14 January 2010

Helen Hawkings

Haiti is not known for having a good security record. We hear that all the inmates from the huge local penitentiary who were not killed by the earthquake have escaped.

Today we do a rapid appraisal of the communes where we have recently trained teams in emergency WASH (Water, sanitation and Hygiene) response. Visiting the open areas where displaced people are sleeping, the main needs we are told, not surprisingly are drinking water, food, medicines and latrines.

The WASH coordination meeting does not go as planned but in a good way. Several private water companies are offering their services to provide water to key locations in the city, which is wonderful news. These organisations will provide 80 trucks full of water. The international organisations including Oxfam need to organise storage and management of the water, which is an enormous task.

Unfortunately we also find out that our emergency stock, (the materials that we keep stored so that we came respond quickly when there′s an emergency) have become inaccessible following the quake. This is a huge setback as tomorrow we want to start distributing water. People are hungry and people are thirsty.

The most disturbing sights of today were not the piles of debris that just 2 days ago were homes and local schools. The sights that made me draw breath were the bodies. A neat row of 16 bodies carefully wrapped in sheets, the group of 20 at the Canape Vert roundabout some identified with ripped cardboard name tags, a pile with no sheet covering them, just thrown one on top of the other and the two bodies on the corner of a street, an adult motionless under a small dead child.

Today lots of people are covering their faces with scarves and face masks, they believe this will protect them from diseases spread by dead bodies. Red scarves are particularly popular. Red is believed to be the strongest colour and helps ward off disease. . It is true that dead bodies from cholera victims can spread disease, but just walking past the bodies of the ordinary healthy people that the quake has taken does not. But it is a link that people often make probably because of how traumatic it is to see the bodies.

We are told that a plane is sending emergency materials for us and it should arrive tomorrow! This is great news.

Helen Hawkings is an Oxfam public health promoter in Haiti.

Volunteer Helen Hawkings' Diary:

January 12