Jeanne one year on: Haiti still needs food aid

by Clarens Renois

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

GONAIVES, Haiti (AFP): A year after Hurricane Jeanne ravaged Gonaives, killing 3,000 and leaving 300,000 homeless, residents still await emergency food aid and fear they have been forgotten.

At the sight of four-wheel-drive jeeps bearing the logo of the World Food Program, women pour out of their ramshackle homes, their eyes full of hope.

In less than ten minutes, the jeeps are surrounded by a throng of people from one of the areas hardest hit by the storm, which pummeled this northwestern city with powerful winds and torrential rain on September 18, 2004.

The children, scrawny and half-naked, never stray far from the World Food Program's premises, where for six months last year more than 750 families were served free meals.

"Are they going to start the distribution of rations again?" asked an anxious Mariejean Sylverain, mother of four. She was waiting to feed her children, including a five-year-old who showed clear signs of malnutrition.

She described how aid workers after the storm used to regularly hand out a sack of rice, cooking oil and beans. "Since they stopped this aid, we are living on close to nothing," she said.

"We are trying to help ourselves," said another storm survivor as she leaned against a picket fence amid corrugated metal shacks.
After Hurricane Jeanne struck, the UN World Food Program (WFP) delivered food to more than 30,000 families, or about 160,000 people for six months.

"We have completed this program to resume our normal activity to deliver a daily meal to 300,000 school children," said Anne Poulsen, spokeswoman for WFP.

At the moment, less than 10 percent of the eight million inhabitants of Haiti receive aid from the organization. The latest projects focus on development rather than direct assistance, Poulsen said.

Pierre Edner, who helped distribute emergency food aid to storm survivors, said that people were desperate in this immense shantytown on the coast.

"There is nothing for them to eat, there is no hope for them. Government officials have never set foot here. People fear hunger and disease," Edner said.

"Their wish is for the resumption of assistance."

An octogenarian, Valbrum Valcius, raised a chair in a kind of salute to the WFP representative. Since the last visit, the old man wouldn't have eaten except for the generosity of his neighbors.

When he saw Poulsen, he believed for a moment that the monthly rations had resumed. But he heard nothing that promised a return of the regular hand-outs.

A year after Hurricane Jeanne hit Haiti and despite extensive assistance from non-governmental organizations and generous donations from Western governments, the needs remain enormous. The populations of the affected areas of Gonaives live in the hope that fresh assistance from the outside world is on the way.

But now, the television cameras are gone. The international media has turned its attention to the southern coast of the United States, where Hurricane Katrina killed more than 880 people last month.

Poulsen fears that Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, is no longer a priority. "I want to say: don't forget Haiti. Don't forget Gonaives."

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