top menu

Navigation

  • Beraca Medical Center has no bathrooms, showers or other general hygiene facilities. Patients must be wheeled to outhouses located outside the hospitals walls. These outhouses are privies without sinks for hand washing or toilet paper. Disease is easily spread from the patients and workers at Beraca Medical Center to House of Hope.

  • This is the river where the residents of Port-de-Paix obtain their drinking water. The same river is used for bathing, washing, and the disposal of waste. The lack of hygiene facilities in this region facilitates the spread of diseases, such as cholera, that are a leading cause of preventable deaths.

You are here: Home › Our Programs › Water Projects

Water Projects

In 2004, Friends of Humanity President Renel Noel led a team of Miami volunteers who installed a domestic water system at Beraca Medical Center. He returned during a recent cholera epidemic, located and cut off the source of contamination, preventing the deaths of thousands.

Northwest Haiti lacks an adequate infrastructure for clean drinking water and sanitary hygiene. There is no sewer system and there is no waste water treatment plant. The people of Port-de-Paix obtain their drinking water from unprotected springs and rivers which are contaminated by bathing, laundry, and refuse disposal.  At the slightest rainfall, waste blocks drainage canals in Port-de-Paix and floods the city.

The lack of clean drinking water and sanitary facilities is compounded by natural disasters. In the two years following the 2010 earthquake, Haiti experienced a massive cholera outbreak. The number of deaths has roughly tripled since Hurricane Sandy struck the island. The true mortality rate in northwest Haiti will never be known.