Haiti, cholera is rampant and is the umpteenth blow on an island condemned to hell, devastated by corruption and violence by armed gangs

We publish the testimony of Chiara Montaldo, doctor of Médecins Sans Frontières in Haiti, engaged together with the team in the mission on the Caribbean island hit by a new cholera epidemic

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PORT-AU-PRINCE – The car climbs the steep streets of the city and suddenly I see the sea. I forgot I was so close to the sea. As I look at that blue stripe, I think back to how this mission started. About a month ago I received a message from Livia, my friend who manages the mission in Haiti from Brussels, who has been suffering from a new cholera epidemic for a month: “Holiday in the Caribbean?”. I immediately feel that mixture of desire and tension to leave and, I won’t hide it, this time I also feel a little afraid. I know the context of the country and the dramatic evolution of the last few weeks. I know that cholera is just yet another blow to a country in disarray, where violence and poverty are rampant every day in an endless vicious circle. I think about it, but not too much. Sometimes it’s better to feel than to think. And here I am in the Caribbean.

Still, this could be a paradise for the holidays. A musical quartet greets passengers at Port au Prince airport…as if in a desperate attempt to remind us that this could be a vacation paradise, as is the other side of the island, Santo Domingo. But already while I’m in line for checks, a Haitian lady looks at my passport, wonders what I’m doing here and tells me about her: “I come to visit the family once a year, but now it’s increasingly dangerous: the violence, kidnappings, rising prices… I don’t know if I’ll keep coming back”.

In Martissant, the hell district, there is not a soul alive. To reach the last of the cholera centers opened by MSF, I wait 3 days. The shortest road crosses Martissant, a district of the capital now the scene of daily armed clashes. Until a few days before, we used the internal road, which passes through the mountains, long but safer, at least until yesterday. But now even that has become too dangerous. So after three days, we negotiate a ceasefire to go through Martissant, which has become a huge ghost neighborhood. You don’t see a living soul. I see the building that used to be an MSF clinic…but today it has become the base of an armed group…

There is no time to do one thing at a time. The Carrefour cholera center opened a week before I arrived and already welcomes more than 100 patients. As patients arrive, construction continues, pharmacy orders are calculated, cholera beds are recruited and trained, IV infusion rates are controlled, statistics are followed, the epidemiological curve, new hotbeds, safety is monitored, buckets are emptied and waste management systems are built. There is no time to do one thing at a time. There is no time to know the stories of patients, nor to fix their faces in memory. There is no time to think that in the neighborhood next door they are shooting. There is no time to notice how close the sea is.

A little girl was born, she is fine and in the evening, tired, we have dinner and dance. This morning the first message I receive is a photo of a baby girl. She is the first baby born alive in one of our centres. It’s not the place I’d wish for a birth, but she’s alive, her mother is alive. As soon as I get to the center, I’m going to see it. She sleeps. Mum is still getting IV fluids but she is doing better. Her eyes, yes, I fix them forever in my memory. Tonight is Stephanie’s last night, the project logistician. We are all tired, but we want to celebrate this greeting. We manage to organize a nice dinner and dance. We are all so different yet for a few weeks we share the same chlorinated water, the same cold shower, the same fear of crossing Martissant, and the same desire to be here. Before I fall asleep I think back to that mother’s eyes and the blue stripe of the sea and I think that tonight I couldn’t be anywhere else.