23475: Lemieux: IOL on 2004-10-17 : Life deteriorates in storm-ravaged Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>

Life deteriorates in storm-ravaged Haiti

Gonaives - There was no baby shower for Guirlene
Mondestin - no swaddling clothes, no cradle, no
toys.

The hospital where the babe was to be born is
still knee deep in mudslides, so instead it was
delivered at an Uruguayan military clinic set up
to deal with post-disaster medical emergencies.
In storm-ravaged Gonaives, it has become a baby
factory, with up to five deliveries a day.

Twenty-seven-year-old Mondestin lay on a bare
mattress, a surgical coat covering her legs, her
baby boy wrapped in towels at her side. She
stared at the ceiling as flies danced around her
face.

"Now I'm feeling sad," she sighed, wondering
about the future of her second child in this
tragedy-trapped nation of eight million. "There
are problems in the country. Where I live, there
are a lot of dead people and animals. There's a
bad smell, and lots of bugs. It's a bad
environment for a baby."

Like poverty, violence is nothing new in Haiti,
but now it's worse
A more immediate fear was "my baby needs food,
and I don't have money to buy it".

Like most people here, Mondestin lost not only
her money and possessions but her means of income
when Tropical Storm Jeanne sent walls of water
and debris-filled mudslides hurtling down on this
northwestern city of 250 000.

Mondestin's family had scraped a living from a
small holding in Mapou Chevalier, at the northern
edge of Gonaives, where they grew corn and
eggplants and raised goats and pigs. She would
hitch rides on pickup trucks to sell their
produce at a street market downtown.

Now the animals are dead, the crops flattened and
the field plastered with mud.

Four hours after giving birth, Mondestin was
ready to go home, walking gingerly while her
sister carried the baby.

'I just pray for mercy - for me and my children,
Gonaives and Haiti'
They flagged down a truck that dropped them off
at what once was the road home - a
mosquito-infested stretch of knee-deep mud and
water treacherously strewn with torn cinderblock
and tin, wrecked trucks, downed trees, all hung
over with the stench of rotting flesh.

Night fell, bringing blinding darkness as
Mondestin sloshed through filthy puddles,
teetered over planks and climbed along edges of
abandoned houses to avoid falling into the deep,
clinging mud that has destroyed her
neighbourhood.

Finally she reached the four-roomed home where
her husband, Sajous, and his brother had spent
two days digging out mud with a borrowed shovel -
the only preparation made for the new addition to
the family.

All they were able to salvage were some cooking
pots and a broken charcoal-burning stove.

Mondestin spent her baby's first days lying on
sheets on the floor with her swaddled son in the
sweltering heat of a pitch-black room she shared
with her husband and mother.

Three homeless relatives slept in an adjacent
room - on a sheet, a lawn chair and a rice sack.
The roof and wall of the kitchen collapsed in the
mudslide and the fourth room also remains
uninhabitable.

Still, the family strove for a sense of normalcy.

"After a woman gives birth, there are certain
things she must do," Mondestin said.

In keeping with tradition, the women of the
family, led by her mother Mailuc Florestal, 44,
poured an infusion of leaves over her head as
Mondestin balanced on a plank of wood over
suppurating mud behind the outhouse.

On the second morning of the still-unnamed baby's
life, Florestal let out a laugh and called to
neighbours on a rooftop: "What were those
gangsters doing last night, shooting like that
and making such a racket?"

The neighbourhood was abuzz with the night's
disturbance. Roof dwellers, among thousands whose
homes remain filled with mud, had had a clear
view of the young men trudging down the flooded
road, climbing into abandoned houses in search of
loot and rapping on doors and shooting into the
air to frighten people in occupied homes to open
up.

Like poverty, violence is nothing new in Haiti,
but now it's worse, Mondestin said.

Gonaives has suffered unrest since September
2003, when street gang leader Amiot Metayer was
assassinated and his followers blamed
then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Gang
members and police were shooting it out regularly
and victimising bystanders for months.

In February, the violence escalated into a
nationwide rebellion that forced Aristide to flee
on February 29.

Then came the floods.

When the water rushed in, blocking her home's
front door and rising to chest level, Mondestin
was trapped with her one-year-old son until her
husband arrived, kicked open the back door and
helped the two climb onto the roof of the
abutting house.

For two weeks the two families lived there, on
the roof, five people squeezed under a canopy of
sheets, until the baby was born.

Mondestin remembers when life was good in
Gonaives. The best year, she says, was 1986 when
a popular uprising ended the Duvalier family's
26-year dictatorship.

"There was electricity, food, people had enough
money, and agriculture was good. Since then, it's
like the Earth is cursed."

In 1999, at age 22, Mondestin was two years away
from graduating from high school but could not
afford to finish.

She had dreams of her children becoming
professionals - doctors or engineers or
agronomists - but doubts now that she will have
the means to send them to primary school.

Mondestin said her worst year in Gonaives is 2004
because of the violence, even though it's the
year she married.

The wedding was to take place February 13 but was
postponed because there was so much shooting.
March 13, she said, was a happy day. "I had a
beautiful, long, white wedding dress, and a
crown." Those too were lost, along with the
family's birth certificates.

Still Mondestin said she was blessed to survive,
noting many neighbours drowned in their homes,
including 13 in one house. Tropical Storm Jeanne
killed 1900 people in Gonaives and left another
900 missing and presumed dead and some 200 000
homeless.

Mondestin's biggest worry now is whether the new
baby can survive.

Within two days of birth, he was covered in red
spots, his lips were powdery and he was throwing
up his mother's milk.

Uruguayan nurses said he would live, but Dr Laura
Silveira said the spots were a Staphylococcus
infection affecting many infants in Gonaives,
brought on by exposure to contaminated mud and
water.

Doctors say Staph can lead to fatal meningitis.

"Even before this crisis, the situation of
children in Haiti was at a critical level," Carol
Bellamy, directory general of the UN Children's
Fund, said on a recent visit.

According to Unicef, Haiti's child mortality rate
is the worst in the Western Hemisphere - with
eight in 100 not living beyond five years old -
and the sixth worst in the world after Sierra
Leone, Niger, Angola, Afghanistan and Somalia.

To Mondestin, this is all part of a terrible
curse on Haiti. "I just pray for mercy - for me
and my children, Gonaives and Haiti," she
whispered. - Sapa-AP



Published on the Web by IOL on 2004-10-17
10:06:01






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