Author: Alex Renton

Alex Renton visits Port-au-Prince’s Carrefour Feuilles district, where Oxfam’s canteen programme is enabling Haitian people to start work again.

Nine months pregnant, an ankle and a hand still bandaged from her ordeal on 12 January, Carine d’Acier is wonderfully patient and good-humoured. And, as she sits outside the tent that is home to her and ten members of her family, she is very direct about what she needs: “Economic support. Oxfam has done a wonderful thing in getting us fed, but now what we need – what everyone needs – is a way to get job and a way to stand on our feet again.”

Carlene Charles nods in agreement. She has just served a lunch of boiled maize and spicy chicken to Carine and 80 other people in the Bien-Aimee quartier of Port-au-Prince’s Carrefour Feuilles district, under a programme organised by Oxfam. “We’re very content with this idea, it works well,” says Carlene. “It has enabled me to start work again.” Before the earthquake she ran a small local café. Oxfam’s livelihoods teams have enlisted her and, as of mid-March, 55 more local “restauratrices” to serve a hot meal every day to people like Carine and their families. The community and a local NGO, Cozpam, decide who are the most in need, and issue coupons for the free meals.

Oxfam’s team leader in the district, Alix Percinthe, explains the rationale. “There are various benefits. Some people lost everything when their houses collapsed, including cooking implements. And charcoal to cook has gone up in price. So giving them a hot meal once a day like this is effective.”

“But also, many of the small-scale merchants like Carlene had seen their business shattered – this helps them start again, and puts money into the community. The food for cooking is bought by them, locally. And the other good effect is that this encourages the community to discuss things, and work together.” Currently the canteen system is delivering more than 4,000 meals a day to the most vulnerable, at a cost of less than 70 pence a plate.

A sealed off suburb

Earlier I, Alix and some of Cozpam’s volunteers had ventured high up the slopes above Carrefour Feuilles, to where some of the poorest of Port-au-Prince live. Here on the mountainside, people’s simple shacks acted as a metaphor for the precariousness of their lives. We climbed through and over the rubble of those collapsed dwellings, around little encampments of tents and tarpaulins, passing women carrying ten-litre bags of water on their heads. One of them said that the daily climb to fetch the household’s water took her two hours.

We passed human chains of young people, patiently passing rocks hand to hand, in an effort to clear some of the route. Eventually, breathless, we stopped at a tin-roofed church, where 80 or more people had gathered to discuss the setting up of similar canteens here in Pekay. There were former shop, bakery and café owners registering their capacity to cook and serve food, and many family heads, mainly women, already designated as in need of the daily meal. The discussion was noisy, and soon turned to the huge range of problems this community faces.

Chief among them was the fact that that rubble landslides on the steep slopes had virtually sealed off this suburb from the roads – even getting a water bladder in looked like a job for a helicopter. Alix listened to these worries, and we climbed even higher into fields, looking for routes that Oxfam could use to access this cut-off community. On the terraces we saw farmers preparing the ground for the rainy season that will arrive next month.

This is something many people in Pekay are dreading. Even before the earthquake, the paths on these slopes were hard to negotiate in the wet, and there was a permanent risk of landslide. But spending the season down in the city, as many used to, is no longer an option – indeed, if people can be supported here, conditions may be better than among the 400,000 living in temporary camps.

“I can begin my job and my life again”

Sylvanie Pierre, 39, is one of the shop owners who will take part in the canteen scheme. We talk in the shattered remains of her cement and breeze-block house. Only one of the rooms is habitable for her and her six children. She is a widow, and badly needs the income the canteen will bring. “It means I can begin my job and my life again. It’s very difficult at the moment to feed the family. I have had to use all my savings, and now I am borrowing money.” Gael-Blanc, the two-year-old on her lap, has been subsisting mainly on porridge made from flour.

Jobs are of course a major challenge for the recovery of Haiti. Carine worked on the third floor of the Palm Apparel garment factory as a seamstress before, sewing t-shirts for sale in the States. She earned 14 Haitian dollars a day – about £1.70 and less than half the official Haitian minimum wage. “I was there when the earthquake hit, and the roof collapsed on me. It was awful.” It was 36 hours before Carine, then seven months pregnant, was rescued. More than 300 of her co-workers died in the factory. Carine has no idea if the factory will ever be rebuilt.

Before we leave, one of the Pekay community leaders, Vendrien Jeannot, takes my arm. “I want to say what a very good idea this is. It’s good for the community, for the little shop owners, and these women who need help badly. Thank you.” The listening crowd nods.

More on Oxfam’s Haiti earthquake response

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In stricken Haiti, food is key not just to survival, but also to the morale of the aid workers and the displaced. Alex Renton reports.

Oxfam’s Alix Percinthe and canteen client Carine d’Acier. Photo: Alex Renton/Oxfam

Lunch was patés, which look a bit like Cornish pasties that someone has stamped on. But the children were very excited. Most of them had had nothing but bread or the United Nations high-energy biscuits to eat that day. The cook, 19-year-old Valencia Desiluz, was frying them in hot oil, for anyone with five Haitian gourdes (about 10p) to spend.

When my turn came I had a nervous bite: the crunchy pastry was good, but it opened up a Worcester sauce reek of dried fish and onion. This was a little bit further than my stomach was prepared to go on a first date with Haitian disaster camp food. So I gave the rest of the paté to two small boys — Stanley and Dieudonné — who thanked me politely and ate it before we’d finished exchanging names.

Their mother, Marianne, told me that the family had had little help, other than the biscuits, since their home crashed around them on 12 January. They were borrowing money to buy food, like most of the 50 families living under tarpaulins on the beachside road running out of Port-au-Prince. Oxfam was helping them to clean the rubble out of a well and put in a pump. Having a nearby source of clean water would be a big help.

But what were they to do when there was no more money? Fruit and vegetables for the children had become too expensive. What about when the rains came? These were not questions I could answer. I gestured towards the vast United States aircraft carrier lying at anchor in the bright blue: “There is lots of help here — the whole world wants to aid Haiti,” I said, uselessly, in my bad French.

Stanley and Dieudonne eat a fish pasty. Photo: Alex Renton/Oxfam

The broken country is not currently a foodie destination, obviously enough. I’d been warned before travelling to Haiti with Oxfam to fill my suitcase with Pot Noodles and cereal bars; but things have improved. Now, two months into the response, the 200 or so Oxfam staff, 75 per cent of them Haitian, all get a good midday meal. One of the drivers, his family still living under tarpaulin, told me it was the only real meal he gets: “We reserve everything for the children.”

At lunchtime in the school that serves as Oxfam’s temporary operations centre, a queue snakes round the yard as everyone waits for their spicy goat stew, rice and beans. One day there was salt cod, flaked and fried with onion and served with boiled yam and beetroot — delicious. I asked for the recipe.

The aid army, like any other, marches on its stomach. Down at the United Nations logistics base by the airport, needs are served in a wooden structure perched on a couple of portable buildings: it reminds you of a ski resort café. But inside it’s like the bar scene in the first Star Wars movie, with customers of all shapes and nationalities: Japanese and Uruguayan soldiers, big Australian water engineers, leathery bush pilots, elegant New Yorkers strategising with the Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, US military engineers in desert fatigues.

It’s one of those restaurants that for a moment seems to be the centre of the world. There’s a practical hubbub; clipboards, Blackberries and VHF radios lie beside the cutlery. Yet the food is basic American: burgers, hot dogs, with a lot of those children’s snacks with cartoon names: Cheez-Its, Craisins. It is odd to see a hulking American captain dipping rusks into a carton of liquid processed cheese. Still, you can get a good cappuccino — crucial for people who work 12-hour days, most of them without a break.

With the rainy season coming, there is a drive to support people in their homes: more people joining the 400,000 under tarpaulin would not be good. To see this I went into the the badly hit slum of Carrefour Feuilles with an Oxfam team leader, Alix Pecinthe, a young Haitian with degrees in anthropology and sociology. We climbed for 20 minutes up paths that were just scratches through and over the rubble of destroyed houses.

Pecinthe’s task is to set up deals with the community and local restaurateurs: Oxfam gives them funds to provide a daily hot meal to those people the community agrees are most in need. There are already 56 of these mini-canteens, each serving 80 meals a day. The cooks like the scheme (it gets them back in business) and the diners I spoke to liked the food.

So did I: there was a wonderful chicken sauce to go with the boiled maize, rich and red, the spices reflecting the many cultures that have blended in Haiti over the centuries; chilli, garlic, tamarind and cloves. Food, you realise, is key not just to survival, but also to the morale of the aid workers and the displaced. At the moment there is enough food. But Haiti’s troubles are not nearly over.

Originally posted in The Times.

Find out more about Oxfam’s Haiti Earthquake response