Local solutions to Haiti's crisis are being overlooked in favour of foreign profits.
From the balcony of her second-story Port-au-Prince apartment, Mary Ander had a particularly good view of former U.S. president Bill Clinton’s recent tour of Haiti’s soon-to-be-launched “Building Back Better Communities” housing expo, a Haitian Ministry of Tourism competition that will result in the contracting of hundreds of new housing units for Haiti’s post-earthquake reconstruction.
During an interview in the comfortable living room of her two-bedroom apartment in the Zoranger region, Ander exclaimed, “I love my house … I’m very, very happy.” Her apartment is part of an affordable-housing complex known as Village de la Renaissance, and overlooks the expo site that Clinton, along with Haiti’s newly inaugurated President Michel Martelly, visited last Wednesday.
According to Daniel Fauresmy, an engineer working with the housing expo, Ander’s building is resistant to the earthquakes and hurricanes that have devastated Haiti in recent years. The concrete building is also constructed with supplies manufactured in Haiti, something that Fauresmy emphasizes is important, as the “best solution is to work with local materials.”
However, Village de la Renaissance – whose construction began under the government of former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2003, and was aborted when he was ousted in a U.S.-backed coup d’état in 2004 – is not one of the models being considered in the expo competition. Building Back Better Communities, which was one of the first projects of the reconstruction panel that Clinton co-chaired, and which the Clinton Foundation is backing, instead features many imported models. According to Fauresmy, among the 59 units on display, only seven are made by Haitian companies. Fauresmy estimates that, at most, 10 per cent of the models in the expo rely exclusively on local materials.
After his tour of the housing expo, Clinton gave an address beneath a large white tent lined with vendors (many of them American) selling assorted eco-products, from solar-powered flashlights to composting toilets. Standing beside Martelly (who sported a baseball cap with the word “Prezidan” embroidered on it for the occasion), Clinton emphasized Martelly’s campaign pledge to move quickly on building housing for the thousands of people still living in tent camps nearly 18 months after the earthquake.
The former U.S. president then praised Building Back Better Communities as evidence that, “if we do this housing properly, it will lead to whole new industries being started in Haiti, creating thousands and thousands of new jobs and permanent housing.”
Despite Clinton’s words, much about the expo was illustrative of what’s been done wrong thus far in Haiti’s reconstruction.
I first met Fauresmy outside one of the first housing units that Clinton visited – a small manufactured home being sold for $22,500 by a European conglomerate that had established a Haitian outfit called PMA. I had been trying to find out from the PMA sales reps how well the unit’s particleboard walls would stand up in the event of a hurricane. Had they been tested for resistance to strong winds, for instance? “Well no, we don’t do that,” I was told by one of the reps, Karl Sante. “They don’t have to be tested,” he added.
When I asked whether exhibitors were required to adhere to international building codes as a condition of participation, a Haitian employee of PMA helpfully telephoned Fauresmy, who he said would be able to answer my questions.
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Source: The Mark
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