Smashed Hopes: Six Months On, Haiti Remains Covered in Rubble

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Still, even if the United Nations is helping Hygin manage his demolition inventory, and even though American engineers trained the Haitian inspectors, the people out in the streets are finally feeling the government's presence again.

It comes in the form of the young men wearing the emblem of the ministry on their T-shirts, the men who tell them that they can now return to their homes, at least during the day, to cook and watch TV, or who warn them to stay away.

The government is literally putting its stamp on the capital. The stencil it presses against the walls bears the abbreviation of the ministry: MTPTC. More than six months after the earthquake, the Haitian government is reappearing in the form of a code of letters spray-painted onto the ruins.

There is only one building Hygin's men have left out of their inspection of downtown Port-au-Prince: the Presidential Palace. As a joke, one of the American civil engineers drew a dot onto his map to indicate the palace -- in red, of course. The earthquake nearly completely destroyed the edifice, its cupolas perch perilously on the sides of the building, everything is half collapsed and parts of the interior are exposed. No one needs a red dot to know that the structure is dangerous.

A Government Desperately Tries to Maintain Its Dignity

When Hygin's men showed up at the palace gate, they weren't allowed in. They were told to contact the secretary of the Presidential Palace and obtain a permit. "We can get the permit at any time," says Hygin. "I'll request it immediately." But he also understands how delicate the situation is. At the same time, the palace is an important symbol of the country, and he would like to see it repaired soon.

The government is desperately trying to maintain its dignity, as Hygin's homeless boss does in his small office. A paper sign taped to the door reads: Bureau du Ministre. The man uses a lot of words to convey two messages: that the government has excellent relations with the international organizations and is very pleased with the results, and that it has, of course, its very own technical experts.

Every morning, the wind carries the sounds of a marching band to the ruins of Hygin's ministry. At 8 a.m., they raise the Haitian flag in front of the Presidential Palace and march, with their trumpets and kettledrums, past the demolished building.

These are the small gestures of a small nation, looking on as foreigners try to compress the catastrophe into their Excel tables, as the aid organizations divide up the city's neighborhoods and the whole world shows up to rescue Haiti -- with support from a literal rainbow of organizations, like the United States-based Convoy of Hope, Hungarian Baptist Aid, the Jesuit Refugee Service, the Taiwan-based Buddhist Tzu-Chi Foundation, Britain-based Islamic Relief and many others. In Haiti these days, stickers are affixed to every water tank, every portable toilet and just about anything else so that everyone will know which organization or institution they should be grateful to.

'We Received Nothing'

"No one has helped us," says Georges Emanies. "We have received nothing from any organization, nothing." He says that looters stole his savings, about €160 ($211) which he had set aside over a year, from the wreckage of his house. He had planned to get married and had just bought his girlfriend, with whom he already has seven children, a wedding ring before the earthquake. He didn't have enough money for the second ring, he says, and now, after the quake, he has had to pawn his girlfriend's ring to feed the children.

He doesn't understand why he can't participate in the "Cash for Work" program in his neighborhood, one of the many programs sponsored by the aid organizations. The people are paid about five US dollars a day to clear away the rubble with shovels and wheelbarrows. The goal is to provide income and prevent unrest.

Emanies has no money to send Taïna to kindergarten and no money to pay for his sons' lessons. He has owed the school the tuition for almost a year, and now it is refusing to allow his children to take their exams. He lives in a foul-smelling, hot hut without windows and sleeps directly below the cracked wall that's left of his house. Emanies' bad luck is that he was lucky.

His life doesn't match the criteria of the aid organizations. He didn't lose a wife or a leg, he has many children but not just young children, he isn't old and frail, and he no longer lives in a tent, where his family lived for two months. Each morning, the family get their drinking water from a tank provided by an aid organization called Project Concern International (PCI). One of his children plays in the PCI children's tent in the morning. And his sons still walk to school every day along a path cleared by the "Cash for Work" people. They've also taken Taïna to the PCI clinic, because she spits a lot.

One can't say that the world has forgotten Emanies. There are just far too many men and women like Emanies in Haiti, and when the international community comes to visit and scrutinizes his world, the first thing it sees is a canal full of garbage and pigs digging through the garbage. But the garbage is a good sign, and so is the rivulet of dirty water running through it.

It's a good sign because the water is flowing, and because there is room for it to flow. In the earthquake, the houses on both sides fell into the riverbed. If 126 workers hadn't spent two-and-a-half months clearing away the wreckage with their bare hands, the brown water would have backed up and eventually flooded everything. Emanies and everyone else in the ruins would have been living in a cesspool, surrounded by swarms of mosquitoes that transmit malaria and dengue fever.

Now they have only the rats with which to contend. Emanies killed three of them last week, crushing them with a shoe he managed to keep after the earthquake. The rats scurry from one pile of wreckage to the next, eating their way through the tarp where a wall once stood and crawling over the children. Last night a rat ran up Taïna's arm, Emanies says with a short laugh.

A few houses farther down the hill, a Haitian woman carrying a megaphone hurries through the neighborhood, calling out: "Please do not throw any debris into the canal. We have just cleaned it. This is good for all of us."

Things are moving forward very slowly. But would things really be better if help came quickly? One church group, for example, simply built a new hut here. It was the only hut erected in Emanies neighborhood, and the group only built it because the homeless people were devout churchgoers. This hut now stands in the middle of an area Daniel Strode will eventually demolish. And will it be a good thing if the big aid organizations soon descend on Emanies' neighborhood, searching for empty land, and turn their noses up at the reconstruction plans Strode and the people at PCI have devised?

Strode tested his idea in Burma in 2008, after a devastating cyclone struck the country. Instead of simply building new houses where the old ones used to be, he discussed different floor plans with the residents, plans that might include installing latrines or planting trees. Strode, the man who wants to demolish the old Port-au-Prince, has already envisaged a new city in his head.

But the aid organizations are feeling the pressure of donors, who want them to start building now that the materials have finally arrived. The containers had been held up at Haitian customs for some time. NGOs imported the materials because they were worried about turmoil on the local market and that it would otherwise become too expensive for Haitians to repair their houses.

Georges Emanies managed to buy 12 wooden beams and 10 sheets of corrugated metal. For the past four months Emanies, who is just one of Haiti's 1.5 million homeless, has been puttering around on his new home. The International Organization for Migration has distributed identification cards with the following words printed on the back: "Get registered so that you can help us change Haiti." Emanies' family stood in line for an entire day to get its number.

When they were asked where they wanted to go, Emanies' girlfriend said: Canaan. It was what the others had said. She thought: Perhaps it's where they've built proper, safe houses for us. She thought Canaan sounded like a nice place. Later, Emanies told her that Canaan was a location in the wilderness, and that it was full of snakes. Now they are terrified that they will be forced to move to the promised land.

Emanies doesn't want to give up his new house, built on top of the wreckage of the old one. No one should be allowed to tear it down either, he says. For his part, Strode says that he would never tear down the house without Emanies' permission. But Emanies doesn't know this. All he knows is that he can hear the droning of Strode's excavators behind the palm trees, and that the drone is getting louder and louder.

He has just applied a coat of pink paint to the doorframe. Strode, the American who has him so worried, lives in a house that's painted the same bright pink. Emanies plans to build a window soon.

He won't vote this year, because, as he says, nothing will change in this corrupt country anyway. Emanies says that he would rather be an American than independent. He is now devoting his full attention to his house.

In five months, Strode has already removed 210,000 cubic meters of debris, but he has millions more to go. The site where he dumps the debris, the debris and the bones in the wreckage, is Haiti's real mass grave.

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• Part 1: Six Months On, Haiti Remains Covered in Rubble
• Part 2: 'Rubble Isn't Sexy'
• Part 3: A Government's Slow Return