It's our fourth night in Haiti and we had another packed day today. We started out this morning around 8:30 to head to DINEPA (the water treatment, hygiene and distribution group), which we had visited earlier on Monday. At DINEPA we first attended a meeting between all the NGOs where they discussed the situation in many of the camps with their community partners. We then sat in on the WASH (water and sanitation hygiene) cluster meeting led by UNICEF and DINEPA. The two meetings had completely different atmospheres.
The first meeting was held outside under a shaded porch where everyone sat down and discussed what the situation was in each of their camps. Representatives from a lot of the NGOs were present including UNICEF, Save the Children, World Vision, etc. We heard so much about the situation in the camps that I easily filled up three pages of my notebook. They spoke a lot about the hygiene promotion campaigns and how they were going to integrate it with the flag day program. They talked about programming in schools to help students and families learn about the proper use of latrines. They talked about places in Port-Au-Prince which were not being serviced by any NGOs because they had a reputation for being unsafe. One such place has a suspected outbreak of diarrhea, but the representative from the ministry and some of the other NGOs were quick not to label it as a epidemic yet because it may be a natural spike in numbers before the rainy season. All the representatives from the NGOs were asked to speak about their activities and the challenges and difficulties they were facing. While some organizations did not clearly state their challenges others mentioned issues such as typhoid. For example the same camp that may have a diarrhea outbreak has a situation where 8/9 tests for typhoid came back positive. There was one clear case of miscommunication where a community member mentioned that they had no resources and were looking for a NGO to partner with and an NGO representative spoke up about the fact that they were indeed partnered wiht the community as of last week. Other problems faced by organizations like OXFAM include that they have no idea of discriminating between i) people who are in the camps because they need help and have no where else to go and ii) people who are in the camps because they are poor and this is the best way to get resources. It seemed that many of the NGOs have no idea how many people are in the camps.
After the outside meeting with the NGOs and their community partners on hygiene promotion we shifted inside to a tightly packed air conditioned room with sitting room on the floor packed with representatives from every single NGO imaginable. Doctors without Borders, OXFAM, USAID, UNICEF, WorldVision, Save the Children, Norwegian Aid Church, and too many others to name. In the meeting there were no representatives from the Haitian government (surprisingly), media or private sector. They spoke through updates on the municipalities, sanitation technical reports, waste treatment sites, desludging all the things about sanitation that we take for granted in the United States. They spoke about installing latrines in schools (side note: the school we visited yesterday had no latrines) and handed out GPS coordinates of a site where they are doing educational programming tomorrow. Their strategic advisory group mentioned that while there were 300-400 tent cities in February the number has escalated to about 1300 sites where people live and they have NO IDEA how many people are actually in the camps. In the middle of the meeting the conflict between CAMEP and DINEPA became really evident. In the words of the DINEPA representative “I would be lying to you if I told you that CAMEP and DINEPA don’t have an institutional problem”. One group also mentioned how their campaign to move 25,000 people to more permanent shelters was being viewed as being forced relocation.
After waiting for nearly 2 ½ hours we finally were allowed to speak for 2-3 minutes. Jess quickly presented our work and Marvin and I cleared up a few questions. Oxfam mentioned that they have their own kit for $700 dollars (versus our $100) and they weren’t really interested in ours. Fortunately, a group from Germany was more interested in hearing about our project and we plan on visiting the cluster meeting tomorrow at 11am.
By the time we were done with the meeting we had run into our 1pm appointment with the radio/tv station across the street. We quickly ate lunch in their conference room and then were interviewed about our projects. The recording is supposed to be broadcast sometime next week and hopefully we’ll be able to see the DVD.
After the interview we came back to the hotel to meet with a few of the college students. We had a few pretty nice conversations about how different the teaching styles are between MIT and their university. I spoke with a lot of Chemistry students and they talked about for masters and PhD degrees you have to leave Haiti. And there was just a difference in approaches to learning.
I think the most rewarding and hardest part of the day today was visiting the linguistic department at the university in Port-au-Prince. The department lost all but 7 of their faculty members (of 30 + dean) and 200 of their students. The four stories collapsed in the thirty seconds and all we saw today was cleared rubble. One of the professors described that he was on the first floor of the school, in the dean’s office when the earthquake happened. He was crouched over and there was a small tunnel but it was too narrow for his shoulders. He waited 30 minutes for the Haitian firefighters to dig him out with an ice pick. He described that the hardest part of this was that one of his students, was asking for help, but his foot was in the other room after the earthquake. The student permanently lost his foot and the professor hasn’t seen him since.
The most rewarding part of our trip to the linguistic department was the 4 boxes of books we brought instead of suitcases. The department has only a ragged red bookshelf covered in dust and rubble and covered with a tin roof filled maybe 50 books. The highlight of my day was the expressions on the professors faces when they opened the boxes and read through the titles of the books.
On the way back to the hotel we stopped at a supermarket to pick up candy for the kids we’ll be visiting tomorrow. We’re having a team bonding session right now and tomorrow morning we’ll be visiting the cluster and a school where another group will present their project.
And I’ve decided that the generator hates me… the power went out again when I tried to shower.
