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Haiti: a disaster tourist destination?

By Pete Garratt
February 23, 2010 at 10:30 am

Travelling through Miami on the way back from Haiti I fell into conversation with someone who saw my red cross shirt.  He said he wanted to go to Haiti “just to see what its like”.  I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and hope he didn’t mean as a disaster tourist – someone who revels in visiting disaster zones.  Sadly it happens and frankly it’s pretty upsetting when you have just witnessed at first hand the suffering but also the spirit with which Haitians are trying to respond to one of the worst disaster events in history.

My driver while in Port-au-Prince pointed out what used to be his house, now a pile of rubble where two of his family lost their lives.  Ten yards away the rubble was scorched with burn marks, the result of two other bodies being so badly buried and unable to be reached that their families had decided to cremate them in situ.  Everyone you speak to lost family or friends.  The trauma of this earthquake is going to take a long, long time to get over as people begin to put their lives back together and the city is rebuilt.

I’m writing this on the plane back to London after a four day visit to the earthquake response operation.  With 25 BRC staff involved and having already utilised £3.7 million of the funds that have been raised I needed to see for myself how the operation was going.  Perhaps I was a sort of disaster tourist myself as I visited the camps where BRC is providing latrines and promoting good hygiene, observed relief distributions in difficult to access hillside settings and saw the extraordinary devastation caused to entire neighbourhoods and peoples efforts to clear up rubble.  Actually, there was an important difference, namely that the timing of my trip was so I could decide, together with the Red Cross technical experts on the ground, what are the best ways for BRC to support the operation in the next two to three months in terms of people, expertise, materials and finance.  The outcome was to commit a further £2.5 million for emergency shelter, sanitation and
relief support with more to follow in the coming days and weeks. It is clear that sanitation and shelter are the overwhelming priorities right now.

The first night I was there the heavens opened and heavy rain poured down.  The Red Cross operational base is a tented village and some of my colleagues were flooded out.  A minor inconvenience for them but we all were dreading what the night must have been like for families in the cramped camps, huddled together under whatever shelter they could find.  I headed down to one of the biggest camps that morning with our sanitation team and was pleased to see that the Red Cross had distributed 5,000 tarpaulins there the previous week, which provided precious cover and kept off the worse of the rain.

The second camp I went to was in a far worse state.  As I walked around families were busy trying to dry out their possessions and digging out little drainage channels around their rudimentary shelters; they had basically ended up sleeping in the mud.  With the full rainy season fast approaching we simply have to continue to provide as much shelter as we possibly can, hence the Red Cross target of doing this for 300,000 people.

Whilst clean water is now being provided in adequate quantities sanitation is another major concern and we are in a race to provide enough latrines and ensure these are kept clean to help minimise the increases in diarrhea and cholera that are quite likely to come.  Indeed, we are already prepositioning cholera treatment kits in Port-au-Prince in preparation.

The reality is that we’re going to have be prepared to meet continuing major humanitarian needs in a hugely challenging and tightly packed environment for several more months yet while at the same time lay the groundwork to begin the full recovery process that is going to be needed over the coming years. So far the Red Cross has stepped up the mark and I’m proud of what we’ve achieved, but we can’t afford to rest on our laurels and Haiti will continue to dominate the work of our disaster management teams for the foreseeable future.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 10:30 am and is filed under Emergencies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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