© Ramon Espinosa | Associated PressHeavy rain flooded this camp of homeless earthquake survivors in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, yesterday. Screaming residents were swept into eddies, and latrines overflowed.
The overnight downpour sent water coursing down the slopes of a former golf course that now serves as a temporary home for about 45,000 people.
There were no reports of deaths in the camp, a town-size maze of blue, orange and silver tarps behind the country club used by the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division as a forward-operating base.
But the deluge terrified families who just two months ago survived the collapse of their homes in the magnitude 7 earthquake and are struggling to make do in tent-and-tarp camps that officials have repeatedly said must be relocated.
"I was on one side (of the tarp), the children were on the other side, and I was trying to push the water out," Jackquine Exama, a 34-year-old mother of seven, said through tears. "I'm not used to this."
Aid workers said people were swept screaming into eddies of water, and flows ripped down tents that an Israeli aid group is using for teaching children.
Jim Wilson of the aid group Praecipio, who came running from his shelter up the hill when he heard the screams amid the flooding, said: "They were crying. There was just fear down there. It was chaos."
After the sun rose yesterday, people used sticks and their hands to dig drainage ditches around their tarps and shanties.
Marie Elba Sylvie, 50, could not decide whether it was worth repairing damage to her lean-to of scrap wood and plastic.
"It could be fixed, but when it rains again, it will be the same problem," said the mother of four.
Standing water and mud also pervaded a tarp-and-tent city on the outskirts of Cite Soleil, a slum several miles away. Residents waded through the shallow flood to collect their belongings.
Officials know they must move many of the 1.3 million people displaced by the earthquake before the rainy season starts in earnest in April. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said at the golf-course camp Sunday that the people living there were in particular danger.
But after two months of searching and wrangling with landowners, the government has yet to open any of the five promised relocation sites on the capital's northeastern outskirts that are better able to withstand rain and aftershocks.
Aid groups are also struggling to open camps.
"It's been frustrating to us because we need to have those sites in order to build something better," U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes said during Ban's visit. "Until we can do that, people have no incentive to move."
Holmes added: "We're running out of time, honestly."
Source: Associated Press
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