As Haiti seeks to respond to recent disasters, aid workers wonder when help will arrive

Even before the southern coastal town of Jérémie was struck Tuesday by its second deadly earthquake in less than two years — after being battered by torrential rains and flooding this weekend — the region’s 200,000-plus inhabitants were already feeling the collapse of Haiti.

With Port-au-Prince under siege by warring armed gangs, merchandise couldn’t get in or out of the city by traveling the 180 miles between the city and the capital. And the violence meant that Jérémie, known as the city of poets, is now becoming a bastion for refugees.

Add to this, no electricity for over a year, no rain for five months and a flooded bridge. The bridge, which connects the Grand’Anse to the rest of Haiti, was partially submerged by floodwaters over the weekend.

“Things are so unbelievably fragile,” said Nadesha Mijoba, who runs the Haitian Health Foundation in the town. “The availability of supplies is so sporadic. We’ve had to find different options to keep things coming in.”

With the recent rains and the quake, she and others are wondering how aid will arrive and, if it does, whether it will it be enough and will get to those who need it.

“I can’t even imagine what the response is going to be like for this disaster because the bridge is out, Port-au-Prince is under siege and if we barely got anything after the earthquake in August 2021. I can’t even begin to imagine how we are going to do this,” she said.

Haitian authorities and the United Nations have acknowledged the difficulty of moving humanitarian aid in Haiti, especially through Martissant, the gang-controlled neighborhood that connects Port-au-Prince with the southern regions of the country, including the southwest peninsula where Jérémie is located.

The escalation in gang violence has made police escorts necessary, and barges to move aid deliveries.

The back-to-back disasters in just a few days — with more rain in the forecast— requires prioritizing the communities most in need while also reminding groups that want to help that they need to go through the National Emergency Operations Center to coordinate.

In a noon briefing with reporters in New York, Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, said colleagues in Haiti have reported that the ongoing violence and damage to roads are hampering relief efforts.

Still, he said, the U.N. stands ready to help.

“The U.N. stands ready to work with the Haitian authorities and other partners to help ease the suffering of those in need,” Dujarric said. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs is working with UNICEF, the World Food Program and the International Organization for Migration to support communities around Port-au-Prince that were hardest hit by the floods and landslides, he said. The U.N.food program is ready to distribute 350,000 hot meals and other food to those who need it the most.

Mijoba and others remain worried, because past relief efforts have failed to either reach those who need it most.

“I have a feeling that this is going to be a very difficult year in the context of natural disasters for our poor little country of Haiti,” Mijoba said.

Bette Gebrian, who runs the only breast cancer treatment program in the region through her Grand’Anse Health & Development Association, said life has become incredibly difficult in the city, from the lack of food to the lack of potable water in the local prison.

“There are not gangs out there doing bad things but you can’t get food in, you can’t get products in,” she said. “The buses started for a while and then were stopped because Martissant got bad again; so when the gangs are active, charging people or stealing their stuff, people can’t travel at all. It’s awful.

“We’ve gone through this, and cholera, COVID and Zika,” she added, listing the emergencies that have hit Haiti in recent years and isolated Jérémie from the rest of the country. “And now it’s hurricane season.”

Haiti’s Office of Civil Protection said the recent rains caused four rivers to overflow their banks, and the the flooding in the Grand’Anse region washed out the few crops that farmers managed to plant despite the previous lack of rain.

The hunger is so widespread that some people have nothing more than a potato to feed their children, Gebrian, a registered nurse, said.

“It’s amazing how people are hungry in a place where there’s a lot of farmland,” she said. “But without rain people are not able to plant.”

According to the U.N. about 5.2 million of Haiti’s nearly 12 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, a figure that has doubled in the last five years. Humanitarian partners say they are trying to reach about 3.2 million this year, but said donors have been slow to support a $720 million funding request they launched this year.

“I am particularly concerned by this situation at a time when the Haitian population is already highly vulnerable,” said Jean-Martin Bauer, Haiti’s acting humanitarian coordinator and the current country director for the World Food Program. “The humanitarian response plan is still underfunded, with only 20% of the necessary budget received. I call donors to show solidarity with the Haitian people and ensure funding for this plan.”

Mijoba, who has been critical of international efforts to bring aid to Haiti in the past, said donors need to rethink their definition of help. After the 2021 earthquake that struck the Grand’Anse and southwest regions many of promises were made. But those communities are still struggling to recover.

That struggle is further compounded by Haiti’s worsening gang violence and what she sees as a failure by the international community to help.

“With each disaster, we just talk about how we’re going to rebuild better,” Mijoba said. “I don’t see it. I’ve been living and working in Jérémie for 10 years and I am still waiting to see this rebuilding better. Look at the bridge. That bridge should have been built higher, stronger and in fact many in the community said it wasn’t a good idea to build it where they did because of the rains that caused the river to widen.”

The bridge, installed temporarily last year to replace another one that collapsed in the 2021 earthquake, became impassable after it was submerged in water during the floods and part of its off ramp washed away. Workers made repairs but concerns remain that more rain will make it unstable or impassable. The Office of Civil Protection said Tuesday that National Road 7 connecting Jérémie to Les Cayes was blocked.

Mijoba also echoed a common complaint that everything is centralized in Port-au-Prince.

“It leaves everybody in the country, including the displaced people who are leaving Port-au-Prince, with nothing. There is no humanitarian aid to assist all of these individuals because nothing can arrive,” she said.

In the month of March alone, she said, her health charity received 157 displaced pregnant women seeking care. In April, there were 77.

The death of President Jovenel Moïse five weeks before the August 2021 earthquake exacerbated Haiti’s problems, Mijoba said, but did not start them. The volatile gang situation in Martissant, a key thoroughfare for anyone trying to get to the southern peninsula from the capital, already existed.

“We kept saying it needs to be addressed and we kept asking for help and we all got ignored,” she said. “Things have fallen apart further and they are going to continue to fall apart further including in all of the other areas of Haiti. And where is everybody going to go?”