Word: cashing
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Most if not all the laborers alongside Massenat - all working as part of the U.N. Development Program's cash-for-work project - lost a family member in the temblor. Nothing can erase that hurt, but they say cash-for-work has helped to ease it - not only by paying them a wage in a city where jobs collapsed along with buildings, but by making them more than just dazed and helpless bystanders in the Haiti recovery process. "Life stopped with the earthquake," says Denise Metelas, 34, sporting a blue UNDP T-shirt and baseball cap. "I feel like...
...detractors, cash-for-work is glorified street sweeping - a small-scale, feel-good scheme that helps deflect attention from how poorly the U.N. is doing with bigger, more consequential jobs like getting displaced Haitians decent shelter and sanitation facilities. But its backers say the program bears the seeds not only of a more effective rebuilding effort in Haiti, but of a new development strategy that's less about top-down, welfare-style aid and more about economy-stimulating engagement of the grassroots. "The old, more paternalistic way of doing charity was easier," says Brazilian aid worker Eliana Nicolini, a UNDP...
...fact, hopes the idea behind cash-for-work will be applied to broader efforts like earthquake-resistant building construction and more democratic community organization - especially as half a million Haitians relocate outside Port-au-Prince in the coming months. Perhaps its biggest cheerleader is former U.S. President Bill Clinton, the special U.N. envoy to Haiti, who in the 1990s championed "workfare" as a key to welfare reform. More hands-on participation in the recovery, Clinton argued recently, will give Haitians "the opportunity to, in effect, re-imagine the country." (The U.N. is also trying cash-for-work projects in developing...
...Haiti cash-for-work program, which is expected to last through the spring, has employed more than 35,000 locals since it began early this month, at a cost of about $175,000 a day. (Workers earn about $4.50 a day, slightly more than Haiti's minimum wage, UNDP officials say, but not enough to siphon workers from the country's other vital economic sectors.) But the goal is 100,000 workers - a number that will require more than the $25.5 million the UNDP has so far garnered in donations and pledges for the project, which is why the agency...
...patronage orgy. UNDP officials say the Haitian government has been remarkably cooperative. But Haitians aren't shy about noting how thoroughly corrupt that government is. Many workers openly laud the fact that they don't need to know (or kick back to) a local machine boss to get a cash-for-work spot - "If the government were running this, I probably wouldn't have this job," says Sentelis Doassalit, 30 - and that the pay goes directly to their hands and not through a venal, lethargic Haitian bureaucracy...