Six months after the earthquake, Canadian Catholics have contributed $20 million to the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace’s effort to help Haitians build a new Haiti. Its plan is to spend the next five years and all of the $20 million helping Haitians build a country Haitians would choose to live in.

“You can’t do it for somebody else. It has to be Haitians themselves that do it,” said Development and Peace program officer Debra Bucher.

So far, Development and Peace has spent $3.3 million on emergency relief getting Haitian non-governmental organizations and Catholic agencies back up and running. Another $1.5 million is destined for the Caritas Haiti emergency program. There will be $1 million available soon to Canadian religious communities. Add to that a $3.5-million program to help NGOs set up offices, hire staff and work on programs.

Toronto Catholics contributed $3.9 million to the effort through ShareLife.

Development and Peace’s assistance to Haitian rebuilding is part of the Caritas Internationalis effort which has involved every Catholic aid organization in the world reaching out to a country that is 80-per-cent Catholic. Worldwide, Caritas raised $230 million in the first month after the Jan. 12 quake killed more than 220,000 and left a third of its people homeless, injured or both.

Caritas has already spent $46.8 million on relief efforts, delivering food to 1.5 million and health care to 400,000 among other things.

Things are still bad in Haiti, reports the Jesuit Refugee Service. There are nearly 1,400 camps for internally displaced people in and around Port-au-Prince. JRS reports squalid conditions inside the camps. JRS is delivering aid to more than 21,000 Haitians in seven camps, everything from psychological counselling to food and clean water.

But many are opting out of the camps. There are about 600,000 people wandering the countryside looking to restart their lives.

Development and Peace, along with the rest of the Caritas network, has one immediate priority.

“If we don’t want a major food crisis, it’s very important to support agricultural programs,” said program officer Danielle  Leblanc.

Canadian missionaries and parishes — including the Soeurs de Sainte Anne, Soeurs Missionnaires de l’Immaculée-Conception, Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the diocese of London, Ont., and the Soeurs de la Charité de Saint-Louis — ran schools, orphanages and other services before the earthquake. Now Development and Peace is giving them money to help get those services up and running again.

“The schooling system was weak and vulnerable before the earthquake and it’s now even weaker,” said Leblanc. “What we’re trying to do is bridge the gap between what they had and what it’s possible to do now.”

Development and Peace partners are trying to establish a more normal life for the earthquake refugees with short-term cash for work programs, as well as training in building skills so Haitians can be employed in reconstruction projects, said Bucher. Femme Decidé has been paying women to grow and plant saplings in areas that have suffered erosion. Another Development and Peace partner, the Papaye Peasant Movement, has used Development and Peace funding to travel to Brazil and learn how to make large scale water tanks that collect rain water for irrigation and drinking. The hope is the group will be able to establish a small-scale industry building the tanks.

Helping women and small farmers find a way to make a viable living and build a future for their children is all about long-term planning and organizing. It’s much less expensive than flashy three-month emergency operations setting up tent cities, mobile clinics and feeding stations.

“Our specialty is not emergency relief where we go and buy 20,000 tents and feed 500,000 people for three months,” said Bucher. “Our forte is in the partnerships we have with local organizations. Our forte is much more in the area of reconstruction.”