A rare moment to breathe and catch up on things like blogs today. After 6 weeks of 18 hour days, 7 days a week, most aid agency staff seem to be laying low today on a Sunday, trying to catch their breath. I’m with CRS now, still in Port au Prince, and have switched from pics of disease surveillnace as I was taking with the CDC last week to water and sanitation pictures, as CRS gears up for large scale water programming. Visually it may not be that exciting – latrines and water tanks – but the work is vitally important in the camps, which remian crowded. No one is going home yet, and it may be years before some do.
It’s raining here now fairly often – every night, or two of the last three I think now. That makes it hard to camp, as many of us are here, with computer and camera equipment constantly in damp weather. Btu it’s far worse for the people living in the camps, many of them under just thin shelters of plastic tarp, with dirt floors.
Though I used to do emergency work often, it’s been awhile now since I was in one this big. It is a strange and quirky atmosphere, difficult to describe for those who have never been to such a place, at such times. People from all over the world coming together to work on any number of disaster related issues – logistics, communications, security, camp management and HR. They gather at the few hotels available each nigh to drink beer and discuss the day. You can just as easily hear English as French or sometimes Spanish in any given circle at any given time. Many know each other from other disasters from other parts of the world – I’ve met 6 or 8 people here I knew from my days at CRS, some of whom I haven’t seen in many years. Everyone is disheveled – a day spent sweating in 90 degree weather in a warehouse or a displaced camp doesn’t leave you looking fresh and ready for a dinner date. People are sunburned and whiskered and spending inordinate amounts of time on their phones, trying to make plans for the next day or sorting out problems from today. Often things don’t go to plan – I’d be OK saying usually. Trucks break down, partners don’t or can’t do what they promise to do, some staff just drop the ball in the midst of the crazy pass. Beneficiaries in cash for work programs quit, saying they want more money. Sometimes things go really wrong and trucks carrying supplies get looted – spontaneous distributions as they are euphemistically called. Things fall apart for no reason at all sometimes.
But in general, eventually, things get done. Shelter kits get distributed, water trucks arrive, and latrines are built. People eventually recover. Aid workers fly off to France or the US or England and get ready for the next disaster. And today, it is so nice to have a few minutes to catch up to myself. And I have only been here a week.
February 28th, 2010 | by David in Travel
You forget, when you haven’t done emergency work in awhile, just how strange a scene these things can be. I;m at a hotel tonight after week of camping on a rooftop. And I’m camping here as well, in teh small yard in front of the hotel, which is filled to double occupancy with aid workers from around the world. I ran into several old friends already, which is always nice, especially in an emergency. I’m tired after 5 days, and people have been here for almost 7 weeks now, some of them. To say nothing of the Haitians, sleeping outdoors till, many of them, for fear of going back inside. It’s common after earthquakes – people are traumatized, an the thought of being killed or pinned by falling rubble is too much for weeks and months after a big quake like this one. Its hot and humid at night now, but mosquitoes are a problem. Malaria rates will surge in the coming weeks as teh rains come, and with them the standing water in the more than 300 camps will certainly breed disease. A woman died of typhoid in one of the camps today, but this far there is nothing like an epidemic, which is a rare piece of good news. Midnight now – off to my tent.
February 24th, 2010 | by David in Travel | 1 Comment
A word tonight from Port au Prince. I’m typing between two chairs, hunched over for the third or fourth hour now so please forgive any typos. Got in yesterday on the second day of commercial flights, Baltimore to Maimi, Miami to Port au Prince. Spending these first few days with the CDC – Centers for Disease Control – which is always an interesting experience. Basically they are doing what they call shoe leather surveillance, which means getting out physically to the largest of the more than 300 camps that now dot the city like ragged pock marks, sheltering many of the more than 1.1 million people now in need of shelter here. After any such disaster, rescuing survivors is always the first priority. But with that phase over – Haiti has lost as many as 230,000 people – the next great worry is disease, even as aid agencies scramble to provide food, water and shelter to survivors.
The CDC is here to prevent the type of outbreaks that made the Goma camps of the early 1990’s a nightmare, where hundreds of thousands of Rwandans, many of them complicit in the recent genocide in Rwanda, crowded unsanitary camps just across the border in Goma, Congo
. Thousands died there of cholera, which spreads rapidly once the genie gets out of the bottle in a crowded camp. The team I am here following is out and about, working with NGO’s in the camps to help them to serve as the front line of reporters for potential outbreaks of things like cholera, typhoid or malaria. Once the system is up and functioning fully, in about a month, medical staff in the many camps can report suspicious illnesses and provide the samples needed for further testing, so that any potential outbreaks can be quelled quickly.
Following that CDC team I spent a few hours today in two of the camps here. The first, now covering most of what used to be an airfield on the edge of the city, is home to 43,000 people, living under plastic tarps, mostly. Others are building with wood and even corrugated metal salvaged from their homes or the remnants of others, now destroyed. For the conditions, I found people remarkably upbeat. People smiled, posed, and joked. It never ceases to amaze me how resilient human beings can be. One man with a badly burned leg called me over and posed for a photo. I came across a boy of maybe 14 in another camp flying a kite, despite the third degree burn on his wrist, the result of a cooking fire accident in the camp. The fact that the wound was open and untreated, however, is a prime example of just how vulnerable these displaced remain and just how much work remains to be done.
February 21st, 2010 | by David in Travel
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