Summer Relief Camp

 I just came back from a tent camp in Petionville. 5000 people, maybe 10 latrines and 8 showers. Talk about a stateless zone! But still nobody with guns. In fact the only people I’ve seen with guns are the in front of posh restaurants, behind gates of posh houses, or our posh hotel. Bowles and Jayadev to the extreme.

Here’s what my brief conversations went like:

So do the NGOs ever come by here?

No.

Who provides security?

After the earthquake, it was the police, but now nobody. We organize our own nighttime patrols.

Who provides sanitation?

MSF and PAM arrange for the latrines to be cleaned more or less once a day, but sometimes it doesn’t happen for weeks and the worms get so bad that they are unusable.

The interviewees also told me that PAM collects garbage sporadically from a big dumpster at the corner of the tent city. (Below is a picture of an empty water cistern.)

The strange thing is that PAM is the French acronym for the U.N. World Food Programme. I’m totally baffled as to why the World Food Programme would be taking out the trash, so I likely misunderstood something.

Who provides health care?

Nobody.

MSF stands for Medicins Sans Frontiers, aka “Doctors Without Borders.” They have an excellent reputation, but it doesn’t quite seem to be the best use of resources for them to be sporadically cleaning latrines but not, you know, providing health care. It’s also puzzling as to why latrine-cleaning is handled by an NGO, instead of being organized by the camp directors. I didn’t get to meet the president of the camp, but I’m told that the main source of income is remittances from abroad. Some entrepreneurs convert the remittances to inventory and run small retail stores in the camp.  
 
Next is the thing that touched my primal sense of outrage: Red Cross and U.N. trucks parked right outside the tent city, but facing ... wait for it ... the trendy upscale restaurant across the street, where their personnel are all having lunch. 

I’m sure if I met them I’d find them to be lovely people, but really. What are they thinking?

Comments

[Peter]

MSF and PAM arrange for the latrines to be cleaned more or less once a day, but sometimes it doesn’t happen for weeks and the worms get so bad that they are unusable.

This ranks very, very high on the list of Things I Wish I Hadn't Read.

[David]

Is it so strange? Isn't latrines much more important for health than healthcare?

[Bernard Guerrero]

I'm with David. The big early wins for both public health and battlefield medicine were sanitation related. MSF taking care of latrines before all else doesn't seem like a stretch (though the sense that they're being ineffective at it is a bit surprising.)

[Sarah]

Summer is definitely a heat. That is why in our house and business we make sure that we have awnings in Ottawa http://www.lalondeawning.ca/en/index.asp? all around the properties to keep us cool, regardless of the time of the day.