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Haiti

HAITI - Voluntary Relocation of Quake Displaced Gathers Momentum

IOM and partners pushed forward with the voluntary relocation of thousands Haitians displaced by the January 12 earthquake, as part of a Government of Haiti led process to find safe shelter during the rainy season.

IOM had by Thursday evening welcomed 1,417 people to a new site at Corail Cesselesse, on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. The new residents were relocated from the Petionville Golf Club camp, where 7,500 people lived in areas deemed unsafe and in need of emergency engineering works.

Relocation to the new site is the last in a series of options available to Haitians, which ranges from returning to a house certified as safe, to finding a host family to stay with, to temporary accommodation in the new sites until more durable solutions are found.

The number of people relocated from Golf Club to Corail has increased each day of the process, rising from 62 individuals on April 10 to 521 individuals on April 15. A total of 418 tents have been erected. As provider of last resort, IOM is currently acting as Corail camp manager until an identified partner is ready to take over.

Meanwhile outreach activities gathered pace in the Vallée de Bourdon, along a river bed between Petionville and Port-au-Prince centre. A community of 2,500 people has been informed that their area has been found to be at risk by military and international community engineers. Debris in the river has increased the risk of flooding, and heavy rains are expected to render the area all but inaccessible to humanitarians in case of an emergency.

Residents have been offered the choice of relocation to a site at Tabarre Issa, not far from the US embassy on the Route de Tabarre in Port-au-Prince, run by the aid agency Concern.

On Tuesday and Wednesday teams of social mobilizers from the International Rescue Committee (IRC) were deployed to explain the situation to Vallée de Bourdon communities. On Thursday engineers visited the site to identify the areas most at risk, and registration and information centres were established at key points around the valley. Movement is expected to begin on Saturday, and to take at least four to five days.

Meanwhile IOM registration teams said they had now registered 300,000 displaced Haitians, as part of an ongoing exercise to gather clear information about an estimated 2.1 million displaced countrywide, in order to more accurately target priority assistance. The process of registering residents in the Place de la Paix camp, a large square in central Port au Prince, began Thursday.

For further information please contact Mark Turner at IOM Haiti, Tel +509 37025066/ +509 34906678, Email mturner@iom.int or markyturner@yahoo.com