FEATURE - Floodwater Gone but Fear Remains in Haiti's Gonaives
Date: 07-Mar-06
Country: HAITI
Author: Jim Loney
"The water was so high it killed some people over by the mango tree," said Rosemene Ullysee Assad, who lives about 50 yards (46 metres) from the La Quinte riverbed. "It was up to the top of the house and we were all in the tree, 10 or 15 people in the tree."
More than 3,000 people died in and around Haiti's third-largest city, Gonaives, when Jeanne's rains swelled rivers and sent torrents of mud from barren hillsides into the streets. Just four months after another flood in southern Haiti also killed nearly 3,000, Jeanne overwhelmed the impoverished Caribbean country.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and other humanitarian groups launched appeals for money to feed tens of thousands in one of the world's poorest countries. Aid workers descended on Gonaives to pull the city from the mud.
Since the September 2004 disaster, CARE and other groups have cleared 64,000 cubic yards of debris from the streets and built or rehabilitated more than 6 miles (10 km) of canals in the vulnerable city of 200,000, officials said.
Still, Assad and her neighbours fear a repeat. More work needs to be done on the city's defences, and residents hope that the Feb. 7 election of President Rene Preval will bring political stability and increase the flow of aid money.
"Every time it rains, these people get out of their houses and move away from the river," said Jouthe Joseph, a regional administrator for CARE.
Gonaives, a tough port city only 100 miles (160 km) north of Haiti's capital but four bone-jarring hours along a rocky, cratered national highway, was the birthplace of the bloody revolt that forced ex-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide out of the National Palace in February 2004.
WATER TO THE ROOFS
Just seven months after the rebellion, Jeanne compounded Haiti's misery. Although it swept north of Hispaniola, the Caribbean island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the storm's heavy rains saturated vulnerable hillsides cleared of trees by impoverished Haitians desperate for cooking fuel.
Mudslides swamped Gonaives and surrounding towns. At the two-storey Chachou Hotel in the centre of the city, water reached the roof.
Corn, bananas, beans and other crops were wiped out, leaving farmers without food or seed.
The poverty that stalks the vast majority of Haitians - average annual income is about $390 - reached crisis proportions. Aid groups scrambled to feed tens of thousands of homeless Gonaives residents.
The city's dust-choked streets have long been cleared of the mud and the emergency feeding programmes have wound down. But the pain of the flood lingers.
"Life will never be back to normal because I don't have any place to live and we lost everything," said Assad, 34, as she breast-fed her 3-month-old daughter, Ludina. "Before we used to live day by day, but now it's worse. I don't know where to get food for the children."
Assad's mud hut was no match for the floods. She had to move her eight children into her mother's home nearby, which they share with six relatives.
On the banks of the La Quinte, many of the tiny houses have walls constructed of hard-packed mud fortified by sticks. With no electricity or running water, residents use candles or oil lamps at night and carry water in buckets from streams.
Aid organisations built about 50 4.3-6.5-yard (4-by-6 metre) concrete-block buildings, at a cost of about $1,000 each, to replace some of the destroyed mud homes. Scattered along the riverbank, they are jokingly referred to as "Cite Jeanne."
But the contractors told residents not to stay inside the simple structures during high winds, Joseph said.
A $22 million programme funded by the US Agency for International Development paid for a revamped canal system designed to help save Gonaives from a repeat of Jeanne. Along a stretch of the La Quinte near Assad's home, workers spent five months meticulously building 26
