Haiti Quake Updates

Updates from aid workers and journalists in Haiti 

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latrines

 
February 25, 2010
 

VIDEO: Young people help to improve sanitation in Haiti| UNICEF

via youtube.com

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, 22 February 2010 Sanitation is among the most urgent concerns in Haiti following Januarys earthquake. UNICEF estimates that overall, 1.1 million displaced people require emergency latrines. The agency and its partners plan to install over 10,000 latrines in the short term and another 20,000-plus within six months.

To help achieve this goal, UNICEF has enlisted its non-governmental partner, the Haitian Out-of-School Youth Livelihood Initiative (known by its French acronym, IDEJEN), to construct 1,000 sanitary blocks, which include latrines, showers and handwashing facilities. The initiative has enlisted 1,200 young participants to build the sanitary blocks.

"What you are seeing here is a sanitary block made by IDEJEN youth," she said, pointing to a unit with three latrines, which will also have a hand-washing station and a shower. "We'll take care of everything, in terms of management of the sanitary block, in terms of management of the excreta and in terms of evacuation of used water.

Filed under  //   cash for work   earthquake   haiti   idejen   latrines   unicef   water and sanitation   youth  
Posted by Jason Wojo 

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February 6, 2010
 

Bill Clinton, in Haiti, Emphasizes Urgent Need for Sanitation and Health Care

To prepare for future disasters, Mr. Clinton said he planned to suggest that the United Nations consider stockpiling latrines and other sanitation supplies in disaster- or conflict-prone areas around the world, much as it already does with medical supplies, food and water.

He said he believed that the United Nations and the international community needed to devise plans for handling natural disasters and conduct practice exercises to improve coordination and diminish response time.

Mr. Clinton was given the added responsibility on Wednesday of overseeing United Nations aid efforts and reconstruction in Haiti after the magnitude 7 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince, the capital, and surrounding areas on Jan. 12.

Dr. Paul Farmer, the deputy special envoy to Haiti who toured the clinic with Mr. Clinton, said: “For sanitation and health, the key is going to be to create community-based solutions, which basically means hire Haitians and lots of them to begin tracking infectious diseases, doing follow-up on treatments, as well as building latrines and water infrastructure. It shouldn’t be seen as some radical notion that we need to inject the money into the Haitian population, because they are the ones who can actually do the follow up.”

United Nations officials echoed the concerns over sanitation and health. “The rainy season is going to make our sanitation problems become our water problems if we don’t find a way to get more latrines built,” said Souleymane Sow, coordinator for Unicef’s water, sanitation and health cluster. “The rain will wash the waste into the area where people are living and may cause people to become very sick.”

More than 900 pit or trench latrines have been dug. But sanitation facilities are still needed for more than 950,000 people, Mr. Sow said. He added that more donations of services and latrines were still needed from sanitation companies in the United States.

At a sweltering encampment on Toussaint Louverture Boulevard, about a mile from the Port-au-Prince airport, Pierre Toutiane nodded in agreement about the need for more latrines. He stood in his shanty, which is crowded on three sides by other shanties and which opens on the fourth side onto a gulley flowing with human waste. Just inches from the gulley, Mr. Toutiane’s 3-year-old son, Christian, lay on the shanty’s dirt floor.

“Every day that trench gets wider and closer to us,” Mr. Toutiane said. “But we have no place else to go.”

Filed under  //   HelpHaiti   bill clinton   earthquake   haiti   latrines   port-au-prince   relief   sanitation   united nations  
Posted by Jason Wojo 

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