Haiti to relocate 400,000 homeless



Haiti's government has said it will move about 400,000 homeless people to new villages to be built outside Port-au-Prince, the capital, after between one million and 1.5 million Haitians were left homeless by last week's earthquake. Paul Antoine Bien-Aime, Haiti's interior minister, said that in the first wave the government would move 100,000 refugees to tent villages of 10,000 each near the town of Croix Des Bouquets, north of Port-au-Prince. The capital's seaport has now been repaired enough to reopen for limited aid shipments, with a Dutch naval vessel unloading pallets of water, juice and shelf-stable milk onto trucks at the pier. Aid is becoming more plentiful but is still inadequate to feed and shelter the masses left without homes and those injured by the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that killed as many as 200,000 people on January 12. Brazilian UN peacekeepers have begun levelling land in Croix des Bouquets to set up a transitional tent camp at a site where the Inter-American Development Bank planned to help build permanent houses for 30,000 people. The initiative would let displaced Haitians help build their own new homes under a food-for-work scheme, allowing them to stay close to the area where they had made a living. Many are currently jammed into haphazard, open-air camps with no latrines, sleeping outdoors because their homes were destroyed or out of fear that aftershocks would bring down more buildings. "It's miserable here. It's dirty and it's boring," said Judeline Pierre-Rose, 12, camped in a park across from the collapsed national palace.  "People go to the toilet everywhere here and I'm scared of getting sick."

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