Grim return to Mapou

4 June 2004
by Marko Kokic in Mapou

This was my second trip to the flood-hit town of Mapou, where the Haitian Red Cross, backed by the International Federation, ICRC and National Red Cross Societies are leading relief efforts.

Unlike our first visit, during which we assessed the extent of damage and the most pressing needs of the population, our helicopter was not mobbed by hundreds of desperate inhabitants.

As we landed, we could see a group of children playing football with an empty bottle.

But it soon became clear that things were not as they should be. The wails and cries of villagers wafted up towards us as we emerged from the helicopter. Here was a place where death was in the air and grief tangible.

An unbearable stench of death still hangs in the air. Local inhabitants have taken to wearing limes in front of their noses to mask the smell.

“I see so many people in my community crying,” said one boy, 14-year-old Willy Jeudi. “When I see people crying, it makes me cry too.”

We approached a group of people. One woman was crying harder than the others. Her husband’s body had been recovered from the floodwaters, and she and her relatives had had the unenviable task of identifying it.

“How will I manage now. I am alone with my seven children,” the woman, Edith Saint-Louis, wept. This we knew, was not an isolated event.

Her husband, Narcisse Jean-Baptiste, was just one of hundreds who had perished in the floods and landslides that had devastated huge parts of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Some 2,000 people are estimated to have died in the disaster.

We moved on to a health clinic that is being run jointly by the French Red Cross and Medecins du Monde. Among the staff were two Cuban doctors, who had reached Mapou after walking 20 km from the town of Thiotte, accompanied by a Haitian Red Cross volunteer Eddy Alexandre.

“I felt I needed to help the community, and I knew the only way to get here was on foot,” Eddy explained.

The combined efforts of the Haitian Red Cross, the Federation, ICRC, the French Red Cross and Netherlands Red Cross had given us an overview of the scale of the disaster and the humanitarian needs in and around Mapou. Each had contributed their particular expertise and resources: while the Haitian Red Cross had gone door to door in the village, an ICRC helicopter had conducted an aerial survey.

What became clear was that four nearby villages – Barrois, Nan Galette, Saint-Michel, Nan Roche – would be in grave danger if there were any further heavy rainfall. “These four villages were in dire need of immediate evacuation,” said Erich Baumann ICRC water and habitation engineer, who was part of the survey team.

The International Federation is now providing materials to allow people relocated from these villages to build temporary shelters on safer ground.

We have already airlifted in 110 hygiene kits, 150 kitchen sets, 150 tarpaulins and 300 jerry cans, and will be dispatching hammers, machetes, pickaxes, shovels and wheelbarrows. A delegate from the Netherlands Red Cross is on the spot, advising people how to construct temporary shelters.

Another major concern is the contamination of wells. As well as supplying affected communities with means of purifying their water sources, the Red Cross is also closely monitoring the health of community with particular emphasis on diarrhoeal diseases.

A flight over the affected area reveals very clearly the threat. The mountain that towers over Barrois looks as though it will collapse on the village at any moment. A huge scar – the legacy of a deadly landslide, is carved into the mountainside. There is a huge mass of overhanging rocks and debris, with very little to hold it back and stop it sliding down the mountain with the next heavy rains.

It is a similar story in Saint-Michel. A landslide has cut a swathe through the village, the large rocks mixed in with the mud exacerbating the devastation. Just a few corn crops were left standing before the mud poured into the lake that now surrounds Mapou.

“There are no more forests left, nothing to hold the earth in place, nothing to absorb the water. On some mountains, there is only rock and the water just runs straight down the mountain,” Baumann says. “On other mountainsides, further heavy rains will inevitably cause more landslides. People need to be moved from this danger zone immediately.

One of the grim tasks we were faced with was to recover the dead from Mapou’s new lake, and an inflatable boat had been brought in specifically for this purpose. A number of cadavers are believed to be inside the many houses submerged under the water.

Armed with pickaxes, so we could break through the roofs, we set off on our dreadful mission.

The water - so high, that we could pick coconuts off the trees from the boat - was full of corpses – many belonging to livestock left tethered when the floods hit. But we were looking for human remains, and it did not take us long to find them.

This was a job in which we hoped we would fail. We took no satisfaction in finding bodies. We were overwhelmed not only be the heat and the smell, but also by the sensation that this was the scene of an immense tragedy.

We had the grisly task of retrieving the bloated corpses, putting them in body bags and transporting them to shore. There we got local adults – children were prevented from witnessing this terrible scene - to identify them. Most of the bodies are in such a poor condition, that the easiest way to identify them is by their clothing.

So far the Red Cross teams have pulled 17 corpses from the floodwaters. Once they are identified, the bodies are buried. If they were not recognised, we photographed the body before burial, making a record of where it is buried.

When we left Mapou, we were not only physically exhausted, but also emotional drained. The grief had a sapping effect on us.

One consolation was that the Red Cross Movement had been one of the first agencies on the ground to help these battered communities. The needs are immense and the constraints great but the work to assist the most vulnerable continues.