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Haiti’s Elderly Invisible After Quake
March 18, 2010

Few have suffered as much as the elderly since the Haiti earthquake. Already vulnerable, senior must survive with little or no care.  (Washington Post Photo) Few have suffered as much as the elderly since the Haiti earthquake. Already vulnerable, senior must survive with little or no care.  (Washington Post Photo)
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rosaleen
4:15pm Mar 19, 2010

Actually the population of older people is higher in Haiti - probably 6-7% of the population. That about 200,000 older people affected by the earthquake. it's not just in Haiti that older people are the most vulnerable after a natural disaster. After the tsunami, many older peopel found it hard to access relief efforts and many were often not included in assistance to build back their livlihoods, to acess grant and loans. Older people are all around us, yet them seem invisible to us half the time. There's a great Indonesian NGO, YEL that advocates for older people rights and dvocates for wider access to a pension for the poorest old. Keep a look out for them and support them where you can.

Rosaleen at HelpAge International (and ex-Jakarta resident!)


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It was always hard to be old in Haiti, but after the earthquake, to be old and poor feels like a curse.

“We struggle to maintain a little dignity, but look at us,” said Lauranise Gedeon, who sat, embarrassed, in soiled sheets in the ruins of a municipal nursing home in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince.

Residents try to cover their nakedness as they are bathed outdoors with a bucket. They spend the hot afternoons in hospital beds lined up side by side, six to a tent, fanning themselves with pieces of cardboard. They plead for water to drink.

“No water today. We are waiting. We are waiting for medicines, for the doctors, for God to help us,” nurse Yolette Francois said.

Her patients, about 80 men and women, were scooping rice and beans from dented metal bowls. Asked what they need most, one resident said, “Something for the flies.” Another complained that her spoon had been stolen and held up her fingers, sticky with food. “Look!”

The nurse whispered, “We have run out of diapers for them.”

In Haitian Creole, the old are called “gran moun,” and they are relatively few. Those 65 and older make up just 3.4 percent of Haiti’s population, compared with 13 percent in a developed country such as the United States. To attain such seniority in a nation beset by high infant mortality, incurable diseases, AIDS and poverty is an accomplishment.

But in the weeks after the catastrophic Jan. 12 earthquake, the elderly appear to be forgotten.

“They are invisible, and we need to do more to help,” said Ronald Blain, a Haitian government official working for the UN Human Settlements Program.

The elderly hobble through the daily chaos of Port-au-Prince, forced into rubble piles as convoys of aid workers speed past in their sport utility vehicles. There are few usable sidewalks now, and no ramps or rails.

With a cane and a sack, Pierre Louis Pierre crossed a busy road near the airport, helped by a younger man who had watched as Pierre tried, repeatedly, to make his way.

Pierre said he is not certain of his exact age, as most births and deaths in Haiti are not recorded. “I am old!” he said and opened his mouth wide to show missing teeth. Where does he sleep? He pointed at the ground. “On the earth,” he said. In a tent? “When they let me in,” he said.

Elderly women sometimes appear in the food lines, but since the wait for “disaster rice,” the heavy sacks of donated rations, can be five or six hours, the frail ones cannot compete with the younger, stronger and just as hungry.

Most elderly Haitians live with family or caretakers who are paid a few dollars a day by faraway relatives in Miami or New York. The earthquake, which killed about 200,000 people, according to the Haitian government estimates, resulted in disruptions in the tissue-thin safety net that protected the elderly.

“They don’t really have retirement homes. They are being taken care of by families, and those without families have neighbors or their church. Sometimes they go to the nuns and sometimes the government,” said Cynthia Powell of the London-based group HelpAge International, which is providing food and medical care to a municipal nursing home.

Before the earthquake, the city-run nursing home was not too bad; there were men’s and women’s wings, an administration building and a wall that protected a garden. The earthquake demolished the women’s unit, killing seven patients. In the days that followed, the residents slept on the ground, surrounded by rats. Now they sleep five or six to a tent, among clouds of mosquitoes. The ground floods when it rains. With no security to stop them, refugees have swarmed into the garden compound, where they have now established a camp of several hundred people.

“The walls fell down, so people come and go as they like,” said Nickson Plantin, one of the security guards. “If you want to give one of these old people something, you put it in their hand — and don’t give too much.” The neighborhood is surrounded by gangs. 


Washington Post