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<P><EM> This article was reported in partnership with <A
href="http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/">The Investigative Fund at The
Nation Institute</A>, with additional support from the <A
href="http://canadiancentreinvestigates.org/">Canadian Centre for
Investigative Reporting</A>.</EM><BR> <BR>When Demosthene Lubert heard that
Bill Clinton's foundation was going to rebuild his collapsed school at the
epicenter of Haiti's January 12, 2010, earthquake, in the coastal city of
Léogâne, the academic director thought he was "in paradise.</P></DIV></LI>
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disabled>The project was announced by Clinton as his foundation's first
contribution to the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, which the former
president co-chairs. The foundation described the project as
"hurricane-proof...emergency shelters that can also serve as schools...to
ensure the safety of vulnerable populations in high risk areas during the
hurricane season," while also providing Haitian schoolchildren "a decent place
to learn" and creating local jobs. The facilities, according to the
foundation, would be equipped with power generators, restrooms, water and
sanitary storage. They became one of the IHRC's first
projects.</DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV>
<P>However, when <EM>Nation</EM> reporters visited the "hurricane-proof"
shelters in June, six to eight months after they'd been installed, we found
them to consist of twenty imported prefab trailers beset by a host of
problems, from mold to sweltering heat to shoddy construction. Most
disturbing, they were manufactured by the same company, Clayton Homes, that is
being sued in the United States for providing the Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA) with formaldehyde-laced trailers in the wake of Hurricane
Katrina. Air samples collected from twelve Haiti trailers detected worrying
levels of this carcinogen in one, according to laboratory results obtained as
part of a joint investigation by <EM>The Nation</EM> and The Nation
Institute's Investigative Fund.</P>
<P>Clayton Homes is owned by Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company run by
Warren Buffett, one of the "notable" private-sector members of the Clinton
Global Initiative, according to the initiative's website. ("Members" are
typically required to pay $20,000 a year to the charity, but foundation
officials would not disclose whether Buffett had made such a donation.)
Buffett was also a prominent Hillary Clinton supporter during the 2008
presidential race, and he co-hosted a fundraiser that brought in at least $1
million for her campaign.</P>
<P>By mid-June, two of the four schools where the Clinton Foundation
classrooms were installed had prematurely ended classes for the summer because
the temperature in the trailers frequently exceeded 100 degrees, and one had
yet to open for lack of water and sanitation facilities.</P>
<P>As Judith Seide, a student in Lubert's sixth-grade class, explained to
<EM>The Nation</EM>, she and her classmates regularly suffer from painful
headaches in their new Clinton Foundation classroom. Every day, she said, her
"head hurts and I feel it spinning and have to stop moving, otherwise I'd
fall." Her vision goes dark, as is the case with her classmate Judel, who
sometimes can't open his eyes because, said Seide, "he's allergic to the
heat." Their teacher regularly relocates the class outside into the shade of
the trailer because the swelter inside is insufferable.</P>
<P>Sitting in the sixth-grade classroom, student Mondialie Cineas, who dreams
of becoming a nurse, said that three times a week the teacher gives her and
her classmates painkillers so that they can make it through the school day.
"At noon, the class gets so hot, kids get headaches," the 12-year-old said,
wiping beads of sweat from her brow. She is worried because "the kids feel
sick, can't work, can't advance to succeed."</P>
<P>Word about the students' headaches has made it all the way to the Léogâne
mayor's office, but like the students, their teachers and parents, Mayor
Santos Alexis chalked it up to the intense heat inside the trailers.</P>
<P>* * *</P>
<P>But headaches were not the only health problems students, staff and parents
at the Institut Haitiano-Caribbean (INHAC) told us they've suffered from since
the inauguration of the classrooms. Innocent Sylvain, a shy janitor who looks
much older than his 41 years, spends more time than anyone in the new trailer
classrooms, with the inglorious task of mopping up the water that leaks
through the doors and windows each time it rains. He has felt a burning
sensation in his eyes ever since he began working long hours in the trailers.
One of his eyes is completely bloodshot, and he said, "They itch and burn."
He'd previously been sensitive to eye irritation, but he says he's had worse
"problems since the month of January"—when the schoolrooms opened their
doors.</P>
<P>Any number of factors might be contributing to the headaches and eye
irritation reported by INHAC staff and students. However, similar symptoms
were experienced by those living in the FEMA trailers that were found by the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to have unsafe levels of
formaldehyde. Lab tests conducted as part of our investigation in Haiti
discovered levels of the carcinogen in the sixth-grade Clinton Foundation
classroom in Léogâne at 250 parts per billion—two and a half times the level
at which the CDC warned FEMA trailer residents that sensitive people, such as
children, could face adverse health effects. Assay Technologies, the
accredited lab that analyzed the air tests, identifies 100 parts per billion
and more as the level at which "65–80 percent of the population will most
likely exhibit some adverse health symptoms...when exposed continually over
extended periods of time."</P>
<P>Randy Maddalena, a scientist specializing in indoor pollutants at Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory, characterized the 250 parts per billion finding
as "a very high level" of formaldehyde and warned that "it's of concern,"
particularly given the small sample size. An elevated level of formaldehyde in
one of twelve trailers tested is comparable to the formaldehyde emissions
problems detected in about 9 percent of similar Clayton mobile homes supplied
by FEMA after Hurricane Katrina. Maddalena explained that in "normal"
buildings, you'll see rates twelve to twenty-five times lower than 250 parts
per billion, "and even that's considered above regulatory thresholds."</P>
<P>According to the CDC, formaldehyde exposure can exacerbate symptoms of
asthma and has been linked to chronic lung disease. Studies have shown that
children are particularly vulnerable to its respiratory effects. The chemical
was recently added to the US Department of Health and Human Services' "Report
of Carcinogens," based on studies linking exposure to formaldehyde with
increased risk for rare types of cancer.</P>
<P>"You should get those kids outta there," Maddalena said. The scientist
emphasized that Haiti's hot and humid climate could well be contributing to
high emissions of the carcinogen in the classroom. Indeed, months before the
launch of the Clinton trailer project, the nation's climate was widely cited
as a key problem with a trailer industry proposal to ship FEMA trailers to
Haiti for shelter after the earthquake. The proposal was ultimately rejected
by FEMA, following a critical letter from Bennie Thompson, chair of the House
Committee on Homeland Security, who argued, "This country's immediate response
to help in this humanitarian crisis should not be blemished by later concerns
over adverse health consequences precipitated by our efforts."</P>
<P>Yet several months later, the <EM>Knoxville</EM> <EM>News Sentinel</EM>
reported that Clayton Homes had been awarded a million-dollar contract to ship
twenty trailers to Haiti, for use as classrooms for schoolchildren. The
Clinton Foundation claims it went through a bidding process before awarding
the contract to Clayton Homes, which was already embroiled in the FEMA trailer
lawsuit. But despite repeated requests, the foundation has not provided
<EM>The Nation</EM> with any documentation of this process.</P>
<P>There are hints that Clayton Homes aggressively pursued the contract. For
example, a company press release dated August 6, 2010, notes, "When former
President Bill Clinton was named to head the relief effort, Clayton's Director
of International Development, Paul Thomas, called the Clinton Foundation to
see if there was a way to help."</P>
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<P>The chief of staff for the office of the UN Special Envoy, Garry Conille,
emphasized that the foundation's decision-making on the project took place in
a context of great urgency, with the advent of the 2010 hurricane season, when
1.5 million people were living in tent camps. "Under the circumstances, with
all these people exposed, with the first rains," said Conille, "it would have
been completely acceptable to go to a single source, but we didn't."</P>
<P>The Clinton Foundation's chief operating officer, Laura Graham, said in a
phone interview that the contract was awarded to Clayton on the basis of a
"limited request for proposals" from nine companies. She added that the
decision was informed by "recommendations from a panel including a lot of
these experts that do this work for a living, and Clayton was recommended as
the most cost-efficient, with the best product and with the strongest Haitian
partner." She clarified that she did not participate in the bidding process
but said there were "representatives from the foundation as well as [the UN]
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs [OCHA], the UN Special
Envoy Office and the International Organization for Migration [IOM]...and
there was a request for proposals run by them."</P>
<P>According to Bradley Mellicker, IOM's Port-au-Prince–based emergency
preparedness and response officer, however, "the Clinton Foundation paid for
the containers through a no-bid process." Imogen Wall, former spokeswoman
for OCHA in Haiti, responded by e-mail that OCHA never deals with procurement
or project management.</P>
<P><EM>The Nation</EM> made multiple attempts to reach Bill Clinton for
comment. However, the former president, known for championing the role of
nonprofits in global affairs ("Unlike the government, we don't have to be
quite as worried about a bad story in the newspapers," he recently said in a
speech), never responded. A Clayton Homes official referred all queries
regarding the contract to the Clinton Foundation.</P>
<P>When he heard that the new classrooms in his community had been built by a
FEMA formaldehyde litigation defendant, Santos Alexis, Léogâne's stately
mayor, said, "I hope these are not the same trailers that made people sick in
the US. Otherwise I would be very critical; it would be chaos." (They are
indeed different trailers, according to an engineer at Clayton Homes, who said
the new classrooms were constructed specifically for the Clinton Foundation's
Haiti project.)</P>
<P>"It would be humiliating to us, and we'll take this as a black thing," the
mayor added, drawing a parallel between his community in Haiti, the world's
first black republic, and the disproportionate numbers of African-Americans
affected by the US government's mismanagement of the emergency response after
Hurricane Katrina.</P>
<P>* * *</P>
<P> </P>
<P>Demosthene Lubert's disappointment is palpable as he sits in one of his
new-smelling classrooms, perspiration dripping from his face. He had
envisioned that the foundation of the former US president would rebuild INHAC,
his school, as a modern institution with solar panel–powered lights and Wi-Fi.
At a meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in May, Dr. Paul Farmer,
Clinton's deputy UN special envoy, called for healthcare to be integrated into
schools. At the very least, Lubert expected the Clinton Foundation, which is
active in global health philanthropy and cholera prevention in Haiti, to help
with school sanitation.</P>
<P>"I thought the grand foundation of Clinton was going to build us latrines
and dig us wells for the children to wash their hands before meals and after
using the toilet...especially as we're at the mercy of cholera," Lubert says
with a sigh. Less than an hour north of Léogâne, in Carrefour, the number of
cholera cases went from eighty-five per week at the end of April to 820 a week
at the beginning of June, according to Sylvain Groulx, country director of
Médecins Sans Frontières. The disease, which is preventable with proper
sanitary conditions, has killed 5,500 people since the epidemic began last
October.</P>
<P>The Clinton Foundation did not build so much as a latrine at the school, or
at any of the three other schools where its trailers were installed. (INHAC
and two of the other schools had a limited number of pre-existing outhouses,
which the school directors saw as inadequate, while the fourth did not have a
single outhouse, making it unusable, according to the school's director.)</P>
<P>Conille, Clinton's chief of staff at his UN office, acknowledged in a
telephone interview that the trailer classrooms "would never meet the
standards for school building" under Haitian or international regulations.</P>
<P>"Normally when you hear 'Clin-ton,' when people speak of 'Clin-ton,' the
name 'Clin-ton' carries a lot of weight," says Lubert. He trails off, looking
suddenly uncertain. Clinton's name echoes ambiguously through the swampy
chemical air like a plea, a mantra or a brand.</P>
<P>June 1 marked the beginning of Haiti's 2011 hurricane season, and
meteorologists project that Haiti could face up to eighteen tropical storms
with three to six of these developing to hurricane strength. Léogâne, where 95
percent of the downtown area was flooded by Hurricane Tomas last year, is
relying on the Clinton Foundation's trailers as Plan A in the municipality's
emergency response.</P>
<P>The foundation's original proposal to the IHRC referred to the buildings it
planned to construct in Léogâne as "hurricane-proof" shelters, and this past
March, Clinton Foundation foreign policy director Ami Desai reiterated that
claim in a phone interview. On the foundation website, the promotional
write-up about the trailers is featured under the heading "Emergency Hurricane
Shelter Project."</P>
<P>Larry Tanner, a wind science specialist at Texas Tech University, was
"suspicious" when he heard that trailers were to be used as hurricane shelters
in Haiti. Tanner thought it unlikely that Clayton Homes had developed a mobile
home that could safely be used as a hurricane shelter, saying in a telephone
interview that he put the odds at "slim to none." Mobile homes are considered
by FEMA to be so unsafe in hurricanes that the agency unequivocally advises
the public to evacuate them.</P>
<P>In an interview with <EM>The Nation</EM>, Clayton Homes engineer Mark Izzo
said the Léogâne trailers could withstand winds of up to 140 miles per hour.
The company arrived at this figure through calculations, he said, rather than
testing.</P>
<P>But Tanner emphasizes that such structures must be rigorously tested for
resistance to high winds and projectiles. Clayton Homes's failure to test the
trailers meant that they would not meet the international construction
standard for hurricane shelter. "It certainly would not be accepted by FEMA
either," Tanner added. Moreover, the kind of anchoring systems used by the
trailers in Léogâne—which rely on metal straps to attach the shelter to the
ground—"fail routinely," according to Tanner.</P>
<P>Two weeks into Haiti's hurricane season, <EM>The Nation</EM> visited some
of the Clinton shelters with Kit Miyamoto, a California-based structural
engineer contracted by USAID and the Haitian government to assess the safety
of buildings in Port-au-Prince. Standing in front of one of the trailers,
Miyamoto looked doubtful when asked whether, in his professional view, these
structures were, as the Clinton Foundation has repeatedly claimed,
"hurricane-proof." In the world of engineering, buildings are rarely
considered to be truly hurricane-proof, explained Miyamoto, who said he had
never heard of a wooden trailer being used as a hurricane shelter, let alone
being referred to as a hurricane-proof building. "To be hurricane-proof you a
need a heavier structure with concrete or blocks," he
explained.</P></DIV></LI></UL></DIV>
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<P>Miyamoto emphasized that one of the most crucial elements for the public
safety was how well the shelters' limitations were explained to the community
expected to use them. "Hopefully people do understand that these windows do need
to be protected if a major hurricane is expected to be coming," he said.
Miyamoto said the likelihood is "really high" that the windows will break
without storm shutters, and "once those window systems break," he explained,
making a toppling motion with his arms, "you cannot just be in there." The roof
will "pop off."</P>
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<DIV class="media-enlarge float-left">[
<DIV class=views-separator></DIV><A
href="http://www.thenation.com/article/157646/haiti-wheres-money">Haiti: Where's
the Money?</A> <SPAN class=subject-topic>(<A
href="http://www.thenation.com/section/foreign-affairs">Foreign Affairs</A>, <A
href="http://www.thenation.com/section/regions-and-countries">Regions and
Countries</A>, <A
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<P>Despite all the post-earthquake promises, just a fraction of the aid pledged
has actually been delivered.</P></DIV>
<DIV class=comments>When asked if the shelters had come with any storm shutters,
Andre Hercule, director of Saint Thérèse de Darbonne elementary school, which
has also received Clinton trailers, shook his head, then grabbed the nearest
open trailer window and effortlessly slid it shut. Clicking it locked, he
explained, "We'd close all the windows." The school director remains confident
after hearing Clinton speak at a news conference in August 2010 at his school
that the trailers are
hurricane-proof.</DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV>
<P>Léogâne's Department of Civil Protection may also be operating on this
assumption. At the Léogâne town hall, a derelict white paint-chipped building
that looks stately in contrast to the seventeen-month-old tent camp nearby, DCP
coordinator Philippe Joseph explained the municipality's plans for community
outreach in the event of a hurricane. "We'll send scouts with megaphones and
tell people to gather their papers and go to the Clinton Foundation shelters,"
he said as he sketched a rough map, indicating the best routes to the
dual-purpose school buildings from the geographic zones most vulnerable to
storms.</P>
<P>Asked if he believed the trailers would offer adequate protection during a
hurricane, Joseph seemed taken aback: Clinton had himself said that these were
hurricane-proof shelters, he said.</P>
<P>* * *</P>
<P>In a jungly field on the outskirts of Léogâne, four of the twenty Clinton
classrooms sit empty at another school, Coeur de Jesus. Because of the trailers'
leaky roofs, puddles form on the floor that need to be mopped up by the
maintenance staff. As school director Antoine Beauvais explained, the new
sixteen-by-forty-foot trailers were too bulky to fit in the cramped residential
area where his school was previously located. But for lack of toilet facilities
or running water provided by the foundation for the newly created remote campus,
the school has been unable to use its new trailer classrooms.</P>
<P>When <EM>The Nation</EM> visited the site with Miyamoto, at least one strap
on a trailer slated to be used as a hurricane shelter in the coming months was
already loose. As Miyamoto moved the slack metal ribbon that is meant to ensure
the trailer stays stable during a storm, the structural engineer remarked that
these kinds of anchoring systems are liable to corrode. "You definitely want to
look at it at least once a year," he said grimly.</P>
<P>It's unclear whether such maintenance will occur. Clayton Homes recently
visited some of the schools after the International Organization for Migration,
which works with the UN, raised concerns about the condition of the shelters.
However, Conille said he did not know anything about plans the Clinton
Foundation had made for the maintenance of the "hurricane shelters" in the
longer term. The Haitian contractor who was initially hired to help install the
shelters, Philippe Cinéas of AC Construction, said that neither he nor his staff
were trained to service them. This raised concerns for Cinéas because, as he
knew from experience, "in Haiti maintenance is always a problem."</P>
<P>While Clinton Foundation COO Laura Graham claims that the foundation has
always been "very accessible" to the school and municipal officials in Léogâne,
neither the school directors nor the civil protection coordinator had any way of
getting in touch with the foundation, they told <EM>The Nation</EM>,<EM>
</EM>and had to resort to going through intermediaries.</P>
<P>Joseph, the DCP chief for Léogâne, faults the trailer project for being
decided from afar and "from the top down," like so much of Haiti relief. While
the Clinton Foundation claims that it worked with local government to implement
the shelter plan, Joseph disputes this. The foundation simply informed him that
it was building four schools in his district, he says. "To me this is not a
consultation," the local official remarked. "To consult people you have to ask
them what they need and how they think it could best be implemented."</P>
<P>Joseph ascribes the new shelters' "infernal" heat, humidity and other
problems to this lack of on-the-ground consultation. He added, with regret, that
people in desperate need of employment and shelters watched as "the Clinton
Foundation came in with all its specialists and equipment, but they didn't give
any training." He said that "if they use a local firm they will not only create
jobs in a community that has been decapitalized by the quake but they will also
take into account the environmental reality on the ground."</P>
<P>In the proposal approved by the IHRC, the Clinton Foundation said that "up to
300 local workers would be employed to build the schools." Cinéas said there
were only five to eight people hired by his firm on a very temporary basis, and
the foundation declined to comment on what additional jobs were created.</P>
<P>Farmer, the Clinton envoy, recently published a report on trends in Haiti's
dysfunctional aid system. He stressed the need for "accompaniment" to be the
guiding principle of Haiti's reconstruction, with Haitians "in the driver's
seat" and the international community listening to their priorities. Farmer also
emphasized the importance of local procurement and job creation.</P>
<P>It is hard to imagine a better case study of the very opposite approach than
the Clinton trailers. In response to questions about what due diligence the
foundation did to ensure the safety of the trailers it purchased for use as
hurricane shelters, the Clinton Foundation initially insisted that the most
appropriate person to speak to was a Haitian employee of Clinton's UN Office.
When Graham, the foundation's COO, finally agreed to talk about the project on
the record, she denied that the foundation had been responsible for any due
diligence regarding its own project, claiming that those responsible were a
"panel of experts," including one point person from the foundation, Greg Milne,
and representatives of other organizations. (Milne referred all questions to the
foundation's press office.) The Clinton Foundation agreed to furnish
documentation of who was on this panel but by press time had not done so.</P>
<P>Graham said that the staff of the Clinton Foundation—which has for more than
a year publicized the "hurricane shelters" that "President Clinton" built in
Léogâne—are "not experts" in hurricane shelter construction. She claimed the
same "panel of experts" would have been responsible for due diligence to ensure
air quality of the shelters whose secondary purpose was as classrooms.</P>
<P>Explaining Bill Clinton's rationale for the trailers, which were installed at
the tail end of the 2010 hurricane season, Conille said, "It was not meant to be
sustainable. It was meant because we didn't want to have dead people in
September." According to Conille, Clinton was deeply troubled by what would
happen to the women and children in case of a serious storm—and as the former
president felt that "no one" was doing anything about the issue, he took the
lead himself. Moreover, Clinton didn't want to have his new "hurricane shelters"
sitting empty while schoolchildren had classes in tents, Conille added.</P>
<P>Yet according to Maddalena, given the high rate of formaldehyde found in one
of the classrooms, and the children's headaches, "they'd be better off studying
outside under a tarp."</P>
<P>Wall, the former OCHA spokeswoman, responded by e-mail, "We all knew that
that project was misconceived from the start, a classic example of aid designed
from a distance with no understanding of ground level realities or needs. It has
had a predictably long and unhappy history from the start."</P>
<P>Even Conille largely concurred, in a telephone interview, that there were
many problems with the project, saying, "It made sense at that time, and I guess
someone could argue it wasn't the best idea in retrospect."</P>
<P>For his part, Léogâne Mayor Santos Alexis says he is still waiting for Bill
Clinton to follow through on his pledge to equip Léogâne with hurricane-proof
school buildings. Asked about his view on the Clinton Foundation's claims to
having completed an "Emergency Hurricane Shelter Project" replete with new
classrooms for his town, Alexis is defiant. "If those at the Clinton Foundation
are sure it's done then they should prove it, they should show it to us, because
I know nothing about it," he remarked coyly, gazing out from behind his shades.
Seated at his desk in a crumbling municipal building, the mayor said he is still
waiting for the real Clinton Foundation schools, "built with norms that protect
people from hurricanes and flooding."</P>
<P>*****</P>
<P>Correction: This article originally quoted IOM's Bradley Mellicker stating,
"That's a lie," after the quotation from the Clinton Foundation's COO Laura
Graham claiming that IOM had played a role in the procurement process for the
trailers. While IOM played no role, Mellicker's statement was made in response
to a claim by a different Clinton Foundation source that IOM had led the
procurement process, and not in response to Laura Graham. We regret the error.
<EM>The Nation</EM> understands that the Clinton Foundation and the Office of
the Special Envoy looked at a list of unsolicited offers and picked a winner and
that there was no public bid.</P></DIV></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>