With the rainy season looming ominously on the horizon, Coco McCabe reports on Haiti’s preparations to shore up shelters and dig new drainage ditches in time for the coming downpour.
Late last week, rain doused the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, heightening the sense of dread among the hundreds of thousands of people who have been living in makeshift shelters ever since a massive
earthquake destroyed great swathes of their city in January.
The rains will start in earnest in April with the hurricane season following on 1 June. The concern is that cardboard and bed sheets — the materials currently serving as roofs and walls for countless people — will prove no match for Mother Nature. Even a plastic tarp will offer little comfort when the waters begin to rush and froth.
This is Haiti, where unchecked harvesting of wood for construction and charcoal has left 98% of the country deforested, only adding to the potential for flooding when the heavy rains come. And with many of the drainage channels around the capital now clogged with debris, where will the water go?
I can’t help but think of the anxious faces of those Haitians I met recently camped at Centre Sportif de Carrefour, a sports complex where several thousand homeless people had taken refuge under a variety of shelters, many of them constructed from sheets of white plastic stamped with “Made in China” logos.
When it rains hard here the water can pool up to three feet deep, according to Libermann Lexident, one of the camp leaders. That’s hip-height on an adult. Everything below three feet gets soaked. Even so, he said, people would rather cope with the flooding than move back to their damaged homes, so profound and ingrained is the trauma the quake has left in its wake.
“If it’s raining, it’s going to be very hard,” said Lexident. “So far, we’ve been praying. It’s been answered. If it rains, we don’t know where to go.”
Last week’s downpour, drumming a warning on to the plastic tarps strung out across Port-au-Prince, has heightened the urgency for tens of thousands of homeless families.
Oxfam is distributing tents and plastic sheeting to thousands of them and estimates indicate that there is enough shelter material — either in the capital or en route — to meet the needs of about 50% of those who have been displaced. Aid groups think that as many as 40% of them could return to their homes if their buildings are declared safe. Oxfam has a team of structural engineers in the capital right now assessing that issue.
But weather-worthy shelter isn’t the only cause for concern as the clouds start to gather. Sanitation services have become a critical issue as well, especially latrines.
The numbers are frightening.
The UN estimates that the devastated region needs 18,000 toilets but as the first month anniversary of the quake approached, aid groups and local workers had only been able to dig less than 1,000. Of those, Oxfam installed more than 20% — testament to our commitment in this area of expertise.
But the need remains enormous, especially as the rains approach and threaten to slop human waste into temporary settlements and crowded camps where there is little room to improve the drainage.
“We now need a surge in effort to improve sanitation facilities for people in Haiti,” said Marcel Stoessel, head of Oxfam in the country. “Let us not kid ourselves that this is going to be easy. It requires a Herculean humanitarian effort from all quarters. Around 230,000 people lost their lives on 12 January. It is our priority to make sure that we don’t let that number grow.”