In a classroom of a devastated local college, an instructor is impressing upon a group of construction workers that the earthquakes and other natural disasters that seem to inflict disproportionate pain on the people of Haiti are not “God’s wrath”.
It has been just over a month since Hurricane Matthew laid waste to the coastal city of Jérémie, killing more than 1,000 people in the region and destroying the flimsy homes of thousands of families, including scores who have taken refuge in the college and in other schools or public places.
Yet to the disbelief of people focused on the day-to-day task of recovery and basic survival, many of these same buildings are to be transformed on Sunday into voting booths for a Haitian presidential election that was postponed after the hurricane made landfall on 4 October.
“It rains every day, there are landslides, a shortage of food and people’s conditions are miserable,” said Louisiane Nazaire, a local mother and community leader in a farmers’ organisation. “Some have lost everything, including their identification cards, and yet we’re expected to believe that people are going to stand in line under the rain at voting centres that have not even been secured.”
In the western hemisphere’s poorest country, mention of the politically seismic presidential election that has just taken place a two-hour flight away in the US is met with a shrug. And yet there are echoes of that event in some of the concerns being voiced in Haiti – namely around women’s political representation (the Haitian parliament is entirely male) as well as misogyny and physical violence.
“Gender-based violence is a huge issue at any time in Haiti but it seems to increase during the election season,” said Ismeme Elismar, an engineer who has trained with support from the NGO ActionAid and is now working with the organisation in Jérémie to construct long-term safe spaces for women and children who have been at a greater risk from violence in the hurricane’s aftermath.
“For example, female candidates don’t campaign at night, when women are at a higher risk of violence and sexual assault.”
Until this week, Jérémie had seen little election campaigning of any sort in comparison with the Haitian capital of Port au Prince, which emerged from the hurricane unscathed, and where political bunting and posters are in evidence everywhere.
On Wednesday, however, when residents of the so-called “city of poets” looked up, clouds of leaflets for one of the presidential candidates fluttered to earth, dropped from a small plane. Meanwhile campaigning was ramping up around the country, including in many other hurricane-stricken areas of the south where tensions surrounding the roll-out of aid have boiled over, sometimes fatally. In the southern city of Les Cayes, a young teenage boy was shot and killed on 1 November as a crowd attending the distribution of food became restless. Just a few days earlier, at the Port town of Dame-Marie, a teenage girl was killed and three others were shot in a similar incident.
This Sunday’s vote – which is accompanied by voting for a section of seats in Haiti’s senate – come after presidential elections were repeatedly delayed. Results from October 2015 were scrapped after a number of frontrunners asserted that the first round’s results were fraudulent, forcing a rerun.
On Wednesday, Haiti’s interim president, Jocelerme Privert, called on citizens to go to the polls this Sunday, describing them as “fundamental to the future of democracy in the country”.
He linked the election of a new government to stability, desperately needed to meet the challenges of rehabilitating and repairing Haiti’s infrastructure.
Recent polls have put Jovenel Moïse, of the formerly ruling Haitian Tèt Kale Party, in pole position, although he would have to go into a runoff in December if he fails to get more than 50% of votes. Other polls have showed varying levels of support for his opponents including a strong showing in one for Maryse Narcisse.
Some voters have harboured suspicions that opposing political factions have sought to use aid as leverage for securing support in some areas.
Sebastian Rhodes Stampa, disaster coordinator for the UN’s humanitarian affairs office, said: “We are acutely aware that there is the issue of politicisation of aid and we have our means to ensure that it does not impact on what we are trying to do here.
“There will always be, in any political process, those who try to use aid, and aid allocation, to support their own ends. We are not seeing that on any serious basis but it’s something we would counter if we did.”
