Last week, Haiti experienced one of the heaviest rainfalls since the January 12 earthquake. 

 The overnight rainfall severely affected a former golf course that serves as a temporary home for 45,000 people, ripping down school tents and reawakening the recent trauma they had experienced.

 The camp refugees used sticks and bare hands to dig drainage ditches around their homes. Another camp affected, Cité Soleil was flooded by the heavy downpour. There are now plans to move more than 1.3 million people displaced by the earthquake before the rainy season starts next month, if the government are able to open land locations which will withstand the rainy season. 

 Haiti Children at Extreme Risk
Save the Children says an estimated 1 million children have become separated from their parents or lost one or both parents, due to the January 12 earthquake, coupled with the fact that 9% suffering from acute under-nutrition; Save the Children believe that Haitian children's health is at "extreme serious".

 With more children left homeless, and an education system that has collapsed, the charity warns that sexual exploitation and child labour could be on the rise. 

 2010-03-05

Haiti Two Month On

 Fresh trauma sets in as Haitians now battle with heavy rains which have caused flooding, killing at least 13 people, mostly hitting Les Cayes, a city on Haiti’s south coast. This is just a taste of rainy season which properly sets in during April and May.

Aid agencies are on high alert as the effects of heavy rain may cause another humanitarian disaster due to the fragile state Haiti finds itself in after the January earthquake. The combination of floods and the make-shift camps that have been set up will lead to widespread disease, as many camps have no or little sanitisation.

The scale of the catastrophic earthquake that hit Haiti in January means that even with the huge relief adequate shelter has not been provided to hundreds of thousands of people.

Doctors have already begun to report widespread cases of diarrhoea, abdominal pain, fever and infections. The big fears are cholera and typhoid. Iain Logan, head of operations for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in Port-au-Prince, told the IRIN that Haiti is ill-equipped to cope.

“The early floods in Les Cayes are a sharp reminder that the very significant disaster preparedness effort we started after the 2008 hurricanes will have to be expanded and adapted,” he said in an IFRC release.

"We face an almost unique set of circumstances generated by a catastrophic quake, a rainy season, and a hurricane season, one after the other in rapid succession," he added.

Ctrl.Alt.Shift is supporting our partner Koral which has been reaching 1,000 families in the municipality of Torbeck, in Les Cayes. One of Koral’s main activities has been distributing cash and hygiene kits to address the immediate needs of families.

Words: Yumna Martin

Photos: nickwhalen.wordpress.com