Red Cross Blogs

Visiting Red Cross camps in Haiti

By Nick Young
March 29, 2010 at 11:43 am

Haiti airport approaching midday; the arrivals lounge, a large corrugated hangar, is superheating in the hot sun. We queue for immigration, as cases and bags are flung in through a hole in the wall.

Flying over Port au Prince, it looks like a dozen other Caribbean islands: green, mountainous, sandy beaches and bright sea. You can see occasional clusters of blue roofed dwellings, but to a seasoned disaster practitioner it is clear these are tents and tarpaulins, sheltering the lucky ones.

A hand grabs my shoulder: Cassius from the Red Cross takes my bag and we fight our way to the truck and drive the short distance to Base Camp.

Here, there are neat lines of white tents, offices set up in a ruined hotel and lunch with the gracious Haitian Red Cross President Madame Gedeon.

Every disaster produces heroes and heroines – here is one of Haiti’s: precisely spoken, neatly dressed, daintily emphatic, she has dragged the Society to its feet after the devastating quake, found volunteers from nowhere, and now directs operations from a dark, dusty, windowless room with quiet efficiency.

The Danish Red Cross chef produces a delicious soup, and pasta salad. There are mangoes. We eat quickly and leave for the Camps, Automeca and La Piste, where British Red Cross is building latrines and organising the sanitation for 12000 and 48000 people respectively.

Automeca is a clean lively place, a collection of makeshift huts and shelters built on some waste ground beside the main road. It seems calm and cheerful on a Saturday afternoon, the residents taking their weekend ease, squatting in shady doorways, a few feet from their neighbours.

We visit latrines – there is one for every 209 people. They are spotless. The community committee demonstrates how well built they are, and we watch a gleeful gang of small local children dancing around two clowns who teach them a hygiene chant: “After I poo, I wash my hands” they sing, to howls of mirth, as the kids wave their arms and jump about in the gravel.

Two small boys fly a kite, a ragged tangle of sticks, string and scrubby plastic. Up and away. They wish.

We drive on to La Piste, bigger, built on some kind of ceremonial parade ground. Here there is washing going on by the grey scummy waters of a storm drain.

We are building a shower block here, the carpenters already at work. The latrines are clean here too, but scraps of used paper still end up on the path outside.

This is a crammed, edgy place, the wind scurrying busily around the shacks, all built from tarpaulins and scraps of wood from fallen homes and offices.

They lean on each other at crazy angles; here is a small shop, there a bar, now a guy beating out some sheet metal; it looks incredibly well-established, as if this has been home for years. It probably won’t look much different in 5 years time.

Disgracefully, for some Haitians, these are the best living conditions they have ever had. You sense that the good weekend mood could shift in an instant, the tension there just waiting for the excuse to erupt. They have reason to be angry, these unlucky folk.

Follow Nick’s visit to Haiti on Twitter.

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Tags: earthquake, Haiti, water and sanitation

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 29th, 2010 at 11:43 am 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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