The emer­gency in Haiti isn’t over. It’s get­ting worse, as the out­side world’s atten­tion fades away.

Mis­ery rages like a fever in the hun­dreds of camps shel­ter­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands of the 1.3 mil­lion peo­ple left home­less by the Jan. 12 earth­quake. The dreaded rains have already swamped tents and ragged stick-and-tarp huts. They have turned walk­ways into mud lakes and made dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble the sim­ple acts of col­lect­ing and cook­ing food, wash­ing clothes, stay­ing clean and avoid­ing dis­ease. The rainy sea­son peaks in May.

Wors­en­ing the weather cri­sis are the unchecked sex­ual assaults and rapes in the camps, where fam­i­lies are squeezed side by side in flimsy quar­ters and women and girls are left unpro­tected after dark.

A new report from Amnesty Inter­na­tional affirms that secu­rity is inad­e­quate, that police and sol­diers are often miss­ing, that every night­fall brings ter­ror. Vic­tims stay silent because rapists go uncaught and unpun­ished; what lit­tle polic­ing exists is focused on other priorities.

Both the shel­ter and safety crises demand an urgent response, and while feel­ings of urgency abound in Haiti, their impact is only spo­rad­i­cally felt. The lit­tle coun­try is swarm­ing with well-intentioned orga­ni­za­tions, each try­ing to do their lit­tle bit of help. One group is try­ing to dis­trib­ute thou­sands of flash­lights to women and girls. It’s a kind and prac­ti­cal ges­ture, but what they really need are shel­ters from sex­ual vio­lence, and ade­quate polic­ing. Haiti has nei­ther, Amnesty Inter­na­tional reports.

Any effec­tive solu­tion would need to be coor­di­nated with the gov­ern­ment of Haiti, whose lead­ers have been absent from the lives of Hait­ian cit­i­zens since the dis­as­ter. When for­mer Pres­i­dents George W. Bush and Bill Clin­ton vis­ited the cap­i­tal of Port-au-Prince this week, they joined Pres­i­dent René Pré­val in tour­ing the camp in Champ de Mars, across the street from the slumped-over pres­i­den­tial palace. Screams of frus­tra­tion greeted them. Where have you been? Why have you not helped us?

From the first days of this dis­as­ter, some­one should have been rac­ing to find places to build sturdy hous­ing away from the densely crowded, quake-shattered cap­i­tal. But the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment only this week took the nec­es­sary step of invok­ing eminent-domain power to seize land. Sites have been iden­ti­fied, but the num­ber of places avail­able for new hous­ing is still zero. Only a few hun­dred peo­ple have been moved from the camps.

We under­stand the gov­ern­ment has been work­ing hard to pre­pare for a donor con­fer­ence next week, where big ideas for the future will be dis­cussed. But back in old Haiti, land of tents and tarps, work­ers have been putting fresh coats of plas­ter and blue paint on build­ings on the United Nations com­pound in Port-au-Prince, and the rest of the world is mov­ing on.

Some United States troops have started going home. Over­matched work­ers for United Nations agen­cies and non­govern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tions are toil­ing away, many of them hero­ically. But ulti­mately progress must be judged by results. New ways must be found to solve prob­lems, and urgency sus­tained. Haiti is in dan­ger of becom­ing what it always was, a nag­ging blot on the con­science, a neglected project that never gets done.