Quake to be Followed by Torrential Rains

Reporting from Port-Au-Prince, Haiti - Few things are certain in Jislene Brisson's life these days. The Haitian mother of four lost her husband and her house in the earthquake that ravaged this impoverished country a month ago. She has little money left and the emergency food deliveries that aid groups are still struggling to establish have yet to reach her and her children, she said.

In fact, there is perhaps only one thing Brisson can count on and it terrifies her: The rains are coming to Haiti and she is not prepared.

"I don't have a roof, I don't have anything," the 49-year-old said, slapping the backside of one hand into the palm of the other. "No one has come to talk to us about shelter. When the clouds start closing in, I'll be asking God. I'll be putting my arms up in the air and asking, 'What am I going to do with my children?' "

Next month or in April, a punishing rainy season is certain to arrive, bringing with it the daily downpours that swamp this downtrodden capital city. Then will come the hurricane season, which last year delivered a series of deadly storms.

With an estimated 1.1 million people left homeless by the quake, which killed an estimated 200,000, shelter experts are scrambling in a race against Mother Nature, fearing the rain could magnify the humanitarian crisis.

Some displaced Haitians have been taken in by family or friends. The majority, however, are still living in the streets or in densely packed tent camps that have popped up in squares and other open plots in Port-au-Prince and nearby communities.

Some have been lucky enough to get one of the durable, modern tents being handed out in a helter-skelter fashion by the U.S. military and other groups. Most have been left on their own to cobble together flimsy tents made of bedsheets, scraps of plastic and metal and branches hacked from trees.

Brisson and her children have set their makeshift shelter on a 6-foot-by-6-foot scratch of land on the edge of a camp where about 600 families are living, in the Delmas area of the city. The roof is a faded, peach-colored bedsheet and the walls are a mix of tapestries and bed linens. Inside, a jumble of thin blankets covers the dirt floor. A foot or two separates her tent from the next one.

"This is the front door," Brisson said with a rueful laugh, tugging on a blue-striped sheet while she sat outside doing laundry in large metal buckets.

These tent villages could easily become disaster zones, said Alberto Wilde, country director for CHF International, an aid group specializing in shelter issues. With many of the city's drainage canals and ravines blocked with the rubble of collapsed buildings, concern is deepening that the rains will result in deadly flash floods.

"Our fear is not that people are going to get wet when the rains come," Wilde said. "Our fear is that they will get swept away. We are running against time."

Disease is another likelihood when the skies open, with the downpours sure to leave the camps a fetid morass of mud and human waste.

Most of the camps lack sufficient latrines and could easily become breeding grounds for malaria, cholera and other deadly illnesses, medical experts say.

Wilde's group and more than a dozen others like it are trying to jump-start a push to move the huge homeless population into sturdier shelters. Haitian President Rene Preval recently gave the go-ahead for the shelter organizations to pursue a plan to build thousands of one-room structures with concrete floors, simple wooden frames, corrugated metal roofs and tarp walls.

Designed to last about three years, the houses are meant for single families. They come with a solar panel on the roof for electricity and can be erected in about four hours, Wilde said.

Wilde and other shelter experts acknowledged that Haitians may look to stay in these homes longer than intended and could, down the road, begin to rent them or sell them to others. But such concerns have to take a back seat to the more pressing issue of the coming rains.

"Right now, we must be thinking beyond these tents," said Tim Callaghan, head of USAID's emergency response team in Haiti, which is working closely with CHF International on the shelter issue.

Each house costs about $900 and aid groups hope that they will be able to hire local labor with donated funds to do the majority of the construction. Similar programs were implemented after the tsunami in Southeast Asia in 2004 and the major earthquake in Peru in 2006.

Questions and challenges loom, however. One of the most pressing is where to build the houses. The aid groups hope some families will be able to build on the sites of their destroyed houses, but that may be impossible in many cases, as rubble clearance has been slow.

Shelter organizations are considering plans to build houses for about 10,000 families at each of several locations in and around Port-au-Prince. One hurdle is finding adequate areas the Haitian government is willing to cede.

And the tarp structures are built to withstand hurricanes of moderate strength, but not the major storms that sometimes pummel the island.

Perhaps most discouraging is that little of the wood needed to build the homes is available in Haiti and it remains unclear how quickly it will arrive because relief agencies are still focused on bringing in food, water and medical equipment.

Wilde's group had only enough wood and tarps to build fewer than 100 of the structures as of Saturday, he said. USAID has imported thousands of tarps, but without sufficient wood the structures cannot be built. And even when materials do arrive, few construction firms in Haiti have the capacity to build several hundred of the houses at a time, Wilde said.

"I feel like I have been delivered," said Malikan Dominique, a 51-year-old construction worker who had no means to rebuild his family's home after the earthquake and received a tarp house. "I am very grateful."

joel.rubin@latimes.com

There are over 6 million millionaires in the US. Most I guess are typical mean US citizens and will donate only paltry amounts to relieve this situation. Nor will their government tax them to pay.
10,000 dollars from each would build a million new homes. But while they trash the World they care little or nothing for the putrid mess that exists in neighboring countries.
Thanks for the report Blut!
S.

I do not understand.
The earthquake was only in Port au Prince not in the whole country.

Why can the rest of Haiti residents in other areas rescue and bring home the persons affected by the earthquake?
My question is why can the Haitian people open their homs to these newly homeless people?
Why?

The US occupied Haiti for many years. They have been a main customer for clothes made with 2 dollar a day labor for decades. Thsee terms of trade did not allow the development of Haiti and Miami rice destroyed the farming. In more than good measure the US is responsible.

An official from the UN Conference on Trade and Development, Rolf Traeger, faulted the Structural Adjustment Programs prescribed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank for gutting agricultural production in the developing world.


AMY GOODMAN: Nowhere is this perhaps more clear than in the case of Haiti. Thirty years ago, Haiti had all the rice it needed. Then in 1986, Haiti turned to the IMF for a loan. Now, after cutting tariff protections on local rice, Haiti imports most of its rice from the United States, which in turn remains heavily subsidized. US rice farmers get one billion dollars a year in government subsidies. Meanwhile in Haiti, hungry people are rioting in the streets because they cannot afford to buy rice.


http://www.democracynow.org/2008/4/24/the_us_role_in_haitis_food

Yes, I have donated and to expect to repeat.

I agree a long period of assistance will be necessary and aid use monitored carefully. The restoration of agriculture is also vital and there is some progress in this direction. But the total needed is less than the cost of one US aircraft carrier 22 billion dollars.
All countries need to help.
http://bangkokpost.com/news/local/167138/haiti-to-receive-100-tonnes-of-rice

http://www.truthabouttrade.org/content/view/11833/54/

S.

S.

Heavy rain hits Haiti's quake-ravaged capital


By MICHELLE FAUL, Associated Press Writer – 3 mins ago

2/25/2010

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – The first heavy rain since the earthquake briefly doused Haiti's capital Thursday night as relief officials changed tack on dealing with the homeless, demphasizing plans to build big camps outside Port-au-Prince.

Instead, they want the hundreds of thousands of refugees in this city where barren hillsides and weakened buildings threaten to give way to pack up their tents and tarps and return to destroyed neighborhoods.

People dashed for shelter down streets streaming with runoff from the driving tropical rain. The 20-minute drenching swept trash along roadside gutters, clogging drains and turning depressions into ponds.

Some women stripped naked and took advantage of the downpour to take a shower — there are no bathing facilities in overcrowded tent camps that officials want to move people out of.
At a camp housing 40,000 in the hills overlooking the capital, Matin Bussreth dashed for cover from his bedsheet-tent to a neighbor's plastic tarpaulin.

"It's a deplorable moment," said Bussreth. "I heard they might be giving out tents. I hope someone will be giving me one."

With the official rainy season still a month away, forecasters warn that a potential weekend storm, the first since the Jan. 12 quake, could bring floods and mudslides to a population in a perilous state. Many dwellings are severely damaged or clinging to the sides of hillsides.
Bussreth said he could not move back to his destroyed home because it's on a hillside too steep to pitch a tent.

People who lined up at a downtown site Thursday morning to register for the new campaign to resettle more than 1.2 million Haitians expressed skepticism and were dismissive of the plan, and relief officials acknowledged its immense challenges.

"There will be flooding. There will be discomfort, misery. And that's not avoidable," a top U.N. official for Haiti, Anthony Banbury, told a New York news conference this week.

Gerald-Emile Brun, an architect with the government's reconstruction committee, agreed. "Everything has to be done before the start of the rainy season, and we will not be able to do it," he said Thursday.
Brun suggested that Haitians, who expect little of their corrupt and inefficient government, may largely be left to sort it out themselves.

Camp dwellers — the capital alone has some 770,000 — welcomed the idea of swapping flimsy makeshift tents in the city's fetid center for something more stable. But that didn't mean they wanted to return to their quake-ravaged neighborhoods.

Jean Petion Simplice, a 44-year-old father living with his two boys, wife and mother-in-law under a scrap of sheet in the capital, said he feared returning to his district, which is a shambles.
"They're going to remove us from here, but they won't tell us where we're going," he complained as he joined a line of hundreds to get registered at the Champ de Mars, in the shadow of the collapsed National Palace.

The International Organization for Migration began registration at the plaza Wednesday, collecting people's old addresses in hopes that most can be resettled relatively quickly in their old neighborhoods.

The camp is home to some 60,000 people and was chosen to begin registration because about 45 percent of its residents come from a single Port-au-Prince neighborhood, Turgeau, said U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. John Blackwell, who is involved in coordinating the plan.

Not everyone will be able to return to their neighborhood, but relief officials expect to know within two weeks who can after determining which structures are viable and which must be demolished, Blackwell said.

Mark Turner, spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, said that "this is the big new strategy, our big push right now" — to decongest overcrowded and unsanitary camps. "Most people have some kind of tent or structure. We want to be able to tell people, 'Just pack it up and take it home.'"

Haitian President Rene Preval described the new plan Thursday to visiting Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, saying the idea is to create small camps of 50, 60 or even 100 tents.
Silva, whose troops are leading a six-year-old U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti, expressed support for the strategy but said the effort would be challenging because of all the heavy equipment needed to clear neighborhoods of rubble.

"The problem for Brazil and the U.N. teams is to determine the machinery needed do this work," he said.

It is a mammoth task.

Preval has said it would take 1,000 trucks and 1,000 days — more than three years. Brun, of the reconstruction committee, said the government has about 250 trucks and can probably find another 250 in the private sector.

Col. Rick Kaiser, commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers operation in Haiti, told The Associated Press that the rubble would fill the New Orleans Superdome five times over.
Brun described a lengthy process to get the new strategy moving. Blackwell said engineers have only assessed about 25 percent of the Turgeau neighborhood — so it will take at least until late March to sufficiently clear enough rubble to enable resettlement of the throngs jamming the Champ de Mars.
Officials haven't even decided who will do the demolition and rubble removal, Blackwell said. Could U.S. Army engineers be dispatched to do it?

"I don't see it," Blackwell said.

In the meantime, many people remain terrified of another quake.

The U.S. Geological Survey published a new study this week warning that aftershocks — the city has suffered dozens — will continue for many months and almost certainly one will be stronger than a magnitude 5 in the next year. Quake-damaged buildings are particularly vulnerable.
In a parallel resettlement strategy, Brun said the government has been identifying sites outside Port-au-Prince and four other hard-hit towns where it could appropriate land as sites for transitional camps.

Officials say the government would compensate owners for land taken, but land tenure is a politically volatile issue in Haiti, where the courts are clogged with tens of thousands of land disputes.
"The lack of identified land is the dominating issue for shelter," said a report released Thursday by a "shelter cluster" of U.N., U.S. and independent groups working with the government on the issue. So for now, priority is going to the plan to resettle people on the ruins of their old homes or close by.
___
Associated Press writers Frank Bajak, Jonathan M. Katz and Dario Lopez Mills in Port-au-Prince and John Heilprin at the United Nations contributed to this report.

Heavy rainfall in Haiti

03:43 GMT, Sunday, 28 February 2010

At least eight people have been killed in floods triggered by heavy rain in Haiti, officials have said.

The deaths occurred in or near the southeastern port city of Les Cayes which was swamped by more than 1.5m (5ft) of water.
Officials said buildings affected included a hospital and a prison where more than 400 inmates were evacuated.
About a million Haitians are still homeless following January's earthquake which killed up to 230,000 people.
The floods have come several weeks ahead of Haiti's traditional rainy season.
"The situation is grave... whole areas are completely flooded. People have climbed on to the roofs of their homes," local senator Francky Exius told AFP news agency.

Witnesses said some homes had collapsed and people were fleeing for safer areas.
At least two people are reported missing in the floods. One report puts the death toll at 11.
Staff at the flooded hospital in Les Cayes moved patients to the safety of higher floors, reports say, while UN peacekeepers helped police to evacuate the jail.
Les Cayes lies on a peninsula 160km (100 miles) west of the capital Port-au-Prince.
It was unaffected by the earthquake, but its 70,000 population has been swollen by survivors fleeing from earthquake-hit areas.

03/11/2010 07:32 PM

Waiting for the Rain
Haiti's Next Disaster Looms

By Björn Hengst in Port-au-Prince

Only weeks after the country was hit by an earthquake, Haiti is threatened by the next potential calamity. The upcoming rainy season could turn overcrowded refugee camps into hotbeds of disease. And there has been criticism of the local government for not doing more to provide emergency accommodation.

Lesly Mullin spreads his arms. His white and green t-shirt, emblazoned the number 19, is just a few numbers too big, he looks tired and he stands there speechlessly. But his gesture says it all: Everything is lost.

A couple of blue walls, one other painted pink -- there is not a lot left of his house in St. Martin, a neighborhood in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti. Yet Mullin still comes here a lot. He walks up the few stairs that remain, which lead up from the small piece of land on which the house once sat, and makes his way over the concrete lumps to survey the ruins of his home.

His grandmother built this house and he was born here. Most recently Mullin, 42, lived here with his wife and four children: Clifford, Steve, Stephanie and Gary. Then came the earthquake that devastated the city on Jan. 12. Gary, who was only two years old at the time, died in the tremors.

"The whole land bled," Mullin says.

A Nation of Mourners

One does not have to go far to hear further stories of death and disaster, the sort of stories that have turned Haiti into a nation of mourners. Just stepping outside the beige and blue tent, where Mullin and his family spend their nights now, is enough.

"This is our place," he explains. The few cubic meters are adequate enough as emergency accommodation. And the place is surrounded by a labyrinth of tents and huts made out of corrugated iron and fabric or plastic sheeting stretched over wooden frames. On the sheets are the names UNICEF (United Nation's Children's Fund), USAID (the American government's aid organization) or UNHCR (the United Nations refugee agency). There's often only about a foot of space between the temporary dwellings.

And there are hundreds of these kinds of camps. Sitting near apparent deserts of ruins, on the sides of roads or on football fields, most don't have any sort of toilets or any power. Port-au-Prince has become one big refuge for the homeless.

The largest camp has spread itself onto the city's central square, the Champs de Mars, directly opposite the ruined presidential palace. About 30,000 people live there. Despite this, the Red Cross estimates that only half of the 1.3 million poeple made homeless by the earthquake have managed to find refuge in some sort of emergency accommodation. "The needs are still huge," Gregg McDonald, the coordinator of the organizations aid efforts in Haiti, said on Sunday in Port-au-Prince.

Still Waiting for the Haitian Government

The rescue teams are still waiting for the administration to officially designate better-suited areas for emergency accommodation. The United Nations has also put pressure on the administration, but up until now nothing has happened. It has been some time now since the Haitians last heard from their president, René Préval. "He's a phantom," some say, disparagingly, of the leader, who set up a temporary office in police headquarters after the earthquake, but who has hardly been seen since. Préval has given no televised speeches nor has he made any visits to the tent cities.

What the people here actually need is a leader who can point a way out of the catastrophe and who could help to avoid the next one. And the next one could soon be on its way. "When the rains come, there will be endless illness in the camps," says Rüdiger Ehrler, of the German aid organization German Agro Action (Welthungerhilfe, or WHH). Aid organization fear the threat of outbreaks of tuberculosis, typhoid fever, diphtheria and malaria.

Ehrler is part of the WHH's emergency response team. Almost as soon as the news broke of the devastating earthquake, the 57-year-old was already packing his bags and heading to Haiti. "Getting projects on track," is how Ehrler describes his job. He has seen camps being set up almost daily, and in a hasty and uncontrolled manner. A number of them are now in danger of flooding, which could make them hotbeds for contagious diseases.

There are better places for emergency accommodation -- such as empty warehouses belonging to well-to-do Haitians. "But one gets the impression that the Haitian administration doesn't want to step on these people's toes," Ehrler explains. "In fact, we should just be occupying them."

Rainy Season Could Spell Disaster

The relief organizations are running out of time. The past few days have already seen the first heavy rains. Haiti's rainy season usually begins at the end of March and the beginning of April. But it looks like it may be starting earlier this year.

In recent times the rainy season has been a particularly destructive force in Haiti because of the country's overexploitation of its natural resources. For years, the tropical rainforest -- which once covered 90 percent of the country and now only covers 2 percent -- has been being clear cut. The soil in Haiti cannot deal with the sudden influx of water, and mudslides and flooding are common during heavy rains.

The earthquake victims don't really expect any help from their own government. " Préval does nothing for his people," Mullin says. Which is why many of the homeless are pinning their hopes on the likes of Ehrler. Or Per Andersson.

Andersson wears a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead and the 60 year old carries a notebook in the breast pocket of his red, yellow and blue checked shirt. "I will have to leave Haiti soon," he tells his Haitian driver, as the car passes a market stall selling apples and bananas. "It's getting too civilized for me here." It's just a joke, Andersson says, grinning.

He can come across as cynical, but first and foremost, the Swede is a committed relief worker. Be it Somalia, Iraq, Liberia, Sudan and Chad, Andersson has often traveled to the people in need. "I will do this my whole life," he says. In Port-au-Prince, the engineer is mainly concerning himself with the water supply. He tests the water outlets and communicates with Haitian liaison people such as Marnity Beberly, who is homeless herself, about any problems.

"Did you hand out the purification tablets?"

"Yes."

"Were there enough there?"

"They will last for another week."

"Tomorrow the toilets will finally be delivered," Andersson notes.

'It Gets Better Every Day.'

An old man with a walking stick beckons to him. The old man's hip hurts, he can hardly walk and he asks for a doctor. Andersson notes down his name and telephone number. In the poverty stricken neighborhood of Cité L'Eternel, he goes past a hut where the roof awning is held on with just a couple of nails. "The wind will blow that away," Andersson says, pulling his notebook out again. "Bring sketches that show how to attach plastic sheeting," he writes in it.

Despite all the difficulties Andersson still discerns some progress. "It gets better every day," he says. Soon, 10,000 mosquito nets for Haitian families will also arrive from his Ireland-based charity, Concern Worldwide, where Andersson works as part of the charity's emergency response team.

Still, concern about the upcoming rainy season persists. Elke Leidel, who heads Concern Worldwide's team in Haiti, is hopeful that the Haitian government will soon provide some viable options for emergency shelter. She knows that the aid organizations will come in for criticism too -- even if their hands are tied because they couldn't negotiate anything that was against the will of the sovereign state. "They are sitting on our money and not doing anything -- the international media should write about that, there should be pictures of the overflowing camps," she says.

For the aid organizations this is also a fight for credibility, but mostly it remains a fight for human lives.


URL:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,683107,00.html
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Editorial
Haiti, Two Months Later


Published: March 11, 2010

With every day that passes in the mud and rubble of Haiti, the failures of the relief effort are heartbreaking. There are four main strands to the campaign to make sure 1.2 million homeless people are sheltered and safe as the weather turns fierce. All are inadequate.


THE MAJOR PLAYERS The United Nations and foreign countries and aid organizations have dispatched tents, tarps, food, water, medicine and doctors, as they should. They have done a lot of good, particularly the United States, which rushed supplies, a troop force that peaked at about 20,000 and a hospital ship. Many lives were saved. After meeting with Haiti’s president, René Préval, this week, President Obama pledged continued aid.

But after nearly two months, it’s not enough. Only half of those displaced have received even the crudest means of emergency shelter: plastic tarps and tents that will hardly protect them when floods start in earnest next month, and the hurricanes come in June. In hundreds of crowded settlements around the country, like the ones sheltering more than 600,000 in Port-au-Prince, food, water, medical care and security remain spotty.

Large swaths of the earthquake zone remain untouched by aid. They are choking in rubble, and trucks and volunteers have barely begun to scratch out safe places in the wreckage for people to live.

Relief agencies have overcome staggering obstacles, starting with the fact that the quake demolished the United Nations mission, killing much of its leadership and employees. The United Nations is in high gear now, but it has been rightly criticized for disorganization. Last month, in a scathing e-mail message, the emergency relief coordinator for the United Nations, John Holmes, blasted his colleagues for having been too slow to step up to the challenge. Weeks after the disaster, he said, several of the agency “clusters” in charge of handling needs like food and shelter had not even developed a basic overview of what they had to do, much less a plan.

THE HAITIAN GOVERNMENT The quake ruined the presidential palace and the best managers and workers were still on the job when the tremors hit. President Préval and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive have not been able to resume strong or even visible leadership.

The government has not made decisions or has made confusing ones. It has, for instance, refused to allow undamaged or lightly damaged schools to reopen with a full curriculum until all schools can reopen — letting children languish. Mr. Préval was visible at the White House on Wednesday, but in Haiti the question “Where is Préval?” draws a shake of the head.

THE N.G.O.’S Existing charity mechanisms have been revved up to try to match the staggering scale of the earthquake, and new ones are being invented. The big multinational nongovernmental organizations are providing vital support to the United Nations.

But there are thousands of others, like the small rural mission churches and other groups that right now are offering just pinpricks of relief.

THE PEOPLE Haitians are eager to help themselves. Refugees are forming settlement councils and electing representatives to collaborate with the nongovernmental organizations. They are building homes themselves, clearing rubble themselves, burying the dead themselves, organizing security brigades themselves. But they are as overmatched as everyone else by the scale of the disaster.

There is a burning need to tap the energies of Haitians — not just the devastated national government. That means at the grass-roots, church, business and neighborhood groups that know the country, speak its languages, and are deeply committed to its rebirth.

Efforts to do so have been negligible so far. A report by Refugees International, an advocacy group in Washington, says that Haitians have been excluded from major planning at the United Nations compound because they don’t know about meetings, aren’t allowed in or don’t have the staff to send. The United Nations Development Program has hired more than 70,000 Haitians to clean debris. Much more is needed.

Haiti should be able to count on American technical expertise, security and money, especially as energy shifts to rebuilding. Everyone should keep improving basic efforts to keep refugees safe and in good health. But, ultimately, it is the United Nations that must take responsibility to lead and coordinate the relief efforts.

[B]And sanitary conditions are getting worse by the day, according to the organization Doctors without Borders.[/B]

Médicos sin Fronteras denuncia que las condiciones de vida de los haitianos "violan la dignidad humana"

La organización lamenta que dos meses después del terremoto cientos de miles de personas viven hacinadas y sin atención sanitaria suficiente

EL PAÍS - Madrid - 12/03/2010


Haití entra en una fase "crucial". Dos meses después del terremoto que devastó el país y causó más de 250.000 muertos, las necesidades médicas continúan siendo "enormes" y las condiciones de vida de la población "extremadamente precarias", según la organización Médicos sin Fronteras. "Cientos de miles de personas viven hacinadas en campos en condiciones muy difíciles que se están agravando con la llegada de las lluvias", señala la ONG, que añade que la respuesta ante esta situación es "insuficiente".

El terremoto más intenso sufrido en 240 años en Haití
"Hemos visto fracturas, graves heridas craneales y no podemos dar una atención médica adecuada"
Un fuerte terremoto reduce a escombros la capital de Haití
Washington renueva su compromiso con la reconstrucción de Haití
Haití, comenzar de cero Colette Gardenne, encargada de gestionar la labor de Médicos sin Fronteras durante las últimas semanas, subraya la labor de las organizaciones de ayuda en atención médica, pero echa de menos que la solidaridad no se refleje realmente "sobre el terreno", especialmente en los saneamientos y refugios para las víctimas.

"La falta de refugio y las deficientes condiciones de higiene constituyen una afrenta a la dignidad humana para miles de haitianos que se han quedado en la calle", señala Christopher Stokes, director general de la organización en Bruselas. "Muchos haitianos me hablaron de que están abandonados, no se les informa acerca de lo que les ocurrirá o lo que recibirán. No saben adónde ir", explica.[[B]A sense of abandonment has set in[/B]]

El futuro de Haití

Otro de los principales problemas, según Médicos sin Fronteras, es la inseguridad. Apenas hay iluminación por las noches[poor lighting at night], destacan los responsables de la ONG, que inciden en el aumento de casos de violencia sexual.[[B]sexual violence on the rise[/B]]

Para Médicos sin Fronteras, comienza ahora una época decisiva en la que miles de heridos van a necesitar atención médica a largo plazo. Destaca que han ampliado su capacidad para ofrecer cuidados postoperatorios especializados y reforzar la atención primaria en ambulatorios y la secundaria, como obstetricia de emergencia, tratamiento terapéutico intensivo para niños con desnutrición y cuidados hospitalarios de pediatría y de adultos.

Stokes describe la incertidumbre y el miedo que la población siente ante el futuro. "Hace dos meses, un compañero haitiano me preguntó llorando: '¿Qué vamos a hacer con este país? [[B]what are we going to do about this country?[/B]] Hay tantos amputados y heridos'. En ese momento fue cuando me di cuenta de que nos íbamos a quedar allí mucho tiempo".