leave by 6.45am to get to an 8am meeting.
After finishing off a cash-for-work proposal I left the house by 9.45am. I was on my way to see the "reference market" of Croix des Bossales – a reference market is one that sets the prices for all the other markets in Haiti – but the security officer Eric had wanted to check it out first because local staff were saying it was "dangerous". But after it passed its security check I was allowed to go down and take a peek. We drove through several of the areas where the IRC plans to work and I did a "windscreen assessment" of what we need to come back to and explore further.
We were meeting Eric and Gardy in the city centre and as we drove to meet them I saw the collapsed Presidential palace not far from the "spontaneous urban settlements", or what I would call tent cities. The smell is terrible, you can tell there is almost no sanitation available for people, and it's clear that people have made do with any kind of shelter they can find. Everything from a proper Coleman tent to bedsheets strung from poles that do nothing more than obstruct the view. I even saw one shelter that was a salvaged door and cardboard walls, with no roof. There was clearly no place to make a cooking fire, for children to play, or for any kind of privacy at all. And rainy season is only a few weeks away.
The Croix des Bossales market is along a road that is now frequently used by the military, so security is a bit better than it was. I was able to talk to a few women on the edge of the market. They were trying to sell me bananas or a stick of sugar cane, and not really understanding why I was asking about how the marketplace was doing. They said there were fewer people than before, but whether this was because people had no money to buy, or because they had left, they couldn't say.
Nevertheless, there was plenty of food in the market – people don't need food distributions because there is no food available, they need them because they have nothing left to buy food with. I've heard that everything is quite orderly at the distribution points (there are 16 around the city) – they start early and by 9am as many as 1,700 families have received their ration of rice. People seem calmer now that they know there is something coming.
We realised in our assessments that people often just need information, they don't know what help is available or who to contact. The IRC is talking about the best way to help people know what is going on. The radio used to be the best method of communication, but people seem to have lost their radios. So should we get them solar powered or hand-cranked radios? Set up information centres? We know it is something we could do well, we've done it in many contexts before.
But tomorrow we pilot a brand new tool – the EMMA (Emergency Market Mapping and Analysis) Toolkit. It's been two years in the design and piloting, and all the agencies seem very excited about its potential. I'm curious to see how it can change our traditional responses. I think it could contribute to a whole new way of doing this work. But first I hope it will help Haitians get quickly back on their feet again.
More about our work in Haiti >
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