Sunday, February 7, 2010 ? Page 6-A

Haitians begin returning to ruined capital

Ben Fox PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti ? A alf-million Haitians who fled their hattered capital after the earthuake are starting to return to a aze of rubble piles, refugee camps nd food lines, complicating ambiious plans to build a better Haiti. Haitian and international officials ad hoped to use the devastation of ort-au-Prince ? a densely packed prawl of winding roads and ramhackle slums that is home to a third f Haiti?s 9 million people ? to build n improved capital and decentralze the country. An estimated 500,000 people fled o the countryside in the days after he quake, many on buses paid for y the government to move quake urvivors away from the heart of the estruction. Hundreds of thousands ore are camped atop the rubble of heir homes, or packed into akeshift camps. Now some of those who fled are eginning to return after enduring he rural misery that drove them to ort-au-Prince in the first place. ?I didn?t like it there,? said Marie arthe Juste, selling fried dough on he streets of the capital?s Petionville uburb after returning from La oule, in the mountains 20 miles to he north. ?My friends help me down here. p there, I just sat around all day. At east here I can sell things to make a ittle money,? she said, hobbling on rutches because she injured her nkle in the quake. The government is largely poweress to keep people from returning, hough Prime Minister Max Bellerive rotested this week that Port-aurince cannot withstand another nflux of people. ?It?s impossible for these people to ome back before the capital is econstructed,? he said. The idea was to use the quake as n opportunity to fix some of Haiti?s ong-standing problems. In this photo taken Tuesday, relatives of Tulia Ulysse eat at her home in Gros Morne, about 105 miles northeast of Port-au-Prince. Ulysse received a flow of relatives from the capital after Haiti?s Jan. 12 earthquake. ? AP PHOTO/RODRIGO ABD President Rene Preval?s ?Operation Demolition,? an ambitious plan to clear the rubble, includes provisions to remove people living in unstable buildings by force, according to Aby Brun, an architect and member of the government?s reconstruction team. ?We will destroy in an orderly and secure manner,? Brun said. A major part of that reconstruction plan is encouraging Haitians to move away from the capital, providing jobs and basic services in other cities, towns and villages. ?We want to create opportunities for them as well in the second cities,? said the U.S. Agency for International Development?s No. 2 official, Dr. Anthony Chan. But Haitians are already streaming back to their shattered capital. ?This has been my home,? said Alberto Shoute, 62, who returned to his flattened concrete house after eight days in the southern town of Jeremie. ?Most people are from here and they didn?t want to stay with people they barely knew. More are planning to come back soon.? Alfredo Stein, of the University of Manchester?s Global Urban Research Centre, said planners must assume people will return ? and must work closely with them to rebuild. Rather than thinking people are in the way, planners must consider their return to be an opportunity to fix not just the bricks and mortar but Haiti?s social fabric, he said. Haiti plans to build camps with sanitation outside the city, but Stein said such efforts usually fail. ?You?re going to be constructing ghettos that are far away from where people will need to restore their economic lives,? Stein said. ?Experiences in other parts of the world show that after disasters, when people are resettled far away from where they were living, (they) turned out to be very complicated places where there is a lot of crime.? Lawrence Vale, an urban design and planning professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, compared Port-au-Prince to ?the near-continual rebuilding that occurs in Bangladesh after floods and storms ... since this is a place that regularly endures large losses of life, and continues to rebuild at high densities.? In Port-au-Prince, the U.N. says there are a half-million people in 315 encampments, most without sanitation. Schools are closed ? or gone. There?s enough rubble to fill five football stadiums the size of New Orleans? Superdome, and more than 1 million people need to be provided with food and water. But if the government has a plan to rebuild, Bellerive did not reveal it ? and no one knows when, or to what extent a new capital will rise. Former President Bill Clinton says reconstruction ?will be measured in months and even years.? He was visiting Haiti on Friday as a U.N. special envoy. While the government says it will build suburban camps, the International Organization for Migration is trying a different tactic: Handing out tarpaulins, tools and basic building materials so people can erect simple shelters where they are. ?People need to be where their support networks are,? said spokesman Mark Turner. Otherwise, he said, ?They will be dependent on aid for a very long time.? Port-au-Prince has long been a powerful magnet for people throughout Haiti. It generates about 60 percent of the country?s gross domestic product. ?In Haiti, things are not easy, so you go where you find the opportunity,? said 23-year-old Ebed Jacques, a law student who left the capital after the earthquake and has returned ? for now ? to his native St. Marc, a bustling fishing town 70 miles north of the capital. ?The jobs are in Port-au-Prince and the schools are in Port-au-Prince, so that?s where you go.? And despite Haitian and international efforts, opportunities remain few and far between in the countryside. Most refugees from the capital are in northern Haiti?s Artibonite Valley, a starkly desolate region of rice fields and deforested mountains the color of cigarette ash. The influx has strained small towns with few schools and few jobs beyond subsistence farming. It inflated prices for sugar, rice and other basics, and a lack of rain could hurt upcoming harvests in the region, which is Haiti?s breadbasket. In Gros Morne, a town of unpaved streets at the valley?s northern edge, Ann Rose Solitaire, 36, is living with eight relatives crowded into a simple shack with a corrugated metal roof. She sent her mechanic husband back to Port-au-Prince, 100 miles to the southeast, and will probably join him soon. ?I?m here because I have nowhere else to go. But I don?t want to stay,? Solitaire said. ?There?s no way to support my family.? ? (AP)

Burger King: Police filed no charges in spitting

ERIE, Pa. ? Burger King says state police investigated a report that a Pennsylvania worker spat on a Black man?s food and decided not to file criminal charges. Miami-based Burger King issued the statement in response to a federal discrimination lawsuit filed Tuesday by Glenn Goodwin, a trucker from Cleveland. Goodwin?s lawsuit mentions that police investigated the incident at the Fairview Burger King along Interstate 90 in November 2008, and claims the officer found saliva in his food. The lawsuit doesn?t say what action police took as a result, and state police haven?t returned calls for comment. But Burger King says its workers cooperated with police and ?based on the investigation (police) did not file criminal charges. The case was closed.? ? (AP)

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