Employees of IADDIC Shelters along with ShelterTheWorld.com traveled to Haiti  to get a first hand look at some of the locations where IADDIC shelters will be built.  I must interject here that we have come to learn that the word shelter, as it is used in the humanitarian community is somewhat deceiving.  In this community a tarp  can be a shelter as well as a tent.  So when news reports indicate that shelters are being implemented, rest assured they are saying they have passed out tarps and tents. 

To us a shelter has a more enduring quality.  A shelter should be capable of lasting for as long as the recipient needs a place to live until a “permanent” home can be constructed.  There is so much time and money lost in the process of distributing tarps, then tents, then transitional shelter (more on this in a moment), then finally somewhere down the road a permanent shelter or home.    

Truth be told; Haitians are in trouble.  I know the news says that the hurricane season is coming but Haiti doesn’t need to have a hurricane to expose the already present condition of deteriorated tents and tarps.  I personally touched some tents and they literally ripped in my hands.  Tents are already collapsed and on the ground, no longer occupied.  At the end of the day, many (hundreds of thousands) people are already exposed and more will be in the coming months. 

The new transitional shelters that we hear about are really glorified tents.  Here too, a lot of money will be spent erecting the transitional shelters which are defined by UN and other governing bodies as steel or wooden poles with a tarp wrapped around them.  They are said to last longer but for $1,500 the recipient will be left with very little in a year or two.

I do not believe the Haitian people are asking for a handout.  The country was so poor before the earthquake that they literally have nothing with which to re-construct on their own.  Crumbled concrete, which is available everywhere can not be put back together again and reused the same way say wood lumber or steel may be. 

For a quick view of Haiti and the current condition as of July 2010 see the following video.