Word: haiti
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...Even when Haiti and international donors reach the point of working together on longer-term recovery projects, there remains a great fear that much of the billions of dollars involved will fall prey to Haiti's notorious official and business corruption. To assuage that concern, Bellerive says that what matters most to his government is that "Haitians will be at the leadership of the vision, the action plan and the implementation. That doesn't mean we have to receive the money. In fact, if that's the best way to prove we're being totally transparent, it would be best...
...damaged residence overlooking the capital, Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive asks the same question. Next month, he's going to New York City to convince donor nations like the U.S. that Haiti has a "good recovery action plan," one that "won't just rebuild what was destroyed but present the Haiti that we're all dreaming of" 10 years down the line, he tells TIME. Yet the only dream Haitians have right now is of something waterproof over their heads - shelter that their officials and foreign relief agencies seem unable to deliver in appreciable quantities more than a month...
...Such is the mix of anticipation and frustration forming, along with the rain clouds, over the western hemisphere's poorest country. Haiti's challenges seem even more daunting now that a new study by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington has re-estimated the earthquake damage from $5 billion to between $7 billion and $13 billion, making it one of history's worst natural disasters. "This has never happened to a country before," says the European-educated Bellerive, 51, a doctor's son and international-relations expert. "Forty percent of our GDP was destroyed in 30 seconds...
...Still, echoing the sentiments of many development experts, Bellerive insists the quake's obliteration has yielded an opportunity to realize changes in Haiti - in as early as "four to five years," he believes - that might not have been possible before. The most important, he says, is the "deconcentration" of half a million Haitians away from Port-au-Prince. (There, he admits, the death toll was so high in large part because Haiti has had "no policy on controlling the population" of more than 2 million in a city where barely a million can fit.) As a first step toward creating...
...This is hardly the first time the world has heard renaissance rhetoric about Haiti, a republic long crippled by chronic political and natural catastrophes. And experts say it will take far more than just new agribusiness, especially housing and manufacturing, to make the relocation plan anything besides a pipe dream. But Bellerive - who along with the head of state, President René Préval, last week hosted Nicolas Sarkozy in the first ever visit to Haiti by a French President - sees an unusual air of cooperation between Haiti and the international community now. That, he hopes, will create "more...