"It's up to the government to resolve this kind of problem, they must take responsibility and tell us what to do."
Posted on 01/21/2010 11:07:57 AM PST by SkyPilot
* Sanitary conditions deteriorate as survivors camp out
* Thousands eat, sleep, wash and defecate in open camps
* Health risks mount, emergency latrines needed
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 21 (Reuters) - A child squats to defecate yards away from a sidewalk where women press plantain into bite-sized pieces for frying and a naked toddler plays with a pile of rice on the filthy ground.
Nearby, a dead body has been dumped on the street, right in front of a sea of morose people sitting on grubby mattresses, and a garbage collector uses a shovel to scoop up soggy black mounds of putrid trash composed of plastic water bags, polystyrene plates, orange peel and tin cans. Stray dogs forage.
Sanitary conditions in tent cities like this one in Port-au-Prince's once elegant Champs de Mars park around Haiti's crumbled presidential palace are worsening by the day as hundreds of thousands of survivors of last week's earthquake cram together to eat, sleep, wash and defecate.
"It's miserable here. It's dirty and it's boring. There's nothing to do but walk about," said Judeline Pierre-Rose, 12, who misses her comfortable home with its couch and TV.
"People go to the toilet everywhere here and I'm scared of getting sick. My twin sisters vomited last night," she said.
_________________snip
As families settle in after nine days camped out -- preparing food on the dirty ground, cooking on charcoal fires and walking about in flip-flops through toxic dark gray puddles, nobody is doing anything about hygiene.
"It's up to the government to resolve this kind of problem, they must take responsibility and tell us what to do," said Wesnel. Then he added: "Maybe they are in the middle of working out a plan."
(Excerpt) Read more at alertnet.org ...
they could just let them have it all .. it is up to them to fix their problems.
What? Ubama hasn’t waved his hand and made all better?
sounds so lovely
/sarc
(Hmmm... WWARD... Nah, it just doesn't work for me.)
This is the population you get when the government is expected to do everything
Don’t worry. I’ll get it.
I realize that I am sitting in a comfortable home with lights, power, food etc.,
However, many of the pictures from Haiti show hundreds of young healthy men sitting around waiting to be waited on. If they are being fed and sheltered, it is time for them to be organized and ordered to start cleaning up their environment, (however temporary) help in food & water distribution.
The young foreign men and women sent to help Haitians are in just as dire circumstances - heat and long hours of physical labor - theirs should be an example of self-help and intiative.
rant off/
The inertia of such an ‘somebody will do for me’ attitude that already holds them there is unbeatable — they now in hell, and will die there. The daughters who got sick mean it is too late, disease accelerates quickly in the weakened. They do not have the will to fight it.
Katrina redux.
I recognize the tragedy that Haiti is and my wife and I give thru Catholic Charities to assist them in the near term crisis, but for God’s sake, does anyone down there have half a brain? Someone within their communities have to step up and take charge. See what you get when you have a welfare state? People become so dependent that they don’t do what is right even when it comes to personal hygiene. This place is a sink hole.
yep .. just tell congress to stop funding it next week... the military will do what is good for them as always... they should leave soon
it is time to cut and let them handle it ... they have a government they elected..
True, but the attitude that tossed out the middle class, the mulattos, the whites in the last generation, means that Blacks are entitled not to work hard, that whites and browns provide all they need.
One mulatto Haitian friend doesn’t care what happens there now, they already tossed out her family — the ones who lived — after taking everything from them.
Might want to pass out condoms to the women and children since John Edwards is on the way.
"It's up to the government to resolve this kind of problem, they must take responsibility and tell us what to do."
These poor souls have been conditioned for decades to expect government help.
I think we could have helped them, if our military had run teh show and been hard asses, moving everyone out of the city, into camps of no more than 6000, with some modest sanitary facilities. Too late now, I think, the huge wheel that crushes all is rolling. Disease, pestilence, despair.
as you say..... the devil is claiming his followers
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