Walking through a Third World graveyard

GONAIVES, Haiti -- Well into my second visit to Haiti, I had totaled almost three weeks here and avoided even minor illness in a country where sanitation is a problem.

I spent part of Tuesday afternoon in the crowded Gonaives graveyard. Overgrown and strewn with trash, it was a maze of above-ground burial sites. With the help of a gravedigger, who was hauling a shovel and pick in a wheelbarrow, I found what I was looking for: Unmarked graves of children whose families can not afford to buy a headstone. These people are nameless and faceless in the eyes of much of the rest of the world, and death throws one last insult at them: they go to their rest anonynously, with no chance for their survivors to visit a grave.

On the way back to Holy Family School and guesthouse, about a two-kilometer walk, we stopped to buy two pouches of drinking water from a street vendor. The water was clean, but the pouch probably was not. In biting off the corner, I was exposed to some sort of bacteria.

The night was uncomfortable and seemingly endless. The unrelenting heat continues. Night brings little, if any, relief.

The streets are not paved. They are packed dirt which take black and gray colors from the many burning charcoal fires. Gonaives sits in a basin, much like Cincinnati, surrounded on three sides by mountains. The fourth side is on the sea. The haze from the fires and automobile exhaust create conditions that make breathing difficult.

I have spent a great deal of time in the past two days with a third family, headed by a widow with five children. Her husband, a driver, died of what she described as "the fever." Her sister also is widowed, and she lives there, too, with her four children. Then there is a younger brother, who has a 2-year-old daughter. The girl's mother died four months ago.

There are three adults and 10 children living in a two-room house. There are three beds. Many of the children sleep in assigned spots on the concrete floor.