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PORT-AU-PRINCE,
Haiti
— After he lost everything in the
Haiti
earthquake, a lawyers' group gave attorney Clauvy
Robas a tent to sleep in. But, rather than pitch
it in one of the camps that have sprouted up
around
Port-au-Prince
, he prefers to sleep in a friend's car.
"I
am not supposed to be sleeping in the
streets," said Robas, 29, a member of
Haiti's
middle class — klas mwayen — that has been
overlooked in the urgency to save lives and
provide relief to an estimated 1.5 million
displaced by the violent quake.
As
walls crumbled and the slums spilled into the
streets, the
Jan. 12
earthquake became the great equalizer in a society
of staggering disparities, forcing the middle
class and the most impoverished into the same
bucket of despair.
Those
who lost the least have received the most help,
and those who lost the most have received the
least.
"The
worst place to be right now in this country is the
middle class," said
Kesner Pharel
, a local economist. "They've invested
everything they had in their house and they've
lost it all. You have a lower class that didn't
have a house, and today they have a tent and say
'better for me.' The top already had money to get
back on their feet."
In
many cases, post-quake charitable dollars and
goods flowing into the country have allowed
Haiti's
lower class to climb a few rungs up the ladder,
bringing a quality of life not known before
Jan. 12
.
But
for the middle class, the disparity is unbearable.
The quake that took a government-estimated 300,000
lives not only took their homes and livelihood, it
also wiped away social status in a country where
that is priceless.
On
a hillside one recent Sunday morning, where once
comfortable houses made up the middle class
Petionville neighborhood of Morne Lazard,
homeowners looked at the rubble and told a tale of
anger and helplessness.
Almost
six months after the quake,
Haiti's
middle class — lawyers, doctors, receptionists
and thousands of public administration employees
— have become the new poor in a land of immense
poverty. Now, they're homeless and unemployed.
Mostly
absent in the homeless camps, they choose instead
to sleep in tents in the front yards of their
damaged homes, or in neighborhood streets cordoned
off with boulders and vehicles.
They're
still struggling to come to terms with their
tumble from grace.
"They've
forgotten us," said
Camille Bissainthe
, 52, a father of two living with friends after
losing his home of 22 years. "We pay the
government taxes but the taxes don't pay for
anything."
Before
the quake,
Guerda Thelisma
was a receptionist, supporting herself and paying
tuition for two younger brothers.
When
the quake hit, the family's three-story home on a
mountainside collapsed, killing her father who ran
a neighborhood grocery store, a brother and a
5-year-old nephew.
"There
are no words to describe it," said Thelisma,
27, who lost a total of 11 family members.
"You are back at zero."
Thelisma
has had to rely on the charity of friends for
clothes and a place to sleep. Her mother, sister
and two younger brothers are scattered.
Even
before the magnitude 7.0-quake shook
Haiti
, the country's middle class was a struggling,
thinning group. Roughly 15 percent of the
population, they tended to survive on the
shoulders of the masses and the country's tiny
elite.
Mostly
black, the middle class is defined more by its
common values and quality of life, than income or
political ideology.
"The
moment you arrive at a place in this society where
you have something someone can take from you — a
radio, a refrigerator — you're klas mwayen,"
Marc Bazin
, a former prime minister and
World Bank
economist said in a
Miami Herald
interview shortly before he died last month.
A
member of what's known here as the intellectual
middle-class, Bazin was deeply concerned about the
neglect of
Haiti's
forgotten class even while in failing health.
"The larger we expand the klas mwayen, the
more sound the economy will be," he said.
"It's a class that's full of ambitions."
But
it's also a class that has been unable to find its
place in a society where 80 percent live on less
than
$2
a day and the 5 percent making up the economic
elite — they're often light-skinned, and French-
and English-speaking, with deep family connections
— have controlled most of the wealth.
Empowered
during the 1940s and emboldened during the early
years of the Duvalier dictatorship, many in the
middle class later fled, forced by turmoil and
lured by opportunity, to
Paris
,
New York
,
Miami
and
Montreal
in the decades that followed.
In
the days and weeks after the quake, their exodus
continued as many grabbed their passports and
children and hopped flights.
In
a country increasingly dependent on foreign aid,
Thelisma and others say
Haiti's
middle class is not looking for a hand out, but a
way to help it rebuild.
They
watch helplessly as the government attempts to
convince homeless quake victims to return to homes
that either did not exist — or were mere shacks,
even before the quake as their own lots remain
clogged with debris. They can neither afford the
cost of rebuilding nor the rubble removal.
"Everyone
wants to concentrate their actions on the camps,
and the very poor," said Prime Minister
Jean-Max Bellerive
, who has tried to bring more attention to the
plight of the middle class.
"That
is not going to change anything in
Haiti
. After
$2
(billion) or
$3 billion
, we will be back to the best of where we were on
the 11 of January, which nobody liked."
Bellerive
and others say that what
Haiti
is staring down in the struggle to move out the
1.5 million people living in hundreds of makeshift
camps is 200 years of economic and social neglect
that cannot be solved in months. And they warn
that the country risks a social explosion if
reconstruction efforts focus solely on the poorest
of the poor.
Haiti
has always struggled with the class issue, even as
neighborhoods boast having wealthy and poor
families living in them.
"We
are living in apartheid," said
Leslie Voltaire
, an urban planner and government official leading
reconstruction efforts.
For
weeks now, Voltaire has been waging a quiet battle
to turn 9,884 acres the government seized into a
mixed-used development for both poor and
middle-class families.
He
sees the quake and reconstruction as an
opportunity to create a revolution in the
country's social consciousness — not just to
build homes in a country struggling with a massive
housing shortage even before the disaster wiped
out 100,000 homes.
It's
a difficult battle in a society where there are
degrees of classism even among the poor. To
illustrate his point, Voltaire recalls when
President
Rene Preval
, during his first presidential term, asked him to
create a housing program just outside Cite Soleil
for several slum residents who had lost their
homes to a fire.
The
non-Cite Soleil residents protested, saying they
did not want "assassins and thieves"
living next to them.
"I
said 'They are Haitians. What do you want us to do
with them?' They said 'put them in a sack and drop
them in the sea,' " he recalled.
Voltaire
sees the government-acquired land between the
community of Bon Repos and city of Cabaret as a
chance to change that mindset.
The Inter-American Development Bank
is providing
$30 million
to help plan a community that will include roads,
schools, 24-hour electricity and jobs.
"We
want to show there are opportunities for
everybody," he said. "That should be a
new vision, that we want to mix all the
classes."
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