Oxfam blog: empowering Haitians will make them part of the solution

Yolette Etienne (pictured below), from Port-au-Prince, has been Oxfam’s country director in Haiti for the past 10 years. She writes in a special series of posts for Channel 4 News.

To find out more about Oxfam in Haiti visit their website here.

It’s been two weeks since the earthquake struck Haiti.

Driving around Port-au-Prince, you can see things are changing.  Small markets are busy; people selling fruit and vegetables, sodas and biscuits.   

Other enterprising individuals have set up stalls selling things that can fill a need: for example, using a solar panel to re-charge mobile phones. Banks have reopened and people are trying to establish some normalcy, some regularity in their lives. 

Haitians are very active; we’re not just sitting and waiting for help to come. We are survivors – unfortunately well-used to having to deal with disasters such as floods and hurricanes.  

It’s a responsibility we have to take forward.  And I feel the responsibility to continue working for the ones who fell.  We need to show the best of ourselves now in the worst of times.

As head of Oxfam, it’s my job to motivate others, to get the best out of people. 

We don’t spend a lot of time to say to people “you are good”. Some people say Haiti is a violent place. For me, it’s important to recall the dignity of our people.  

There are a lot of heroic acts all around. Like an illiterate man who went into the debris of a collapsed hotel 15 times until he got to save a life. 

When I visited a site where Oxfam is doing water distribution and installing latrines, children were playing a simple game and laughter broke out. Teenage boys next to them played football. It was good to see the children enjoy themselves, to laugh, when there has been so little to laugh about.
 
More aid is coming in and we are also helping more and more people.

Not just with water and sanitation, but this week we’ve also begun projects to pay people for jobs benefitting the communities in the makeshift open-air camps where families are living because their houses were destroyed or because they are too scared to move back. Projects like clearing sites so markets can reopen, removing garbage. 

That benefits the community and helps the local markets.

My home was among those destroyed. In the first few days, my husband and I slept out in a nearby park. Now we are with friends. 

A lot of money is pouring in from around the world for Haiti. It’s big money. And we need to think carefully how it can be spent.

It can be an opportunity to rebuild a new Haiti. We have many problems like deforestation and our country is affected by climate change. We need to take that into account; the people’s vulnerability. We need to look at alternative to wood materials when it comes to building shelter.  

We need to focus on activities in certain sectors that we can kick start and rebuild.

Donors can invest in social housing for people who are in low-income brackets; can help the business sector. Before the quake, there was already an unemployment rate of 60 per cent.  

Haiti was always disorganised. And now it’s worse. Port-au-Prince was originally built as a city of 200,000; now it’s home to two to three million people.

We need to provide some support to help people care for themselves and to help them become empowered, so they can be part of the solution.

We need help from the outside world, but we need people to help us be actors and to be part of rebuilding our country. To be part of the vision. 
  
The Haitians need to be consulted; their voices need to be heard.