Haitian Town Rebuilds After Hurricane

WLRN Public Media

Published October 14, 2016 at 4:13 PM EDT

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Teams from the Civil Protection office of the provincial government have spent the past week clearing fallen trees from roads and other infrastructure.

Rowan Moore Gerety / WLRN

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Members of the Haitian-American hurricane relief effort load bags of medication and food onto buses at the airport.

Rowan Moore Gerety / WLRN

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Snarled playground equipment in a park in the center of the town of Camp Perrin.

Rowan Moore Gerety / WLRN

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People displaced by the storm did their laundry in drainage canals and hung their clothes out to dry in a park. Only one hoop was left standing after the storm but soccer, not basketball, remains Haiti's national pastime.

Rowan Moore Gerety / WLRN

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Rocks from a ravine almost completely filled the davzac canal, choking the flow of the 6-foot-deep canal to a tiny stream.

Rowan Moore Gerety / WLRN

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Nearly all the fruit trees near Camp Perrin were laid flat in the storm. For the past week, people have been salvaging what they could from demolished fields and backyard gardens. Here, rotting breadfruit in the davzac canal.

Rowan Moore Gerety / WLRN

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Ourdy Alva approaches a mango tree laid across the irrigation canal that supplies water to his entire neighborhood. Since the storm, they have been fetching water from a spring much farther from home.

Rowan Moore Gerety / WLRN

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Scarcely a leaf remains on the trees near Camp Perrin. "We shouldn't be able to see the city from here," one young man said. "We should be standing in the shade."

Rowan Moore Gerety / WLRN

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A group of school principals met at Camp Perrin's city hall to discuss how to begin reopening even a small number of the city's 80 schools. Twenty were completely destroyed and all but five had missing roofs or other major damage.

Rowan Moore Gerety / WLRN

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A pile of elementary school books that were soaked during teh storm, behind a primary school in Camp Perrin.

Rowan Moore Gerety / WLRN

In the Haitian town of Camp Perrin this week, Fanesse Saintsur was taking apart a section of roofing that flew off the store where he works, rafters and all.

People say sheets of metal roofing were flying around like planes during the long hours it took Hurricane Matthew to pass through the area.

Saintsur was taking the roof apart to salvage what he could and put it back together, doing for his employer what he could not do for himself.

"My whole house is gone," he said. "The cinder blocks were crushed. Matthew took the roof. We're all outside."

Renette Bazile walked through the streets of Camp Perrin wearing a campaign T-shirt for a local candidate for parliament. Haiti was set to hold a long-delayed election just days after Hurricane Matthew devastated the southern peninsula. Now that election has been delayed. "We'll wait for them to give us a date," she said. "It's up to the foreigners to give us a date."

Saintsur came back home to Camp Perrin from the capital in 2010 after several of his family members died in the earthquake. Now he is one of dozens of people sleeping on the floor of Camp Perrin's police station.

"I'm a mason," he said. "The reason I haven't started building my house again yet is that I don't have the money to buy any materials. My children aren't back in school yet. ... I've taken a lot of blows."