Esmorin Konsten was tending his goats in the hills of Titayene, about 10km outside the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, when bodies started arriving.
It was the day after a massive earthquake hit the Caribbean island state of Haiti. Within minutes, about 75% of Port-au-Prince’s buildings had been destroyed, and tens of thousands killed.
At first, bodies were carted to the hospital to be identified by relatives. But the sheer volume of corpses, the breakdown in communications, and the difficulty survivors had travelling on roads covered in rubble, often made this an impossibility.
Many of these bodies, and others found in the rubble, were simply put into tipper trucks by front-end loaders, driven to Titayene, and dumped into mass graves.
“Each truck carried about 100 bodies. In the first days there were many, many trucks – one every 15 or 30 minutes,” recalls Konsten. “It was endless.”

Mass graves of Titayene
These are the graves where protesters and political opponents, killed by the government troops who deposed former- President Aristide in a coup in 1991, were also buried. As in their case, the graves mark the final extinguishing of the earthquake victims’ identities. “Once they come here they vanish – disappear,” says Konsten.
A week later, the number of trucks arriving has dropped significantly. But the stench of mass graves half filled with decomposing bodies is overwhelming. “I can smell it from my house, a 30-minute walk away,” says another farmer. “It’s horrible.
“This hurts me a lot; we are all Haitians. It could have been me buried there. Luckily, we live outside Port-au-Prince.”

Like a war zone
The capital resembles a war zone. The city centre is one of the parts that was hardest hit. Many homes were flattened completely. Others have lost front walls, revealing rooms with their furniture still inside, or slid sideways entirely intact. The smoke-shrouded rubble creates an eerie, apocalyptic look. Like the end of the world.
Looters risk their lives to salvage goods from shattered shops and warehouses. Once they emerge from the debris, they look out for a scooter to take them to a nearby slum, Cité Soleil. Those who find the gap make it. Others are clubbed down – sometimes fatally – by bystanders who want their spoils. At other times, the police arrive, shooting over their heads; sometimes they shoot the looters. I saw one left to die in the street, bleeding from a shotgun wound to the leg. Another had been shot in the stomach and was already dead.

Relief and reconstruction
The United Nations (UN) was criticised for the way in which it was running humanitarian assistance.
For the first week, it failed to coordinate fragmented food distribution and medical aid efforts. Haitians said they were going hungry despite hundreds of tons of food being offloaded at the UN and US bases at the airport. The tardy response had cost many lives, said doctors.
But the UN believes the criticism is unfair. “This is one of the most complex relief efforts we have ever dealt with,” said spokesperson Nick Reader. Speedy distribution had been hampered by a lack of fuel, transport and by security concerns.
Efforts are now turning to reconstruction. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has called for a Marshall Plan to rebuild the shattered nation. Over US billion (R15 billion) in grants and loans has been promised, but much more is needed.
The Haitian government has identified agriculture as a key pillar of any reconstruction plan, and the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has called for donor support for a US0 million (R5,3 billion) investment plan in the sector.
Haitian agriculture minister Joanas Gue held a meeting on 27 January with his Dominican Republic counterpart, Salvador Jimenez, and international aid agencies to discuss the plan.

Agriculture an urgent priority
“The food situation in Haiti was already very fragile before the earthquake and was highly dependent on food imports.” Alexander Jones, FAO emergencies response manager in Haiti, said in a statement.
“With people moving back to the rural areas, growth in Haiti’s agricultural sector is now urgently needed, and the Haitian government’s plan does a very good job of defining the immediate priorities.”
The earthquake was simply the latest in a string of setbacks for the sector, which suffered severe damage from storms and hurricanes in 2008. Some parts of the country haven’t yet recovered.
The government estimates it needs  million (R263 million) immediately to buy seeds, tools and fertilisers, so that farmers are ready for the spring planting in March which accounts for 60% of Haiti’s agricultural production. The livestock sector needs thousands of tons of feed.
Reconstruction plans include repairing a sugar refinery near Léogane, about an hour’s drive west of Port-au-Prince, rebuilding and reinforcing collapsed river banks and damaged irrigation channels, reforestation and watershed protection programmes, and rehabilitating 600km of feeder roads, the FAO said.

No place for burial
Tens of thousands of bodies are still being recovered, and burial space is becoming scarce. Father Jean-Pierre Charles runs Le Sept Doleurs church, inside the city’s main burial ground, where gravediggers are opening up covered tombs, clearing out the bones and filling them with fresh corpses. “There is nowhere else to put them,” he says. Several have been piled into a mass grave nearby. “Some didn’t have the opportunity to have a nice funeral with a service.”
The search for survivors has officially been called off, and diggers wearing surgical masks are clearing bodies with shovels, and laying them in sheets. Those who have been identified are pulled by cart to burial grounds such as Grand Cemetery. The rest go to the mass graves at Titayene.     |fw