Storms bring misery to Haiti

Some families said they were getting only one meal every two or three days.

McClatchy Newspapers

GONAIVES, HAITI — After Hurricane Jeanne in 2004, Hearts and Hands for Haiti, a tiny Raleigh, N.C.-based charity, paid for the materials to help residents of the tiny farming community of Sous Raille rebuild their homes.

Now most of those homes are gone again.

Four tropical storms, ending with Hurricane Ike earlier this month, have raked Haiti this summer, bringing more misery to the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

“The people there are extremely resilient, and I know that, but I’m wiped out emotionally just hearing about it,” Stan Wiebe, who along with his wife, Patty, run Hearts and Hands for Haiti out of their basement, said in an e-mail last week from the United States.

The group is roughly halfway toward raising $120,000, with the main goal of rebuilding Sous Raille, near the city of Gonaives, Wiebe said. Two local foundations said last week that they would match up to the next $20,000 in contributions, Wiebe said.

His group already sent $12,000 in cash for emergency food and clothes. That money was distributed by churches it works with in the Gonaives area, which was among Haiti’s worst hit.

The money is badly needed. The people will need new homes. They need enough to eat. Staples such as rice, already expensive because of a worldwide shortage, have doubled in price, and several families in Sous Raille said they were getting only one meal every two or three days.

Thirteen members of the Jean-Baptiste family, who lived in a single shack divided into two homes in Sous Raille, moved to higher ground when the storm started. They returned to find that their home, built with materials provided by Hearts and Hands for Haiti, had been swept away. Now they spend their days under a big mango beside the square outline of rocks that shows where the house was, with no food and no way to earn money.

“We are just waiting for support because we don’t see any way we can help ourselves now,” said Dieule Jean-Baptiste, 52, standing in the shade of the mango’s canopy.

In the center of Gonaives, Haiti’s fourth-largest city, some streets are still under water and entire neighborhoods are buried under up to 5 feet of mud. Hundreds, maybe thousands, have moved their belongings onto their roofs, where they are living to stay out of the stinking slurry.

In few parts of the city, though, was the devastation as thorough as in Sous Raille. The community, which was reachable even before only by footpath, is a wasteland of tangled debris, hardening mud and freshly cut streambeds. A handful of houses survived; mercifully, a safe drinking water well drilled by Hearts and Hands for Haiti is still working.

In interviews, residents of Sous Raille swirled together discussion of Hurricane Jeanne with their more recent catastrophe.

The earlier storm and a life of hard times left Edette Henry unimpressed at her own survival in Ike.

There were 10 people in Henry’s home when they realized the river was rising too quickly to escape. They pulled themselves into the limbs of a nearby tree and spent a full night there, hoping they could hold on and that the tree would stand against the roof-high torrent, she said.

“It happened before, so I wasn’t scared,” she said.

Hurricane Jeanne was worse, Henry said, because it swept her and two of her children downstream. She was badly injured and lost 14 family members, including her 5-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter. She herself was badly injured, she said.