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Give me shelter: Haiti's homeless ask for tents
(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-01-26 17:09
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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti: The dusty soccer field lined with spacious tents is an oasis for earthquake survivors among Haiti's homeless sheltering in acres (hectares) of squalid camps.
Competition for the canvas homes has boiled into arguments and machete fights, a sign of the desperation felt by the hundreds of thousands of people without homes struggling for shelter in this wrecked city. Haiti's president has asked the world for 200,000 tents and says he will sleep in one himself.
Fenela Jacobs, 39, lives in a 4-by-4-meter (13-by-13-foot) abode provided by the Britain-based Islamic Relief Worldwide. She says the group offered her two tents for 21 survivors but she ended up putting everyone in one tent after people threatened to burn both down if she didn't give a tent up.
Still, she says living in the 2-meter-tall (6-foot-high) khaki home with a paisley interior is better than the makeshift shelters crafted from bed sheets propped on wooden sticks where her family was living before.
"It's a lot more comfortable," Jacobs said, though she added it gets really hot inside the tent in Cazo, a Port-au-Prince neighborhood hidden in the hills behind the international airport.
The global agency supplying tents said it already had 10,000 stored in Haiti and at least 30,000 more would be arriving. But that "is unlikely to address the extensive shelter needs," the International Organization for Migration stressed.
The organization had estimated 100,000 family-sized tents were needed. But the UN says up to 1 million people require shelter, and President Rene Preval issued an urgent appeal Monday calling for 200,000 tents and urging that the aircraft carrying them be given urgent landing priority at Port-au-Prince airport.
In solidarity with earthquake victims, Preval plans to move into a tent home on the manicured lawn of his collapsed National Palace in downtown Port-au-Prince, Tourism Minister Patrick Delatour told The Associated Press.
"It is a decision that the president has made himself," Delatour said.
The secretary-general of the Organization of American States, Jose Miguel Insulza, planned to visit Haiti on Tuesday to study relief efforts.
The Haitian government and international groups were preparing a more substantial tent city on Port-au-Prince's outskirts.
Brazilian army engineers with the UN peacekeeping force in Haiti have cleared and leveled 12 acres (five hectares) north of the city, planned as the first of more than a half-dozen sites that officials hope will shelter the displaced before the onset of spring rains and summer hurricanes.
Col. Delcio Monteiro Sapper said the Interamerican Development Bank wants to clear a total of 247 acres (100 hectares) owned by Haiti's government that could house 100,000 quake refugees.
