PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — United Nations humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher walks through the sprawling displacement camp in Haiti’s gang-ravaged capital, moving in silent disbelief through a labyrinth of narrow alleyways, hanging laundry and makeshift shelters cobbled together from pieces of wood, metal and faded tarps bearing the U.S. Agency for International Development logo.

As he steps over overflowing sewage, he’s confronted by the faces of hungry mothers, the emaciated frames of malnourished babies and the desperate shouts of refugees who have fled gang violence.

“We are hungry,” they shout in Haitian Creole as he winds his way through the overcrowded camp. “We need help. We want to go home.”

Located on the grounds of the Ministry of Public Works, Transport and Communication in Delmas 33, the camp is among dozens that have popped up in public spaces as the number of Haitians displaced by armed groups surge. In six months, the site has grown from 600 people fleeing gang attacks in nearby Delmas 30 to 5,000 people from all over the capital, sheltering in packed government offices and makeshift shacks.

“Seventeen people are sleeping in a single space,” Gerson Guedant, 45, a visually impaired father of two, said as Fletcher stopped to speak to him. “When we were at our homes, it wasn’t like this.”

Guedant, a resident of Delmas 30, said the displacement camps, which have nearly doubled from 142 in December to 272, are difficult for people with disabilities, with their cramped quarters, limited bathrooms and lack of privacy.

“We need the help of international organizations to help us feel once more that we are living,” he pleaded.

Since being named the under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator in October, Fletcher has been visiting the world’s most urgent humanitarian crises — Sudan, Chad, Syria, Gaza and Ukraine among others — to get a firsthand look at the human cost of the conflicts as they drive mass displacement, starvation and alarming levels of sexual violence.

In Haiti, a country gripped by escalating gang violence that has pushed the Caribbean nation into one of the world’s worst places for hunger and among top five countries when it comes to grave violations against children, he’s also trying to understand the world’s indifference.

“I’m furious, and I’m ashamed on behalf of the world that we cannot find it within ourselves to be more compassionate, to be more kind, to recognize what people here are going through,” he said. “I cannot believe we are struggling to find the funds to support these families as they try to rebuild their lives. We cannot imagine what they’ve been through.”

U.N. funding cuts

Fletcher traveled to Haiti like everyone else: From Miami into northern Cap-Haïtien, via the only airline directly connecting the country to the United States since gang gunfire hit three U.S. commercial flights last November, triggering an ongoing Federal Aviation Administration ban on flights to the country.

Before boarding a bullet-proof World Food Program helicopter for Port-au-Prince, he greeted staff and did a quick donor request promo for the humanitarian air service, which routinely faces shutdown because of lack of money.

The funding cuts amid Haiti’s escalating surge in gang violence added urgency to his visit. As he moved about in the displacement camp, Fletcher was visibly moved. Inside dimly lit rooms, mothers spoke about their husbands being gunned down, and of having to live apart from their children because of assaults and rapes inside the camps. Fathers spoke of feeling abandoned by the government and the difficulties of getting help.

“We want to live like everyone else,” said Rudy Jean, 36, a father of three who was chased by gangs out of his Solino neighborhood. “We don’t have access to potable water. We don’t have the opportunity to work, and we don’t have the opportunity to live normal lives; there is nowhere else left to run to save yourself.”

Nachely Joseph, 27, who fled Solino after the father of her three children was gunned down, said she wants out of the camp and a way to earn a living so she can send her children to school. “I’m sleeping in a garage with them,” she said.

Fletcher, who also visited a local organization treating survivors of gender-based violence, a center targeting youth from gang-ravaged communities and the only public hospital still operating, said the visit in the camp “was really hard to witness.”

“It’s something about the congestion,” he said. “The sense you get of it being so, cramped… how close they’re living together and the lack of dignity of that.

“It’s one of the responsibilities of this job to be here, to bear testimony and to recognize not just what we’re doing, which is important, but also more importantly what we’re not doing,” Fletcher added. “It’s that gap between what we’re able to do and what we should be doing for the people here that enrages me. It saddens me, but most of all, it makes me furious.”

Lack of aid

Half of Haiti’s population, about 6 million people, are in need of humanitarian assistance. More than 1.3 million have been internally displaced, half of them children, by armed groups. Schools, hospitals, businesses, police stations, even government ministries, have all been gutted, while entire neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince have been emptied out and overtaken as gangs spread to rural provinces.

Yet, despite the expanding human tragedy, the country remains one of the least funded of the U.N.’s humanitarian appeals, at less than 12% of its request.

The $908 million appeal, even if fully funded, will still only provide assistance for 3.9 million Haitians. But without it, millions more are at risk for death, sickness and migration, Fletcher said.

“We’re not asking people to give up the hospital in their city or the school around the corner,” he said. “We’re asking their governments to spend 1% of what they spend on arms, weapons, on humanitarian work.... It’s so small, the difference.”

Politicians in other countries are telling their people that any money for Haiti is wasteful, pointless and liable to be squandered by corruption, he said.

“It makes me angry that somehow that message isn’t getting through in the way that, for me, it did when I was a kid,” Fletcher said about the needs, as he recalled his own activism in the 1980s during the famine in Ethiopia. “We were talking about it at school, and that was way before social media.”

U.S. foreign aid cuts

Fletcher’s visit to Port-au-Prince came ahead of this month’s U.N. General Assembly meeting, where much of the focus on Haiti will be on Washington’s efforts to get support for a more aggressive security force to dismantle gangs. But the strategy has to also focus on the deepening humanitarian crisis, Fletcher, former vice-chairman of Oxford University in England, said.

In Haiti, he met with the prime minister and head of the presidential council, the current U.S. chargé d’affaires and the new head of the U.N. Integrated Office, along with U.N. agencies heads and local partners.

“We’ve got to kind of double down on the stuff that’s working, and then be really ruthless in reducing the stuff that’s not working so well,” Fletcher said.

Last year, the United States funded 65%, or $190 million, of the U.N.’s Haiti humanitarian appeal. The amount, this year, is expected to be nowhere near that as the Trump administration restructures foreign aid.

In his meetings with the heads of aid organizations, Fletcher heard about their efforts to navigate the funding shortfalls amid the surge in violence that’s disrupting access to healthcare, education and employment. He also heard concerns about safety as workers are increasingly targeted by gangs and getting to gang-controlled neighborhoods becomes harder by the day.

Among his marching orders: More coordination and less competition among agencies, removing branding from vehicles, and giving more authority and money directly to national organizations.

“What I’m trying to do is actually a kind of quite radical shift of power across the system. In some ways, it’s a dismantling of the current system, to move more power to local levels and community levels,” he said. “I think we should be more trusting of those who are closer to the communities.”

The power, he said, ultimately has to rest in the hands of the people who are in need of the assistance.

‘I am not living well’

In Haiti, it means listening more to those who are displaced, some of whom teared up as they recounted their own horrors and the indignity of having to depend on the generosity of others to survive.

“I am not living well,” Roseni Charlot, 67, said as Fletcher leaned in to speak with her. “I’m not used to this kind of situation.”

Her house, she said, was burned down 20 months ago when gangs attacked her Delmas 18 neighborhood. After attempts to stay with host families ended with rejection and indignation, she ended up in the parking lot of the public works building.

Now, she sleeps on the bare ground. “When you get up, you see maggots crawling all over you,” Charlot said. “We’re not living.”

“Help me retake my life,” she asked Fletcher on the verge of tears. “Once I am making a living, I can find a place to rent, and I will feel better, because here is no good.”

Next to her, a man wiped tears from his eyes. He was shot during a gang attack in his neighborhood, he said, as he pointed to where the bullet remains lodged near his chest.

Mothers told Fletcher of sending their children to live elsewhere for fear they will be raped in the displacement camps, a constant worry. The disabled and elderly relayed what it was like to have to fight when scarce water and food arrive. All spoke about the inhumane conditions, from the fetid human waste to having to stand during the rain because there is nowhere to lie down.

“We want to leave here,” Kashmina Jean-Michel, 33, said as she cradled the youngest of her three children. With no way to earn a living and no home since gangs torched her house, her children are scattered. “They called me to come get them and I can’t because I have no way to keep them.”

The Haitian government has cleared out some encampments and is trying to relocate more people, especially those housed on the grounds of schools. But there is limited housing, because gangs occupy 90% of the capital.

“People are just asking for oxygen, for dignity, and they’re asking to be heard,” the humanitarian chief said. “When people talk to me, they are not holding their hand out asking for help. They are asking for enough support to get their lives going again.

“They want to work, educate their kids,” he added. “No one chooses to live in these conditions, and they are desperate to get out.”

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