Haiti Quake Updates

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.”

text sizeAAA

January 31, 2010

In Haiti, relief organizations are still struggling to get food, water and other aid to the survivors of the devastating earthquake that struck earlier this month.

But some food and other necessities are available on the streets and in the markets of Port-au-Prince — if survivors can afford it. That has led some aid groups to shift gears a bit and pay people for clean-up work, so they can buy what they need to survive.

Enlarge David Schaper/NPR

Lunide Francillon, a mother of six who lost everything in the earthquake, sweeps the street to make a little money that she can use to buy food and other necessities for herself and her family.

David Schaper/NPR

Lunide Francillon, a mother of six who lost everything in the earthquake, sweeps the street to make a little money that she can use to buy food and other necessities for herself and her family.

On Rue Prolongee in Port-au-Prince, survivors have set up a shantytown using sheets, blankets, boards and whatever else they could find to create shelter. The aid organization Oxfam has begun hiring some of the people, giving them brooms and shovels to help clean up the area.

The work makes the camp more sanitary, while also providing a bit of income to survivors who would otherwise have nothing.

Lunide Francillon is one of several women sweeping up and shoveling trash and small pieces of debris into rusty wheelbarrows. She says she needs money badly. Francillon and her six children have been left with next to nothing. With no job, she has no way to clothe and feed her family.

The situation for many like Francillon is increasingly desperate — food aid comes inconsistently at best, and even when food is delivered, not everyone in camps like this one is able to get something to eat.

Improving Sanitation For Survivors

Enlarge David Schaper/NPR

Latrines and showers being built near a survivors' camp in Port-au-Prince. The somewhat primitive facility will provide a desperately needed upgrade in sanitary conditions in this makeshift camp.

David Schaper/NPR

Latrines and showers being built near a survivors' camp in Port-au-Prince. The somewhat primitive facility will provide a desperately needed upgrade in sanitary conditions in this makeshift camp.

Relief organizations are making some progress in improving the living conditions for hundreds of thousands of survivors of the devastating Haiti earthquake, but that progress is slow.

In the encampment on Rue Prolongee in Port-au-Prince, wooden beams are going up where the group Save the Children is constructing showers and latrines. They will provide much-needed sanitation to improve the health of the survivors living together in such cramped quarters.

Save the Children officials say they fear there could be "a second disaster in health" in Haiti that could especially affect children if more isn't done soon to improve living conditions in survivor camps like this one.

—David Schaper

Enlarge David Schaper/NPR

A little girl washes herself with soapy water from a small pan. The new showers and latrines will improve sanitation in the camp.

David Schaper/NPR

A little girl washes herself with soapy water from a small pan. The new showers and latrines will improve sanitation in the camp.

Francillon says she hopes to be paid for her work, but adds she would do this sweeping, cleaning and picking up anyway, because it needs to be done. The encampment of improvised tents and shelters, which is now home to about 1,000 survivors in very tight quarters, is becoming filthy and smelly.

Alex Yiannopoulos, emergency food security coordinator for Oxfam, says while the clean-up work sounds menial, it is important.

"There's a lot of waste products, rubbish ... because people have nowhere to throw their rubbish; there's no one else taking that responsibility. It's basically to make sure the environment's clean to reduce disease risk."

Proper waste disposal can help control rats, mice and insects, which often spread disease, and is critical to ensuring the long-term health and safety of earthquake survivors.

Yiannopoulos adds that paying the survivors to do this work puts money into their hands, empowering them to buy food when they want, rather than waiting for inconsistent deliveries. He says there is food available at local outdoor markets; it's just that many people can't afford it, as food prices have soared since the quake.

"People are getting what we call minimum wage here, which is about $3 to $5 ... So that's enough to feed a family for the day and to have a bit of money on the side," he says.

That small daily wage is also enough to help kick-start a moribund local economy, Yiannopoulos says. Even before the earthquake, the unemployment rate in this neighborhood was around 80 percent.

"We're not only looking at the now and present," he says. "We're also looking at four years down the road and further. So these activities have to be linked into our longer-term effort. And we're trying to be creative about making sure there's an overlap in our immediate response and our more long-term programs."

Yiannopoulos says the organization wants to make sure the people have jobs, incomes and a more sustainable future.

"People have more priority than food. You have to look at water, you have to look at shelter, and you have to look at the basic hygiene conditions and ensuring that people have a life ... with dignity."

Oxfam already has a few hundred people earning cash for clean-up work, and hopes to eventually hire 5,000 Haitians. Other broom-and-shovel brigades are cleaning up trash, debris and rubble for other aid groups throughout the Haitian capital, and even more cash-for-work programs are ramping up this week.

The scene could be taking place anywhere in Port-au-Prince - thousands of sweaty, dusty Haitians squeezed back-to-chest waiting for relief supplies that could determine whether they survive the next few weeks.

But in Petionville, a comparatively well-heeled suburb, the operation reveals more than just the colossal need that exists throughout post-earthquake Haiti. It shows how the disaster crossed boundaries of income and class, turning even the once-exclusive Petionville Club into a fetid expanse of desperation.

And it shows the enormous effort, involving governments, aid organizations and the U.S. military, that is required to satisfy the most basic of human needs in Haiti.

Roughly 400 members of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division have taken over the club, using the restaurant as a headquarters and taking bucket baths on the bleachers by the tennis courts. A federal disaster-management team has set up a medical clinic on the putting green closest to the clubhouse, and the poolside cabana bar is serving as a pharmacy. The aid group Oxfam International is setting up 90 latrines along the fairways, part of a project to provide water and sanitation for the sprawling tent city.

Karen Ketchie, a disaster-management team leader from Jacksonville, Fla., who works at the club as part of a medical aid group, imagined that Gulf Coast hurricanes were good training for the Haitian relief effort - until she arrived in Petionville.

"There, the infrastructure is up and if we needed something, we could just go a few counties over," she said. "Here it's totally different. Everything you need is a challenge."

As Ketchie spoke near the club's half-empty pool, she was standing next to a sign that read: "Pillar collapse potential if aftershock. Do not stand here."