Transitional Shelters Bring Relief to Homeless Families in Mangeoire
The neighbourhood of Mangeoire, which stretches above
Port-au-Prince, was once a peaceful wooded area where rural
migrants who came to the capital first settled. Under the
dictatorship of Jean-Pierre Duvallier in the seventies and
eighties, it turned into the slum that it is today.
"Once upon a time, Mangeoire was almost empty", says 71 year old
Millien Paul, who lives in what is still known as le petit village.
With an air of nostalgia in his eyes, he says residents used to
grow cassava, maize and beans.
Facilities and services did not keep up with the dramatic
population increase of the last decades. As a result there are no
roads, no water system, no electricity, no health care centre and
no schools today. Hardships are commonplace in Haiti, but it is
hard to imagine a more difficult place to survive and in
which to raise children.
Document
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"Some the children have to walk all the way down to a catholic
primary school in the neighbourhood of Croix-des-Prés", says
resident Emmanuel Elizaire. He adds that older children have to
trek to schools in distant neighbourhoods such as Turgeau,
Bois-Vernat and Lalue.
For years now, residents in Mangeoire have been left to fend for
themselves while living in dire poverty. That is until the 12
January earthquake.
"It's the earthquake that put us on the map," says Philippe
Millien. "Before that, everyone had forgotten us."
Roughly a thousand persons lived in pre-earthquake Mangeoire,
most of them in tumble down shacks built haphazardly at the bottom
of a narrow ravine, which is regularly flooded during the rainy
season.
The earthquake wreaked havoc on the slum. More than 20 people
died and seventy percent of dwellings were destroyed or severely
damaged. Because of its location, aid took some time to reach the
survivors who had huddled together under makeshift shelters pitched
in cramped and insalubrious areas.
Later on, families moved their improvised shelters to nearby
land that belonged to local landowners, Catherine and Nathalie
Hermantin.
Families lived there without water, sanitation or other basic
facilities until a group of youth from Mangeoire decided to do
something for their unfortunate peers. They set up a small
association with the objective of catching the attention of
international organizations in order to get relief assistance.
The Committee for the Survivors of Mangeoire contacted the IOM
in April to ask for water, sanitation and shelter assistance. IOM
quickly responded to their call for help and is now in the process
of building a first batch of 80 transitional shelters on land that
has been cleared of debris.
These family shelters offer a living space of some 18 square
meters each. They are built out of fire resistant wood and plywood
with corrugated iron roofs.
A workshop employing a dozen masons and carpenters was set up to
speed up and standardise the production of the shelters.
Over a number of weeks, the first ten of a total of eighty
transitional shelters were built to the delight of homeless
families, who also took an active part in the construction
effort.
Their initial contribution consisted in removing the wreckage
and rubble and transporting the building materials, including IOM
donated sand and cement for the foundations. Families were selected
according to their vulnerability in consultation with
representatives of both the community and of the local
authorities.
Forty-three year old Mercia Jean-Baptiste is delighted at the
prospect of having a proper roof over her head. "I'm happy to move
into my new house, even if it is a small one. It's much better than
what I had before and I can now move out of the shelter that I had
built on the land of the Hermantin sisters".
She adds that the sisters had agreed to lend the land to the
homeless but only for a limited period of time.
"The shelters built by IOM are a godsend because we will not be
evicted from the sisters' land."
IOM's transitional shelter activities in Mangeoire are part of a
broader programme which has seen the construction of 40 shelters in
Petit Bois. Work on shelters in the commune of Aux Cadets, in
Petion-ville has also started whilst foundations have been laid in
the courtyard of the State hospital in Port-au-Prince for the
construction of two large transitional shelters with a capacity of
56 patients each.
IOM initially aims to build up to 10,000 transitional shelters
with funding from the Governments of Japan and Sweden and from the
Emergency Response Fund for Haiti.