Inside Haiti’s Displacement Camps
**PORT-AU-PRINCE —** At the Caroline Chauveau displacement camp, just steps from the National Palace, women forge bonds of solidarity through small, everyday gestures. At the camp entrance, a few have set up informal street stalls. Further inside, three women sit around a large basin, quietly laughing as they wash clothes together. One braids another’s hair. Another woman watches over a neighbor’s child so their mother can do her chores.
As waves of gang violence have emptied several neighborhoods of Haiti’s capital over the past few years, hundreds of thousands of displaced families now crowd into makeshift camps. Facing inhumane conditions, women have built systems of mutual aid as a matter of survival.
Following the 2021 assassination of the U.S.-backed right-wing president Jovenel Moïse, a political and security vacuum has been filled by armed and violent gangs. Their power only increased in 2023, when Haiti lost its last democratically elected officials; 10 senators whose terms expired. The armed gangs now control an estimated 85% of the capital. A U.N. force of Kenyan police, who do not speak Haitian Kreyol, has failed to reclaim any territory since its arrival in June of last year.
> “Sleeping here is a nightmare.”
More than 1 million people — around 10% of the country’s population — have been forced to flee their neighborhoods, according to the International Organization for Migration. In Port-au-Prince alone, 108 improvised displacement sites have emerged, set up in abandoned schools, empty lots or even narrow alleyways blocked off with makeshift barriers. With each wave of armed incursions — where armed groups violently take over neighborhoods — camps like the Caroline Chauveau National School, or the one near the Rex Theatre, and another in the Office for the Protection of Citizens in Bourdon, grow even more dense as fleeing people seek safety.
“Sleeping here is a nightmare,” Rosiane Philidor, in the Caroline Chauveau camp, tells Truthdig. She is staying there with two of her four children and her husband after escaping the suburb of Savane Pistache. “We fled with nothing. And now, with all the ongoing gunfire around the camp during clashes between the police and gangs, I don’t feel safe at all. I can’t live like this anymore.”
Previously a shopkeeper, Philidor now washes clothes to earn an income and care for her family. Her husband has hypertension and isn’t working, and her other two children have been taken in by friends. She said she and other women bear the consequences of economic precarity and violence disproportionately to men. “Men can come home calmly and tell you they have nothing. But you, as a woman, you’re obliged to find solutions because you have to feed, wash and protect,” she says.
In the Caroline Chauveau camp, a woman does her laundry while chatting with others. (Photo by Magdala Louis)
The stories I’m told share a common thread: that within the blue tarps of the camps, amid trash, overcrowding and extreme vulnerability to violence, women bear the heaviest burden. A recent U.N. report noted that with the increased violence and instability, women’s unpaid care workload has increased, sexual and gender-based violence have increased and 65% of female-headed households in the displacement camps face acute food insecurity.
Women are also often forced to trade sex for food, and they describe attempted assaults, verbal abuse and leering stares. Philidor’s 16-year-old daughter became pregnant in the camp and won’t talk about what happened or who the father is. She appears traumatized, so the assumption is that she was raped.
“She’s mocked by others. In situations like this, the burden falls entirely on women,” Philidor says.
With nowhere else to turn, women in the displacement camps have found that they must stay united and support each other. Jessica Percena, in the camp by Rex Theatre, fled her home in Carrefour-Feuilles in November of 2022 with her infant. In the camp, she met another internally displaced woman who would become her child’s godmother. “She helps me, gives me food, sometimes money,” Percena says, noting that such help is still painfully insufficient in the absence of institutional support.
Nevertheless, such grassroots solidarity also helped Roselène Mondestin, a mother of four and grandmother of two, stay strong. She fled Martissant, a large neighborhood in the south of the capital, in 2021, when gangs seized control of the main road. She sought refuge in the Dominican Republic, but after a year, she returned to Port-au-Prince to escape the manhunt launched by Dominican authorities against Haitians; a campaign during which one of her children nearly lost his life. But once back in Haiti, gang violence saw her again forced to join a displacement camp with her whole family.
> “There is no safety.”
“Other women here help me; we support each other, laugh together. It makes the days bearable, because we don’t have a government,” she tells Truthdig, explaining that they support each other by sharing food and clothes, and telling jokes to relieve the stress. Her network of solidarity helps to ease the isolation and hardship, and in critical moments, Mondestin says, the women step in and improvise care, such as when one of her daughters gave birth in the camp.
In camps such as those at Rex Theatre and the Caroline Chauveau National School, women-led nonprofit organizations like the Haitian Association for Peace and Education are also doing what they can to support displaced women, often with limited resources and under precarious conditions.
“The government hasn’t said a word about the camps or gangs,” Sabatini Medjina Arcelin, the group’s deputy coordinator tells Truthdig, referring to the transitional presidential council that is meant to be running the country at the moment and restoring order. “It’s often international organizations, working alongside local ones, that try to provide support.”
These organizations provide food, health care and much-needed psychological support, but their efforts are inadequate given the scale of the crisis. Mental health care is particularly important, as the threat from gangs is ongoing. They have tried to move into camps, but police stopped them, and clashes between the two are regular. With gunshots echoing day and night, the people in the camps are stuck in the middle and constantly fearful.
The front of the Rex Theatre camp. (Photo by Magdala Louis)
“There is no safety,” Philidor says. “Stray bullets fly all the time. There are constant alerts, with no end in sight.”
A final layer of vulnerability the women face relates to physical health care. The camps lack regular sources of clean water and rely on temporary latrines used by hundreds of people. Women must bathe their children with dirty water, manage their menstruation without privacy and sometimes give birth without assistance. Infections are common. And yet, even under these strains, Arcelin notes, “Women cook, care for others, look for odd jobs.”
Arcelin tells me that what they really need is relocation to decent housing, financial aid, health care, psychological support and programs for pregnant teens. But there is little optimism that these things will be provided on an adequate scale soon, especially as women in the displacement camps are completely overlooked by the mainstream media or those with any influence. The displaced women of Port-au-Prince, she says, will continue to rely on each other for survival in a dire situation that calls out, not just for aid, but for structural justice.
“The women carrying the load here deserve to live as human beings,” she says. “Women are simply asking for a decent life, not charity.”
