Tom Lehrer said it best in his song "Pollution": Don't drink the water....
Actually the water is delicious: we drank it filtered, and it was wonderful -- once the bacteria, viruses, ascaris eggs, and other nasty stuff had been strained out of it. So if properly treated, the water was very good. Water from clean springs was wonderful. But many (probably most) Haitians don't have access to clean water.
According to Human Development Report, 2006, one American uses the water of 30 Haitians: people in Haiti use less than 20 liters of water per person per day, whereas in the US people use 575 liters per day (figure 1.2, p. 34). 54% have access to clean water (ibid; figure 1.3, p. 36)
These figures are undoubtably overestimates, according to the same report, as they indicate that the poor are systematically underrepresented in the reported data world-wide.
The problem in Ranquitte is that the water is contaminated by many sources, but primarily by fecal material ("poop"). The most dangerous poop is human, but fecal material from any animal can cause public health problems. Ranquitte suffers from typhoid, which is most commonly spread through water from human poop contamination; and from ascaris and other intestinal worms. Imagine a gut-full of these:
What leads Haitians to contaminate their waterways with poop? Poor public and personal toilet facilities. In Ethiopia, 69% defecate in field or forest; 28% use a pit latrine; 3% a flush toilet (Human Development Report 2006, figure 1.3, p. 36). The numbers would be similar in Haiti. According to the same source, 30% of Haitians have access to decent public sanitation facilities (restrooms). The rest no doubt are contaminating our environment. Once the poop's on the ground, there are a lot of pathways for human contamination. Water is one of the most important, however.
There is a "rural-urban" divide in sanitation access also: in Haiti, estimates are that approximately 15% of rural people have access to toilets, and that 55% of urban people do (figure 1.17, p. 54, ibid). Urban people are in a tighter bind, however, as their are fewer places to hide to do their business. This has given rise to the phenomenon of what's called the "sachet noir" in Haiti (the "black sack"): people defecate in opaque black plastic bags, and then throw them wherever. This is not a phenomenon of Haiti, however: it's practiced world-wide, as the following story shows. It concerns people in Kibera, a slum of Nairobi, Kenya:
"The conditions here are terrible. You can see for yourself. There is sewage everywhere. Some people have pit latrines, but they are shallow and they overflow when it rains. Most people use buckets and plastic bags for toilets -- and the children use the streets and yards. Our children suffer all the time from diarrhea and other diseases because it is so filthy." -- Mary Akinyi, Mugomo-ini village, Kibera
"One of the strongest pieces of evidence contesting data on service provision is the 'flying toilet'. With neither public nor private latrines available, many of Kibera's resident resort to defecating in plastic bags that they dump in ditches or throw on the roadside. Two in three people in Kibera identify the flying toilet as the primary mode of excreta disposal available to them. It is not difficult to see why. In one slum area -- Laina Saba -- there were 10 functioning pit latrines for 40,000 people at the end of the 1990s. To the extent that any estimate can be derived for the slum as a whole, sanitation coverage in Kibera is probably well below 20%."
Unfortunately, "Those numbers are difficult to square with life in Kibera. Somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million people live in the slum." (p. 38, ibid), which means there is a lot of flying poop, just as their is in Cap Haitien and other cities in Haiti. And where there's flying poop, there's going to be bad water.
Ironically, we in the first world have our own version of the 'flying toilet': it's called the disposable diaper. Our diapers end up along roadsides, in dumpsters, in garbage cans, and especially in landfills all over the country. Americans seem to think that if it's bundled up and tossed, then the problem's been resolved. How similar are people world-wide!
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