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Port-au-Prince: Coming Rainy Season Raises New Fears

February 01, 2010 - Haiti

Right now, it is still hot and dry here in Port-au-Prince, but everyone is scared for the rainy season to begin. One of our Haitian friends said, ”We Haitians don’t dodge bullets, but we try to dodge the rain.”

Even without an earthquake, the rain put everyone who had a house on and up the many hills in the precarious situation that a mudslide could take the whole house down. Now, with unstable ruins everywhere, it is not safe for anyone to go back into their houses, and many houses that were hit, but not completely destroyed will probably not survive the next rain. So there might be a few more days, maybe a few more weeks left, but the rain will come eventually. Authorities predict that the rains will compound the devastation and cause more, unseen problems including further collapse of buildings, contaminated ground water sources as decomposing bodies and feces are overwhelming the already strained and destroyed sanitation system and infrastructure.

As we drove from refugee camp to refugee camp, night fell and it got dark in Port-au-Prince. Really dark. There is no electricity in the city. The few traffic lights that work are powered by solar power. Everything else is pitch black. What do you do in a refugee camp with hundreds of thousands at night when you have no light? There is no sanitation, no water either.
We did not see any violence or aggression, just despair. People were actually extremely peaceful.

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