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
Stay updated regularly on David's trips, upcoming travel itinerary, useful photography tips and recent photographs. Sign up below.
All Material © 2008 David Snyder
