Rainy Season Not Yet Here--February 2010
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Rainy Season Not Yet Here
Haiti: Survivors Face New Fear
By MJ Smith
Port-au-Prince - The rain came in the middle of the night, turning the ground under tents made of blankets into mud, and all anyone could do at Haiti's sprawling homeless camps was be thankful it was not May.
They sought better cover or just stayed where they were. Some were resigned to not sleeping.
"You've got to stand up," said Markson Jean, a 24-year-old who lives with his three-year-old child in a massive camp at what used to be a country club golf course on a hilltop overlooking Port-au-Prince.
Haitians who survived the collapse of their homes in last month's devastating earthquake that killed more than 200 000 now fear something that may at first seem far less threatening: rain.
Downpours like the one early on Thursday have provided a reminder that the heavy rain season begins around May even as 1,2 million people made homeless by the quake remain living in camps or in the streets.
Besides the obvious concern that homeless camps will be consumed by mud, the rains also threaten to create a nightmare health scenario unless functioning latrines and drainage can be built in time.
The UN humanitarian coordinator, Kim Bolduc, said last week that the Champ de Mars camp near the destroyed National Palace, where about 16 000 people are living, had already "turned into an almost dangerous area" due to poor sanitation.
Aid workers are rushing out tarpaulins in a bid to provide everyone with some kind of shelter before the heavy rains, but officials admit that they will only provide basic protection even if they can be distributed to everyone in time.
They are also working to build latrines, but UN officials recently estimated that only five to 10 percent of what was needed had been completed.
"No matter what, though, it's not going to be pretty," Anthony Banbury, the deputy head of the UN mission here, recently told AFP.
Officials have chosen to focus on distributing tarpaulins instead of tents in part because they can reach more people faster.
"There is an impression out there that we will be able to turn around and build transitional shelter with framing and all that by the rainy season. Forget it," said Canadian Deputy Commanding General Nicolas Matern of the Haiti Joint Task Force.
"It ain't going to happen. We don't have the resources nor the time to do it."
The strategy is a hard one for many desperate Haitians to accept.
Some waiting in line recently to collect tarpaulins - including those who said they arrived at 3.00am for the distribution that began more than seven hours later - said the material was not nearly enough.
After Thursday's rain at the golf club camp, where a vast patchwork of makeshift tents housing thousands stretches downhill on what used to be bright green grass, Haitians dug small trenches to keep their tiny living spaces from flooding again.
They hung clothes from rope, dragged mattresses out to dry and washed clothes. Others waited in line for vaccinations.
"Water came in over the ground," said Clautide Berlice, 32, as she washed clothes in a small basin outside her shelter made of blankets and wood.
"It was really hard."
Ten people live in her shelter near the top of the hill at the golf course, where the view extends past collapsed buildings and ruined neighbourhoods toward the Caribbean Sea.
The camp is better off than others, with many tarpaulins being used as opposed to scrap material, though there is plenty of that as well.
Old signs were turned into walls, while thin tree branches were being nailed together to form frames.
Some said they had been provided with food rations such as rice. Others said they had yet to be given anything.
Elisoi Mista, 64, carried sticks for his makeshift tent in one hand and a machete in the other. He too said water had entered the shelter where his wife and two children live the night before.
His house collapsed in the quake, but he and his family were not inside at the time.
"God has given me a chance," he said.
"Because we are still alive." - Sapa-AFP
Published on the Web by IOL on 2010-02-19 11:12:35
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Comments in 2021--
Rain is a big deal in Haiti. It is the subject of many daily conversations. As the rains go, so goes Haiti.
Why?
Without good drainage, as water always seems to run downhill, people at the bottom suffer immediate consequences. Street markets can be washed out along with roads and schools and medical clinics. People can't get to work because they are too busy cleaning up their own house of water and mud.
And when water drainage goes wrong and sanitation is weak, water-borne diseases can take over. Cholera was not a thing in Haiti when this article was written, but a few months later in October, cholera in Haiti's main river would take over and begin to sicken and kill hundreds of thousands of people over the next decade.
The New York Times had a "slide show" in late February 2010. It showed the dismal living conditions of thousands of Haitians in impromptu camps that were set up after the quake. The article focused on human waste that filled the camps and the danger that it imposed. Interestingly, a Haitian company SANCO is shown in one of the slides dumping dirty water in Cite Soleil. The same company dumped human feces from the Nepal UN soldiers camp in a river north of Port au Prince which started the largest cholera epidemic in the world in October 2010.
Why do I mention SANCO? Well, the UN brought cholera to Haiti. And intense efforts were made to hold the UN responsible for the epidemic. Were intense efforts used to hold SANCO responsible for the epidemic? They made good money dumping cholera into Haiti's main waterway which poisoned many downstream Haitian people.
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Friday, February 26, 2010
Haitians Expected to Return to Ravaged Neighborhoods....Are They Kidding?
(More about the rainy season in Haiti and the fear it engendered after the earthquake.)
(Photo by John Carroll)
February 26, 2010
Haiti Wants Refugees Back in Ravaged Neighborhoods
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:13 a.m. ET
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) -- Relief officials have changed tack and are urging Haiti's earthquake homeless to return to their destroyed neighborhoods as the rainy season fast approaches.
Officials had initially planned to build big camps outside Port-au-Prince. They still anticipate creating some settlements, but they decided this week to instead emphasize getting people to pack up their tents and tarps and go home.
For that to be possible, authorities will need to demolish hundreds if not thousands of buildings and remove mountains of rubble.
A 20-minute downpour Thursday evening gave a taste of the approaching rainy season and the problems it will bring. People dashed for shelter down streets streaming with runoff while trash clogged gutters and turned depressions into ponds.
Haiti's government weather service lifted its warning of heavy rains Friday morning, but advised people to remain vigilant as chilly winds and dark clouds moved through Port-au-Prince.
Floods and mudslides threaten hundreds of thousands living in camps, and many dwellings are severely damaged or clinging to the sides of hillsides.
At a camp housing 40,000 people in the hills overlooking the capital, Matin Bussreth ran for cover from his bedsheet-tent to a neighbor's plastic tarpaulin during the drenching Thursday night.
''It's a deplorable moment,'' Bussreth said. ''I heard they might be giving out tents. I hope someone will be giving me one.''
Some of the hundreds of Haitians who lined up at a downtown site Thursday to register for the new campaign to resettle many of the 1.2 million homeless back in their old neighborhoods expressed skepticism about the plan. Relief officials also acknowledged the immense challenges.
''There will be flooding. There will be discomfort, misery. And that's not avoidable,'' a top U.N. official for Haiti, Anthony Banbury, told a New York news conference this week.
Gerald-Emile Brun, an architect with the government's reconstruction committee, agreed. ''Everything has to be done before the start of the rainy season, and we will not be able to do it,'' he said Thursday.
Brun suggested that Haitians, who expect little of their corrupt and inefficient government, may largely be left to sort it out themselves.
Camp dwellers -- the capital alone has some 770,000 -- welcomed the idea of swapping flimsy makeshift tents in the city's fetid center for something more stable. But that didn't mean they wanted to return to their quake-ravaged neighborhoods.
Jean Petion Simplice, a 44-year-old father living with his two boys, wife and mother-in-law under a scrap of sheet in the capital, said he feared returning to his district, which is a shambles.
''They're going to remove us from here, but they won't tell us where we're going,'' he complained as he joined a line of hundreds to get registered at the Champ de Mars, in the shadow of the collapsed National Palace.
The International Organization for Migration began registration at the plaza Wednesday, collecting people's old addresses in hopes that most can be resettled relatively quickly in their old neighborhoods.
The camp is home to some 60,000 people and was chosen to begin registration because about 45 percent of its residents come from a single Port-au-Prince neighborhood, Turgeau, said U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. John Blackwell, who is involved in coordinating the plan.
Not everyone will be able to return to their neighborhood, but relief officials expect to know within two weeks who can after determining which structures are viable and which must be demolished, Blackwell said.
Mark Turner, spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, said that ''this is the big new strategy, our big push right now'' -- to decongest overcrowded and unsanitary camps. ''Most people have some kind of tent or structure. We want to be able to tell people, 'Just pack it up and take it home.'''
Haitian President Rene Preval described the new plan Thursday to visiting Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, saying the idea is to create small camps of 50-100 tents.
Brun described a lengthy process to get the new strategy moving. Blackwell said engineers have only assessed about 25 percent of the Turgeau neighborhood -- so it will take at least until late March to sufficiently clear enough rubble to enable resettlement of the throngs jamming the Champ de Mars.
Officials say the government would compensate owners for land taken, but land tenure is a politically volatile issue in Haiti, where the courts are clogged with tens of thousands of land disputes.
''The lack of identified land is the dominating issue for shelter,'' said a report released Thursday by a ''shelter cluster'' of U.N., U.S. and independent groups working with the government on the issue. So for now, priority is going to the plan to resettle people on the ruins of their old homes or close by.
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Associated Press writers Frank Bajak, Jonathan M. Katz and Dario Lopez Mills in Port-au-Prince and John Heilprin at the United Nations contributed to this report.