Word: portes
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...feel like I'm among the living again." Massenat sees a more practical value. "Whenever there was a disaster in Haiti before," he says, "the international community never directly involved the poor. We're finally taking part in getting things done now." (Read about the prophetess of Port-au-Prince...
...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 cash-for-work coordinator in Haiti who first helped bring the plan to Port-au-Prince a couple years ago. "This is different - I really believe it has longer-lasting development effects because it's the local community, not the foreign community, that's executing it." (See pictures from Haiti's catastrophic earthquake...
Backhoes and other rubble-removal equipment can't climb the steep hills and narrow streets of the bidonville, or slum, known as Carrefour-Feuilles in Port-au-Prince. More than a month after the Jan. 12 earthquake that ravaged Haiti, and which slammed Carrefour-Feuilles especially hard, much of the bidonville's clean-up is still being done with shovels and wheelbarrows. As pigs and billy goats forage in the debris, Patrick Massenat stares out at a concrete-smothered hillside. He recalls his 79-year-old mother, whose corpse he helped pull from the wreckage he's now helping...
...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...
...plenty of bribes to so-called government inspectors. Structures have scant reinforcement and are often set on weak foundations. That's why 13 of 15 federal ministry buildings pancaked in the Jan. 12 earthquake - and why, in 2008, 91 students and teachers died when their school in a Port-au-Prince suburb collapsed. The school's owner was convicted of involuntary manslaughter after admitting he barely even used mortar to hold its concrete blocks together. (See pictures of the Chile earthquake aftermath...