As for drinking water, Haiti averages 54" of rainfall per year, with a usual minimum of a little over an inch in the two driest months. Rainwater collection is the cheapest and cleanest drinking water available anywhere, and doesn't need treatment if it isn't contaminated after it lands. If they aren't using it as a source of drinking water, they should be.

A 20x20' hut with a cheap coated steel roof (~$400 retail) and some rain barrels ($50 each, retail) would be a relatively cheap way to provide drinking water for a family. Every inch of rain would provide about 250 gallons of clean water.

If a 200 x 40' community shed/farmer's market were built, that would provide 8,000 sqft of rainwater collection equaling about 5,000 gallons per inch of rain. Have that water run into a relatively cheap, locally-made (with local help or volunteers) covered concrete cistern for community use.

Both typhus and cholera are mainly transmitted by contaminated water. Remove the sources and remove much of the disease.

One of my previous posts sneered at flush toilets in Haiti. I had to go to work and didn't have the time to elaborate. Flush toilets are a waste of resources, esp in places like Haiti that don't have enough clean water to drink, much less for flushing toilets.

There are other options of safe waste management that are far cheaper, and require fewer resources than flush toilets. I don't think there is any worldwide law that you MUST have multi-million-dollar waste facilities. Using 20-25% of the total water usage in a household for a flush toilet is wasteful and stupid. And if anyone thinks sewers and septic tanks are the ideal way to safely dispose of human waste, you really need to do some research and educate yourself. Every time you use a flush toilet, much of it eventually ends up in a water supply.

A woman in Africa came up with the idea of movable village outhouses: dig a hole, place the outhouse over it. When it gets nearly full, move the outhouse, fill in the top part of the hole with soil, and plant a fruit tree. Repeat. The tree uses the waste to grow fruit.

Cattails grow in Hait. Cattail marshes can be used to clean gravity-fed wastewater (solids removed first, usually), and one acre of cattails can be harvested to process methanol, to the tune of 8,000-10,000 gallons of methanol per acre. And they don't need a multi-billion dollar distillery, either. All they need is a smart farmer with some scrap metal and a welding unit. The Haitians could use locally-made alcohol for cooking and running vehicles.

There are reasonably-priced options, but it takes some common sense and some thinking. Why anyone would think flush toilets and highly-mechanized processes would work in Haiti isn't thinking very clearly. Clean water and decent waste management would solve many of Haiti's problems, and possibly even provide some jobs. Is that too much to expect?

Sue