Red Cross Blogs

A foretaste of Haiti’s impending rains

By Nick Young
March 29, 2010 at 3:30 pm

We return to Base Camp for a security briefing. There is a strict 6pm curfew, and great care is taken to ensure the safety of our teams. There have been some violent incidents as frustrated people show their anger.

Then it’s day’s end, and our mass sanitation team members review progress – pits dug, latrines built, timber (in impossibly short supply) sourced for next week, the warehouse cleared and sorted.

I say how pleased I was with the cleanliness of the camps, how proud of all their hard work. They smile and exchange glances.

At supper time it starts raining. Sheets of solid water sluice down from a black sky. We sit out for a while under an awning.

Soon we are soaked from the splash back. I trudge to the social tent, wet through, and meet Marcel and Ian, who are running the massive Red Cross operation here.

They know that the rainy season is coming, tonight a modest foretaste: it will bring a second wave of disaster and misery for the camps, and Haiti will slide another few steps backwards. No one talks of rebuilding.

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Tags: earthquake, Haiti, water and sanitation

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 29th, 2010 at 3:30 pm and is filed under Emergencies, International. 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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