Waking up in the mud

By Emmanuel — February 19, 2010 | 7 comments

Sainte-Marie, Port-au-Prince - After last night’s rain drenched Haiti’s camps in mud, this morning people had to play hopscotch to get in and out of their tents safely. The camps were were so muddy that people were afraid they would be swallowed up in it.

Making it through the night was a real mental struggle for me. I went to my friend’s house to get away from the drizzling weather. The house is cracked; no expert has visited it yet to tell us if it is secure to stay there. But risky or not, inside and sheltered from the rain is the best place to sleep.

But sleep didn’t come; I spent the whole night with my eyes wide open, so I could easily get away from the building if necessary. It was still dark out in the morning when I left to seek stories for my first blog for Inside Disaster.

My first thought was to to go to the camps in Champs de Mars, where I guessed that the rain would have a disastrous effect, creating another source of panic and disturbance.

But on my way there, an alley off the main road caught my attention. I ventured down the alley, risking that there might not be any story to be told at the end. I had no idea of what I would find in there, but my instincts urged me on.

After walking around for ten minutes, I was surprised to find a big camp flooded in mud, three or four kilometers away from the main street near Canape-vert. I had never heard of this place, called Sainte-Marie. There are lots of fissured houses, stacked between the rubble of the ones that weren’t able to resist the January 12th earthquake.

Further along, I saw both the young and old trying to clean their tents with primitive tools to start another day in the flooded camp. There was an entire community living here, even though the entrance looked like the way to a residential area where there would be no natural disaster victims surviving.

Seeing me with my camera, they automatically assumed I was a journalist. Everybody wanted to be photographed, filmed, to tell their story about that night and ask that always-common question: how are we gonna help them get out of this mess? It shows that Haitians not only expect help from the government and from God, but from anyone with the will and ability to lend a hand.

I sympathize with them. Trying to sleep through the rain can feel like a bad dream – you wake up feeling like you’re drowning and are relieved when you realize you’re not. But when you open your eyes and discover that you’re soaking wet for real, you see it’s not just a nightmare, but part of real life.

I met a young mother who told me she had just spent a sleepless night under pieces of used cloth, supported by wood tied up with home-made ropes. She was trying to cover her two boys so they wouldn’t get wet or catch flu and all other diseases the rain can bring to her kids, who are not old enough to understand what’s going on around them.

I also met this 56-year-old woman, named “Joseph Supreme”. She told me that she had been waiting six hours for the sun to come out, so she could mop up around her shelter.

Joseph toldme she had been sitting on a block all night, thinking of the life she had before the earthquake. The way she lives now, she told me, “is not even a way that I would treat my pigs. What should I do?” She is not the only one asking this question.

Within six hours of the rain stopping, the people in Sainte-Marie had begun to form a line to collect the aid water distributed by UNICEF.

And this was after it had rained for two hours! There is not even a mechanism to collect the rainwater – which is free to all, and hasn’t been branded nor transported in by trucks!

Port-au-Prince student, fixer and researcher Emmanuel Midi is blogging for Inside Disaster from Haiti. You can learn more about him in these blog posts, or connect with him on Facebook .

Emmanuel volunteers with the youth organization Fonds D’Actions pour le Développement, profiled by Nicolas Jolliet earlier this month.

Tags: Camps Emmanuel and Johnny Emmanuel Midi Featured Humanitarian aid Water