Now, though, recovery must accelerate. Only 28,000 of the displaced have found permanent shelter; some poor souls make do with lean-tos perched on a highway median strip. There are only 300 trucks working on rubble removal, a half-billion-dollar job that would take at least three years with 1,000 trucks to complete, according to some estimates. This is doubly maddening: For hundreds of thousands of unemployed Haitians, an internationally funded cleanup and rebuilding effort could be the ultimate economic stimulus. Instead, there are confounding, frustrating details at every turn: how to fit rubble-removal trucks through the narrow streets; what to do with valuables and corpses that turn up in the ruins; how to rebuild homes whose former renters need shelter but whose owners perished in the quake. All these questions and many more need answers before more grandiose ideas of a brand-new, green, wireless Haiti can be entertained.

Money is part of the problem — of $5.3 billion in pledged long-term international aid, only about a tenth has materialized. The U.S. share, $1.15 billion, is tied up in the partisan congressional wrangling over appropriations. But the dollars couldn’t be effectively spent anyway until Haiti works out bureaucratic and political bottlenecks. Almost 20 percent of the Haitian civil service was lost in the quake, along with many crucial official records, such as voter registries. Yet President René Préval made the uncertainty worse by winning authority from parliament to extend his term by three months, until May 2011, then dragging his feet about organizing an election for his successor. Pressured by the international community, Mr. Préval recently ordered voting to proceed in November. Meanwhile, he has yet to devise a strategic plan for land use, without which housing construction and rubble removal cannot begin in earnest. Three months ago, the United Nations and Haiti, following the Aceh model, established a reconstruction commission — a kind of parallel government with an 18-month mandate to supervise internationally aided projects — chaired by former president Bill Clinton and Haiti’s prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive. But it has met just once, a month ago, and has yet to hire an executive director or other senior staff.

The people of Haiti, like all people of good faith, understand that the reconstruction of their country could be the work of a generation. But they should not have to tolerate a single day of avoidable delay.

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COMMENT:HAITIAN-TRUTH.ORG
Only the naive will state that Haitians will not wait a single day for action – progress – fair play…or whatever.

The vast Haitian majority has never had any say in their well-being or that of the Nation. Such an assumption assumes some sort of connectivity from the bottom up, and there is none. The Haitian masses will just have to accept the fact their government is blocking entry – to Haiti – of  needed relief supplies. The docks are full of containers awaiting customs clearance.  Preval and his team have ordered  the Director of Customs to slow down and delay the process.

In any other country, the people would rise up and remove their government, a government that is allowing children’s deaths via starvation and disease.