Port-au-Prince - Mud invades every inch of the saggy handmade tent Mimose Pierre-Louis now calls home.

It spatters the pink bedsheet that serves as her wall, crawls up the acacia branch that plays the role of wobbly tent pole and forms the floor she lies on. Near one end of the tent, a steep slope leads several hundred yards up to the Petionville Club, where elites once played tennis and luxuriated poolside with rum sours. A foot from the other side of the tent, the earth drops 15 feet into a stinking canal-turned-open-sewer since the Jan. 12 earthquake that left more than 1 million Haitians homeless.

Here in Port-au-Prince's largest encampment, a hillside inhabited by as many 70,000 people, Pierre-Louis lives on the edge as the ferocity of Haiti's April-May rainy season approaches.

Confronted with the challenge of destructive rains and floods, international relief agencies have launched an ambitious logistical operation aimed at protecting the Pierre-Louises of this wrecked city. They hope to carve new drainage outlets in the most vulnerable of the hundreds of camps by mid-April and to relocate people living in the most precariously perched tents.

The consequences of failure would be devastating, Haitian and international officials say: another catastrophe - 37,000 dead in floods and mudslides - in a country traumatized by more than 200,000 earthquake deaths.

"The rainy season is a freight train headed right at us," said Anthony Banbury, who until recently was the acting second-in-command at the U.N. mission in Port-au-Prince. "We're in a race against time, and we can't lose a day."

The sprint happens between now and April 15 - the expected start of heavy rains - when crews will dredge the new canals and build retaining walls. They also will attempt to find new refuge for 9,000 people whose tents are so imperiled by flash floods that they cannot be saved by the engineering work.

But that's just the beginning. Eventually, over the course of months, international officials hope to relocate at least 150,000 people living in unacceptably muddy camps wedged into ravines and on steep hillsides that could become breeding grounds for disease.

Hillsides made bald by years of deforestation in Port-au-Prince and other parts of the country act as giant sluices, funneling torrents of water in even small storms.

In post-earthquake Port-au-Prince, rainstorms - including several brief ones over the past week - lift refuse out of piles and spread it across streets and camps. The ooze - an awful melange of rotting fruit, chicken bones and human waste - smells like spoiled milk and gangrenous wounds.

On March 18, Port-au-Prince got a preview of what's to come when a short downpour collapsed a school tent, turned streets into rivers with floating garbage islands, and left water knee-deep in the camps. Pierre-Louis saved her tent, but the water swept away everything else. She sank to her knees and "asked God to change my life."

Source: The Washington Post