Haiti After the Earthquake by Paul Farmer Read Free Book Online Page B

say as much to friends working with the U.S. government and with disaster-relief organizations based in Port-au-Prince, it became clear that, as of yesterday, there’s not a lot of accurate information leaving Gonaïves, although estimates of hundreds of deaths are not hyperbolic. We had no cell phone coverage there and had to wait until last night to call people in Port-au-Prince. One sympathetic American friend, following up on our distress calls about a lack of relief, told me this morning the retort she’d heard from an expert employed by a UN-affiliated health organization: “Three days without water is nothing. People in southern Haiti affected by Gustav went ten days without water.”
    No human can go ten days without water. Food, perhaps. But not water. So we can expect that the people you see in these photographs, which I took by borrowing the digital camera of a Zanmi Lasante employee from Gonaïves (whose family, like all those you see, lost everything), are at great risk of falling ill with water-borne illnesses. There is also a lot of dead livestock floating down the streets of the city. The stench is overwhelming.
    We are familiar with a lot of the Haitian officials charged with responding to this tragedy, which is, agreed, widespread. They showed up in Gonaïves: the district health commissioner, who is from the city and felt lucky to have avoided drowning; the coordinator of the government’s
disaster response; nurses and doctors we’ve known over the years. They are doing the best they can with scant supplies. They are tired, thirsty themselves, hoarse-throated. Even Haiti’s newly appointed Prime Minister, on her first day on the job, showed up this morning in Mirebalais, keeping a promise she made many months ago, long before she was directly involved in politics. She now has to install a new government, perhaps this afternoon, and respond to multiple disasters at once. These people, who are trying to help their fellow Haitians, deserve our help. 13
    I wrote this letter a few hours before Ike, the fourth storm, hit Haiti. Pierre-Louis’ first official visit was to the shabby Mirebalais hospital, which sat in a place everyone called lòt bò latem —“on the other side of the river.” The bridge connecting the town center to the hospital was also the span that connected central Haiti to the coast. A modest bit of infrastructure, the bridge was nonetheless a key artery. (Although there’s no reason that the new prime minister would pause to make such an observation any more than might any of those accustomed to crossing it.) But that night, as Hurricane Ike drenched central Haiti’s deforested mountains, a flash flood hit a UN base (home to a battalion of Nepalese peacekeepers) and swept scores of empty cargo containers into the river. The containers—with “UN” marked in huge black letters—struck the Mirebalais bridge with enough force to bring it down, and the Central Plateau was cut off from the coast for months. The only way to reach the hospital was in dugout canoes.
    This letter became Partners In Health’s first online appeal. (The generous response to this letter would later be dwarfed by the heartening response to our appeals after the earthquake.) After returning to Harvard, I forwarded the Gonaïves letter to a number of current and former U.S. government officials. We heard back from several of them, including President Clinton, who called within hours of receiving the appeal. He underlined the need to link palliation of suffering—disaster relief—with strategy and longer-term investments to grow Haiti’s economy. To paraphrase his comments: “What can I do to help? We have to provide relief, but we need to focus on the
big picture: Haitians need more and better jobs, and perhaps some of them could be in reforestation and public works, like during the American Depression.” Clinton called as I