Haiti hit by heavy rains

24 February 2010

And then came the rain... On Wednesday 17 February, Haiti’s capital experienced its heaviest rainfall since the earthquake, a soaking downpour that lasted for several hours. The storm, the second this week, foreshadowed things to come when the rainy season sets in next month.

A woman and her family live in a tent community on a soccer field in Jacmel, Haiti. Photo by Jonathan Ernst/LWR/ACT Alliance

“It has rained before, but not so hard and so long,” said Marie, 37, who lives in a makeshift shelter in the Delmas 40-B encampment in Petionville, with her 10-year-old son. Her other three children died in the earthquake.

A home of garbage
“Our clothes got wet, everything got wet. I just tried to keep the water out the best I could,” she said. Whenever water started to pool in the tarp that serves as her roof, she would push it up with a stick and try to make sure it ran off to the outside instead of coming in.

The residents of Delmas 40-B and most other encampments in the area live in very small shelters they have constructed from scavenged materials – bed sheets or pieces of plastic strung between sticks, their meager belongings piled inside on dirt floors. A lucky few have found pieces of wood or corrugated metal to put together a slightly more substantial structure. The morning after the rainstorm, the grounds of the camp had turned to thick, slippery mud.

Mosquitoes cover the standing water in the Delmas 33 tent encampment in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, February 19, 2010. Photo by Jonathan Ernst/LWR/ACT Alliance

No sleep in the rain
Ouslande, 30, another Delmas 40-B resident, lives with her cousin and two children in a shelter made of bed sheets. The cloth was not keeping the rain out, so they turned their mattress up on its side and spent the night standing on blocks inside their shelter to stay out of the mud. None of them got any sleep, she said. The National Weather Service is predicting above average rainfall for the next two weeks for Haiti.

Shelter is a major concern, cited by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) as one of the most urgent priorities facing the humanitarian community. OCHA estimates that only 24 percent of the 1.3 million people in need of shelter have received tarps or tents. ACT Alliance members are prioritizing the delivery of shelter items in the hope of reaching as many people as possible before the rains come.

Can’t build houses fast enough
“We’re all concerned about what to do when the rains come, but it seems the rains are already here – I think it’s an early onset rainy season,” said Sophie Gebreyes, program officer for Latin America and the Caribbean for the Lutheran World Federation Department of World Service, an ACT Alliance member.

“It’s a major concern for us, as for any humanitarian organisation working here. We simply cannot build houses fast enough, so we’re starting with emergency shelter like distribution of plastic sheeting. We’ll also start soon with building transitional shelters, and providing building materials so people can build sturdier shelters before the hurricane season begins.” The issues of shelter and sanitation go hand in hand, she said, as the potential dangers of the rainy season include outbreaks of malaria, dengue, and waterborne diseases.

By Emily Sollie, Director for Communications and Media Relations for ACT Alliance member Lutheran World Relief.