Haiti Schools Reopen for First Time Since Quake
Schools are opening across Haiti's capital for the first time since a devastating earthquake hit nearly three months ago.
It's a major step toward normalcy, but the hard-hit education system is just beginning to recover.
The Jan. 12 quake damaged or destroyed some 4,000 schools. Nobody wants to put children back under concrete roofs and many schools are waiting for tents.
Only a few hundred schools are expected to open this week. UNICEF education official Mohamed Fall said the goal is to have 700,000 children back in school by the middle of next month.
Educators said Monday they will focus on providing emotional support for traumatized children before picking up the regular curriculum.
While the schools have started to reopen, the task of getting food aid into the country has been bogged down in bureaucracy. In the weeks following the earthquake, supplies flowed in freely from the Dominican Republic. More recently, however, normal customs restrictions have been reinstated, creating severe delays at the border.
One day last week at the customs office at Malpasse, the Haitian town across from Jimani in the Dominican Republic, a single agent was processing a caravan of trucks. In the line were rice, beans, canned food, construction materials and ambulances - all desperately needed in Haiti.
"We haven't been able to distribute food for two weeks," said Paloma Rivera, an official with Quisqueya in Action, a nonprofit Dominican organization that is feeding some of Haiti's homeless quake victims.
Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive says border controls are necessary to intercept contraband, and also raise revenues from commercial drivers' import fees.
"Some kind of control is needed," said Bellerive, who added that delays were to be expected. "There is a lot of traffic across a border that was not prepared for that."
The main southern road between the two countries that share the Caribbean island of Hispaniola became a major thruway for humanitarian aid following the magnitude-7 quake, which killed a government-estimated 230,000 people and left more than 1 million people homeless.
The road was particularly important in the first weeks of the crisis as the Port-au-Prince airport, which has only one runway, diverted aid flights to Santo Domingo amid a crush of emergency traffic. The U.N.'s World Food Program is also now rushing to build up Haiti's sea ports ahead of hurricane season, when heavy rains often wash out mountain roads.
Haiti's bureaucracy was famously sluggish even before the earthquake shattered government agencies. Businesses could wait months for supplies from the U.S. to clear customs at seaports.
Corruption was also a problem. Haiti regularly ranks among the worst in Transparency International's annual ranking of perceived corruption. Haiti ranked 168th out of 180 countries in 2009 on a scale where low scores mean most corruption.
Aid delivery by the U.S. Agency for International Development has not been affected by the recent backups at the border, according to Kimberly Flowers, an agency spokeswoman in Port-au-Prince. She said most of its supplies arrive by sea, and USAID has its own customs and leasing agents to expedite material coming over land.