In the 'shooting zones' of Haiti

Robbed, forced from homes

On March 23 several hundred men from gang groups came to the area. Armed, they enter people’s homes with a specific goal: to find money and, if possible, electronic equipment. They broke into my home. We had money set aside for our relocation; they took everything and left. In neighboring houses, they beat people who couldn’t give money and kidnapped several other residents as ransom guarantees.

On March 25 we were forced to flee the house without a clear idea of where to go. I had to send my child to the province for safety, and since that Monday, I’ve been staying at the hotel so I can continue to work, without lots of disturbance.

Since weeks now, amid looting, kidnapping, sexual violence, and murder, residents try their best to cling to the little hope they have left. Hunger is threatening to set in and grow visibly. Today, in the streets of Port-Au-Prince, adults fight each other for a scrap of anything to eat, and from the mouths of the young, you hear, “I’m so hungry, if only I knew how, I would have already joined this gang or that gang.”

Food, fuel prices spiking

In the shooting zones, several families are unable to leave their homes, while others are unable to return home to fetch their wives, husbands, or children. Some are trapped inside their homes for several days because they didn’t have time to escape before the gunfire began. 

The price of food is constantly increasing, up by around 25 percent today. The scarcity of fuel has driven up public transportation prices and food prices. The purchasing power of the population of Port-au-Prince is rapidly decreasing, at its lowest level in the past few years.

Entire families are forced to leave their homes to go to relatives or, for most, to open-air places serving as temporary displacement sites; for others, to monasteries where they desperately seek a place to sleep and settle. The resurgence of armed violence in Haiti has triggered a deep humanitarian crisis and, in its wake, an increase in the number of internally displaced people, majority of whom are children and women. It is said that more than 362,000 Part-Au-Prince residents are displaced from their homes. 

In the streets of Port-au-Prince, especially in the lower part of the city, the scenario remains the same. Buring of tires at times, people fleeing to avoid gunfire. The streets are paved with filth, which will soon expose us to new cases of disease. In fact, there are reported cases of cholera in parts of the city.

Haiti is in desperate need of a well-funded humanitarian intervention, along with a solution to the gang issue. The humanitarian community struggled to meet the escalating needs in 2023 when roughly one third of Haiti’s Humanitarian Response Plan was funded. This year, the funding gap looks set to widen as needs skyrocket. To that end, through the first quarter of 2024, only seven percent of the Plan has been funded.

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