Red Cross Blogs

Haiti earthquake: live update from hygiene aid worker

By Sarah Oughton
January 26, 2010 at 1:39 pm

Listen in as I call Sharon Reader – one of our delegates in Haiti.

Sharon is part of our mass sanitation emergency response unit, joining the huge relief effort in Haiti.

Transcript:

Hello this is Sarah Oughton, International writer at the British Red Cross based in London. I’m speaking to Sharon Reader who is one of our emergency response delegates currently based in Haiti. Sharon, can you tell us when did you arrived and what you’ve seen so far?

We arrived in Haiti last Thursday the thirty first of January. Well we arrived first into the Dominican Republic and then the following morning we got up early and caught the bus up from Santo Domingo to Port-au-Prince. Which took about nine hours, it is quite a lengthy journey. Driving into Haiti, initially you could see straight away that a lot of the buildings damaged, cracked but you could also tell that underneath that it had been a poor city beforehand. And so the earthquake has hit it hard and it didn’t have a strong infrastructure to begin with.

And where are you based now?

We’re based at a Red Cross base camp, there must be twenty different national Red Cross societies. Next to us we’ve got the Iranian Red Crescent and on the other side the American Red Cross so it’s quite an international field. But conditions are pretty basic in the camp. It’s a wood warehouses we’re in, so we’re in the courtyard of it, pretty stony ground, we’ve just had to pitch our tents. I’m sharing a tent with one of the other delegates, Liz who is a hygiene nurse. We haven’t got any electricity, there is some power in the corner of the warehouse that we can use as an office, But it’s pretty chaotic in there, everyone’s fighting to get a seat. There’s two toilets, two showers but only have water for a short while every day, no fridge or anything along those lines. So its pretty basic, it’s pretty hard going but it’s quite inspiring you know that everyone’s getting on with it really and the mood is quite good.

Have you had a chance to get out around the city and find out how people are coping?

Yeah we have. We’ve been out two days I think to do some assessments. Mainly sort of gathered in an open space within their neighbourhoods. You can find anything from maybe a hundred families have gathered to fifteen hundred or two thousand families gathered in these open spaces. We’ve been to see about ten different camps to check the sanitation. If they haven’t got any latrines what do they do with their rubbish and have they seen any cases of things like diarrhoea. We’ve been speaking to the people in the camp about what it would be like, so yeah we’ve done quite a few assessments now and found two camps that really need us so that’s where we’re going to start.

Great, and what are the main public heath risks?

The main public health risks are in one of the camps Automec, or Diahatzu as its also called, its really crowded, everyone’s very, very close together and it wouldn’t take much for a disease to just run like wild fire through a camp like that. Haiti already has a bad incidence of bad diarrhoea but something like this, people don’t have access to the normal toilets or water or showering facilities, then that obviously gets much more serious. So we’re looking out for cases of diarrhoea, any kind of cases caused by things like sand-fly or flies attracted by the rubbish piling up in the camps. Also keeping an eye out for things like dysentery, malaria, all these kinds of diseases.

And can you explain a bit more about what you and your team are doing?

Absolutely, it’s not a glamorous job, we’re the sanitation team. So we will be going into the camps, seeing where people go to the toilet at the moment. In most cases the  camps don’t have any latrines at all so no toilets. I mean it’s given us an evaluative area of where people go to the toilet. But if it’s not hurried then doesn’t take much for them to get a bit on their foot or their hand and that’s how diseases spread. Sorry about the helicopter overhead there [noise in background].So it doesn’t take much for disease to spread in that way. So basically we’re looking at building quick latrines in most of the camps we’re going to work in. We’ll also be speaking to the camps about what to do with their rubbish, which is usually just collecting it and burning it, that’s the best option. Also we will be looking at washing facilities, showering facilities and we’ll be doing hygiene promotion as well. So making sure people have got water to wash their hands with, but also that they know to wash their hands after they’ve been to the toilet. What to cut down the risk of malaria, have they got mosquito zones? Those kind of things as well. I mean most camps we’ve visited its quite impressive the Haitian people have formed a committee in the camp so its quite well organised. They’ve got people to make sure that the water is delivered, people get access to some sort of food, and we’ll work with that committee to construct latrines.

That’s really encouraging to hear that people are managing to get themselves organised. And thanks for taking the time to speak to us and we’ll catch up with you in a couple of days time.

Great thanks Sarah.

Thanks Sharon, bye.

Donate now to the British Red Cross or DEC Haiti appeal.

Image © Marko Kokic/IFRC

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Tags: emergency response, emergency response unit, ERU, Haiti, Haiti earthquake, haiti earthquake appeal, sanitation, video, water and sanitation

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