Haiti

There are at least 595,000 Haitians living in camps around Port au Prince (1). President Martelly has a program, called 16-6, which proposes to resettle residents of 6 large camps in 16 neighbourhoods in Port-au-Prince. In total, if the program succeeds, it will touch 5000 families, or 4% of the camp population. I spoke to the director of 16-6, Clement Belizaire. So far, 190 families have been resettled from the first camp, Place St. Pierre, in Petionville. Belizaire expects the 1500 families who live in the first two camps, Place St.

Hi everyone. I got sick yesterday and am still recovering. Still managed to get some work done (thanks to Ansel) but most of the interviews were of the background variety.

Patrick Elie is a Haitian activist who worked in the first Aristide administration. I interviewed him in Port au Prince on October 5, 2011.

Justin Podur (JP): Can we start with your analysis of the Preval administration of 2006-2011? What could he have accomplished under the circumstances? What did he accomplish?

The centerpiece of Haitian President Martelly's policies so far is his scholarship program. It is an ambitious plan to provide free education to every primary school-aged child, between 6-12 years old or from grades 1-6. President Martelly's press office provided some of the plan's details.

Barbancourt 17, a camp on a construction site south of the Toussaint L'Ouverture Airport (sud-aeroport), was evicted last week – on Thursday September 29 - by the International Organization on Migration (IOM), the manager of Haiti's post-earthquake camps. Home to 43 families, the camp dates to immediately after the earthquake in January 2010.

For the seven years since he was overthrown in a coup in February 2004 there have been many different speculations about why Aristide never returned to Haiti. People argued that his exile in South Africa was comfortable, that he had fled in 2004 out of fear for his life and didn't return because of that same fear, that he was waiting for the moment when he could return to power.

I'm working over some of the material I wrote and have never published - it's one of my summer projects. There are quite a few projects that need a bit of work to push them over the edge. One of them has me revisiting my Haiti files. I have a pretty passive research method - stuff comes to me. The Canada Haiti Action Network (CHAN) for example, is an active community of people, among them very skilled researchers, constantly posting stuff on Haiti politics for years. Looking back at their archives is a pretty amazing exercise.