On air in Haiti: WHYS in Tent City
Post categories: Haiti
| 17:21 UK time, Thursday, 29 April 2010
If you've any questions for the guests that you hear on today's show, please post them here.
Sheetal: This is the latest blog from Mark in Haiti...
There's so much that you see here that will stay in the memory forever: driving down a street where 4 or 5 buildings are fine and then the next looks like someone has flattened it with a giant fist for example.
But it is the tents which define Port Au Prince more than the rubble. They occupy every free space in the city, they are on roundabouts, in parks, on the hills and sometimes, in the middle of the road. They are grouped in twos and threes, and in other places in groups of thousands and thousands.
It's hot here, and very humid. I can only begin to imagine what it must be like when that heat is magnified by a layer of canvas. Unbearable would be one word for it. And yet hundreds of thousands of people are living like that and have been for months.
What troubles many people - apart from the obvious dire circumstances of how people live - is that it's hard to see when the tents will disappear. We've seen some evidence of rebuilding on a large scale, but we've seen the more wretched sight of people breaking down the rubble of their houses with a single sledgehammer, presumably to one day re-build.
We've also seen people living in tents in the grounds of their old dwellings. As a result, people are afraid of the rains that have just begun and the hurricanes which are predicted for later in the year.
On our way up to the orphanage, we saw the tents clinging to the sides of the hills and you didn't need to be a meteorologist to know that they could so easily be washed down the slopes by the mud and the rain. 
So people are getting angry as well as afraid. Some blame the Government, others the aid agencies and the NGOs (we've seen graffiti saying "down with the occupation") and some foreigners in general.
We'll be at the Terrain Acra camp today which when we walked around there on Tuesday was grim but accessible. When the rains come it will be a different story.
We'll aim to give you an idea of what it must be like to live in such conditions - just a stone's throw from where you once lived in comparative - and I emphasise the word comparative - safety and comfort.
As we were heading away from the orphanage today we stopped for a beer. As we entered the bar we saw a guard packing what looked like a serious gun. Our fixer - Dris- said with a shrug "that's Haiti, man" as if that's what life is like here. I imagine that isn't the sense of fatalism being shared in the camps.
WHYS will be speaking to lots of people living in the camps today. We'll be happy to put your questions to them during the programme. if you wnat to know how they are coping, what their day to day lives are like, please send your questions in now and the team in London will send them to Mark, James and Alicia.
