Bending the rules of aid distribution

By Emmanuel — March 22, 2010 | 1 comment

Port-au-Prince - As I was going downtown the other day, I came across a highly organized food distribution by the NGO Catholic Relief Services, or CRS.

The CRS had hired a bunch of young people to distribute their aid in an organized manner, with backup from U.S. soldiers. The soldiers had cut all access to the street, Rue Magny, where the aid was being distributed.

Many people couldn’t get access to the street even though they weren’t looking for aid. You couldn’t pass the barriers unless you were media, an employee, or have a pre-distributed card; everyone else just heard that simple sentence, “Stay behind the line please!”, over and over.

Some of those people became angry, because they only wanted to go to their job at the “Ministère à la condition feminine” or go to the Digicel customer care office (Digicel is one of our local cell phone providers).

As food began to be distributed, many people left satisfied, while others were still complaining about not having enough for their family, or the lack of access cards.

Yolande Pierre is a 56 –year-old blind woman who was being guided by a ten year-old girl. I met her around the distribution point, sitting on a corner with two heavy sacks of food, plus a bucket and gallon of vegetable oil. She told me she was waiting on her three younger kids to come and help her with the loads.

But they had a problem: her family didn’t really have any real shelter since the earthquake collapsed their house in Christ-roi. She told me that she walks the street every day, hoping to find aid distributions, usually with no luck.
Today she was just passing by Rue Magny when she heard about the distribution.

The two rules of aid distributions are usually 1) you have to have a card to receive aid, and 2) you need to be a woman. Since she didn’t have a card from the previous assessments, she counted on being a woman to get her access, and used her blindness as a source of compassion.

She told me that the Haitians working for CRS didn’t care about the fact she was blind; they were following the rules of their job and told her: “no card, no food: that’s the rule”. Fortunately, she found some kind young people that helped her explain her case to the soldiers; they eventually took pity on her and granted her access to the line. Afterwards, they allowed her to stay in a safe spot right behind them to wait for her kids to come by and help her with her goods.

The rules of aid distribution are important, but sometimes making exceptions is the right thing to do.

Port-au-Prince student, fixer and researcher Emmanuel Midi is blogs weekly for Inside Disaster from Haiti. You can learn more about him in these blog posts, connect with him on Facebook or through his business, Haiti Fixers.

Emmanuel volunteers with the youth organization Fonds D’Actions pour le Développement (FAD), profiled by Nicolas Jolliet earlier this month.

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