23848: Hermantin (news)-Miami-Herald-In Haitian city, a hard life is left harder by storm (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Wed, Dec. 08, 2004


In Haitian city, a hard life is left harder by storm

By JOE MOZINGO

Miami Herald


GONAIVES, Haiti - The disastrous flooding that hit this city two months ago
is now a searing white cloud of dust, beaten into the sky by an army of
mopeds.

It is damp earth preventing the poorest of poor from making charcoal for a
living. It is cheap cinderblock eroded like rotten molars, mud-crusted
mattresses and clothes, weeds and debris heaped on crumpled tin rooftops.

In the 2 ½ months since Tropical Storm Jeanne inundated this city and killed
nearly 3,000 people, residents are coming to a resigned acceptance that life
here will be hungrier, dirtier and more dangerous for years to come.

The immediate fears of typhoid, cholera and famine never came to pass, but
mere subsistence -- which has always been a struggle in this crumbling port
city -- is going to be a long, bleak slog out of the mud.

The recovery has begun in earnest. Children are back in school. Merchants
are selling used shoes and other hand-me-downs on the sidewalks. Tractors
are scooping up towering mounds of debris, dislodging the pigs that used
much of the city as a sty.

Relief agencies have brought in tons of rice and installed giant water tanks
to replace the city's system of wells and hand pumps, now buried in mud and
hopelessly polluted. The Red Cross set up a tent hospital to replace the
destroyed General Hospital.

''We thought it was going to be a lot worse,'' said David Bellemare, head
nurse at the tent hospital, which treats 300 to 400 people a day.
Gastroenteritis from overflowing sewers and polluted drinking water is the
most common problem. ''No asthma or respiratory problems from the dust
yet,'' he said.

WAVES OF VIOLENCE

Doctors also see a lot of gunshot wounds, sometimes several a day. In the
past two months, untold numbers of people have been injured or killed in
gang warfare and robberies.

The violence has come in waves. By the end of October, food convoys were
being looted and some aid organizations pulled out of the city. In early
November, the rebels who helped oust President Jean-Bertrand Aristide
earlier this year clashed with police and forced them to abandon the
station. This city of 200,000 people -- four hours by axle-breaking road
from the capital -- was drifting toward a disastrous isolation.

But the atmosphere has now quieted down -- a little. Police officers
returned under the protection of U.N. peacekeepers, as did the convoys of
food from Port-au-Prince.

''The situation remains precarious,'' said Guy Gauvreau, Haiti's director
for the World Food Program, ``because of the armed gang that is still in
power in Gonaives.''

As of last week, the World Food Program has delivered 3,126 metric tons of
food to the city.

DAILY STRUGGLE

All the help has prevented starvation, but it has done little to relieve the
day-to-day misery.

Clotide Dorime, 50, just last week finished shoveling the dreck out of her
home. Dirt and pebbles still cover her windowsill. Weeds and shreds of trash
bags are caught in the joints above her walls, eight feet high.

Several weeks ago, she sent her seven children into the countryside to live
with relatives.

''The rain took everything I had,'' she said. ``There's no life here.''

Dorime said she can't get food from aid groups because she lost her
identification papers in the flood. Neighbors angrily nod in agreement,
echoing the complaint.

SHACKS FULL OF MUD

Dorime's neighborhood -- Riel Wawa -- is a warren of cinderblock shacks,
many still full of mud and mosquitoes. In a vacant lot, standing water has
bloomed neon green with algae. In an easement where a wall collapsed, the
bodies of two of their neighbors still rest under the rubble. The road in is
impassable.

''This is where I live,'' said Bertone Pierre, 23, on the rooftop of a
neighbor's home. There are six battered mattresses on the roof, once their
refuge from flooding, now their only mudless space. Across the neighborhood
are dozens more, surrounded by buckets, furniture and toys.

''There is nowhere else to go,'' he said -- of the roof and the city.

His friend, Pierre Dateuse, points to the road. ``Traffic can't get through.
No one cleans it up. The government does everything for Port-au-Prince, but
it does nothing for Gonaives.''

As he spoke, crews were clearing debris on the main thoroughfares with big
tractors. But the neighborhoods looked mostly like his, as if the flood had
hit a week ago.

In a little hamlet just outside town, a mother of four named Enid Michelle
now lives on a mud flat, the skin cracked like old makeup, but moist
underneath. Her wells are ruined. Her home tilts absurdly in the direction
of the flood.

''Everything we ever had was taken away by the storm,'' she said.

Michelle is part of an extended family that lives in this cluster of huts on
the road south to the capital. They make their living raising a few goats
and pigs, and hunting the hills for sticks to burn for charcoal, which they
sell in the market.

DEFORESTATION

Only a few of them understand that the deforestation of hillsides for
charcoal is what made floodwaters move so devastatingly quickly on Sept. 18,
but they say they have no choice.

''That's the only thing we know how to do,'' Michelle said.

Now, her family is stuck. The ground is too wet to burn the wood in the
holes they dig. Their livestock washed away. They spend their time
plastering the stick frames of their huts with gray mud and going to town
for water.

They don't plan to move into one of the refugee camps set up around the
city. This is their home.

The matriarch of the village, Sylvia Loren, has lived here for 80 years. She
remembers when the hills were ''beautiful'' and full of trees. Now they look
like giant moldering anthills.

In all Loren's time, she has never seen such a flood. ''This was the first
time, the very first time,'' she said. ``Only God knows why.''