Floods Bring More Suffering to a Battered Haitian Town

[seemslikeadream]

By TIM WEINER

Published: May 29, 2004


APOU, Haiti, May 28 - Mapou is gone. So are a thousand people who lived here.

This was a town with outlying hamlets where perhaps 10,000 lived, or endured. They scratched a living from the earth, down in a steep green valley in the southeast corner of Haiti, in the deepest poverty of the Western world.

On Monday, "the rain started falling so hard, it was like the flood in the Bible," said Fernando Gueren, a farmer who lost his parents and his son in the deluge.

The river that runs through Mapou drowned the town on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Lt. Col. Duane Perry of the United States Marines flew down the valley in a helicopter after delivering aid to another devastated town, Fond Verrettes.

He looked down at a muddy lake with a few roofs poking through its shallows and said, "It looks like there was a town there."

That lake was Mapou. The town was under 25 feet of water, Colonel Perry said. The dead hung from the trees.

Standing amid tons of rice he helped carry to Mapou on Friday, he said the village elders had told him that at least 300 people were dead and that 700 more had vanished and were feared to have drowned. "We estimate about 1,000 dead" in Mapou, Colonel Perry said.

If so, Mapou is the most devastated place among the many damaged and destroyed in the floods that killed perhaps 2,000 people in Haiti and on its border with the Dominican Republic this week.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/29/international/americas/29cari.html