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 Less than a week since Hurricane Matthew slammed into Haiti, killing
at least 1,000 people according to a tally of numbers from local
officials, devastated corners of the country are facing a public
health crisis as cholera gallops through rural communities lacking
clean water, food and shelter.
Reuters visited the Port-a-Piment hospital early on Sunday morning,
the first day southwestern Haiti's main coastal road had become
semi-navigable by car.
At that time, there were 39 cases of cholera, according to Missole
Antoine, the hospital's medical director. By the early afternoon,
there were nearly 60, and four people had died of the waterborne
illness.
"That number is going to rise," said Antoine, as she rushed between
patients laid out on the hospital floor.
Although there were 13 cases of cholera before Matthew hit, Antoine
said the cases had risen drastically since the hurricane cut off the
desperately poor region.
The hospital lacks an ambulance, or even a car, and Antoine said
many new patients were coming from miles away, carried by family
members on camp beds.
Inside the hospital, grim-faced parents cradled young children whose
eyes had sunk back and were unable to prop up their own heads.
"I believe in the doctors, and also in God," said 37-year-old
Roosevelt Dume, holding the head of his son, Roodly, as he tried to
remain upbeat.
RUBBLE
Out on the streets, the scene was also shocking. For miles on end,
almost all the houses were reduced to little more than rubble and
twisted metal. Colorful clothes were littered among the chaos.
The region's banana crop was destroyed with vast fields of plantain
flattened into a leafy mush. With neither government or foreign aid
arriving quickly, people relied on felled coconuts for food and
water.
The stench of death, be it human or animal, was everywhere.
In the village of Labei, near Port-a-Piment, locals said the river
had washed down cadavers from villages upstream. With nobody coming
to move the corpses, residents used planks of driftwood to push them
down the river and into the sea.
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Down by the shore, the corpse of one man lay blistering in the sun.
A few hundred meters to his left in a roadside gully, three dead
goats stewed in the toxic slime.
"It seems to me like a nuclear bomb went off," said Paul Edouarzin,
a United Nations Environmental Program employee based near Port-a-Piment.
"In terms of destruction - environmental and agricultural - I can
tell you 2016 is worse than 2010," he added, referring to the
devastating 2010 earthquake from which Haiti has yet to recover.
Diarrhea-stricken residents in the village of Chevalier were well
aware of the nearby cholera outbreak, but had little option except
to drink the brackish water from the local well that they believed
was already contaminated by dead livestock.
"We have been abandoned by a government that never thinks of us,"
said Marie-Ange Henry, as she surveyed her smashed home.
She said Chevalier had yet to receive any aid and many, like her,
were coming down with fever. Cholera, she feared, was on its way.
Pierre Moise Mongerard, a pastor, was banking on divine assistance
to rescue his roofless church in the village of Torbeck. In his
Sunday best - a sports coat, chinos and brown leather shoes - he
joined a small choir in songs that echoed out into the surrounding
rice fields.
"We hope that God gives us the possibility to rebuild the Church and
help the victims here in this area," he said, before the music
seized him, and he slowly joined in the chant, closing his eyes and
turning his palms up toward the sky.
(Editing by Frank Jack Daniel and Kieran Murray)
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