from Sue Reid
‘tent cities’ put up by aid workers in the quake’s aftermath.
Most of the canvas still has ‘USAID. From the American People’ printed on it.
The tent cities were viewed as an indignity by Haitians, who either left them quickly or were forced to do so when the accommodation they provided, some of it unwisely sited on flood plains, disintegrated after a couple of years.
An estimated 10,000 charities, mainly from the U.S. and Europe, arrived in Haiti in 2010, to provide medical care, feed survivors and build homes.
These non-governmental organisations (NGOs) had billions of dollars in donations to spend. But now, Haitians are asking: ‘ Where did the money go?’
In the aftermath of the earthquake, there were more NGOs per square mile in Haiti than in any other country on Earth — and in the driving seat of the enormous humanitarian operation from Britain were such outfits as Oxfam and Save The Children, which launched publicity drives to raise donations from ordinary people back home.
Some aid organisations flew their own PR teams and film units to Haiti to record heart- rending personal accounts from victims and footage of the earthquake devastation for primetime fundraising television adverts.
But all the PR teams in the world can’t hide the truth: that after eight years and one of the biggest aid operations the world has ever seen, the real scandal is not the abuse of prostitutes, many of them young girls who turned to selling sex to survive — dreadful as that is — but that conditions in Haiti are as bad as ever, with what appears to be up to £9 billion in aid money squandered.
As one Haitian charity worker, who runs a respected agency distributing U. S . - donated medicines, explained this week: ‘Everyone in the charity world descended on our country. It became the NGOs’ playground.
‘It was the right-on place to be and the agencies were watched on TV every night. There was a buzzy atmosphere and they all had halos. They liked it much better than working in sub-Saharan Africa, out of the limelight.
‘The restaurants were full, the nightclubs, the hotel cocktail bars.