Via the Shots blog of National Public Radio, a long report with an audio clip: Port-Au-Prince: A City Of Millions, With No Sewer System. Excerpt:
Port-au-Prince is about the size of Chicago. But it doesn't have a sewer system. It's one of the largest cities in the world without one.
That's a big problem, but never more so than during a time of cholera.
Since cholera was introduced into Haiti 18 months ago — most likely by United Nations peacekeeping troops from Nepal, where the disease is endemic — more than a half-million people have gotten sick and at least 7,050 have died.
Public health authorities say cholera will stay in the environment for a long time, because Haiti has the worst sanitation in this hemisphere.
It's hard for Americans to imagine what this means.
The cumulative sewage of 3 million people flows through open ditches. It mixes with ubiquitous piles of garbage. Each night, an all-but-invisible army of workers called bayakou descend into man-sized holes with buckets to remove human waste from septic pits and latrines, then dump it into the canals that cut through the city.
Follow pediatrician Vanessa Rouzier on a tour of a Port-au-Prince slum called Cite de Dieu — City of God — to get an idea of what it means to live in a city sans sanitation. The sprawling slum, close by the earthquake-ruined Presidential Palace, is home to 40,000 Haitians, including a lot of her patients.
