Author: Coco McCabe

For the people of Saint Michel, it has been a long four months since the January’s earthquake destroyed so much of Haiti’s capital. Coco McCabe experiences the chance to forget – just for one day – all the sorrow and hardship.

Boys climb a tree to watch a soccer game during a festival in the rural Haitian town of Saint Michel. Photo: Ami Vitale/Oxfam America

I missed the voodoo rara the first time it wound through the narrow streets of Saint Michel de l’Attalaye. It was a Friday and we were stuck in the early evening traffic that jammed the square. Before I could climb out of the car, the women in their bright pink dresses and men in blue suits had passed, their sax player and a man with maraccas pacing the paraders as they sang and swayed.

But we ran into them again, a few blocks away, and this time I jumped out, squeezing into the line of marchers, feeling myself swept along by exhilaration and anticipation as the streets darkened on the eve of Saint Michel’s feast, the annual celebration of the town’s patron saint.

For the people of Saint Michel, it has been a long four months since the January earthquake destroyed so much of Haiti’s capital. Now the chance had come to forget – just for one day – all the sorrow and hardship.  Even out here, in this rural community a four hour drive from Port-au-Prince, the quake has taken a heavy toll.

Many families here, where Oxfam has been working on longer-term development programs, lost relatives in the disaster. About 158 of Saint Michel’s own died – many of them students sent to the capital to study because schools in this area of Artibonite Department are not often very good. And in the days following the quake, about 11,000 survivors made their way to Saint Michel Commune. They descended on friends and relatives, many already pinched, needing food and shelter, and many have stayed. One family, the Perards, already nine strong, now have 17 relatives sharing their home, doubling up in beds and sleeping on the floor when night comes.

The day before the feast, we could feel the excitement building. Behind the home of Mayor Michele Lisette Casimir, women prepared giant bowls of food. Band members, hunched in a circle, held a quick meeting in her front yard. And visitors streamed through her gate, hoping for a few minutes of her time before the big day.

Casimir had her fingers crossed that the night of the festival she would be able to flick a switch and finally bring electricity to Saint Michel – even as she worried whether the community could afford to keep the lights on. Since the late 1980s, this sugarcane-growing town has been without a municipal source of electricity. Casimir has been working with the national government to get a 635 kilowatt generator hooked up – enough to electrify the main part of town. The only concern is the fuel it will consume: 25 gallons of diesel an hour.

“That’s the problem in a poor country,” said Casimir. “You take and you figure out how to manage later.”

A bandstand was going up board by board in the square. Banners strung across the streets announced the festival. And those who were smart made sure they got their tickets in advance for Tropicana D’Haiti, an adored big band scheduled to play the night of the feast.

Down one street, the transformation was complete: residents had stripped their beds of sheets and draped them, dazzling in the tropical sun, over the rickety fences separating their homes from the road. The effect of that simple gesture was magical – from dusty way to heavenly lane, festooned, occasionally, by curled red ribbons.

But my favorite vision was this: A swarm of boys, all ages, perched high – so high, on ever thinner limbs – in a row of trees overlooking the tall wall of the local soccer field. Feast day also happened to be the day of the final match between Saint Michel and Gonaives, a contest no one wanted to miss, including a flock of boys too poor to buy tickets to the game.

But in that creative way that necessity inspires, the boys had found their own solution.

“The tree is free!” said my Haitian colleague, as our car bounced by beneath the branches.  And a grin, as bright as the sheets dancing down that nearby street, stretched across his face.

Where we work: Haiti

Originall posted on the Oxfam America blog

Oxfam America’s Coco McCabe explains some of the hardships more than one billion people endure just to get the clean water they need to survive.

None of us can live without water. But for huge numbers of people around the world, the water they depend on is far away and it isn’t always safe for drinking. As you can see in the video below, many people hike several hours every single day to fetch enough simply to live.  So next time we turn on the tap and let the water gush, cold and clean, it’s worth remembering what a marvel running water is.

Oxfam’s water engineers are known internationally for the speed and efficiency with which they can help provide large-scale water supplies, and essential sanitation facilities, even in the most difficult circumstances.

Oxfam’s emergency water and sanitation work

Audio slideshow: water in emergencies

This post originally appeared on the Oxfam America blog.

Oxfam is retrofitting latrines and flying in plastic sheeting for shelters to help people displaced by the January earthquake prepare for the heavy rains ahead. Coco McCabe finds that, amidst all this, life goes on as three newborns in a Delmas camp thrive with support from a local church.

At a camp in a neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, this baby is one of three who were recently born. Photo by Kenny Rae/Oxfam

My colleague, Kenny Rae, sent an email message from Haiti last week — a stark reminder that for many of the people of Port-au-Prince and surrounding communities, little has changed in the nine weeks since a massive quake leveled much of the Haitian capital.

“Two months later, great unmet needs continue to be identified every day,” said the brief e-mail, before summarising in one, short-hand-like sentence, the sweep of challenges people there face: “three babies have been born in this small camp of 40 families since the earthquake.”

The reality is this: newborns are living outside with their families on a hill too rocky to accommodate latrines and too steep for water trucks to climb. When Oxfam staffers reached the camp on Monday, they learned that the people there had received virtually no assistance since the quake struck.

Heavy rain on its way

I spoke with Kenny on Thursday as he was banging along in a car through the noisy streets of Port-au-Prince. Over the scratchy phone line, I could hear vendors shouting through the windows and the engine grinding as the vehicle negotiated streets riddled with pot holes and crowded with people.

Everyone is keenly aware of the approaching rainy season, Kenny said, and Oxfam is busy distributing plastic sheeting to families desperate for shelter. Many people are still living in tiny huts made from bed sheets salvaged from their ruined homes. To ensure that Oxfam’s supplies of plastic sheeting continue to arrive quickly, we’re flying in the material, while others are playing a dangerous game of wait and see with freighting companies that are sending goods slowly by ship. It’s more costly, said Kenny — about $18 (US dollars) per two-piece family shelter kit — to rely on the air freight, but with the rain coming, there is no time to waste.

Along with shelter, people also have an ongoing need for a safe and decent place to go to the bathroom. Aid experts say that 18,000 latrines are needed and only a fraction of these have been dug so far.  On Thursday, Kenny said the need remains huge. We’re retrofitting some of the latrines we’ve dug so they can withstand the rain when it comes. We’re banking the sides and putting covers on top to keep downpours from filling the holes, and we intentionally have been digging the pits about ten feet deep to accommodate the rain that might get in.

But latrine construction is only partly about engineering. As important is working with the people on whose land the latrines have been dug. A weariness is setting in, said Kenny. People want this nightmare to be over, and the goodwill that landowners showed in the beginning has started to thin. On Thursday, Kenny was headed to a neighborhood called Ti Savanne to talk with the man who owned the land where Oxfam had built a bank of latrines. The man wanted them filled in, and for people to go home. But in a city where more than 97,000 buildings totally collapsed and nearly double that number were severely damaged, where can people go?

Shaping the lives of Haiti’s next generation

I’m thinking about those three babies in the camp in that Delmas neighborhood, born into the tumult of a year seared by what the Inter-American Development Bank says may be the most destructive natural disaster in modern times. How will that shape their lives? Will it be like a birthmark that forever reminds them and their families of upheaval and loss?

Almost afraid to hear the answer, I asked Kenny about the babies. “They seem to be thriving,” he said. “A local church is providing assistance to the mothers.”

I remembered, then, what a young woman told me about two weeks after her world came crashing down. She was sitting outside her tent in a once-empty lot now crowded with the makeshift shelters of families displaced by the quake. “We know how to live together,” said Guirlene Firmin, whose tent is full with 12 sleeping bodies every night. “We share everything we get.”

For the Delmas babies, perhaps that’s the birthmark — the spirit of sharing — that will never fade.

This article was originally posted on the Oxfam America blog.

Find out more about Oxfam’s Haiti Earthquake response

Wealthy developed nations are eyeing up land in some of the world’s poorest countries in order to feed their own. It sounds like good news for local economies but how can people in places like Ethiopia be sure they’re getting a fair deal? Coco McCabe reports.

In August 2009, I found myself sitting on the damp earth of Dida Liben, a once-prosperous pastureland in southern Ethiopia where both wild and domestic animals thrived. Today, it’s mostly hard-packed dirt, pocked with patches of stubby grass and thorny bushes ― except where I was perched with a small gathering of local elders.

Around us, the grass had grown tall and thick, the result of an Oxfam-supported conservation effort that had set aside 275 acres of pasture and fenced it off with a bramble enclosure to give the land time to recover. And it had, gloriously, prompting the elders to luxuriate in the feel of the grass all around them, as they had when they were children. Even some of the wildlife was coming back including antelopes, rabbits and boars.

But a tinge of fear coloured their reminiscences. What if someone were to see how good all of this had become and decide to take it away? That was the first thing Kotola Buyale, wrapped up in a tight red shawl, wanted to talk about as we sank into the tall grasses to get out of the wind. What if?

Shopping abroad for places to plant

Kotola Buyale worries about what may happen to some of the pastureland in southern Ethiopia now that it has become productive again. Credit: Eva-Lotta Jansson/Oxfam America.

The elder’s words came back to me like an omen when I read a story in the New York Times about how rich countries with limited land suitable for farming are now shopping abroad for places to plant so they can feed their people. And guess where they’re looking ? Ethiopia, where hunger regularly stalks almost eight million people. The story reported that the country’s ministry of agriculture has tagged more than seven million acres as virgin land and plans to lease half of it, very soon, to foreign investors for just 50 cents an acre per year.  It’s part of a trend now sweeping the globe. In May 2009, the Economist reported that in the last three years foreigners had secured deals or engaged in talks on between 15 million and 20 million hectares of farm land in developing countries.

Surely Ethiopia, one of the poorest places in the world ― it’s 171st on a United Nation’s index of 182 countries that measures national wellbeing ― could benefit from some robust foreign investment. But it must be the kind that helps the government meet its responsibility to ensure people have enough to eat. Is 50 cents an acre that kind of a deal? And for people who must certainly be living on those millions of acres, will there be long-term benefits they can count on from these investments? The government, like any government in this situation, should insist on it.

The pressure is on
The pressure is on. And Ethiopians feel it, even as they scramble to find ways to feed themselves. It’s hard not to admire the drive and entrepreneurial spirit of a man like Huka Balambal, a herder in southern Ethiopia who knew he needed to find a different way to provide for his family when repeated droughts shriveled the pasture on which his livestock depended. First, he taught himself to farm. Then, he devised an entire irrigation system for his small plot near the Dawa River. Now, harvests of corn and onions have eased his situation considerably.

That kind of determination can help feed a nation ― if the government ensures people have the resources and support they need.

Where we work: Ethiopia

This article was originally posted on the Oxfam America blog.

Oxfam America’s Coco McCabe concludes her two-part report on a meeting with some remarkable young camp leaders in Port-au-Prince who are striving to make a difference in Haiti’s quake-devastated capital.

Read part one.

Stephan Durogene (left) helps distribute goods at a camp at Delmas 62. Credit: Kenny Rae/Oxfam America.

Together with Jennifer Banessa Destine and a few other young adults, Stephan Durogene formed a committee to lobby for aid on behalf of those families who had taken refuge inside a once-private compound at Delmas 62. By day, 300 people were squeezed together under a few tarps and ropes draped with bed sheets. By night, the numbers soared to 1,000.

“I just wanted to help people out,” said Durogene, a student who knew that aid organisations would be flooding into the city and could provide assistance. “People don’t know where to go, so I decided to go forward.”

Persistance paid off

The small committee visited every aid group it could reach, including Oxfam, whose office was about half a mile from the camp.

“I explained to them there are injuries. They don’t have water. They don’t have anything to eat,” recalled Durogene.  Sometimes, the committee went back to make its case a second time.

The persistence of the committee members paid off.

First they succeeded in getting water delivered to the site. Then, when it started to rain, they appealed for tarps and got those too. Deliveries of kitchen supplies – pots for cooking, utensils for eating – followed from Oxfam, with the committee organising an orderly distribution the following day. Soon, Oxfam was also digging latrines at the site and setting up a more permanent water supply in the form of a large collapsible bladder.

“I always have a head on my shoulders and come with bright ideas,” said a matter-of-fact Destine, 29, about the role she plays as the only woman on the committee. And because she’s a clear-thinker (and studied management for four years at university), the others embrace her ideas – like the one about recording the names of each head of household and the numbers in each family so the committee can keep track of how many people there are in the camp.

Keeping order

During the evenings, the committee also works to keep order in the camp.

“At night, when everybody is back and ready to go to sleep, I take the megaphone and explain this is a private yard and this is how we’re supposed to behave,” said Durogene.

Occasionally, the stress everyone is living under boils over and both Durogene and Destine have found themselves on the receiving end of a barrage of vitriol.

“Sometimes I find people cursing me,” said Durogene who always speaks with a quiet, calm voice, a voice that most in the camp seem to respect, “but I stay strong… I didn’t know it was so hard, so difficult. But I’ll stay until everything is stable.”

Commitment is at his core.

Ulrich Bien-Aime, the retired school teacher who was living in his sister’s house in the compound, told me that Durogene was close – for the second time – to achieving his dream of becoming an engineer when the quake hit. A bullet shattered his university hopes the first time.

Twice-shattered dreams

“One afternoon he was standing on a corner with friends when Aristide was going down,” said Bien-Aime. “Soldiers were shooting.” A bullet grazed Durogene’s head, destroying the vision in his right eye and setting him back in his studies.

But he didn’t give up, said Ulrich.

Durogene is 27 now. He had just one project left to complete before the degree was his. Then, his world crashed down all around him once again. This time quite literally.

“There is no building. No university. No staff,” said Ulrich.

Durogene said he’s not sure what will come next with his schooling or even with job prospects, which are nothing if not extremely challenging in Haiti. But of this he is certain: his commitment to the camp and the people it’s sheltering is paramount.

“I cannot go out and look for a job now,” he said. “I want to be sure the structures are in place in here.”

The camp is just a beginning. As Haiti starts the long, arduous process of rebuilding itself, the social solidarity born from this tragedy, and all the potential of people forever shaped by it, can become the rocks from which mountains of good may rise.

Find out more about Oxfam’s Haiti Earthquake response

In part one of a special two-part report, Oxfam America’s Coco McCabe meets a group of inspirational young leaders helping people get the supplies they need in one of Port-au-Prince’s many makeshift camps, following the earthquake that destroyed so much of their city.

Members of the Delmas 62 camp leadership committee including Stephan Durogene (left) and Jennifer Banessa Destine (second from the right). Credit: Coco McCabe/Oxfam America.

An estimated 230,000 lives lost, huge swathes of the capital destroyed, more than one million people left homeless. Where in the sea of turmoil left by the January earthquake does Haiti begin to right itself? What are the first steps?

Whenever I asked those questions during my recent field visit there, the answer was often a long sigh. So much in Haiti – its infrastructure, its educational system, its job markets – demanded attention before this disaster. Now the need is hyperacute. Where in the world do you start?

Reconstruction starts with the people

One answer seems clear to me. Reconstruction starts with the Haitian people – like the committee of young leaders who emerged at Delmas 62 to help the hundreds of people camped in the yard of a private compound. They needed food and water, shelter and medical care. And they needed to be organised. It was through the efforts of twenty-somethings like Stephan Durogene, Jennifer Banessa Destine and a handful of others that sorely needed assistance began to flow over the tumbled walls and into their makeshift camp.

“Stephan, since the first time I met him, has always shown good potential,” says Ulrich Bien-Aime, a retired school teacher who was living in his sister’s house in the compound when the quake hit and has known Durogene since he was a high school student. “He believes in doing well, doing good, doing what’s right.”

In the month since the quake leveled much of Port-au-Prince, the opinion of Haitian civil society has gone largely unheard. But at the end of February, a coalition of civil groups is planning to hold a conference on reconstruction. Wouldn’t it be a perfect opportunity for new leaders, rising to the myriad challenges in the camps, to have their voices heard? Encouraging their participation in the decision-making that lies ahead can only make for a stronger Haiti.

Enormous personal strength

Already, some of these leaders have shown enormous personal strength. When the buildings at Ruben Leconte University crashed around him, Durogene, an engineering major, helped pull students from the wreckage before heading off to find his parents and siblings. They were safe – and deeply relieved to see him. They had heard the university had collapsed and feared that he had died in the rubble. But when they urged him to move with them to a safer part of the city, Durogene refused. He saw the need at Delmas 62 and decided that’s where he had to stay.

“I didn’t know I had this in me,” he said, sitting still for a rare moment in a patch of hot shade at the camp. It was about ten days after the disaster struck. “It’s during the earthquake I realised I can be a good leader.”

Part 2 will be published tomorrow, Saturday 27 February.

Find out more about Oxfam’s Haiti Earthquake response

With the rainy season looming ominously on the horizon, Coco McCabe reports on Haiti’s preparations to shore up shelters and dig new drainage ditches in time for the coming downpour.

Late last week, rain doused the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, heightening the sense of dread among the hundreds of thousands of people who have been living in makeshift shelters ever since a massive

Volunteers digging latrines as part of Oxfam’s cash-for-work programme, Petionville Club, Delmas 48, Port-au-Prince. Credit: Coco McCabe/Oxfam.

earthquake destroyed great swathes of their city in January.

The rains will start in earnest in April with the hurricane season following on 1 June. The concern is that cardboard and bed sheets — the materials currently serving as roofs and walls for countless people — will prove no match for Mother Nature. Even a plastic tarp will offer little comfort when the waters begin to rush and froth.

This is Haiti, where unchecked harvesting of wood for construction and charcoal has left 98% of the country deforested, only adding to the potential for flooding when the heavy rains come. And with many of the drainage channels around the capital now clogged with debris, where will the water go?

I can’t help but think of the anxious faces of those Haitians I met recently camped at Centre Sportif de Carrefour, a sports complex where several thousand homeless people had taken refuge under a variety of shelters, many of them constructed from sheets of white plastic stamped with “Made in China” logos.

When it rains hard here the water can pool up to three feet deep, according to Libermann Lexident, one of the camp leaders. That’s hip-height on an adult. Everything below three feet gets soaked. Even so, he said, people would rather cope with the flooding than move back to their damaged homes, so profound and ingrained is the trauma the quake has left in its wake.

“If it’s raining, it’s going to be very hard,” said Lexident. “So far, we’ve been praying. It’s been answered. If it rains, we don’t know where to go.”

Last week’s downpour, drumming a warning on to the plastic tarps strung out across Port-au-Prince, has heightened the urgency for tens of thousands of homeless families.

Oxfam is distributing tents and plastic sheeting to thousands of them and estimates indicate that there is enough shelter material — either in the capital or en route — to meet the needs of about 50% of those who have been displaced. Aid groups think that as many as 40% of them could return to their homes if their buildings are declared safe. Oxfam has a team of structural engineers in the capital right now assessing that issue.

But weather-worthy shelter isn’t the only cause for concern as the clouds start to gather. Sanitation services have become a critical issue as well, especially latrines.

The numbers are frightening.

The UN estimates that the devastated region needs 18,000 toilets but as the first month anniversary of the quake approached, aid groups and local workers had only been able to dig less than 1,000. Of those, Oxfam installed more than 20% — testament to our commitment in this area of expertise.

But the need remains enormous, especially as the rains approach and threaten to slop human waste into temporary settlements and crowded camps where there is little room to improve the drainage.

“We now need a surge in effort to improve sanitation facilities for people in Haiti,” said Marcel Stoessel, head of Oxfam in the country. “Let us not kid ourselves that this is going to be easy. It requires a Herculean humanitarian effort from all quarters. Around 230,000 people lost their lives on 12 January. It is our priority to make sure that we don’t let that number grow.”

Find out more about Oxfam’s Haiti Earthquake response

Oxfam America’s Coco McCabe reports on the efforts of Haiti’s government to reopen its schools and meets one student who’s determined to be top of the class.

Katty Rebecca Matin, 13, spends several hours each day studying the school books she brought with her in a pillowcase. Photo: Coco McCabe / Oxfam America

For kids not affected by the devastating earthquake that rocked Haiti in January, schools reopened on the first of February. But so far only a few students in the north-west and south of the country have shown up for class – not a promising start for a government aiming to open the rest of the country’s schools by 1 March.

Around Port-au-Prince, the tremor reduced many school buildings to rubble, making it hard for the children to shake off the nightmarish thought of what might have happened to them had the quake hit earlier in the afternoon while they were still seated at their desks.

Instead, it struck at 5.00pm, just after the kids had left for the day. Thankfully.

Countless lives saved by chance

I heard that whisper of relief voiced over and over again on the dusty streets of the capital as we drove past schools with pancaked floors and collapsed walls. Countless lives saved by chance. Thankfully.

But what’s been interrupted now is the certainty, order and sense of opportunity the school day brought to the lives of those Haitian kids who had been lucky enough to secure themselves a place in the classroom – even if that classroom lacked amenities and discipline.

Many in Haiti don’t get the chance to have much schooling. According to one report, only two-thirds of Haitian children complete primary school. And the learning they get is hardly consistent, given that almost 80% of primary teachers are not certified. The report, compiled for the Partnership for Educational Revitalisation in the Americas, pointed out that most students in Haiti – about 80% of those enrolled – attend private schools. However, three-quarters of these have neither certification nor a license from the education ministry.

The government wants to see all schools reopened in less than three weeks. But where? With what resources? A recent story in the New York Times described an orphanage that promised to educate the children within its walls, but a reporter who visited saw no signs of books, paper or pencils anywhere.

Last week, three experts testified before a subcommittee of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on how to help Haiti recover from the incredible destruction left by the quake and each one of them emphasised the importance a sound educational system will play in rebuilding the country.
And perhaps no one wants that as much as those kids who’ve lost every semblance of comfort and security they ever knew – including their schools.

Katty’s Story

In a spontaneous camp at Delmas 62, made of tarps and bed sheets, Katty Rebecca Matin, 13, sits bouncing a neighbour’s baby on her lap. She’s good with children but her heart really lies with her collection of books. It was that love that prompted her to drag her school books – a pillowcase stuffed with them – from her family’s damaged home to the camp where they now sit, carefully stacked and easily accessible, with a few other salvaged household belongings.

“I love school,” says Katty, digging into the pillowcase and pulling out a workbook. Side by Side, it is called, a language book for children studying English. She flips it open to chapter six – a section on families – and with hordes of relatives teeming around her, she ticks off the words for sister and brother, aunt and uncle, mother and father in near perfect English.

“I like doing homework,” Katty adds. That’s a challenge in a camp where there are hardly any quiet corners to be found or even any comfortable places to sit. But Katty has found a way to carve out some mental space for herself all the same. Together with two friends, she has formed a study group and for two or three hours a day they focus on their school work. To give the sessions some structure, Katty’s mother asked an older student in the camp to help tutor the younger ones as they plow through lessons in maths, social science, English and Spanish.

The informal sessions help pass the time at Delmas 62. But what Katty says she would really like is for school to start again so that her dream of attending university and studying science can one day come true.

Donate now and find out more about Oxfam’s Haiti Earthquake response

Oxfam America’s Coco McCabe reports on how our cash-for-work scheme is faring as Haitians left homeless by last month’s earthquake continue their efforts clearing away the remaining rubble and refuse.

Workers assembling family kits. Photo: Oxfam

As devastating as the earthquake was for the people of Port-au-Prince, for some of them there’s the thinnest of silver linings: jobs. Not necessarily long lasting ones, but at least a few weeks’ worth of work that will put money in their pockets and help them weather the tough times ahead.

Montinard’s Story

That’s how it is for 19-year-old Montinard Jean-Baptiste, who landed a job in an Oxfam warehouse not far from the airport, loading and unloading a stream of goods to help some of the people left homeless by the quake.

Jean-Baptiste is one of those homeless people. He’s now living in a cardboard shelter in a camp of about 600 people right behind the warehouse. With him are his aunt and uncle, who raised him and his four brothers and six sisters. All of them depend on the earnings his aunt makes from selling coffee and bread to people going to work in the morning. She supports the family.

Jean-Baptiste has managed to find some work in the past – for Coca-Cola, which has hired him for truck-loading stints on 12 different occasions. But each time, after three months, the company has let him go. Oxfam is his second employer and he says with the flood of aid groups pouring into the country – many of them needing help to carry out their work – part-time jobs have become more available.

“It’s important to me,” he says of his work at Oxfam. He plans to share his earnings (200 gourdes a day, about $5) with his aunt and brothers.

Family Kits

Late on a Friday afternoon at this two-storey warehouse, there is a hum of activity. A rainbow of big plastic tubs – green, blue, red – fill the yard. Each is now loaded with “family kits” of essential household items like towels, toothpaste, shampoo, cups, plates and eating utensils.

Men are busy lugging boxes of soap and kitchen implements from the warehouse, while others, men and women at three long wooden tables, quickly unpack them and reassemble the goods into the tubs, which can be used as wash basins. About 45 people are working here now.

Dario Arthur, an Oxfam staffer leading part of the emergency response, says he could have ordered pre-assembled kits to distribute in the camps. But that would have been a missed opportunity to give people jobs. The assemblers, who need to work fast and will be employed for just two weeks, are earning 500 gourdes (about $12.25) a day: a rate substantially above the local minimum wage. Warehouse workers will likely stay on the job for two or three months, as different supplies pass through.

All told, the crew here will put together 10,000 kits. As soon as 100 or so are assembled, off they go in the back of a truck to one of the scattered camps that now dot Port-au-Prince. But Olivier Girault, an Oxfam logistician, says one of the challenges is determining where the need really lies.

Beyond the gates of the warehouse yard, a small crowd of men has gathered. When a truck trundles out with its load, a commotion erupts: The men are clamoring for the goods, saying they are representatives from camps where people need help. But Girault says that all the requests need to be checked out, otherwise the kits could wind up in the market for sale – not in the hands of families who could use them.

By the end of the day, a sea of cardboard and plastic wrapping stretches beneath the work tables, all that’s left of hours of frenetic activity. The workers stream out of the gates, and Girault, with a smile on his face, climbs into a truck to head home. Hired just a few days ago by Oxfam and fluent in French, Spanish, English, and Creole, this is the first regular job he’s been able to land since returning to his native Haiti nine months ago.

“It’s good for us Haitians to work for those who can’t work and lost everything,” he says.

Donate now and find out more about Oxfam’s Haiti Earthquake response