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 OM has sent out an emergency response team to Haiti. Initially we are focused on getting food, water and medical attention to a five orphanages in the southern areas of Port-au-Prince, two of which have been totally destroyed
We are providing shelter so that the children will no longer have to sleep on the ground. This is an urgent challenge because Haiti's rainy season will begin soon.
Structural engineers are examining the buildings to assess what needs to be done to make them safe. Read the latest updates below:
March 7 Update
During the first week of March, a couple sent by the OM office in the Netherlands helped our work in Haiti. He is a structural engineer and inspected several buildings including orphanages, churches and some houses. He provided reports with recommendations on each. The wife is a psychologist, and she met with hundreds of adults and children, helping them process their reactions to the earthquake and the pain of their losses.
At the end of the week, an eight-member medical team sent from OM's staff in Uruguay arrived to assist. They are helping to serve a volunteer medical clinic and also are visiting orphanages and doing clinics for the children.
Our team continues to deliver food to various locations. At OM’s office in the USA, staff are collecting some specific food and hygiene items and some shelter items to fill a shipping container. After this shipment, we will focus on obtaining food and supplies within Haiti to help stimulate the local economy. OM's Caribbean team is grateful for the funds they continue to receive from various OM offices around the world.
February 19 Update
On February 16 we sent a team six people from the USA into Haiti to continue our work there. The team included a nurse, two women to work with children at an orphanage, and three people to work on distributing food, water and other supplies to orphanages and their surrounding communities. We were able to send 4,000 pounds of supplies into Haiti with the team.
The women who went to one orphanage spent time with the children and tried to help alleviate their fear of going back inside their building, which has been inspected by an engineer and deemed safe. One of the women stayed overnight, sleeping in the building to convince the children that it’s safe to sleep inside.
The nurse worked with a Christian medical clinic operating in the area. They are seeing approximately 500 to 600 people per day. The rest of the team visited five orphanages where they distributed sheets, blankets and food.
On Monday, February 22, a structural engineer and a psychologist will arrive in Haiti to work with OM. We are also arranging the final details for an eight-member medical team to come from Uruguay on February 28 for two weeks.
January 29 Update - Personal experience from one OM aid worker
“I knew there were going to be ‘God moments’ through the week when the tap-tap [taxi truck] ran out of gas right in front of the orphanage.” That was the beginning of the visit to Haiti by Henry Couser, a member of OM’s staff in the USA. He had travelled nearly two hours from the airport in the tap-tap, and the fuel lasted until they got to the orphanage gate.
Henry arrived in Carrefour, a suburb of Port-au-Prince, in the first days after the January 12 earthquake. His goal was to visit the three orphanages OM had helped in the past, in partnership with a US church, and assess their needs. He based himself at the first one, where the tap-tap ran out of gas, and found that instead of 200 children, the orphanage was housing 350 and was also giving shelter and food to approximately 1,000 people from the community. And they were coming to the end of their food supply.
No outside help had arrived yet. Their buildings were still standing, but, like everyone else in the region, they were sleeping outside due to concerns about aftershocks and damage to the structures. By finding some shops that had not been destroyed, Henry was able to purchase food for the immediate need.
Two days later, Henry was joined by a six-member, trained emergency response team sent by OM’s USA office and led by former OM worker Rusty Garrison. One of their tasks was to check the rubble of a nearby school that had collapsed on 2,000 students. They could find no signs of life. Faced with this and other sites where children had died in piles of rubble, the team wanted to work at removing bodies. “But we knew that our mission was to help the living, and that had to be our priority,” Rusty said.
 Each of the three orphanages was visited, and at each the team found a similar situation: buildings standing but showing cracks, children and staff living outside, food and water nearly gone. Through contacts in the communities, the team was able to find food and water to stock each orphanage. They located a relief aid warehouse which had begun receiving food shipments, but the director was overwhelmed at organizing it and establishing a distribution system.
He asked only for the team’s labor of unloading trucks and organizing a supply line in exchange for food they could take to the orphanages. “I’ll never forget the cheers that erupted as we drove into the orphanage gates,” says one of the team members, speaking of arriving with food from the warehouse.
As they transported injured people to a hospital in the area, they found that the medical staff had run out of food two or three days earlier. The team provided them with food, as well.
During a week in Haiti, the three orphanages were supplied with food and water to last until a shipment could be arranged, injured people were transported to clinics, and a child whose adoption had been finalized just before the earthquake was helped out of the country with her adoptive parents.
Everywhere there were the stories and stunned faces of people still in shock--not yet grieving, only staring at the rubble. There was the old man who, with his wife of 58 years, was visiting from Canada when the buildings collapsed. Her body was removed from the rubble, and he asked Henry to take a photo of her passport picture “so that the world will not forget Anne Marie.”
There was the family who lost 15 members in the collapse of their home. Four bodies were recovered and placed in one coffin, but the other 11 were still in the ruins. The family asked Henry to take of photo of the surviving members. The heartbreaking sadness was knowing that hundreds of thousands of people had similar stories.
But in the midst of such tragedy, after the team’s work, there were three orphanages which had smiling children with full stomachs. They understood that God had brought Henry and the team to help them
January 21 Update on OM’s Haiti Involvement
The emergency response team members in Haiti were unharmed by the strong aftershock on Wednesday morning. They made contact with a third orphanage which has approximately 135 children, all of whom are safe but in need of food and shelter. They are living outside because of some damage to their buildings.
The team was able to get some food for them, and we will begin working on getting tents and plastic to use as shelter. We are currently working on obtaining a larger shipment of food, water and supplies for sending to Haiti at a later date. We hope to have a clearer plan for our ongoing response in the next week.
January 19 Update on OM's Involvement in Haiti
The emergency response team, sent to Haiti by OM USA, in partnership with a local US church, was diverted to the Dominican Republic. They have been traveling by land, have crossed the border into Haiti and are expected to reach their destination soon.
We have had contact with another of the three orphanages we are seeking to help. Their children are unharmed. The building sustained minor damage, but because of concerns about having the children living outside on the street, they continue to keep them inside.
January 18 Update on OM’s Haiti Involvement
A member of OM’s USA team arrived in Port-au-Prince on Saturday January 16 and made his way to an orphanage in Carrefour (just outside Port-au-Prince) which OM has helped in the past. He reports that the devastation in that area is perhaps worse than in the capital city, yet no help has arrived so far.
He has been able to obtain enough food for the orphanage for a few days, and their water tank may have enough water to last through the week, as well. |
