Images of Haiti Today: Recovery and a National Addiction to Wood Fuel

In Gonaives, a flood basin north of Port au Prince, 26-year-old Fils-aime Clairmentine lost two homes during floods in 2004 in 2008 before, like many Haitians, she gave up and moved to the capital. She survived the earthquake, but has since returned t

Most Haitians rely on subsistence farming. Deforestation—visible in the barren hills in the background—undermines agricultural livelihoods, providing a push effect to the pull of jobs in the city that drove rapid urbanization in recent dec

Port-au-Prince was “a disaster before the disaster,” as one U.N. official told me. The loss of 230,000 people is a reflection, in part, of shoddy building practices. The stream of urban migrants flooding the capital each year moved into la

"There's no mystery why these buildings came down,” said Peter Haas, who runs Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group, an engineer training charity inspecting buildings and teaching masons how to build back better in Haiti. “

The city's slums became breeding grounds for disease and political volatility, potentially stirred up around elections or a change in grain prices.
 

Photo by Justin Ostensen

U.N. peacekeepers here since 2004 fought neighborhood to neighborhood through the areas like Cite Soleil, once considered the most dangerous slum in the Western Hemisphere.

Photo by Justin Ostensen

According to one International Crisis Group report, between January 2006 and May 2007, the murder rate in some slums was "comparable to that of Colombia's Medellin during the worst days of trafficking related killings in 1991, when it was Lat

On the heels of four consecutive storms and hurricanes that wrought $897 million in damage, the ICG warned that "a new natural disaster in 2009 in an overpopulated city such as Port-au-Prince could easily transform the considerable opposition to

Today, the country's first official relocation camp is built in a flood basin beneath hills scarred by erosion. Thousands were told to evacuate when a tropical storm lashed the valley this fall.

Photo by William Wheeler

Kids in a camp wait for a meal cooked on a fuel-efficient stove, intended to reduce demand on wood fuel.

Photo by William Wheeler

But experts say that alternative fuels and jobs to supplement income from charcoal production—like work planting trees or protecting forests—are also needed to restore Haiti’s environment.

Photo by William Wheeler