Things Fall Apart…

More than year after the earthquake in Haiti, I still take a lot of pictures like these…

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Many people cannot go home and rebuild until rubble is removed from their site or until their damaged houses have been repaired. Hundreds of bodies remain in thousands of flattened buildings. Some sites have been cleared by machine, and others by hand using buckets and wheelbarrows, but most rubble still sits where it fell or has simply been moved onto the sidewalks and streets. The cost of recycling or removing rubble from a site is for many people more than the cost of building a house, and for people of few means, this is a nearly impossible dilemma.

Thus, in a situation with many priority problems layered one atop another, rubble management is a major bottleneck blocking many other tasks. While there are many reasons why large scale rubble management and building demolition has not progressed further, one major issue is lack of money.

While many billions of dollars were pledged to Haiti in the wake of the January 2010 earthquake, only a portion of that money has actually been released or utilized so far, and much of the initial money focus was on caring for internally displaced people in camps, and on setting up temporary or transitional shelters. While removing debris is not nearly as sexy as rebuilding permanent homes it is one of the necessary precursors to that goal, and in order for that to happen, the powers-that-be are going to have to loosen their purse strings a bit and agree that a large scale, coordinated rubble management effort is the only way this is going to happen in an acceptable time-frame.

So anyway, destruction can make for some cool photographs, but walking and driving through a half destroyed city every day is not exactly uplifting, and living in a tent camp for more than a year is downright miserable. I hope by next year it will be a lot harder for me to take photographs like these, and that a lot more people will be in permanent homes and/or working on rebuilding in their old neighborhoods. Providing the right conditions will better allow people to help themselves.

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~ by tchibanga2000 on February 10, 2011.