Donal Reilly is Senior Emergency Advisor with Catholic Relief Services.

Gonaives is a mess. Haiti is a poor place on a good day. I used to work in the slums in Port-au-Prince, but I've never seen this amount of destruction. The water was a huge issue at first. It rose past the first floor levels of the buildings at the center of town. People who worked in Aceh described it like the Tsunami effect, but the water didn't come from the sea.

Now with the water receding, the silt is settling and the mud is becoming more of a problem. I've never seen a place so choked up by debris. The UN has calculated 2.5 million cubic meters of mud have been deposited in the city alone. I estimate it would take the removal of about 400 truckloads of mud a day, every day for a year to clear Gonaives.

With all the mud on the streets there is no drainage. The drains are full. The septic tanks are full. The pit latrines are full. Gonaives is basically a city without sanitation.

People are already cleaning the mud out of their homes and business but the problem is there is nowhere to dump the mud. So they put it in the streets and it piles up and hinders mobility.

If it rains again before the streets are cleared their houses will effectively be turned into swimming pools. This is because their buildings are at a lower level than the streets around them. Since there is no drainage, the water just stays there.

One of the first places we started clearing was the Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Ascension school. Two sisters care for about 700 street children in that small compound.

When the rains started the nuns had nowhere to go but up. They waited out the storm on the roof of the building. I can't imagine how frightening it must have been for two nuns who can't even swim to wait out the storms on that rooftop not knowing when the rains would cease and the waters would stop rising.

Getting to the school was difficult. It's in a neighborhood that has been turned into a swamp. We went in a four-wheel drive. Walking there would have been impossible. The mud had washed over the building, poured into the kitchen and encrusted everything with a thick layer of sludge.

In two days of cleaning the school the streets were blocked. It's an ongoing process as people clean out their house, the mud rises and there is a need once again to clean the streets.

We're getting some trucks and loaders to begin removing the heavier loads of mud. Wheelbarrows and shovels are not enough. It's a huge task and one that is necessary for the city to come back to life.

The government has identified a site just outside of the city where people can begin depositing mud. In some parts of the city, I think they should be able to use the dried mud to raise the ground floor levels of any new homes, especially in the low-lying areas close to the sea front which are prone to seasonal flooding.

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