Hospitals are among the buildings destroyed in southwestern Haiti which was devastated by Hurricane Matthew earlier this month, complicating efforts to treat the injured, cholera patients and pregnant women.
A team from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) set out for the hurricane ravaged southwest peninsula of Haiti on Saturday (October 15) to assess the damage with one team focusing on maternity clinics in the region.
UNFPA is a United Nations organization that focuses on pregnant women and people in need.
“We’re taking loads of food and water because we can’t go to these places without bringing something. People there are starving, they’re thirsty, there’s a high risk of cholera in these areas, so we’re bringing clean water for them as well. Just to show you… we have cookies, spaghetti, water… all of these things so that people will have something to eat. We’ll be delivering these to the maternity clinics where we’re going to conduct an assessment of what damage there is and what the needs are,” said UNFPA representative Marielle Sander as she showed bags of supplies the team was bringing to the area.
In the city of Beaumont, southeast of hard-hit Jeremie, the UNFPA team found the maternity ward at the Beaumont hospital in complete shambles.
The Category 4 hurricane tore through Haiti on Oct. 4, killing about 1,000 people and leaving more than 1.4 million in need of humanitarian aid, including 175,000 made homeless.
Flooding has triggered a new wave of cholera infections, a disease introduced to Haiti by U.N. peacekeepers a few months after the country’s last major humanitarian crisis, a destructive 2010 earthquake.
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