Homeless in Haiti, As the Rain Nears

You could add it as a caption to any tent-city photo like this one: To make this situation worse, just add water.

Across the Caribbean, hurricane season usually doesn't start until June or July. But the onset of Haiti's rainy season is earlier than that, and the threat of heavy landslides and thickened mud in unstable camps has people anxiously watching the skies. Already, it's started to rain in parts of the city, and a steady pattern of rain is expected to sweep Port-au-Prince as early as the month's end.

It's not just the inevitable muck, either, that has survivors and aid workers worried -- though when you have 500,000 survivors crowding makeshift shelters built out of bed sheets and rubble, that's no small force to contend with. More frightening, though, are the deadly water-borne diseases -- from diarrhea to typhoid fever -- that make inroads with accelerated speed in the aftermath of rain.

The World Health Organization has seen cases of measles, tetanus and diarrhea jump in recent weeks, and with contaminated water conditions, cautions that such cases could easily become epidemics.

The rain comes in devastating sheets in Haiti: according to the National Climatic Data Center, average monthly rainfall in Port-au-Prince gets as high as 6 inches in April, and 8.5 inches in May. By contrast, monthly average precipitation in Baltimore is about 3.5 inches year-round.

So far, the UN has distributed at least 10,000 family-size tents. But the shelf life of a tent is maybe six months to a year, with no guarantees that the shelter will continue to hold up against rain or strong gales (or, for that matter, the overhead force of helicopters ferrying supplies in). Meanwhile, the UN reports that its emergency flash appeal for funding to support shelter is only 47% funded (donations can be made here). To date, the over 600 relief agencies working in Haiti have provided only one-quarter of those in need with emergency shelter materials -- and we're using the word "shelter" loosely here, applying it to mean anything from a sheets to tarps.

In just three days, the time elapsed since Haiti's quake will have hit the one-month mark. Yet as the rain clouds build, with half a million Haitians still living precariously on the street, small wonder that survivors' feelings of disappointment in international aid efforts are quickly massing into anger.

Photo Credit: United Nations Development Programme