Haiti’s Water Crisis: The Thing No One Talks About Anymore

I was in Port-au-Prince last month and watched a little boy fill a cracked cooking-oil jug from a puddle the color of coffee with milk. His mother told me the communal pipe in their alley had been dry for three weeks. They couldn’t afford the trucked-in water anymore, so the puddle it was. That image has been sitting in my chest ever since.

Fifteen years after the earthquake, the idea that Haiti might one day have reliable clean water feels almost nostalgic. The pipes that broke in 2010 are still broken. In the countryside there never were pipes to begin with. Less than a third of the country drinks water you or I would consider safe, and even that number feels generous when you see what people actually use.

The capital is controlled by men with guns now. They decide which roads stay open and which water trucks get through. Technicians from the national water agency can’t reach the treatment plants on the hills because someone might shoot at them for fun. So the plants sit half-functional, and the city drinks whatever comes out of the hose.

Out in the Artibonite, the river that feeds half the country looks like a sewer because it is one. People wash clothes upstream from where others fill drinking buckets downstream, and everyone pretends not to notice. When the rains come, the hills—bare as parking lots after a century of charcoal cutting—send torrents of mud straight into the same rivers. When the rains don’t come, the springs disappear and people walk farther and farther with yellow jerrycans balanced on their heads.

Cholera never really left. It went quiet for a couple of years and everyone celebrated too soon. Now it’s back, moving through the same brackish estuaries around the bay where the 2010 strain learned to live. Every time the sanitation chain breaks—and it breaks every single day—the bacteria get another chance.

I’ve seen mothers in Cité Soleil wake at three in the morning to stand in line for a standpipe that might have water and might not. When it doesn’t, they pay a guy on a motorcycle whatever cash they have for a few gallons he pumped from who-knows-where. That water eats twenty, sometimes thirty percent of what the family earns in a good week.

Up in the mountains it’s quieter but no easier. Kids who should be in fourth grade spend their mornings climbing down ravines to a spring that’s more mud than water by February. Their little brothers and sisters pay for it later with diarrhea so bad the clinic runs out of oral rehydration salts.

There are bright spots if you look hard enough: a village in the Southeast where a Swiss NGO built a gravity system that still works, a neighborhood association in Carrefour that chlorinates its own well every morning, a composting-toilet project turning human waste into fertilizer instead of poison. But these are candles in a windstorm. One hurricane, one surge of gang roadblocks, one missed donor payment, and the candle goes out.

Haiti has received billions since 2010. Billions. Yet the same families still carry water on their heads in 2025. The money disappeared into emergency responses, short-term contracts, and things that looked good on reports but crumbled the first time reality showed up.

Clean water shouldn’t be this hard. It’s not a complicated technology; it’s just pipes, pumps, chlorine, and the political will to protect the people who keep them running. Haiti has none of those in the quantities required.

So the boy with the cracked jug keeps drinking the coffee-colored water, and his mother keeps praying it won’t be the batch that kills him. Most days it isn’t. That’s what passes for hope around here. ⯌