Three mainstream articles look at Haiti on the two year earthquake anniversary

Below, three articles looking at Haiti on the anniversary of the earthquake, from the Miami Herald (two articles) and the New York Times.

Haiti 2 years later: Half a million still in camps

By TRENTON DANIEL, Miami Herald, Jan 8, 2012
 
Days after the earthquake killed his little girl and destroyed much of his house, Meristin Florival moved his family into a makeshift tent on a hill in the Haitian capital and called it home. Two years later they're still there, living without drains, running water or electricity.
 
A few kilometers (miles) away, Jean Rony Alexis has left the camp where he spent the months after the quake and moved into a shed-like shelter built on a concrete slab by the Red Cross. But he's not much better off. The annual rent charged by a landlord who lives in a nearby camp jumped from $312 to $375, and he too has no running water.
 
"This is misery," said Florival, whose 4-month-old daughter was crushed to death in the quake-stricken family home. "I don't see any benefits," said Alexis, whose shed is flooded with noise at night from a saloon next door that's appropriately named the "Frustration Bar."
 
The two men are among hundreds of thousands of Haitians whose lives have barely improved since those first days of devastation, when the death toll climbed toward 300,000 and the world opened its wallets in response.
 
While U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, former U.S. President Bill Clinton and others vowed that the world would help Haiti "build back better," and $2.38 billion has been spent, Haitians have hardly seen any building at all.
 
At the time, grand ambitions were voiced for a Haiti rebuilt on modern lines. New housing would replace shantytowns and job-generating industry would be spread out to ease the human crush of Port-au-Prince, the sprawling capital with its 3 million people.
 
But now the government seems to be going back to basics, nurturing small, community-based projects designed to bring the homeless back to their old neighborhoods to build, renovate and find jobs through friends.
 
The reasons for the slow progress are many. Beyond being among the world's poorest nations and a frequent victim of destructive weather, Haiti's land registry is in chaos - a drag on reconstruction because it's not always clear who owns what land. Then there's a political standoff that went on for more than a year and still hobbles decision-making.
 
After the quake, a disputed presidential election triggered tire-burning riots that shut down Port-au-Prince for three days. The international airport was forced to close and foreign aid workers had to hunker down in their compounds.
 
Even after the vote was resolved and Michel Martelly was installed as president in May 2011, there were further snags. The former pop star, new to politics, took six months to install a prime minister, whose job is to oversee reconstruction projects. He infuriated opposition politicians because his administration jailed a deputy without following the law and named a prime minister without consulting them first. They retaliated by trying to thwart him at every turn.
 
For six months, Martelly was running a government with ministers of the outgoing administration. "It created a situation where it was difficult to take off," the new foreign affairs minister, Laurent Lamothe, told The Associated Press.
 
Another victim of the impasse was a reconstruction panel co-chaired by Clinton, the U.N. Special Envoy to Haiti. Lawmakers refused to renew its mandate, complaining it contained too few Haitians, though they may have been using it as a pretext to punish Martelly. But it meant that for the next six months there was no agency in place to coordinate home-building.
 
Meanwhile government employees could be found napping at their desks while awaiting orders from their bosses that never came.
 
The government and international partners say there has been some progress - 600 classrooms for 60,000 children to return to school, more than half of the 10 million cubic meters of rubble cleared, and roads newly paved in the capital and countryside.
 
New housing is still the most critical objective, yet the biggest official housing effort targets just 5 percent of those in need, and the encampments of cardboard, tarps and bed sheets that went up to cope with 1.5 million homeless people have morphed into shantytowns that increasingly look permanent.
 
More than 550,000 people are still living in the grim and densely packed camps that are squeezed into the capital's alleyways and pitched on the side of rural roads. And many of those who left the camps, often being evicted or paid to go, say their new conditions are little better, and sometimes much worse.
 
"I certainly wouldn't call (reconstruction) a success," said Alex Dupuy, who has written books about Haiti and teaches at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. "Other than putting a government in place ... I haven't seen any concrete evidence of recovery under way."
 
In the first year after the quake, the previous government never set up a housing agency or a clear housing strategy, and meanwhile the camps swelled because foreign aid groups were delivering what the government didn't: water, latrines and electricity. Former President Rene Preval identified five plots of land for new housing but only obtained one, through eminent domain.
 
Of the 10 best-funded projects approved by a reconstruction panel, not one focuses exclusively on housing. A U.S.-financed $225 million industrial park includes housing for 5,000 workers. But it's on the northern coast of Haiti, 240 kilometers (150 miles) outside the quake zone.
 
The highest-profile effort to house the displaced came three months after the quake, on the eve of the rainy season. The U.S. military and actor Sean Penn bused 5,000 people from a flood-prone golf course to a cleared field in Corail-Cesselesse, north of Port-au-Prince. It was supposed to be the country's first planned community, with factories and houses for 300,000 people. That never happened.
 
Today, the people of Corail-Cesselesse are ravaged by floods or bake in the heat in their timber-frame shelters. They are far from the jobs that sustained them before the quake. They speak of abandonment and lack of services.
 
"It looks like there's no government," said Stanley Xavier, a 30-year-old former cabbie, now unemployed. "Before they moved us out of the golf club, they made a lot of promises like they'll create cash-for-work."
 
"They said they'd give us jobs," said neighbor Jocelin Belzince, 39. Instead he says he has had to become an extortionist, charging newcomers $250 for a scrap of land he doesn't own.
 
"It's an opportunity for us to survive; I have kids to feed," Belzince said with a smile. "It's not only us doing this. There are a lot of people doing the same thing."
 
Martelly's new administration has begun building two housing projects: 400 homes by the bay and another 3,000 at the foot of a deforested mountain. And Lamothe, the foreign affairs minister, says $40 million in Venezuelan aid will be used to develop the southern coastal town of Jacmel in hopes of decongesting the capital.
 
But the government's overall strategy now is to move quake survivors back into their old neighborhoods even if many of those were slums even before the quake. That skirts the land title issue, makes infrastructure cheaper and puts people closer to old friends who might help them find work.
 
This comes in the form of a housing project in Port-au-Prince called "6/16." The government and aid groups are moving residents of six camps into 16 neighborhoods to be redeveloped. Several thousand people have already left three settlements, one in a stadium parking lot, the others in two middle-class town squares ringed by amenities such as restaurants, a church and a hotel.
 
The program seeks to house only 5 percent of the displaced population, but government officials say it's a pilot project that they hope to replicate elsewhere. Residents can pay the landlord a subsidized annual rent of $500, or accept money to build or rebuild their own homes. They also get $150 in moving costs. "Staying in a tent is not an option any more, two years after the earthquake," said Nicole Widdersheim of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
 
Although it's more modest than the old ambition of dispersing population to new areas, "6/16" is getting some $125 million in aid, mostly from the World Bank and the World Bank-run Haiti Reconstruction Fund.
 
Many former camp dwellers have moved into old, boxy apartments in the vast mountainside shantytown called Jalousie. Here young people hum Rihanna hits and fist-bump each other, saying, "respect - Jalousie," a sign that a sense of neighborhood is taking hold.
 
Marise Nelson, a pregnant mother of one who received $500 from aid groups to pay a year's rent, doesn't miss the camp in the town square which she left after two years. "You couldn't find food. You couldn't find water. You couldn't find a community," said Nelson, a 26-year-old homemaker.
 
She likes her new one-bedroom house, the neighbors, the water well and the little boutiques. "The big difference here is that I can keep the place clean," she said as she stirred a pot of white rice and her daughter peered behind her.
 
Meristin Florival wishes he could too. Instead, he says, he must put up with neighbors in a camp who use plastic bags for their bodily waste and toss them onto shanty roofs.
 
Jean Rony Alexis and his wife, Darlene Claircin, are glad to have shade from the sun and room for a table and bed, but say life is no better in the crowded Delmas section of the capital than it was in the camp. "It's the same thing," Alexis said. "I was suffering there. I'm suffering here."

Haiti experiences progress, exasperation 2 years after quake

By Jacqueline Charles and Nancy San Martin, Miami Herald, January 8, 2012
 
In public squares where dirty, overcrowded tents once housed thousands of homeless quake victims, children now ride bikes and kick soccer balls in the open space. Roads previously barricaded by rubble are clogged with traffic. A downtown nursing school and a hilltop hotel that collapsed are under reconstruction.
 
Two years after Haiti’s most horrifying 35 seconds, seeds of progress are evident across this battered nation where a devastating earthquake left 300,000 dead and some 1.5 million homeless in its capital and surrounding cities.  But with more than a half-million people still living in squalid camps, and billions of dollars in promised aid still to arrive, much remains to be done for the changes to take root. And some Haiti experts and Haitians worry that the country could still slide backwards without major efforts to create jobs and economic reforms.
 
“After two years, what can I say? We’re still here,’’ said Yvrose Mongerard, who lives in Corail-Cesselesse, a post-quake planned community north of the capital where tens of thousands of people have since set up makeshift camps. “We are not asking for a handout, but if we were working, we would be able to help ourselves. We are not doing anything here, just looking.”
 
Faius Adonis, 56, who lives in a tarp-covered shack with his wife and five children in the southern city of Leogane, agreed that times remain brutally tough, regardless of the reconstruction that is occurring.  “Hard times are killing us,.” he said. “The tarp doesn’t do anything. Two years after the quake, we’re still in the streets.”
 
Even as some worry about the slow progress, the country’s new president points to positive steps. “We’re moving into bettering the lives of the Haitian people,’’ President Michel Martelly said in an interview with The Miami Herald. “We’re moving into getting them out of the tents.’’
 
There is no doubt that lives have been saved with the outpouring of billions of dollars — both through private charitable organizations and the myriad international aid groups that rushed to Haiti in the days and weeks after the 7.0 quake. But the slow pace of recovery, disorganized, donor-driven projects, scattered development and lack of investments in creating jobs have many questioning whether the money was smartly spent.
 
The quake  offered an opportunity for Haiti to pull itself out of the economic and political morass that has existed for decades. But even that possibility was quickly beset with problems. Lack of decision-making in the early days after the devastation, nongovernmental organizations that wanted to chart their own course for recovery and an international community with its own spending priorities all hampered Haiti from the start of the recovery. Add to that a cholera epidemic, a political crisis and months of no government at all and Haitians began to feel grateful simply to get the rubble cleared from the streets.
 
“Humanitarian work is not always visible. It’s about giving food and saving lives,” said Emmanuelle Schneider, spokeswoman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs  in Haiti. “It’s not about building cathedrals....You might not see it, but a lot has been done.”
 
In the past 24 months, new communities  have sprouted. Tattered tents have been replaced by 100,604 temporary shelters — some no larger than a backyard shed. Hundreds of schools have been repaired, some new ones built, and the rubble that could once fill five Superdomes, has been reduced by half, recycled into construction and road material.
 
In recent weeks, thousands of quake victims have been relocated from tent cities with the help of a one-time $500 cash payout, financed by the U.S. Agency for International Development, to pay a year’s rent. It came on the heels of forced evictions, and rapidly deteriorating conditions in camps where free services, including water, are quickly disappearing.
 
“We had 1.5 million people in the streets ....66 percent of those people have left the camps,” said Luca Dall’Oglio, the head of the International Organization for Migration in Haiti, which has been relocating tent dwellers into homes. The aid group is coordinating a government-launched housing initiative aimed at shutting down at least six camps and returning people to 16 rehabilitated neighborhoods. “The decrease of people from camps has been dramatic. The closure of a number of camps has been equally dramatic,” Dall’Oglio said.
 
But Dall’Oglio concedes that while in theory, the progress could be viewed as a “great achievement,” in practice everyone needs to be cautious. “They are not all back home,’’ he said of the displaced. “Many of these people are back in houses that probably should be demolished, or sharing space in very precarious situations.’’
 
For Johnny Fleurentin, 29, the joy of finally moving out of the camp at Place Boyer, a public plaza in the hills above the capital in Petionville, is tempered by the reality that a year from now he could once more be homeless. “Every year around this time, we’ll have to find the rent money,’’ he said, just days before Christmas as he dismantled a friend’s tent in the Petionville square. “And you could very well not manage to come up with the money.”
 
Days earlier, Fleurentin also found a place to live, a $325-a-year dwelling. After a caseworker approved the location, both he and his landlord were given bank PINs to tap into the $500 allocation. The landlord got his $325, with  Fleurentin receiving the remaining $175.
 
“What can I do with that? I had nothing. I had to buy some clothes, and as soon as you get that money, friends invade you,’’ he said. “If you come see my house, all you’ll see is a little carpet with a little mattress.”
 
Petionville Mayor Claire Lydie Parent, who first piloted the program before it was taken over by the Martelly government, said the empty public plazas are a beautiful site. Recently, her office put a fence around Place St. Pierre, which became an eyesore after residents rushed to the hills from downtown fearing a tsunami after the disaster.  “If you knew Petionville before the earthquake and you knew Petionville during the earthquake, you would come here and you would clap “Bravo” because Petionville returned to the state it was initially,” Parent said. “People once more have a place for them to go sit and take back their lives. They are returning home.’’
 
But home for many in this country of shanties and slums doesn’t necessarily mean a house, a reality not lost on aid experts.  A report issued by the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission shortly after its 18-month mandate expired described the effort to address the recovery of neighborhoods and the more than 70,000 houses destroyed and 90,000 damaged in the quake as “a slow and challenging process.”
 
“Housing reconstruction is the most visible indicator — both to the affected society, and to those outside who help fund reconstruction — of whether progress is being made with reconstruction,” the report said. “Internationally, the camps have become an enduring symbol of how the earthquake affected Haitians, and until this symbol disappears, it will be used to judge whether reconstruction is really happening.”
 
But getting rid of the tents is not easy. “For [the tents] to be gone, a lot has to happen on the government side. A lot of projects, a lot of money,” said Philippe Verstraeten, head of OCHA in Haiti.
 
The housing challenges are evident throughout quake-affected communities. In Zorange, not far from the Port-au-Prince international airport, 380 houses are currently under construction by a government agency. The two-room, pastel-colored homes come with a tiny bathroom, porch and cooking area. The Inter-American Development Bank is providing $7.5 million, while South Florida-based Food for the Poor built about 140 at a cost of $3,200 per unit, according to the IDB.
 
Up the street, across from a Wi-Fi-equipped post-quake Nouvelle Zorange school that began in tents, dozens of houses built by the Venezuelan government are being occupied by Haitian squatters who say they grew tired of waiting for the government to decide how they should be distributed.
 
And in Leogane, a devastated coastal community 18 miles south of the capital that was the epicenter of the quake, life is slowly returning to a semblance of normal. Habitat for Humanity is building one-room permanent houses, while damaged homes have been repaired. Tents are increasingly hard to find. Even so, the supply of decent housing remains inadequate, say residents living in shanties made of corroded aluminum sheeting.
 
Twelve miles north of the capital in Corail-Cesselesse, 2,107 transitional shelters now line a sun-soaked, rocky plain, once billed as a place for quake victims to begin to rebuild their lives as they await the birth of a new city with factory jobs and services. The factories never came, but thousands of illegal shacks did — now dotting the barren mountains surrounding the camp. The once flimsy tents have been replaced by shelters that were supposed to be temporary but are quickly taking on an air of permanence.
 
With all of the NGOs having left Corail, there is a growing sense of despair. “If we were to find work, it would be a good thing,” said Norcius Lenord, who saved his family but lost his job when the business he worked for collapsed in the devastation. “All we have out here is sun and rocks.”
 
Sam Worthington, the head of InterAction, a coalition of U.S.-based humanitarian aid groups with members working in Haiti, said it would take more than the $5.3 billion pledged  by the international community, or the $1.36 billion given by the American public to return a poverty-stricken Haiti to its pre-quake state, much less build it back better.
 
“Did we solve poverty in Haiti? The answer is ‘No.’ No amount of aid can solve it,” he said. An engaged and effective Haitian government will, he said.
 
With the fate of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission on hold — the government would like to extend it, but parliament is divided — Prime Minister Garry Conille recently created a unit in his office for the reconstruction of public infrastructure and housing to expedite the process. Among the priorities are not just how to provide adequate, safe housing for those without jobs but what to do about public buildings — almost all of which were destroyed.
 
“For the first time, we could have real projects with real money behind them,” Conille said.
 
These projects include a new $52 million State University Hospital, financed by France and the United States; another hospital in the Cite Soleil slum and a new permanent parliament building. The main airport is currently undergoing a $5 million facelift. But there are risks that compassion fatigue and donors’ own financial woes at home could cause them to reduce their commitment to Haiti.
 
“That would be a real catastrophe,” said Conille, who is trying to rally donors around three priorities: “Getting rid of the people in the tents is essential. Making sure that people could feel the reconstruction is essential. Making sure that we are creating jobs is essential.”
 
A new industrial park in the north, financed with donor dollars, is supposed to create up to 65,000 jobs. But critics charge the industrial park’s model is not enough to kick start the economy and help Haiti break the cycle of dependency.
 
“What the Haitians want is employment,” said Mats Lundahl, a Sweden-based consultant and development economics expert who recently visited Haiti and supports the park’s concept. “During the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, the humanitarian non-governmental organizations did a good job providing food and other necessities. This is what they are good at, but they cannot, in the vast majority of instances, handle development projects. Economic growth and employment must come from a viable and sound private sector.”
 
While meeting the most basic needs is still a work in progress, Haitians are starting to find some sense of hope in the public parks that are now free of tents and trash, the new school buildings, and streets that are — finally — clear of debris. “We can tell something good is coming,” said Fleurentin, the quake victim. “We have been suffering for a long time.”
 
It had better happen quickly, though, he said, “because after five years, there won’t be any hope for change.”

A Billionaire Lends Haiti a Hand

By STEPHANIE STROM, New York Times, January 6, 2012
 
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Almost two years after an earthquake ravaged this city, some half a million people are still living in filthy tents, cholera has infected a similar number across the country and the president works from a flimsy prefab structure behind the still crumpled Presidential Palace.
 
Denis O’Brien, an impatient Irish billionaire who tends to make his points with a few choice profanities, is determined to change all that.
 
On a recent sunny morning, he presided over the opening of the 50th school that his vast telecommunications company, Digicel, has rebuilt since the quake struck in 2010 — and then he promptly pledged to build another 80 schools by 2014.
 
His intention is not, however, to be a one-man force for change. With a skill for what he calls “frying feet,” he has sweet-talked, cajoled, harangued, nagged, strong-armed and shamed government officials, international financiers and business leaders into doing more to rebuild Haiti.
 
“It’s all about project management,” Mr. O’Brien, 53, said in an interview at Digicel’s offices here. “Everyone’s on hand for the photo op, but where are the 100 houses that were promised after the cameras are gone? I’m the guy who’s going to count them.”
 
In the process, he has become de facto ambassador for an emerging business-centered approach to the redevelopment of this disaster-prone nation, which has so long relied on the work of nonprofit groups and aid agencies that it is known as the Republic of N.G.O.’s, or nongovernmental organizations.
 
“We’ve seen the growth of the N.G.O. community here for the last 20 years, and many of them do good work and there is a demand and a need for that work,” said Lionel Delatour, a business consultant and lobbyist whose brothers have served as government ministers. “But N.G.O.’s do not pay taxes, and when they bring their supplies and cars and other goods into the country, they do not pay customs duties.”
 
Digicel, on the other hand, is the country’s largest employer and taxpayer. The privately held company has invested $600 million in Haiti, making it by far the country’s largest foreign investor ever, and it has democratized communications with its strategy of selling low-price cellphones and services to the masses.
 
Mr. O’Brien has profited extensively from Haiti, which is Digicel’s largest market and accounts for roughly one-third of its 11.1 million subscribers.
 
“There is something that is two-way about this relationship,” Mr. Delatour said. “It is not only a story of what Digicel and Mr. O’Brien have done for Haiti, but also what Haiti has done for Digicel and Mr. O’Brien.”
 
For his part, Mr. O’Brien does not like to hear his work on behalf of the country or Digicel’s largess there described as corporate social responsibility. “If you make money in a poor country, you can’t just take it and disappear,” he said. “It would be bad business.”
 
Thus, Digicel unveiled plans in November to invest $45 million in a new 173-room hotel next door to its offices, to be run by Marriott. That announcement came at a forum sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank that drew 500 business people from 29 countries.
 
It was kicked off by a ribbon-cutting at a new industrial park in Caracol whose first tenant will be Sae-A, a Korean apparel manufacturer with extensive experience in Latin America. It is building a plant that plans to employ 20,000 and, unlike the low-wage apparel manufacturing operations that spawned vast urban slums, incorporate housing developments and other infrastructure.
 
Just last month, Heineken, the Dutch brewing concern, increased to 95 percent from 23 percent its stake in Brasserie Nationale d’Haiti, a Haitian brewery and bottler, saying it saw greater political and economic stability in the country.
 
Then there are commitments from the 60-odd members of the Haiti Action Network of the Clinton Global Initiative, or C.G.I., which include installing solar panels, increasing energy supplies, refurbishing homes and providing job training.
 
Mr. O’Brien is charged with overseeing their progress on behalf of former President Bill Clinton, and so after the school opening, he headed to the Hotel Montana to grill the network’s members, as he does 10 times a year.
 
“I hear Digicel is a difficult company to work for because he holds the people who work there accountable for everything, and he runs the network in much the same way,” said Anne Hastings, chief executive of Fonkoze, a microfinance institution in Haiti that is a member. “But he does it with a nice sense of humor, so that no one is afraid — and Haiti is a country that can benefit from someone keeping account, believe me.” President Clinton said, “The Haiti Action Network symbolizes the best of C.G.I.” in large part thanks to Mr. O’Brien’s unusual commitment to it. “What is striking is how deeply he has embedded his Haiti work into both his business and personal life,” Mr. Clinton said. “Because he cares so much, it’s easier for him to motivate and hold accountable other network members.”
 
Mr. O’Brien does not limit his haranguing. He pointedly asked the guest speaker at a recent network meeting, Thierry Mayard-Paul, Haiti’s interior minister, about the government’s plan for a new Center to Facilitate Investment. “It has five people,” Mr. O’Brien said. “It needs 50. How will you staff it? How long will it take? How many weeks?”
 
They are the kind of questions Josefa Raymond Gauthier knows well. In charge of the agency that finances a variety of government projects financed primarily by international donors, Mrs. Gauthier was the first chief executive of the Digicel Haiti Foundation, which oversees the construction of the schools.
 
“I arrived at the foundation in late 2008, and all of a sudden it was, ‘We have to deliver a school by March because Denis O’Brien is coming,’ ” Mrs. Gauthier said.
 
“Then Denis arrived and said, ‘What a nice school. Let’s have 20 more, one in each department of Haiti, before the end of the year,’ ” she said. “That’s Denis.”
 
The foundation quickly realized, however, that simply putting up a school was not the answer. “Teachers are a catastrophe,” Mrs. Gauthier said. So Digicel began remedial teacher training and paying teachers when the Ministry of Education was late or checks went missing. And then there were textbooks and desks and myriad other things.
 
“I always thought building the schools would be the hard bit, because of the contracts involved and all that,” Mr. O’Brien said. “But the hard part is really about getting the community together to support the school and identifying the leaders and so many other things.”
 
As a young man, Mr. O’Brien thought he would make his fortune replicating the Home Shopping Network in Ireland, but instead he nearly went bankrupt, saving his investors and himself with the do-or-die purchase of an Irish radio station that became part of what is now the Communicorp Group. He then established Esat Telecom in 1990, eventually buying Ireland’s second mobile phone license — and igniting speculations that political favor had played a role in the bidding.
 
After a 14-year inquiry, a judicial tribunal last year accused the government minister who awarded the license of accepting payments from Mr. O’Brien, payments he vehemently denies ever making. He has denounced the tribunal as a sham and has been accused of using his investments in the Irish media to squelch coverage of it, accusations he has described as “malicious and simply not true.”
 
Amid the storm, Mr. O’Brien sold Esat in 2000, leaving him at 41 with a few hundred million in the bank and “bored out of my mind.” He saw an ad for the sale of a mobile license in Jamaica, picked up a phone in a Dublin pub, bid $47.5 million and won, opening the door to a telecom enterprise spanning the Caribbean and South Pacific. Forbes magazine ranks him 254th on its list of the world’s billionaires, with an estimated $4.2 billion.
 
He walks a fine line in Haiti, where his take-charge manner and ability to push projects forward highlight government ineffectuality and weakness. Digicel, for instance, has put up street signs in parts of Port-au-Prince, serving as reminders of the company’s role in public life as much as guides for navigating the city.
 
Most mornings, people crowd around the reception desk of Digicel’s office building, not to complain about the firm’s services but to see the mayor and other city officials whose offices are on the sixth floor since the earthquake.
 
The company provides the space rent-free, Mayor Jean-Yves Jason said, and gave the city computers and furniture. “We have plans to build a new city hall in downtown Port-au-Prince, but we are so comfortable here it is easy to delay,” Mr. Jason joked.
 
The mayor conceded that the arrangement has left the city vulnerable to charges of conflicts of interest and favoritism. Mr. Jason said, for example, he was having trouble getting another Haitian telecom company to pay its taxes. “We can’t really go after them publicly, though, because they are going to claim we’re aligned with Digicel, their competitor.” Mr. Jason said the city could not have functioned without Digicel’s help in the early days after the earthquake. The company prepaid its taxes, which allowed the city to make its payroll and other payments, and paid for dump trucks and tractors that were used to remove rubble and clear spaces.
 
Digicel does not always get its way. It would like, for instance, to increase its role in the redevelopment of downtown Port-au-Prince around the iconic Iron Market, which Mr. O’Brien rebuilt with $16.5 million of his own money after the earthquake. But so far, he has been unable to get the necessary government approvals to move forward and redevelop parts of downtown. “We’re getting the slow no,” he said. There are other challenges. In an interview in New York after attending the Clinton Global Initiative’s meeting in September, Mr. O’Brien spoke enthusiastically about plans by Haiti’s president, Michel Martelly, to finance his program to provide free primary school education to all Haitian children with fees on cellphone calls and remittances.
 
Mr. O’Brien said that despite opposition from his senior management, who knew the charges would be unpopular with customers, he regarded them as an innovative means of raising needed revenue and a promising sign of government resolve.
 
Two months later, word broke that $26 million in the new National Fund for Education was missing. “I’ve spoken with President Martelly about this, and there will be an audit,” Mr. O’Brien said. “I will make it my business that it will be audited, one way or the other.”