Author: Kenny Rae

In Haiti, Oxfam’s job isn’t just providing water, but working together with the local people who’ll be drinking it, our staff are ensuring its ongoing quality. Oxfam humanitarian response specialist Kenny Rae is currently in Haiti working on the recovery effort.

Tom Mahin, in blue shirt, helps set up a tapstand with five drinking taps, which draws clean water from an Oxfam water bladder. Photo: Kenny Rae/Oxfam America

Six months ago, Tom Mahin’s focus was figuring out how to improve the quality of drinking water in the Massachusetts city of Gloucester. The city’s 30,000 residents had been told to boil their tap water before drinking it due to high levels of harmful bacteria. Mahin is a drinking water specialist with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and is working as an advisor to Oxfam America in Haiti.

Because of the urgent need, Oxfam chose this camp to be the first to receive one of ten bladders — rubber tanks resembling big pillows — that hold about 2,900 gallons of water each. Until now the 1,482 people in this densely populated location close to the city centre were venturing out as far as a kilometre for drinking water. Today, for the first time since the earthquake on 12 January, 340 displaced families in Impasse Fouget, Port-au-Prince, have safe drinking water, thanks to Mahin and Haitian engineer Donald St. Preux.

Oxfam’s job is not only to provide water, but to ensure its quality, all with the participation of the people who will be drinking it.

How to build a ten tonne water bladder

At Impasse Fouget, our first task was to build a large platform with rubble, rocks, and earth on which the bladder would rest. A bladder like this, filled with water, weighs ten tonnes, so the platform has to be well constructed–a task that community members took on, with no request for payment. A flexible pipe running to a set of five outdoor taps carries the water from bladder down to where people can collect it.

Chlorinating water ensures its safety — and Oxfam works to reinforce that idea through hygiene promotion activities in the camps. When a delivery truck comes to fill the bladder, chlorine is added, a responsibility we have given to local users who have selected a water committee to carry it out. Mahin provides bottles of a 1% chlorine solution (quite safe — household bleach is six percent) to a committee member who adds it to the bladder. An Oxfam engineer, working with the same handheld meter used by water authorities in the US, monitors the chlorine level to determine whether it’s appropriate, and can adjust the concentration if necessary.

Oxfam is working in camps of many sizes, from a few hundred people to many thousands. Our team’s focus is on 35 smaller encampments in the Delmas district. Between 200 and 2,100 people might reside in each. Working at this scale makes our community-based approach for chlorination effective.

A test of the water emerging from the tank at Impasse Fouget showed an acceptable residual chlorine level of 2mg/litre — enough to ensure any bugs in the water would be killed, but not enough to be tasted except by the most sensitive palate.

Mahin’s with us for a couple of weeks, and by the time he returns to Boston he will have helped to bring safe water to more than 12,000 people — almost half the number who live in Gloucester.

Find out more about Oxfam’s Haiti Earthquake response

This article was originally posted on the Oxfam America blog.

As preparations for Haiti’s spring rainy season continue, Oxfam America’s Kenny Rae reports on shifting needs and a race against time.

It’s my first week back in Port-au-Prince after a brief respite in Boston, Massachusetts. Last night was uncomfortable. Not physically, as my tent is now packed away and I’m sharing a room in a down-at-the-heel hotel on a hillside overlooking the harbour. But as I listened to the rain, I realised that my conditions were utterly luxurious compared with those endured by the tens of thousands of families sleeping rough in the city below me.

With the threat of rain imminent, 12 year-old Samuel swings his pick to build a drainage channel for his family. Credit: Kenny Rae/Oxfam America.

A thick layer of mud

My concerns were confirmed first thing the next morning. I visited a small spontaneous camp in Delmas 83, where I was confronted by around 300 people who had just been through a miserable night. The rain had turned the topsoil of their small field into a thick layer of mud. The few grassy strips remaining around the perimeter were laid out with clothes, mattresses and even sodden cardboard boxes that had previously been used for improvised shelters.

Our intention in coming here was to set up latrines but now other priorities are beginning to seem more pressing. Will the 400,000 square feet of plastic sheeting ordered arrive as promised by next week? It is critical that it gets here as soon as possible so that we can start distributing it to the more than one thousand families we’ve identified as in need of shelter. I find myself with tough decisions to make. Should I deploy two of the four Haitian engineers working with me to focus exclusively on drainage in the camps? How would this affect the plan to set up water tanks next week and the endless demand for toilets from neighbourhoods throughout our working area?

The need for drainage

While dwelling on this, I find that people in the camps were all too aware of the need for drainage and many of them had started digging small trenches around their own settlements. Samuel, a 12 year-old boy, is swinging a pick almost as big as he is, cutting a channel around the tiny tent he shares with his mother and sister.

Other urgent issues emerge. I am told that the owner of a nearby piece of land currently housing a small camp has changed his mind. He wants the latrines built on his property removed, even though hundreds of people are already using them.

“Doesn’t he realise that this is a much more hygienic solution than having people pooping in the open,  that it’s temporary and that Oxfam will fill and cover the pits?” I ask.

“Yes, but he wants to talk with you,” comes the reply, so I know that a good part of tomorrow morning will be spent trying to resolve this, a real stretch for my two years of high school French.

Gathering materials

The problem at Delmas 77 was a bit more basic. The engineer had explained to the work crew that the latrine pit had to be dug 90cms wide. The next day he was running around gathering materials. When he returned today he found a hard-working crew digging a pit 1.5 ms wide (fully one foot wider than the length of our latrine slabs). We had to have a talk about communication and the need for supervision but ultimately came up with a good solution.

I have a tentative plan for the next two weeks: to identify priority sites for additional water tanks and start to set these up, to have one of the engineers trained in how to properly chlorinate and test water, to continue scouting other potential priority sites for more toilets and get these built.

But after seeing the impact of this week’s rain, reviewing the increasing populations of the camps and knowing that within a very short time the heavy rains will be here, I realise that we need much more plastic sheeting. After conferring with colleagues, I call the manufacturer in Ohio and ask how soon we can have an additional 500,000 square feet. He’s sympathetic to our needs, explains about his obligation to existing customers but promises delivery here in two weeks. Hopefully this should give us enough time to begin distribution before the downpours begin.

Find out more about Oxfam’s Haiti Earthquake response