Nation reeling from string of disasters
FAUCHE, Haiti — A woman who lost just about everything now gives her children coffee for meals because it quiets their stomachs a bit. Another despondent mother relives the awful moment when her 18month-old baby was swept from her arms by a flash flood. The bodies of a family of five killed in a mudslide still lie in a morgue unclaimed.
Haitians, who know well the death and despair natural disasters can cause, suffered mightily from Hurricane Sandy, which bashed the country’s rural areas and killed at least 54 people.
Three weeks after the hurricane’s deluge, Haiti, still struggling to recover from the earthquake in January 2010, is facing its biggest blow to reconstruction and slipping deeper into crisis, U.N. and government officials say, with hundreds of thousands of others at risk of hunger or malnutrition.
All around this hamlet and others nearby, the men and women who farmed bananas, plantains, sugarcane, beans and breadfruit stare at fields swept of trees, still flooded or coated with river muck. They had little, have endured much, and now need more.
As if the quake were not enough, Haiti is now suffering the combined onslaught of storms and, before that, drought, imperiling its food supply, causing $254 million in agricultural losses and throwing 1.6 million people — about 16 percent of the population — into dire straits.
Tropical Storm Isaac in August destroyed farms in the north, preceded by a spring drought that devastated farms there. Then came Hurricane Sandy, which poured 20 inches of rain over southern Haiti.
The government and the United Nations have issued an emergency appeal for $39 million in humanitarian aid. U.N. officials have received pledges for about $8 million, and the Haitian government is in talks with donors to raise at least half the requested amount.