Marcelin's story

Marcelin Marie Ange outside her tent in the Henfrasa camp, Port-au-Prince (photo © Natasha Fillion/Progressio)

Single parent Marcelin Marie Ange, 38, is trying to support her five daughters on little more than the profits she makes from selling mangoes. Since 12 January, she has been living under canvas in Henfrasa camp, Port-au-Prince, with few facilities and even fewer prospects of finding a way out of the sprawling tent city, now home to 7,000 people.

“My biggest problem is that I don’t have a house to go to,” Marcelin says. “I didn’t own my house before, I rented a house and it was destroyed,” she adds, pointing into the distance to the area where she used to live.

But Marcelin is even more worried about her children, and the fact that she can no longer afford to send them to school. “After the earthquake they asked us to pay for school, now I have no money left,” she says.

That means her daughters have had to abandon their studies for the time being. They now spend most of their day at home in the camp, or hovering outside their tent while they wait for it to cool down. Temperatures inside the canvas shelters can reach 40-50 degrees in the middle of the afternoon.

When it comes to the Haitian government, Marcelin barely has a positive word to say. “They have not been here,” she scoffs. “Sometimes people have tried to deliver food to us, but the government says we can’t have it. I just feel we don’t have a government – I don’t feel good about it.”

Her hopes for the future have also been shattered. “You can’t progress in this country,” she says. “You just go backwards.”