Frustration and Anger Over Conditions in Haiti

This year had already been a disastrous one for Haiti when a cholera epidemic erupted a few weeks ago that has killed over 700 people in the countryside and is spreading to the capital, Port-au-Prince. It's where millions of people live in wretched conditions - a perfect breeding ground for the waterborne disease to flourish.

This latest disaster couldn't have come at a worse time: Haiti was already struggling to recover from last January's earthquake that killed 300,000 people.

To help it get back on its feet, nearly half the households in America donated money and countries from around the world pledged billions.

"60 Minutes" traveled to Haiti to see what has happened since then and we were surprised to find how little progress has been made.

Even by Haiti's standards, this place is incomprehensible. The camp was started out of desperation in the chaotic days following last January's earthquake.

If you can believe it, residents actually saw this as a safe haven, despite heavy traffic rumbling by just a few feet from their shelters.

Since then, the population has grown from just a handful of people to 3,800 who call the median "home."

When "60 Minutes" and correspondent Byron Pitts got to one of the tents, a woman who lives here with five other people invited us into the tiny space.

This has also been 7-year-old Jean-Edouard's home for ten months. When Pitts asked the little boy what he thinks about living there, Jean-Edouard said, "It's not good… I'm afraid of a car."

In the background, one could hear traffic whizzing by the tent-like structure.

Outside, traffic races by at breakneck speed, a few feet from where children play. A camp leader told us nearly 30 people have been hit by oncoming vehicles; ten were killed, three of them children.

Almost no government official has ever come to the encampment, so when "60 Minutes" showed up with the mayor of Carrefour ,Yvon Jerome, he got an earful.

Pitts asked him what people were saying. "Yeah, they need food. And I say to them, we're not there to give them food. We trying to get them a better place to live, but not provide them food," the mayor explained.

"But Mr. Mayor, I mean, can you even call this living?" Pitts asked.

"No, it's not living," Jerome agreed. "It's not living. They're just there. They just explain to me yesterday there's an accident right here. A baby was get hurt by a car."

"The international community has promised to give Haiti more than $5 billion. But yet these people are living on a median," Pitts pointed out.

"With newspaper, with TV news every day, I heard about the number of the money - not see the money," the mayor said.

A step up from the Carrefour median is Jean-Marie Vincent Park, the largest tent camp in Port-au-Prince. It's a city within a city, home to 50,000 people.

There's a main street with shopping and fresh water, but it is not an oasis: conditions are deplorable. With people living on top of each other, the camp has become a breeding ground for domestic violence, gangs and rapes. There are row after row of outdoor latrines, women washing clothes and children bathing in canals.

Ever since these camps sprung up, conditions have been so unhygienic there were fears they could become a breeding ground for waterborne diseases like cholera.

Fears of that came true on October 22, when an epidemic of cholera struck the remote countryside.

"Were you surprised when the epidemic erupted?" Pitts asked Haiti's Prime Minister is Jean-Max Bellerive. "Scare you?"

"Yeah," the prime minister said. "My biggest concern was that the capital, Port-au-Prince, was seriously touched for the concentration of the population. And the condition a lot of the population are living right now. So, I was afraid."

At first, the epidemic was only in the countryside where David Walton, an American physician from Boston, has worked for 13 years.

"It went from a few cases of diarrhea that were quite suspicious to, you know, all hands on deck. This is an epidemic of the proportions of which we have never seen before in Haiti. There are 60 cases of acute watery diarrhea that we had heard about. The next day, 24 hours later, 500 cases," Dr. Walton explained.

Dr. Walton works for Partners In Health, a U.S.-based international health organization that operates 15 hospitals and clinics in Haiti.

The one "60 Minutes" visited, La Colline, is the only hospital for miles.

While we were there, a 16-year-old girl named Manoushka had just arrived. It had taken her a full day just to get there. She had all the classic symptoms of cholera.

The disease is an acute intestinal infection caused by drinking contaminated water.

If not treated quickly, it can kill in a matter of hours. So Dr. Walton and his Haitian colleagues rushed to start Manoushka on IV fluids and a life saving mixture of ordinary bottled water sugar and salt.

"These are not ideal medical conditions," Pitts observed.

"These are not ideal medical conditions. When this hospital was built three years ago, we did not envision a crisis of this proportion," Walton explained.

Since the epidemic began, the staff at La Colline has treated over 550 cholera patients. Five have died.

Friends and neighbors of one sick woman we saw were praying for her to live.

"Look, we're gonna get through this. However we do it, we're gonna do it, but there is a way forward. We have to. There is no other way. We're not gonna lay down and die. It's gonna be slow. It's gonna be tough. It's gonna be agonizing. But we will make it through," Walton vowed.

To help Haiti "make it through," the international community created the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission last April. Its mandate: to control and coordinate the monumental job and the billions of dollars to rebuild nearly everything in the country.

Haiti's prime minister serves as one co-chairman; the other co-chair is an American who honeymooned in the country 35 years ago: former President Bill Clinton.

"Your plate was full before the earthquake. Why take this one?" Pitts asked.

"I took it because I know more about Haiti and I've spent more time there than almost any other American figure, and so I know a lot of the leaders and I understand the culture better than a lot of people do. And I love the place," President Clinton said.

Clinton brings clout, credibility and power to the job - power to attract donors and get countries that pledged money for Haiti to pay up.

"Does it frustrate you, make you angry, the lack of funding moving in to get things done?" Pitts asked.

"It's all frustrating 'cause people are suffering down there. I'm frustrated we don't have more jobs and investment. I'm frustrated we haven't fixed all the ports and airports. My job is just to push as hard as I can and get as much done as quick as I can," Clinton said.

"Frustration" describes how almost everyone in Haiti feels. Ten months after the quake, the lack of resources and funding have hampered everything.

More hands than machinery and heavy equipment are removing the rubble that is choking the city. So far, only 19,000 of the 130,000 temporary shelters the U.N. says Haiti needs have been built.

And nobody is more upset at that than Haiti's prime minister, who says it all boils down to money. And a lot of it hasn't arrived yet.

"Simple terms of the 5 billion-plus dollars that's been pledged to Haiti, how much have you received so far, percentage-wise?" Pitts asked.

"I'd say 15, 20," Prime Minister Bellerive

He told Pitts the lack of funding is a big factor of the slow recovery process. "Right now we don't have the budget or the financing to remove the rubble that has to be removed."

"You lose sleep over this?" Pitts asked Clinton.

"Well, I worry about it a lot because I don't want anybody to die because of the floods. But I just want the people who are watching this program to understand that it's not like anybody's really been asleep at the switch down there," he replied.

"There is widespread perception that the recovery is going so slow. Why is that? Why is it taking just so long?" Pitts asked.

"This was a natural disaster that hit the country in a highly impacted, dense, urban area. Now it's covered with rubble which has to be cleared as you do the rebuilding. Housing always takes the longest," Clinton explained.

Housing is Anton DeVries' specialty. He is the construction manager for ADRA, the development arm of the Seventh Day Adventists, who have been working in Haiti for over 25 years.

DeVries, a South African engineer, had supervised the construction of 1,300 temporary shelters financed by USAID and was ready to build a lot more when he ran into an unexpected road block: the Haitian government.

"Is this warehouse normally this empty?" Pitts asked DeVries during a tour.

"No," DeVries said. "This warehouse should be packed to capacity right to the ceiling full of stuff for the immediate displaced people, waiting are they to be helped, which we can't do because our containers is stuck in port.

When we were there in August, 24 containers loaded with his building materials - enough to build 1,200 temporary shelters - had been stuck for months in a special customs area in Port-au-Prince because of a bureaucratic glitch.

"I've got a list of each container when it left United State," DeVries said. "Before the container arrives here, we already have all of the documentation with a packing list from the beginning. So, there's no information that anybody need that we don't have."

To prove his point, DeVries took us to his office and showed us some of his paperwork and a $6,000 dollar check, written to the Haitian government to pay an imposed storage fee.

When asked how this situation made him feel, DeVries told Pitts, "Very bad, very sad, frustrated. If it was your mother or your child waiting for five months in a small little tent? And somebody come and say, 'I will help you give you shelter,' 'No problem, but I can't because your material, your government is holding in the port.' Would I be happy? No."

Prime Minister Bellerive did not know the specifics of DeVries' situation, but his office oversees Haiti's ports and customs.

"We don't charge for any goods given to the Haitian people when it's done properly," the prime minister told Pitts. "Period."

"So, in this case, then, you're saying there's something they haven't done properly," Pitts remarked.

"Exactly," Bellerive said.

Since we interviewed the prime minister, all but one of the containers has been released. According to DeVries' office, the problem was a missing government seal - a minor problem compared to the cholera epidemic.

The official death toll surpassed 700 this week and there are fears it could get out of control.

"I can tell that makes you angry," Pitts said to Dr. Walton.

"It makes me frustrated. I can understand if there was another earthquake that happened. But cholera? You know, it seems like the insults never end," Walton replied. "In Haiti, the insults never end."

Produced by Harry Radliffe and Magalie Laguerre-Wilkinson