Post Earthquake Jacmel (Haiti) Report and EMMA

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Bainet, new cement houses are common as well as colonial homes most of which are in state of
deterioration or ruin.
Impact: People in the city with their cement houses and buildings suffered a far greater
impact in terms of loss of life and property and injuries than those in rural areas. In the City of
Jacmel--where lived some 350 of the 400 Southeasterners killed in the earthquake--tents line the
streets and fill vacant lots and the town square. Most of the tents are used only at night as
sleeping quarters for fear of another earthquake. The largest tent city, near the airport, has a
population of 5,000. What that means is not exactly clear. Reportedly most are IDPs (internally
displaced persons). But a high degree of opportunism has invaded the aid landscape, meaning
that at least some of the residents may have been attracted to and continue to stay in the tent city
because of the hope of continued aid from the international community.
The rural areas were not hit as hard. The walls in many of the poorer quality cement and
rock homes collapsed. However, most roofs remain intact as they are supported with wood
beams and often lashed together with a special type of vine. Few rural people sleep in tents—
unless they are among the fortunate few to have obtained one via connections to a local NGO or
mission—but rather in the earthquake-tested house of family or neighbors or in a joupa (the
easily assembled palm-thatch covered A-frame structures that people throughout Haiti construct
as shelters in gardens). iv
2.4. Livelihood Strategies
Livelihood strategies, discussed in greater detail shortly, can be heuristically characterized by
four dimensions: rural to urban, gender, household, and remuneration. On the rural extreme are
farming, commerce craft specialties and traditional healers. On the urban end one finds an array
of taxi drivers, porters, construction workers, vendors and entrepreneurs. Most occupations are
gender specific. There is also a great dependence on household labor pool, something that tends
to diminish with urbanization. About 30% of those who live in the city of Jacmel and a much
lesser number of people in the outlying areas receive remittances from family, spouses, and
lovers who have reached France, the DR, Canada, and more than anywhere else, the US. v
Impact: As with physical infrastructure, economic fallout in terms of occupational loss
and income struck more directly at people in urban areas. But as seen shortly, those in the urban
areas are closest to the aid and have benefitted most from food distribution, cash for work, full
employment as aid employees, and expenditures that aid workers, refugees and receivers of
remittances make. By far the bulk of the Southeast population, and hence the principal subject of
this report, are those living in the rural areas. By dent of their relative isolation and poverty these
are the people of greatest risk to long term crisis and who have been hurt most by the aftermath
of the earthquake, negative consequences of the aid, and the recent drought. Fortunately, as will
also be explored in greater detail shortly, they have mechanisms to cope with food scarcity and
decline in available cash; for these are the people who form Haiti‘s domestic security net; the
people to which the city dwellers, usually arrogant and disparaging toward their farming cousins,
fled. Historically these rural dwellers have not depended on outside aid or even the world
economy. They practice a configuration of livelihood strategies that for three hundred years,
from the time when the colony was the most productive in the world to the present era of
impending ecological disaster, has underwritten the survival of the urban minority. The merchant
and governing elites have sustained themselves on gate-keeping ―peasant‖ access to the world
market—both in terms of exports and more recently through a manipulation of the markets they