An estimated 500,000 people fled to the countryside in the days after the quake, many on buses paid for by the government to move quake survivors away from the heart of the destruction. Hundreds of thousands more are camped atop the rubble of their homes, or packed into makeshift camps.
Now some of those who fled are beginning to return after enduring the rural misery that drove them to Port-au-Prince in the first place.
“I didn’t like it there,’’ said Marie Marthe Juste, selling fried dough on the streets near the capital’s Petionville suburb after returning from La Boule, in the mountains 20 miles to the north.
“My friends help me down here. Up there, I just sat around all day. At least here I can sell things to make a little money,’’ she said.
The government is largely powerless to keep people from returning, though Prime Minister Max Bellerive protested that Port-au-Prince cannot withstand another influx of people.
“It’s impossible for these people to come back before the capital is reconstructed,’’ he said.
The idea was to use the quake as an opportunity to fix some of Haiti’s longstanding problems.
President Rene Preval’s “Operation Demolition,’’ an ambitious plan to clear the rubble, includes provisions to remove people living in unstable buildings by force, according to Aby Brun, an architect and member of the government’s reconstruction team.
A major part of that reconstruction plan is encouraging Haitians to move away from the capital, providing jobs and basic services in other cities, towns and villages.
“We want to create opportunities for them as well in the second cities,’’ said the US Agency for International Development’s No. 2 official, Dr. Anthony Chan.
But Haitians are already streaming back to the capital.
Meanwhile, 10 US Baptist missionaries charged with child kidnapping should be allowed to leave the country pending the outcome of their case, their Haitian lawyer argued before a judge yesterday.
Prior to the closed hearing, defense attorney Edwin Coq told reporters he would ask the judge to grant the detainees “provisional release,’’ a type of bail without money posted. He said they should be allowed to leave Haiti until their trial, a date for which has not been established.
The 10 were taken back to jail after the hearing. Coq said the judge has not ruled on the request. More hearings in the case are scheduled for next week.
The missionaries filed back into a police van after spending half the day at the courthouse. They did not respond to questions from waiting journalists. Their lawyer says the judge told them not to discuss their case.
As displaced people moved back to their demolished homes, Alfredo Stein, of the University of Manchester’s Global Urban Research Centre, said planners must assume people will return - and must work closely with them to rebuild. Rather than thinking people are in the way, planners must consider their return to be an opportunity to fix not just the bricks and mortar but Haiti’s social fabric, he said.
