for news updates throughout the day, head over to aljazeera.com. i'm liss sa fletcher and you're in the stream. billions in untraceable donations and cholera. we talk to haitians four years after the earthquake that devastated their country. my colleague and typically behind the scenes digital guru omar is joining me tonight for our digital producer on set. >> always fun to do this. >> our community is really keying into the fact that all of this money has been donated, but there really isn't a good paper

trail as to how it's been spent. >> there is not, and there's a lot of frustration with what seems to be widespread indifference about the fact nobody knows where the money went. we have a lot of pupil weighing in on community. everybody is to blame for haitian recovery. we have john here who says most-quake haiti releff went to efforts that while effort are only band-aids for long-term problems. dominique says haiti's recovery is not designed to aid the people but to cement an economic and political status quo. nick says they don't need aid but a political and cultural refuse revolution. at home we want to know what you think and be part of the conversation tonight. be sure to tweet at the hashtag on your screen right now. >> how far has haiti come since the earthquake four years ago? according to the u.n. 174,000 haitians still live in makeshift

shelters, i.e., tents in extremely precarious conditions. they also face expulsion due to land rights issues. compounding the problem more, 650,000 haitians have been sicken by cholera which they believe was caused by u.n. workers. although the u.s. pledged $1.5 billion in aid, according to the center for economic and policy research, the vast majority of the money went to straight u.s. companies and organizations. only 1% went to haitian companies and groups. the report also noted a lack of transparency as the state department was not required to track anything after the initial $1.5 billion pledge. in the end the u.s. has pledged even more, a total of 3.6 billion in all. so how can there be so little progress and so little tracking of the money? joins us for more is keisha, a southeastern policy analyst with action aid usa.

they advocate for the land rights of small farmers and women in foreign countries. joins us by skype is a citizen journalist in at a time tan and we have the co-founder of god ministries, and they do a lot of things including building schools and supporting orphanages in the after math of the quake. also in the hangout is ben. welcome to all of you. obviously, a big part of the discussion is digging into the money trail. before we do that, take us back to that day in 2010. you were in an internet cafe right before the quake hit, and you really had a near-death experience. >> yeah. it was crazy, liss sa, because we were just in the internet cafe. we were waiting for a friend, and the earth started to shake. we went into the cafe, and it fell down.

we're in the middle of the street. it's like when a lot of dirt is coming out and we felt like we were the only person that survived for like 30 seconds. after we heard all the people screaming "save us" and everything, it's really in a zombie movie. every face was blank, and everything -- i don't really like to talk about it. it was a very, very bad experience. >> how long after you left the cafe did it collapse in front of your eyes? >> we just got out, and it fell down. about 15 people died inside. >> oh, my goodness. >> sadly, you lost your grandfather that day. we actually have a photo of you standing in front of a building in which your dad worked. it's a pile of rubble. what was the scene like for your father and sister that day? >> actually, i just want to say

hi. i did not lose my father. my sister was in that school where you saw like -- there was like 5 hundred sthunts, and only three of them survived in that day. >> so your sister, you initial thought she was dead, and how much time transpired until you found out otherwise? >> i found my sister after three days. when me and my friend, my best friend, ricardo, when we went to port-au-prince to look for it, it was like a tragedy as well. what you saw on tv, it's nothing compared to if you were there in the flesh. i found her. they have a clinic down there,

and then i found my sister. she was really injured really, really bad. >> your parents are there. talk a little bit what's going on there day to day four years after the earthquake. are families getting the support they need? >> well, i think nowadays if you go to haiti, you will find that most people are still hoping. people are hoping that things are going to get better, but they're not sure that what they're seeing is the light at the end of the tunnel. it's because they're not sure the policies are being implemented and making a difference in their lives. >> what do you hear from your folks when you talk to them? >> i think the lack of inclusion of haitian people in the decision-making process. this is probably one of the biggest hurdles we're facing right now. >> are there baifk baifk needs they're struggles for? >> the right to food. in haiti it costs 11 and 12

dollars a day to feed yourself, and wages offered don't pay for that amount of money to feed one person let alone an entire family. >> we have some community weighing in about the fact that the earthquake took everyone by surprise, and that affected preparedness for it. ricardo says reconstruction is extremely challenging. they were not prepared for a tragedy. he said in the pre-quake haiti, only 40% of the urban population had access to clean water and sanitation. can you talk a little bit about how that impacts the situation we find ourselves in today. >> clearly, haiti was a very vulnerable country before the earthquake, and the earthquake was the worst natural disaster in recent history. when you have vulnerable people that are very -- that can be impacted by an earthquake, you will see very serious damages that are occurring. in this instance i think that

there were many things that be could have been done better in order to help haitian people deal with the impact of the earthquake and part of what needed to be done was to make sure that they were at the decision-making phases where the lines were being discussed. >> we definitely want to get into more of that in a couple of minutes. omar mentioned in one of his tweets this idea of lack of access to clean water and sewage situation. there was a hoff rick outbreak of cholera that still continues, 630,000 people sickened and more than 8,000 killed. talk about what the impact of that outbreak has been on top of just the devastation of the quake. >> people already don't have basic services, and you have what available water they have is contaminated. cholera is something that can be treated, and it's one of those diseases that can actually be addressed with proper effort.

we'll get into the money later, but there are resources to deal with these things. the question is whether or not the groups that have these resources are the -- have the capacity to deliver services and whether they've been wrong and deceitful and corrupt in asking for dollars, because maybe they're not the right groups to have the money. >> so you're suggesting that these groups have positioned themselves assist something they're not just to get ahold of the money, they're not capable of taking care of the problems they say they can help with? >> that happens all over the world. there are a lot of well-intentioned people that want to help. some organizations have tremendous capacity to deliver services and others don't have any capacity at all. on the photos on their website, the stock photos they use are photos they have taken themselves, maybe they only have a few people on the ground when the disaster happens and they might raise 10 million or more to respond. they can't deliver services until they ramp up their capacity. there are all these

organizations in the country already, a lot of them local, civil society organizations in haiti not raising hardly any. we all the 1% figure. they're dependent on international ngos, nongovernmental organizations to give them money. instead of allowing haitians to help themselves and build resilience for future disaster, we see a great dependency on outside organizations. >> he mentioned this inability for most haitians to access a sustainable amount of food every day. talk about that from your perspective on the ground. >> for me, i think the way some people see haiti sometimes, i feel like haiti is destroyed by the ngo. as a haitian i feel that because people sometimes think they can do things for haitians. ngos hin haiti, even if you hav

an organization in haiti, you can't do it for haitians but do it with haitians. most people -- i use the example. it's like when you go in an and you saw nice animals and you want to bring the little animal home. somebody said no, the animal is just there for people to come to watch. i feel most people in ngos use the haitian people like animals at a zoo. they come and take pictures and say, this is what we're doing, but in actuality in haiti most of those ngos, they are buying cars that cost roughly 60,000 or $50,000 which can feed the whole village, which it build a nice school building to help the haitian people. >> those are powerful accusations. i want you to hold that thought.

when we come back, we're going to get more into that, where has all the money gone? we're talking about billions in aid, and haitians say they're not much to show for it including an effort led by former president bill clinton that builds a 182,000 industrial park in port-au-prince. we'll fill you in on the details next. i'm phil tores. coming up this week on techknow. techknow's shini somara goes straight into the storm. winds of 150 miles per hour. but this twister is created in the lab. >> i'm at the national wind institute where they can actually recreate a tornado. >> now science and technology take on mother nature. >> who wins? >> it's completely fine. >> techknow. sunday 7:30 eastern on al jazeera america. fema sending clean water to west virginia in the wake of a toxic chemical spill. hundreds of thousands can't

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>> that is a harsh reality that's hard to watch. welcome back. we're talking about haiti. how far it's come four years after its devastating quake. ben, is there any way to know how much the money donated actually got in the hands of the haitian people or programs that directly benefit them? >> overall not really. the organizations that are raising these dollars are not subject to information laws. you can look in their tax returns to see how much they spent in the caribbean each year in the last three years. but in their tax returns, they say operations in the caribbean, that's it. unless they tell you specifically what they've done, that's the problem. the partnerships and relationships maybe a bunch of organizations are contributing to the same program. they might say we did this so that inflates the success of what really happens.

>> what bill was mentioning, a group of ngos were driving on the beech through the disaster area in a $60,000 car. >> it's not that the relief can be done cheaply put the results should be much more than they have been. much more resilient for disasters and civil recovery organizations are not that resilient and haiti is dependent on outside support looking at those numbers, the pictures of people on the show of such dire straits, the immediate reaction is they want to help. and you can't blame them. the question is how can people help effectively and give without middle men? we don't need organizations regranting. we don't have need organizations doing things for people in haiti. we need people in haiti getting

dollars directly and doing things themselves. 90% of these organization he left. >> ben doesn't just talk about they has worked for them. >> i want to point out actually something else, take a quick look at my screen here. la von la mont is the prime minister of healthy haiti, he wants to know why there isn't anyone from authority on the show, we reached out to him to see if we could get him as a guest but didn't hear back. government to government aid, ben says, never gets to the victims. gabe says you might as well flush the money down the toilets, the people don't get it. mary says put the money directly in the hands of the people who need it. the same haitians who were fighting over a bowl of rice,

were fighting over a bag of rice on the 13th. do you agree that the aid has actually divided haitians? >> just to show haiti is bad, to be honest with you, most people don't to to haiti to look for good news. they just go to haiti just to talk bad about our country, which is the first black country in the world. i don't have any trouble with my government, access is government more than government in the past. the problem is if anybody would like to bring haiti, they must do the haitian people, people in haiti don't have any skill. when you don't care for the people, you don't know their feelings. you don't know what they really want to do. haitian people they don't really have a dream. to be honest with you they do have it but they don't have any opportunity to access that

dream. >> i know you want to jump in. >> sorry, but i have to say that it's not people who coming, they not coming to see better the way they do it is not the best way. when we not saying that the same person was prize for fighting on the 23rd, i mean because the head was distributed on a bad way, because the people was coming and say hello haitian people, this is uncle sam who coming to help you. but this is what we can offer you, we have the technician, what do you want to do, that could be better. you know, it's not really like the help in general. it's more about all that's being distributed and how it's being organized. for example when you say tons of rice in the haitian market, you know it's

produce that of lots of money they cannot sell their rice anymore because too much free rice on the market right now. people can get for free. so it's smart, but what itself, when you say shoes for haitian people what they will do with shoes? they will wear it but did we really need shoes, rice and stuff like this. >> i want to put you on pause. go ahead. >> i think there's plenty of blame to go around, it is not who is to blame but exactly what is to blame and the structural i inequities, make a big difference, and put you in these inequities, after an earthquake and billions of dollars pledged to haiti, four years later we're

still asking where did the money go and the haitians didn't see much improvement in their lives. >> and this brings up these land use issues you deal with so closely in haiti. can you explain why haitians have been displaced when physically it did not affect them? >> that is a good question, puzzling people outside of haiti. the haitian people do not have stocks, they do not have bonds they do not have bank accounts, they do not have retirement accounts. their sland their most important asset. in haiti, 95% of haitians do not have secured access to land. they may have a title to their land, the title can be taken away, it can be contested in court, the title may be out of date and sometimes they have been occupying the land and

using the land for decades under what you would call a social relationship. and that land is easily taken away from them now in the name of reconstruction and this is what happened in the north of haiti, where indeed far from the epicenter of the quake and in the north of haiti, about 250 hectares of land prime agriculture land was taken away from 266 farmers in their families and the agricultural workers who use that land regularly for communities, to pay for their school and market that land was taken away in the name of benefit. displacement? >> if you speak to the community not at all. in the wages that have been offered in that industrial park are about $5 a day and they are still struggling to -- >> to eat.

>> to eat. doesn't make any sense whatsoever. >> clearly haiti was struggling before the quake. so what is it going to take to rebuild the country back to that level, how involved should the u.s. be, keep tweeting us, we'll

real reporting that brings you the world. >> this is a

>> welcome back. that video that you're watching quake. very much showing the resilience of the haitian people. something not very often talked about, as we see lots of images of poverty and destruction. ranel you tapped into the psychological needs of haitian people very early on after the disaster. and that was the need to express their emotions about what was going on and you did it with a hairbrush. tell us about that.

>> yeah, it was like a quake like on the night me and todd a friend we take a hairbrush and a camera look a plastic bottle and we go we ask the camera what you feel tonight and what do you want tonight? who you lose, what you lose, and the answer is like i lose all my friend my family my house. but when we have them what they -- ask them what they need tonight, they say we need that everything back to the normal. and i think it's reflect what all the haitians want everything back to the normal. but the question is: what is the normal? the normal what is it for haitian people? because we live like lack of pure slavery, haiti before we got independence not so late after we got dominated like for

almost 20 years by the u.s., you know when they were takings possession of our land. after we got the capture and then arristide demonstration, another earthquake but what is normal for haitian people? >> there's a tremendous amount of resiliency among haitians but do you see that level of optimism changed at all due to the lack of progress or do you see a sense of resolve that still exists there? >> i think haiti is in a process. i think haiti is better than the way haiti used to be. young people in haiti we stand to change our country. because one thing you said, how can someone, just asking myself that question, how can someone they not change a country if you do not trying to help change the people's life?

everything about haiti is like haitian people, people everybody that's going omeat how they can have haitian people, the only way is knowledge. haiti do not have problem with food. haitian people we strong we can work. haitian people we do have knowledge when people talk about building school in haiti, they don't build any library in that school. after they just built a building. they don't build like a place where kids can go do research. you live like in 2014. trying to -- >> we actually have some community -- we have some community weighing in talking about what it is things acan be done to help. ngos who drive 60,000 dollar vehicles have got to go.

there should be a balance of profit and loss statements. lynnie, she goes on saying, seriously, where all the money went for the relief aid i donated. and finally, we should at the core if we're going to talk about what a prosperous inflation, talking about the united states, we should be able to give like we are one. >> we have about 30 seconds left. how do you measure progress? >> you measure progress what the haitian people need. you need food, you need resources, you need to be in the driver's seat. in the u.s. government itself there is a bill that is by the house called the assessing progress in haiti bill one that will hold the u.s. government accountability. >> accountability is needed across the board. thanks for all our guests for joining us, until

>> welcome to the news hour, coming up on the program one of the controversial prime ministers in the middle east. >> he took difficult decisions and implemented them courageously. >> the head of egypt gives the clearest signal yet he could run for