A Friend in Haiti Writes

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February 18 2010
About Children and Rain

There was a long steady rain during the night in Frères. We needed the rain but as I keep telling my son Max, in Haiti people are not ready. We are almost never ready for the situations that we know are going to happen. We only react after the problem. All week I saw workers cleaning out sand and trash from the ditch next to Route Frères. Since we had two light rains prior to this big one, someone in the government must have thought that it was time to get ready, to clean the ditch for the rain water. But the sand was pilled up on the street next to the ditch last night. They did not have time to load it up and take it away. This morning it must all be back in the ditch.

There is so much to worry about with the rain. We can worry about the foreign doctors sleeping in tents on the roof of the hospital. I wondered if their tents protected them. I asked how they did. “We got hammered,” said Paul, the volunteer pharmacy organizer from St. Thomas.

I am worried about the Lalue orphanage. It is a place on a main street of Port-au-Prince where 43 children sleep in 2 little rooms. Some of the HCH hospital volunteers who wanted to help orphans were taken there 2 weeks ago by their Haitian driver. The orphanage’s main building was damaged by the earthquake. The children are crowded in 2 dark rooms with leaky roofs. The babies are left in cribs all day in a humid room. Most of the children have symptoms of malnutrition: large bellies, skinny limbs, skin rashes, lethargy. An American volunteers got the person in charge of the orphanage to release to the hospital 3 very unhealthy babies. The babies are still with us. There is a small room at the hospital which has become an intensive care pediatric ward . There are 5 children. In addition to the 3 orphans we have 2 others of uncertain status. .Manuelie looks like those children from the original “We are the World” campaign to help Africa: skeletal. She might be a year and a half. She sits up straight and hardly moves, she wimpers sometimes. She has pneumonia in addition to starvation. The fifth child is a preemie. Someone dropped him off last Friday. It’s a 3 pound baby boy. The doctors from Aruba improvised an incubator. They wanted to take the baby with them. We could not complete the legal steps for to let them travel with him, and then someone showed up to say he was an uncle. I was told that yesterday someone said to be the mother came. The name David was added to the incubator. We hope David will make it and mommy will come back again. There are 3 young Canadian nurses in the baby room. They hold them and feed them. Manuelie looks like she has cheeks today and they told me that she smiled yesterday. She loves Plumpeanut, the therapeutic food for children suffering from malnutrition.

The children of Haiti are having a rough life these days.

I went to UNICEF’s child protection office 2 days ago because we feel that as the 3 orphanage children get better, we cannot return them to the same place. UNICEF gave me the name of someone in the government. UNICEF says that they know about the bad orphanage but that it is up to the government to do something about it. I called the appropriate office “Bureau du Bien-Etre Social”. They told me that they would send someone to see the orphanage and to the hospital see our orphans. The situation made me think about the UN trucks in the movie “Sometimes in April.” The Tutsi’s and the Hutu’s were at war, and only Whites were evacuated. We have to follow chains of command and legal steps. It’s hard.

In the yard of the hospital there are usually half a dozen boys under 12 years hanging out. Sometimes they slide down the outdoor staircase ramp, some times they play soccer with empty plastic bottles. Yesterday I saw an American female volunteer from the Rescue 24 Baptist group teaching them to bat with a tree branch and an empty water bottle. Mostly the kids hang out because they might get the chance of being fed by someone or being given something. I saw them hanging around a US military Humvee and eating MRE’s two days ago. It is very unlikely that school will start any time soon. Many schools have collapsed. Since 80% of schools are private and uninsured, some will never reopen even when they have minor damage. The government is grandiosely speaking about the end of the public/private binary but at the same time says that there is no money to rebuild schools. Children are afraid of staying under cement roofs and in two-story buildings. If we had enough trees we could just have school in the shade of the trees when there is no rain.

We need the rain. After a full dry month, the city was engulfed in a cloud of dust and smoke. It looked foggy but it was sand from all the destruction and smoke from many small fires put by people who are trying to clean up the trash that the government does not pick up, by burning it. Today the air is clear and cool. I just don’t know about the ground in the hundreds of camps all over the city. I can just imagine little children’s muddy feet kicking around whatever they find to use as soccer balls. The government says that they are afraid that the mud will be spreading germs and we’ll have epidemics of infectious diseases. Are we ready for that?