Rainy Season Danger in Haiti
COOPER: Saving Haiti. Well, they survived the catastrophic earthquake. Now more than a million people in Haiti face another kind of potential disaster. We've been telling you about it, really, about the threat for weeks now. It's the rainy season. It's putting families in not even tent cities -- tarp cities is what we're talking about -- in grave danger. Torrential rains could flood makeshift shelters. We've heard about the plans and the promises to relocate those at risk and to move them to new settlements. For months they were talking about that. We're told now that the first wave of people to be moved will start this weekend. But will the sites be ready? That's the question we wanted to know. And are the people willing to go? We'll talk live to Sean Penn about the situation in a moment. But first, Gary Tuchman reports tonight from Haiti.</s>GARY TUCHMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): On this golf course in the hills above Port-au-Prince, there are no more greens or fairways. Instead, there are up to 60,000 displaced people in a place that regularly floods during rainy season. And it is now rainy season.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): We don't like living here. But that's the way it is.</s>TUCHMAN: Any time now it could start raining for days on end. Because this camp is on a steep hillside, people could end up getting washed away. That's why, for many weeks, there has been talk of getting these and hundreds of thousands of other people in unsafe places out of Port-au-Prince to a safer place. And this is that safer place. It's an area called Corail (ph) where this weekend Haitian families are expected to be bussed in to start new lives. (on camera): This area is only about 45 minutes away from downtown Port-au-Prince. But for the mostly desperately poor, displaced people who don't own vehicles, and therefore never leave their densely-populated city, this could feel like being on the moon. (voice-over): Back at the golf course, Selena Destina knows that she and her children are not safe here, but she's never spent any time out of Port-au-Prince.</s>SELENA DESTINA, EARTHQUAKE SURVIVOR (through translator): I would like to go, but I don't know the area. I have to find out more about it.</s>TUCHMAN: Actor Sean Penn started an aide organization to help earthquake victims. His organization oversees the golf course camp. He's trying to explain to people here that it's imperative they go someplace safer. (on camera): So basically when the rains start coming, this creek starts overflowing and it's dark. I mean, children could just drown and be carried away in the rapids.</s>SEAN PENN, JP HAITIAN RELIEF ORGANIZATION: Absolutely. And you see these areas here. This all becomes very slick mud. And they're right -- they were right on the edge of that, all the way up and down this ditch, because they come out of their tents to see what's happening and they could slip right down into it. And they'd be carried away in the dark at this point.</s>TUCHMAN (voice-over): Everyone agrees people who can't go back to their homes need to be in safer places. But why is it taking so long? It's been talked about since the days after the quake, almost three months ago. "Keeping Them Honest", we asked a member of the Haitian presidential commission for reconstruction what took so long to declare eminent domain and buy these tracts of private land.</s>ABY BRUN, HAITIAN PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION ON RECONSTRUCTION: It could have been done faster. But you have to coordinate it with the U.S. Army, the Corps of Engineers, with the U.N. people, with the European (ph) community, with the Oxfam, all bunch of actors, none of them working together.</s>FOREMAN: But it was a bureaucratic nightmare.</s>BRUN: That is rough. I've been involved with the task force, you know. We presented the government in the process of trying to sort out and making some planning for it. At the beginning -- now it's rolling. It's going to go faster.</s>FOREMAN (voice-over): When people arrive here, they will be given tents, but ultimately, will have simple homes built for them. There will be food halls, medical care and opportunities to make money doing jobs in this new community. But has the word gotten out? Does the U.N. really believe thousands of people will leave Port-au-Prince for a place they know nothing about? (on camera): You expect -- you expect next week at this time that there will be thousands of people sleeping here, living here where we're standing right now?</s>GIOVANNI CASSANI, INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR MIGRATION: Yes. It's going to happen.</s>TUCHMAN: Sunday is the target day for the new beginning. Gary Tuchman, CNN, Port-au-Prince, Haiti.</s>COOPER: Joining us now for the "Big 360 Interview," Sean Penn, who you just saw in Gary's report. So Sean, your camp needs to move thousands of people. Today you all performed, I guess, a test run for the first relocation of about 100 families. How did it go?</s>PENN: Well, in any case, this is going to be at this stage some level of organized chaos. You know, I find it bewildering that so many of the aid organizations are so overextended and that the completion of one project is -- is difficult to task. And we've got a couple of days to get things together, but in either case, the way that we're looking at it is the way that we struggle to focus people on, which is that this is very likely going to be a catastrophe if we don't make these relocations happen. You get people to safer ground. There's a lot of complicated mechanics to it and a lot of very skilled people, but in a circumstance where experience would be an arrogance. It's not something that anyone here has ever had to deal with in the complicated way that this disaster has played itself out in such a poverty-stricken zone.</s>COOPER: And I mean you go to these meetings at the U.N. I'm sure you spent many hours in these meetings. What are they like? I mean, how -- how big a problem is this bureaucracy?</s>PENN: Well, it's a problem of bureaucracy, and it's also a problem of breaking through the glass in front of our own face and seeing just how real this concern is. There's -- there's always a balance between the arguments for the perfect plan versus a decisiveness. And I think that you could find me clearly on the side of decisiveness, that as long as we make all efforts to -- certainly to be very honest with the people, to let them know what their option is. Whether it relates to aid incentives or in terms of the danger, the risk that they are at by staying where they are, that at that point it is their option, that our prerogative is to provide an area where people may very well die if the rains get heavy. They have an opportunity to live and then a lot more organization will have to go into that to get to the future. But I -- you know, this is a disaster period where decisive action has to be taken. And this is a country that had minimal health care to begin with. And hospitals are being allowed to close, despite all the enormous funds that internationally and in the United States that people have put forward. And I think it's time that they demand of the agencies to whom they've given the money, that they release those monies and spend them decisively. It's a six-month period. It has to be looked at as an emergency.</s>COOPER: Why are hospitals closing now? I mean, you have all these people who underwent amputations, who need follow-on care. Why has that happened?</s>PENN: Well, it's not only those that -- the follow-up care; it's also the care for the impending issues that are coming. The reason that they're closing is because, in general, when you have these kinds of funds, the organizations themselves will contract and spend money on evaluators. That takes time. The negotiations take time. And hospitals close while those negotiations go on before evaluations are ever made. And the hospitals run out of money after having not been able to pay staff that have been working 12- and more hour shifts for all of these months and months before the earthquake happened. And all of these agencies are aware of it, and they let it happen. They let it close. And if people die, the blood is on their hands.</s>COOPER: You know, what's the difference? I mean, you used to watch this stuff on TV and see this stuff in Katrina, that's what motivated you to go down there. You saw this in Haiti; that's what motivated you to go down there. You spent weeks and weeks there, longer probably than, certainly, any other well-known person, and you're running a camp of some 60,000 people. What is different -- I mean, what have you learned about, you know -- a lot of people look at the stuff, see it on TV -- over the last couple months, what have you learned about doing this, about how this -- how this actually works on the ground?</s>PENN: I think that in disaster over-caution kills people is the likely lesson. And I hope that we don't learn it factually.</s>COOPER: Sean Penn, I appreciate you being with us tonight, again. Thank you very much. We'll check in with you again. Up next a look at a high school that others should follow; one where every senior is headed for college. Part of our news series, "Perry's Principles." Education contributor, Steve Perry, has the story right after this.