18006: (Chamberlain) Haiti water (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

(Sun-Sentinel, 7 Dec 03)


`It's up to God to bring more water to this island'

The staff of life is also the bringer of death in Haiti, where access to
clean water is limited

By Tim Collie



PORT-AU-PRINCE-- Samantha Joseph's quest for water begins just after
sunrise when the roosters crow in Jalousie, a sprawling slum of
concrete-block hovels that tumble down a steep mountainside above Haiti's
capital city.

Joining a steady stream of young girls lugging empty antifreeze jugs,
medical-waste containers, old paint cans and bright-colored buckets, the
demure 13-year-old makes her way over a rocky slope each morning, past the
homes of this country's elite.

If a groundskeeper is hosing the gardens, she may beg him to fill her jugs.
If there's been a heavy rain, she and other children may rush to collect
water trickling out of irrigation pipes from the well-fertilized lawns.

After walking three miles through several other slums and busy streets, the
trek ends at Tete de L'Oeu -- the fountainhead -- a small, sky-blue
concrete building that resembles a public restroom on a South Florida
beach.

A crossroads for the urban poor, the fountainhead offers a snapshot of the
chaos wrought by Haiti's growing environmental crisis: A man in shorts is
pulling wire toward his home from a utility pole in a bid to steal
electricity -- a common act of piracy that electrocutes dozens each year.
Behind him, others collect water from a filthy stream to make concrete
blocks for new homes on land they occupy as squatters. Toddlers with
bellies bloated from malnutrition play alongside scrawny pigs, goats and
other livestock in foul puddles teeming with flies and mosquitoes.

Samantha and other girls crowd into the building, pushing money through
bars to a clerk who then steers them to another caged area where they fill
their containers.

It's 9 a.m.

Like most here, she has never been to school; her family cannot afford the
cost or the loss of Samantha's labor.

"It's women's work; that's just the way things are here," explained Marie
Therese Pierre, 62, the girl's grandmother and the matriarch of a household
of 58 people, mostly small children, who live on a tiny plot in Jalousie.
"But it's getting harder. There used to be plenty of water here. It was
easy to find, and the streams were clean. Now the streams are dirty and the
girls, they walk a lot. But we cannot do without it, we try to collect it
when it rains but that's really not enough."

Darlene Joseph, Samantha's 16-year-old cousin and guardian, also buys water
to resell in the streets, although she doesn't make much money. "In the
home where I grew up we have a faucet in the house, but water hardly ever
comes from it," she said.

Less than one-third of Haiti's population has access to clean drinking
water and sanitation. The number of people who live within 15 minutes of a
clean water supply has fallen dramatically in recent years. Demand from the
growing population has overtaken dwindling supplies. Young girls like
Samantha are walking ever-longer distances in search of water.

Haiti is at the forefront of a global water crisis. What happens here
during the next decade, experts say, could take place in larger, similarly
water-poor countries. Although it receives huge amounts of annual rainfall,
Haiti has managed to become one of the driest, most disease-ridden places
on Earth. Freshwater aquifers are shrinking. Desert areas are expanding.

Recent studies by the United Nations and other groups have ranked Haiti
among the worst in the world for water supply and quality. Investment in
water and sewer systems -- largely constructed by the United States in the
1930s -- has not kept up with population growth. Most of the countryside,
where about half the population lives, has never had plumbing or sewers.
Fewer than one-quarter of rural residents have access to clean water.

Clean water is a foundation of modern public health. The advent of water
and sewer treatment plants in Europe and the United States in the 19th
century precipitated rapid declines in the rates of typhoid and other
infectious diseases.

But in Haiti, much of the country remains hundreds of years behind
developed nations.

"Water is life" is a common phrase among Haitians. The average Haitian's
life span has fallen to 49 years -- six years less than a decade ago -- in
part because of disease rates tied to dirty water.

Women and children suffer the most. With running water lacking in most of
the hospitals, Haiti's maternal- and infant-mortality rates are among the
highest in the world. Twelve of every 100 children die before their fifth
birthday, and more than 500 of 100,000 women die during childbirth. In the
United States, fewer than one of 100 children die before age 5; about seven
of 100,000 U.S. women die during childbirth.

"Our biggest problem is water, followed closely by the lack of
electricity," said Yvrose Lestin, a nurse at Carrefour Hospital, outside
Port-au-Prince. "Water determines everything. The mothers who come here for
treatment often don't have any water at home, and they're usually coming
long distances without enough drinking water."

The women who reach this hospital are among the lucky 20 percent of Haitian
women who give birth in a clinic or hospital. The rest rely on family
members or village midwives. Lestin says most women show up only when
they're in labor, usually at night to avoid filling out forms or standing
in long lines.

"Some women get sick and nauseated just because of all the dirt, all the
sewage in the water they're drinking," Lestin said during a break between
patients. "We're not supposed to, but you end up feeding them and giving
them water because you can't have people dying of starvation in a hospital.

"We do lose quite a few children here. Many are just born dead because of
the bad water their mothers have been drinking."

Dr. Paul Farmer, who has run a clinic in Haiti for 20 years, says the
impact of environmental conditions on health care is staggering.

"Maternal mortality rates are -- no other way to put this -- appalling," he
said, in testimony at a U.S. Senate hearing on Haiti last summer. "Even the
low-end estimates [523 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births] are the
worst in the hemisphere, and one community-based survey conducted in the
1980s pegged the figure at 1,400 per 100,000 live births. For a sense of
scale, those same figures in the United States, Costa Rica and Grenada are
7.1, 19.1 and 1 per 100,000 live births, respectively."

The water crisis affects every link in the island's food chain. Water
flowing from the mountains into fertile watersheds should transfer rich
minerals like fluoride, iron and calcium from the soil to plants to animals
and, ultimately, to people. Streams should run clean, fast and swift,
emptying into freshwater lakes and the ocean seabeds, nourishing habitats
for fish, an important sustenance food.

But as deforestation and erosion cause Haiti's rivers to silt up and dry
out, freshwater lakes are disappearing and coastal seabeds are smothered by
runoff from the mountains.

"There used to be fish coming out of this lake -- nice big fish -- but
nobody's eating fish here anymore," said Willy Mathurin, a fisherman who
lives along the L'Etang Bois Neuf, a lake that has dried out. Cattle now
graze its surface. "The United Nations came here one time and was actually
going to start a fishery. Now look at it."

Mathurin said poor farmers and fishermen cannot stop erosion. Only a
national effort can do that.

"There's no way to stop the mud from coming and blocking up these lakes,"
he said. "There's no time to plant enough trees to save people here. The
water that's life is just nothing but stagnant water, not the sweet water
we need."

As more lakes and streams are lost, young girls like Samantha must walk
farther and families must pay more than ever for the precious liquid. Some
foreign-aid experts estimate that simply getting cheap drinking water to
Haitian families would raise their income by one-third and perhaps allow
more families to send their daughters to school.

"I have a husband and a son who are earning most of the money, but my son,
the bricklayer, all of his money goes for the water," said Pierre,
Samantha's grandmother. "It didn't use to be that way, but what do you do?"

Water is also power. A new well will draw squatters so rapidly that the
path to the water is quickly obscured by dozens of makeshift shanties
erected virtually overnight. Many squatters sell what they don't need for a
small profit to water-gatherers like Samantha.

"The biggest concern for us is the effect it has on the children because it
is the girls who are sent to fetch the water," said Jacques Laguerre, 30,
head of a citizens group in Jalousie. "We've had many children hit by cars
on these busy streets fetching water. Some are walking three, four miles
one way and they get very tired, very quickly."

Chantal Coq estimates her family may spend as much as 25 gourdes -- about
75 cents -- a day on water. That's a huge sum, considering the average
daily wage in Haiti is just over $1. "But we know that it's safe water,
that's the thing," said Coq, 26.

Others, meanwhile, have created a private system of water by drilling
illegal wells that tap into the country's aquifer. In the Cul-de-Sac area
of Port-au-Prince, drilling continues night and day on private lots where
dozens of tankers fill up under giant pipes. The neighborhood poor gather
the runoff to bathe, wash their clothes and collect drinking water.

"I know it hurts the underground water; it's more brackish than it was a
year ago, but if the country was working well, then I wouldn't be doing
this because there wouldn't be any money in it," said Harry Frantz, 35, who
manages about 30 trucks a day from his pumping station on property in the
Cul-de-Sac. "But people need water, I need money, so this is what you have.
We're all just trying to survive and without water that won't happen."

In places like Jalousie, the few residents with running water in their
homes sell it to others.

"There's maybe 1/20th of the homes here that have plumbing, but those are
the power brokers," said Laguerre. "They become merchants overnight, and
the money is better than anything they'll make in another job."

There is no public sewage collection or treatment in any of Haiti's cities,
leaving many water sources contaminated with organisms that cause fatal
diseases and gastrointestinal illnesses.

Haiti's abundant rainfall could provide enough water for its current
population, if it were captured and well-managed in clear canals,
water-treatment plants and distribution facilities. On average, the country
receives about 55 inches of rainfall every year. By comparison, South
Florida receives between 40 and 65 inches every year.

Political conflicts have stymied efforts to reverse the country's water
crisis and better manage resources for irrigation, sanitation and
consumption. In July, the Inter-American Development Bank said it would
release nearly $200 million in loans to Haiti that had been withheld since
2000 because of missed repayment deadlines. About $146 million of that
money is slated to improve access to safe water and improve roads and
medical clinics over three to five years.

But tens of millions of dollars have already been spent on such efforts,
with mixed results, in the last two decades.

The Pan American Health Organization funded construction of 148 water and
sanitation systems in rural areas at a cost of some $16 million during the
1980s. But efforts to build on those initiatives have stalled in the past
decade.

"The country has more than enough water; it's a question of storing and
managing it well," said Jean Andre Victor, one of Haiti's leading
environmental researchers. "But if we started now, it's going to take
years, perhaps decades, to correct this crisis."

Victor envisions a coming environmental struggle with the Dominican
Republic, which, though poor, has much better access to water and
sanitation. As Haiti's rivers and underground streams continue to dry up,
more pressure will be put on the Artibonite River, the main source of water
for both countries.

"You have two different cultures sharing the same island: One is running
out of water, but the other still has plenty of it," said Victor. "If we
don't work out better ways to manage our water, I really fear serious
problems breaking out over the Artibonite."

Haitian government officials could solve the nation's water crisis by
following the Dominican Republic's lead -- creating systems to capture,
treat and distribute the island's abundant rainfall for consumption,
agricultural and industrial uses. Reservoirs are needed to store fresh
water. Land-management techniques are necessary for replenishing aquifers.
Conservation programs would ensure that surface water sources -- lakes,
rivers, ponds, springs and streams -- are well maintained and managed.

Barring that, the country will continue to exploit its finite sources of
ground water.

"The serious deforestation that has taken place has upset the rainfall and
hydro-geological system of the country," concluded a United Nations
Development Program report this year. It has led to a "decline in the flow
of springs and the replenishment of underground water. ... The volume of
water flowing from 18 springs that supply Port-au-Prince has dropped on
average by 50 percent in the last 10 years. A similar situation exists
practically throughout the entire country."

Once that fresh water is gone, it cannot be replaced.

"They're drilling in so many places that the aquifer is going down and the
salt water is coming in," said Paul Paryski, a former U.N. environmental
manager who ran projects in Haiti from 1994 until 2000. "Once that cycle is
complete, it's finished. You cannot rebuild an aquifer."

But such consequences are inconceivable to the Joseph family, whose water
carriers cannot imagine conditions becoming worse than they already are.

"Something has to improve because we can't walk much farther for water or
we'll be gone all day," said Samantha Joseph's cousin, Darlene. "It's not
up to us, but it's up to God to bring more water to this island.

"God or the government."