The neighbourhood of Mangeoire, which stretches above Port-au-Prince, was once a peaceful wooded area where rural migrants who came to the capital first settled. Under the dictatorship of Jean-Pierre Duvallier in the seventies and eighties, it turned into the slum that it is today.

"Once upon a time, Mangeoire was almost empty", says 71 year old Millien Paul, who lives in what is still known as le petit village. With an air of nostalgia in his eyes, he says residents used to grow cassava, maize and beans.

Facilities and services did not keep up with the dramatic population increase of the last decades. As a result there are no roads, no water system, no electricity, no health care centre and no schools today. Hardships are commonplace in Haiti, but it is hard  to imagine a more difficult place to survive and in which to raise children.

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"Some the children have to walk all the way down to a catholic primary school in the neighbourhood of Croix-des-Prés", says resident Emmanuel Elizaire. He adds that older children have to trek to schools in distant neighbourhoods such as Turgeau, Bois-Vernat and Lalue.

For years now, residents in Mangeoire have been left to fend for themselves while living in dire poverty. That is until the 12 January earthquake.

"It's the earthquake that put us on the map," says Philippe Millien. "Before that, everyone had forgotten us."

Roughly a thousand persons lived in pre-earthquake Mangeoire, most of them in tumble down shacks built haphazardly at the bottom of a narrow ravine, which is regularly flooded during the rainy season.

The earthquake wreaked havoc on the slum. More than 20 people died and seventy percent of dwellings were destroyed or severely damaged. Because of its location, aid took some time to reach the survivors who had huddled together under makeshift shelters pitched in cramped and insalubrious areas.

Later on, families moved their improvised shelters to nearby land that belonged to local landowners, Catherine and Nathalie Hermantin.

Families lived there without water, sanitation or other basic facilities until a group of youth from Mangeoire decided to do something for their unfortunate peers. They set up a small association with the objective of catching the attention of international organizations in order to get relief assistance.

The Committee for the Survivors of Mangeoire contacted the IOM in April to ask for water, sanitation and shelter assistance. IOM quickly responded to their call for help and is now in the process of building a first batch of 80 transitional shelters on land that has been cleared of debris.

These family shelters offer a living space of some 18 square meters each. They are built out of fire resistant wood and plywood with corrugated iron roofs.

A workshop employing a dozen masons and carpenters was set up to speed up and standardise the production of the shelters.
 
Over a number of weeks, the first ten of a total of eighty transitional shelters were built to the delight of homeless families, who also took an active part in the construction effort.

Their initial contribution consisted in removing the wreckage and rubble and transporting the building materials, including IOM donated sand and cement for the foundations. Families were selected according to their vulnerability in consultation with representatives of both the community and of the local authorities.

Forty-three year old Mercia Jean-Baptiste is delighted at the prospect of having a proper roof over her head. "I'm happy to move into my new house, even if it is a small one. It's much better than what I had before and I can now move out of the shelter that I had built on the land of the Hermantin sisters".

She adds that the sisters had agreed to lend the land to the homeless but only for a limited period of time.

"The shelters built by IOM are a godsend because we will not be evicted from the sisters' land."

IOM's transitional shelter activities in Mangeoire are part of a broader programme which has seen the construction of 40 shelters in Petit Bois. Work on shelters in the commune of Aux Cadets, in Petion-ville has also started whilst foundations have been laid in the courtyard of the State hospital in Port-au-Prince for the construction of two large transitional shelters with a capacity of 56 patients each.

IOM initially aims to build up to 10,000 transitional shelters with funding from the Governments of Japan and Sweden and from the Emergency Response Fund for Haiti.