Lives Lost in Haiti Escape

17 bodies have washed ashore after a group of Haitians made an unsuccessful bid to migrate from their home country, the poorest in the Western Hemisphere.

After receiving the call on Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard is assisting the Haitian Coast Guard in the search for another 19 people still believed to be missing. 12 survivors have been found so far.

Their sailboat freighter ran aground on a reef after attempting to turn around due to high seas. It was headed for the Turks and Caicos Islands and ultimately the U.S., but sank in Haitian territorial waters near the coastal town of Le Borgne on Haiti’s north coast.

“Our crews are searching with every intention to find these missing people and bring them back to their loved ones,” said Captain Mark Fedor, U.S. Coast Guard 7th District chief of response. “The sad truth remains that many have already perished and the Coast Guard urges all to reconsider taking the dangerous and illegal voyage at sea. Our condolences go out to all affected by this tragedy.”

Migrants from Haiti frequently sail through the Turks and Caicos and the Bahamas in an attempt to reach the United States some 600 miles (965km) away, often in overloaded and unseaworthy vessels.

The U.S. Coast Guard said it has intercepted 309 Haitians at sea in the last six months. 

The Haitian government has urged Haitians to stop risking their lives on migrant smuggling boats, and condemned those who organize the illegal voyages. 

Escaping disease

Around a 1,000 new cases of cholera are reported on Haiti each week, reports Reuters. Cholera, a water-borne disease caught by drinking and using contaminated water, has killed nearly 9,000 Haitians and infected 732,000 since it broke out in the country in late 2010.

With the lowest levels of access to drinking water and sanitation in the Americas, Haiti is struggling to stamp out the disease, which resurged between October and December last year, said the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).

During the first two months of this year, cholera cases totaled 7,225, including 86 deaths.

Infectious diseases such as cholera thrive in the overcrowded slums sprawled across the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince. With few toilets there, people are forced to defecate in the open. Cases normally spike during Haiti's rainy season from September to November.

Cholera causes diarrhea and vomiting that often brings on severe dehydration, which if not treated quickly can be fatal.

Forty percent of Haiti's population of 10 million do not have access to clean water, while nearly half of the country's hospitals lack either drinking water or sanitation, PAHO says.

Furthermore, 60 percent of Haiti's schools lack toilets, according to Human Rights Watch.

The U.N. says 28,000 more Haitians could be infected this year. The government is unable to cope with peaks in cholera as the country's health sector is still recovering from the massive 2010 earthquake, says medical charity Doctors Without Borders.

Escaping poverty

Nearly 80 percent of people in Haiti earn less than $2 a day, and nearly half are illiterate.

Gustavo Gallon, a U.N. independent expert, said last month that because roughly half of Haiti's 10 million people are unable to read or write, many can't enjoy their basic human rights.

"Haiti faces a very serious and catastrophic human rights situation that goes back many years," Gallon told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview.

"Knowing how to read and write is crucial to life with dignity and is the basis of knowing your rights and the possibility of claiming your rights. It's also the basis of getting an education, which in turn gives access to other rights such as a job, food, housing and health," he said.

Gallon urged the Haitian government and foreign aid donors to allocate more funding to improve literacy among children and adults and focus not only on Creole, Haiti's native tongue, but on French - the language used by the country's elite.

Only two percent of children complete high school in Haiti, and at the rate of current programs underway to raise literacy rates, it would take 23 years to eradicate illiteracy in the Caribbean nation, U.N. figures show.