February 4, 2010
The evening temperatures have been near-perfect for camping. The only minor downside has been the serenade of nearby roosters crowing and dogs barking throughout the night. You quickly learn to sleep through it. More and more of the resident CHF staff are going back to their houses to sleep at night.
Language barriers continue to be an issue. Today, we were supposed to visit the IDP (internally displaced persons) camps. Due to a language-related misunderstanding, we ended up at the Ministry of Education. The building was destroyed by the earthquake, resulting in many fatalities. The most complete set of records of Haitian citizens resided in this complex, so early on CHF did quite a bit of work recovering information from the on-site computers.
Because we started at the Ministry of Education, we were only able to make it to one IDP camp. It is situated in the field of a soccer stadium. We were told that there were 4,600 people in the camp. Based on a quick estimation of the number of tents, that looked about right. There were rows of tents tied together for the length of the field with 18 to 24 inch alleyways between the rows.
When we arrived at the camp, there were vendors on the street above the stadium selling highly-turbid bottled water. There was also a water truck on the field and a long queue. The truck left before everyone received water, but those left in the queue just sat down and stayed there.
We asked to see the “president” of the camp and were taken to the top of the stadium steps into a small room not more than three by five feet. There were at least a half dozen people in there when we arrived. In most places when you ask to see the community leader, you are introduced to an elder in his late sixties or seventies. The “president” of this camp was no more than 30 years old and well-muscled. I don’t think there was an election to the post. He spoke Creole but little French, so communication was a challenge until a Haitian-American named MarcDany Pierre found his way into the room. He was from Miami, spoke fluent English, French and Creole and was agreeable to translating the conversation. We asked the leaders to prioritize their needs. They went off and prepared the list shown here.
Organizations that act as first-responders to disasters focus on providing immediate relief with solutions that are close to immediate as possible. However, these solutions are not necessarily economically, operationally, or environmentally sustainable. Immediate relief efforts can include the provision of bottled water, water bladders, or high-tech purification of surface water. Our focus has been on building capacity in communities and facilitating the use of locally-accepted technologies for water and sanitation that have been proven to be sustainable. The trade-off is that our solutions don’t provide relief within hours and days. Both approaches are necessary, but they are completely different and serve different, but equally important needs. So, in considering how the earthquake might impact our programs in Haiti, one possibility is to deploy in the camps that will likely become permanent settlements and ultimately communities. There are all types of considerations with that approach, but that is the subject of a longer note.
Tomorrow, I have made arrangements to meet with MarcDany at the IDP camp and travel to other sites where he can act as a translator.
- Keith Stamm, Water.org Chief Operating Officer
