by Paul Sanon on Thursday, November 4, 2010 at 11:05am

The last major cholera outbreak  in the western hemisphere started in Peru in 1991 and almost 500,000 people took ill.  Fortunately, it did not reach Haiti which  has not had a single reported case in the last 50 years. The October 2010  outbreak  has already sickened more than 9,000 people, caused more than 500 deaths in the Artibonite area and  is about to invade Port-Au-Prince, the capital.. We are more than frightened especially when Haiti’s water, sanitation, economic conditions and  public health infrastructure are left to be desired.  Even tough  the disease  matches strains commonly found in South Asia, however, by pointing our fingers on a foreign community does not exonerate us as a nation.

Cholera is endemic in Nepal and there was an outbreak there last summer. It is believed by many that the disease was brought down by the Nepalese peacekeeping force that is stationed  near Mirebalais , a place watered by the Artibonite river, the country largest river.  This troop contingent arrived in Haiti  on October 9, just a few days before the disease broke out in Haiti and a few weeks after it hit Nepal. Most of the infected people live along the Artibonite river. We all know that  Cholera is a waterborne disease spread when human feces contaminate drinking water. Cholera often occurs in areas without proper sanitation and water facilities, where people use river water for washing and cooking. Do we really have clean drinking water and decent sewage system?  Have you heard of Nan mang?

It is rumored that sewage from the UN  Nepalese peacekeeping base in Mirebalais was either dumped or found its way into the Artibonite river. The  Associated Press Journalists  who visited the base claim to have found open an cracked pipes behind the  base that was leaking foul-smelling black fluid toward the river.   Even tough that sanitation system in that base may not be up to par with international standards, but again why the Haitian authorities did not make a fuss about it prior to the outbreak. We never have the will to build public sanitation systems for the population.  What we drink and where to excrete were never part of the national plan. It is true that the Nepalese should have used better ways of disposing their excrement. But again, it is incumbent   upon us  to reinforce that sanitary position since it is well known that cholera is endemic in Nepal. Truthfully, the buck stops with us because after 206 years of independence , we were not supposed to be drinking from the river.

In many cities, latrines were built without taking in considerations  distance and angle to wells. So many poor city dwellers  are renting   rooms without access to bathroom and were forced to dump  feces in the drains or in open areas.  We often take advantage of the rain to dispose of our garbage. In the country side, a great portion of the population does not have bathroom or latrine and has to use their backward or neighboring rivers. Most of the people do not  have access to clean drinking water. Cemeteries are built next to rivers.These were never a problem for the dominating classes. As long as they can have clean  drinking water upstream and dump their sewage and garbage downstream, they felt at peace.  This has been the law of the land. It seems that we fail to understand that we are all connected. What you dump downstream will come back !

We should not center all the blame on the Nepalese peacekeeping force, while most of the country side is deprived of clean  water and the people are forced  to drink from streams or rivers. Cap-Haitian, the second city has not had running water in the last 18 years.  It is true that there are many companies that sell distilled water. But who tests them , oversees their quality and why their test results are not public are unanswered questions. We are simply lucky to have survived that long without a major outbreak. Where  and how  do our bayakou dump our excrement?

We are not trying to play the devil advocate, however  there has never been any  national campaign to bring clean water in each part of the country . Have we done anything to enforce that each family has a latrine or bathroom?  As long as we do not build a sanitation system that can treat the rich and the poor, the peasants and the city dwellers almost equally, we all are at the mercy of all diseases. And if we must be true to ourselves, even tough the Nepalese peacekeeping force can be charged with negligence, why should they treat us better than how we treat ourselves and how we treat the unfortunate ones that happen to live downstream. We can be certain that they would have handled their sewage system differently in a country that respect the well-being of all its citizens. In Rome, they will do like the Romans-In Haiti, it is sad to say that  they simply  do like the Haitians. We must look at ourselves instead of using scapegoats

In Sum, the world became a small village with a lot of crisscrossing.  We must admit that  the current water, sanitation, and hygiene infrastructure in Haiti have certainly facilitated the outbreak. Concentrating all our energy on  the  disease’s national origin is simply a cop-out. Whether the first carrier is  from New-York, Petionville, Paris, Raboteau, Nepal, Dondon would not have changed anything if only 20% of the population has acces to clean drinking water and  10%  to a latrine. Our conditions simply facilitate the outbreak.  Once again, this cholera outbreak reiterates the old Indian notion that we are all interconnected in the cycle of life. Water is life, but unclean water is sickness and death. Clean drinking water should not be a luxury and  the people who live at the base of the Artibonite River  should not have to drink water from it.  Bringing  clean water to all  must  be in our short priority list. The future adjustments are more important than pondering on the past. As a nation, we must learn how to take our responsibility instead of keeping blaming others ! We keep digging our own graves.