Nearly seven years ago, Adrienne St. Fume and her family fled their home as the earth shook and their city crumbled around them. They ended up in what was then a vacant lot overlooking a cluster of shops along a busy street in the Haitian capital — and they've been there ever since. The mother of three said she figured their plywood shack would be temporary as they and the rest of Port-au-Prince recovered from the magnitude 7.0 earthquake on Jan. 12, 2010. But St. Fume has yet to find a way out. "It's been hard but we've tried our best to make a kind of life here," she said. At least 50,000 people like St. Fume remain in 31 settlement camps that emerged in Haiti in the days and weeks after the disaster. The number of people in these makeshift communities has declined 96 percent since the immediate aftermath, but those who remain are a stubborn reminder that this impoverished country has yet to fully recover from one of the worst natural disasters in history. Authorities estimated 1.5 million people were living in over 1,500 camps in July 2010. The numbers dropped either because people were evicted by private property owners, raised enough money to rebuild homes, or received rental subsidies from the government and aid groups that got them back on their feet. The International Organization for Migration, which is working with a final $7 million to resettle displaced people from three camps in Port-au-Prince, will soon be out of money for the effort, said Fabien Sambussy, the organization's operations chief in Haiti. Even if the agency had more cash, it would still be hard to find housing for people in a country where more than half the population survives on less than $2 a day and adequate housing is increasingly expensive. And there are those who don't want to leave camps that in many cases morphed into crowded shantytowns. "It's quite difficult to try to convince them that they are not at home after six years," said Sambussy, who said her agency has tried to clear out the camps in a humane way after forced evictions by people claiming ownership of the land became common during the first years after the quake. St. Fume, who earns a meager living selling charcoal, said that unlike some of her neighbors, she would not oppose plans to move with her husband and their three children to subsidized housing for a year. They have struggled in the camp, where the mother said she dreams of living in a "decent house" where her children are safe. "There's always a lot of worry here," she said on a recent morning. — AP
