ARTICLE: In Haiti, relief agencies rush to meet desperate need for water, By Rob Stein, Washington Post, January 16, 2010
The key line here comes from a Pan-American Health Organization worker, when speaking of Haiti's water-supply system:
"They don't have a good system in place. It has a lot of problems in the normal situation," said Luiz Galvao, PAHO's manager of sustainable development and environmental health. "Now it will be worse -- much worse."
True to our giving spirit, we come into the catastrophe and want to deliver clean water in sufficient volume to everybody who needs it. The sad truth is that, in the past, most people there did not receive truly clean water and are highly unlikely to get access to it once we leave.
This dynamic typically accounts for that lingering sense of being ripped off by the world that victims of these disasters inside the Gap ultimately harbor: they get a taste (pun intended) of a better life only amidst the recovery, then to lose it in the non-revitalization to come.
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Comments (1)
In my experierience we always leave behind locally practicable lessons in how to make and distrubute better water. It's the prevmed gift that keeps on giving.
Posted by tej | January 24, 2010 9:50 AM