Tent Camps

In one month I’m going tent camping with my sister. We’ll pitch my fine REI tent on a carefully tended campsite in a lush forest, toast marshmallows over a fire, sleep on comfortable mattresses, and consider it a fine vacation.

In Haiti there is a completely different situation going on with tents. Driving around the countryside we saw plenty of tents pitched on hillsides or out in fields. Many of them were stenciled with “PR China” and the names of countless other governments and NGO’s providing housing to the Haitian people after the earthquake. In Port au Prince there are tent camps scattered around the city. There’s a big one by the airport, there are tent camps in spaces where there used to be parks or public squares, there are tent camps built on top of the rubble from fallen buildings, and Sean Penn’s famous tent camp in Petionville (a suburb of Port au Prince) is situated on a golf course and houses and cares for 50,000 people. Check out this before and after satellite photo.

We drove by many of them, but it is difficult to take photos while cruising in a van, and I also didn’t want to be a voyeuristic jerk, obnoxiously taking photos of other people’s misfortunes. So I don’t have great photos. I have ones like this:

But I have vivid memories.


One of my host Carla’s good friends is a man named Mona who is a remarkably gifted painter, poet, musician, and song writer. He is a classic Renaissance man. On January 12, 2010 the earth started shaking, walls and ceilings came down all around Mona, and despite being in a basement room on the bottom of a house, he miraculously survived.

Out of necessity, a tent camp sprung up in his neighborhood and 300 families currently live there. When my group visited his camp we walked through muddy, narrow walkways past rows of tents and shacks made out of plywood and scavenged materials. Tent flaps were tied back to reveal 5-10 people sitting in tents about 15 feet wide and long. Older children came out to shake our hands and offer cheerful “bonsoir’s”, while naked toddlers laughed and twirled in the rain.

Our group gathered in a make-shift community center built out of plywood, and listened to Mona and his co-laborer William speak of their experiences helping to run the tent camp. Shortly after the earthquake, a pastor from San Diego had showed up with a wad of cash, asked the tent community what they needed, and peeling off $3,000 had commissioned them to build the community center in one week so that he could take a photo of it before leaving to show his church what they had paid for. Mona and William had hired Haitian workers and moved heaven and earth to complete the room in one week, with a painted sign “Rev. James W. Smith Memorial Community Center” being the finishing touch. They also built a small medical center so tent community members could get medical attention, and they want to stock it with more medicines but they need to save up for a cupboard with a lock so that the medications will stay safe. They’d also like to hire a Haitian nurse to provide care-- especially since there are so many Haitian medical practitioners currently out of work.

Of the 300 families living in the tent camp, there are a handful of men and women who participate in a committee that makes decisions for the community. It is difficult for Mona and William because they are looked at as people who can give other people work if an NGO approaches them with a project. So they hear a lot of desperation and get a lot of requests. Mona and William have a computer with spreadsheets of hundreds of names of people who want work, and there is a lot of pressure to ensure that the distribution of work and resources is fair and just.

Seeing that the tent community had taken initiative to build a community center (as a gathering place for meetings, and for a space for children to play and learn), another NGO gave the tent camp a water tank and built toilets and showers. The NGO pays for two people to clean and maintain the public toilets and showers, but instead the community chose four people to work part-time so that more people can make a little money. With an 80% unemployment rate, cleaning toilets is a prized job.