Haïti - Pays en crise

Frontline Diary

28 September 2004: Gonaives struggles to rebuild after floods

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By Patrick Slavin

Patrick Slavin is senior writer for the US Fund for UNICEF. He is in Haiti assisting the UNICEF country office with public information during its emergency response to tropical storm Jeanne.

GONAIVES, Haiti, 28 September 2004 - The humanitarian emergency in Gonaives has turned from rescue to recovery. More help is on the way, thanks in part to the work of UNICEF and its partners. The stoical residents of Gonaives are rebuilding, even though parts of their city remain flooded more than a week after Tropical Storm Jeanne lashed northwestern Haiti.

Tap-tap buses (the name comes from the tapping of passengers signalling the driver that they want to get off) are running again. More importantly, street food markets are once again selling local produce to a hungry and thirsty populace. Nearly all of Gonaives is covered with a slick and deep layer of mud - the filthy residue of a flash flood that destroyed homes, schools, and hospitals with a force that swept away giant Mack trucks and knocked down concrete retaining walls.

People, especially the young and the infirm, didn't stand a chance. The death toll from the floods has risen to some 1,650, with about 800 people still missing, according to Reuters. Hundreds of thousands are homeless.
 
What was once a dry, cactus-filled plain on the outskirts of the city - where the Gonaives airfield used to be - is now a lake filled with floodwater. It stretches in each direction for at least a mile. Relief convoys coming from the south and from the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, must drive across the floodplain with local guides sitting on the front hood pointing out where the highway used to be.

When I drove into Gonaives yesterday, we followed a 33-vehicle military convoy of Uruguayan peacekeeping troops, who were deployed by the United Nations to help secure the distribution of food and water. Rioting broke out in this city of 200,000 on Saturday. There were no reports of violent disturbances yesterday.

"I'm sleeping on a neighbor's front porch, with my four children. Our house was destroyed, with everything in it," said Nerline Joseph, 29, cradling her four-month old son Gaelle, at a UNICEF-supported triage clinic that has opened at the State University of Haiti. Gaelle was being treated for diarrhoeal dehydration while Nerline was resting a badly sprained ankle.

The city's main hospital, La Providence, was destroyed in the floods, and the Government of Haiti, United Nations agencies, and non-governmental organizations, including UNICEF's partners CARE and Caritas, have opened six emergency healthcare facilities. During my 30-minute visit to the university triage clinic, doctors successfully delivered a baby girl and treated a patient with a deep and bloody leg wound. What would have happened to these patients if UNICEF and its partners were not on the ground?
 
More help is on the way. Yesterday two UNICEF convoys delivered 120,000 gallons of water, enough to meet the needs of 10,000 people for two days. Half a million UNICEF water purification packets have already reached Gonaives, along with high-protein biscuits for 20,000 children. Plastic sheeting for temporary shelters and schools is clearing customs in Port-au-Prince, along with 120 'Schools-in-a-Box', containing enough educational materials for nearly 10,000 students and hundreds of teachers. UNICEF has made a commitment to rebuild 25 schools in Gonaives and construct two new ones.

UNICEF cooking supplies for 3,000 - including pots and utensils - were dispatched to Gonaives on Sunday and will be distributed to families like Nerline Joseph's - people who had little enough before Jeanne. Today they have nothing but hope and their Gonaives
resiliency.