I haven’t been able to write about what’s happening here. Thinking too deeply about it all makes it too overwhelming. Below our good friend, Sasha Kramer from our long-time partner organization in Haiti SOIL, writes about the situation on the ground.
Port au Prince, Haiti, Jan. 19 – This afternoon, feeling helpless, we decided to take a van down to Champs Mars, the area around the palace, to look for people needing medical care to bring to Matthew 25, the guesthouse where we are staying which has been transformed into a field hospital. Since we arrived in Port au Prince, everyone has told us that you cannot go into the area around the palace because of violence and insecurity.
I was in awe as we walked into downtown among the flattened buildings in the shadow of the fallen palace. Amongst the swarms of displaced people, there was calm and solidarity. We wound our way through the camp asking for injured people who needed to get to the hospital.
Despite everyone telling us that as soon as we did this we would be mobbed by people, I was amazed: As we approached each tent, people gently pointed us toward their neighbors, guiding us to those who were suffering the most. We picked up five badly injured people and drove towards an area where Ellie and Berto had passed a woman earlier.
When they saw her, she was lying on the side of the road with a broken leg screaming for help. As they were on foot, they could not help her at the time, so we went back to try to find her. Incredibly we found her relatively quickly at the top of a hill of shattered houses. The sun was setting and the community helped to carry her down the hill on a refrigerator door. Tough looking guys smiled in our direction calling out, “Bonswa, cherie” (Good evening, my dear) and “Kouraj” (Courage).
When we got back to Matthew 25, it was dark and we carried the patients back into the soccer field-tent village-hospital where the team of doctors had been working tirelessly all day. Although they had officially closed down for the evening, they agreed to see the patients we had brought.
Once our patients were settled in, we came back into the house to find the doctors amputating a foot on the dining room table. The patient lay calmly, awake but far away under the fog of ketamine. Half way through the surgery, we heard a clamor outside and ran out to see what it was.
A large yellow truck was parked in front of the gate and rapidly unloading hundreds of bags of food over our fence. The hungry crowd had already begun to gather and in the dark it was hard to decide how to best distribute the food.
Knowing that we could not sleep in the house with all of this food and so many starving people in the neighborhood, our friend Amber, who is experienced in food distribution, snapped into action and began to get everyone in the crowd into a line that stretched down the road. We braced ourselves for the fighting that we had heard would come but, in a miraculous display of restraint and compassion, people lined up to get the food and one by one the bags were handed out without a single serious incident.
During the food distribution, the doctors called to see if anyone could help to bury the amputated leg in the backyard. As I have no experience with food distribution, I offered to help with the leg. I went into the back with Ellie and Berto and we dug a hole and placed the leg in it, covering it with soil and cement rubble.
By the time we got back into the house, the food had all been distributed and the patient, Anderson, was waking up. The doctors asked for a translator, so I went and sat by his stretcher explaining to him that the surgery had gone well and he was going to live. His family had gone home and he was alone, so Ellie and I took turns sitting with him as he came out from under the drugs.
I sat and talked to Anderson for hours as he drifted in and out of consciousness. At one point one of the Haitian men working at the hospital came in and leaned over Anderson and said to him in Kreyol: “Listen, man: Even if your family could not be here tonight, we want you to know that everyone here loves you. We are all your brothers and sisters.”
Cat and I have barely shed a tear through all of this – the sky could fall and we would not bat an eye – but when I told her this story this morning, the tears just began rolling down her face, as they are mine as I am writing this. Sometimes it is the kindness and not the horror that can break the numbness that we are all lost in right now.
So don’t believe Anderson Cooper when he says that Haiti is a hotbed for violence and riots. It is just not the case. In the darkest of times, Haiti has proven to be a country of brave, resilient and kind people and it is that behavior that is far more prevalent than the isolated incidents of violence.
Please pass this on to as many people as you can so that they can see the light of Haiti cutting through the darkness, the light that will heal this nation.
We are safe. We love you all and I will write again when I can. Thank you for your generosity and compassion.
Three and a half weeks may have passed, but the situation on the ground is still much the same as what is shown in this photo series. The major differences are that the search and rescue operations have come to a close. The field hospital at MINUSTAH logbase where much triage of earthquake victims was occurring has also closed. The type of medical personnel needed on the ground has shifted. Initially surgeons, especially orthopedic surgeons, were in high demand to deal with trauma, fractures and amputations. Now many of these patients require post-operative care. The 1000+ amputees will require intense physical therapy. An untold number will need grief counseling. Many doctors have answered the call, including my good friend Dr. Megan Coffee, who is manning the TB tent at the general hospital (see Haiti Hospital’s Fight Against TB Falls to One Man in NYTimes). Unfortunately, nurses who spend much more time delivering care to individual patients than doctors ever can are in short supply. As we move out of the early phase of the post-earthquake response, infectious diseases ranging from diarrheal diseases to tuberculosis are becoming a grave concern. Most of the remains of quake victims that are visible (i.e. not under rubble) have been cleared, burned or buried. Many will never find the bodies of their loved ones to give them a proper burial.
“Earthquakes don’t kill people,” says John Mutter, a seismologist and disaster expert at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. “Bad buildings kill them.” And Haiti had some of the worst buildings in world. There are building codes, but in a country that has been ranked as the 10th most corrupt in the world, enforcement is lax at best. The concrete blocks used to construct buildings in the capital are often handmade, and are of wildly varying quality. “In Haiti a block is maybe an eighth of the weight of a concrete block that you’d buy in the U.S.,” says Peter Haas, the executive director of the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group (AIDG), an NGO that has worked on buildings in Haiti. “You end up providing buildings quickly and cheaply but at great risk.”
Compared to the sensationalist reporting and scaremongering from other major news organizations, Amy Goodman and her team covered the situation on the ground with a great deal of sensitivity. I very much appreciate their balanced reporting as a counterpoint to dominant narrative being put forward at the time by CNN.
There are also significant problems with the quality of building materials used, says Peter Haas, head of the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group, a US-based non-profit group that has been working in Haiti since 2006.
“People are skimping on cement to try to cut costs, putting a lot of water in, building too thin, and you end up with a structure that’s innately weaker,” said Mr Haas, who was on his way to Haiti to help assess the safety of damaged buildings.
“Concrete blocks are being made in people’s backyards and dried out in the sun,” he said.
Mr Haas said there were also “serious problems” with the enforcement of building codes in Haiti.
He said the government did not function at all in several parts of the country, and many communities lacked basic services such as electricity, sanitation services or access to clean water.
“So the problem of code enforcement is low down on the list,” he said.
At the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group, a small nonprofit organization in San Francisco, projects are also developed from the ground up by providing support to local entrepreneurs, said Peter Haas, its founder.
Mr. Haas spoke while traveling to Haiti, where, before the earthquake, his group had been set to announce a competition for local entrepreneurs to develop plans for infrastructure projects. The competition has been delayed, and the group has added a new category: earthquake-resistant housing.
In Haiti, Mr. Haas’s group has already been helping Coopen, a business cooperative in Cap Haitien that will collect organic waste and human waste from public toilets and convert it to biogas, a fuel, for cooking. And in Guatemala, the group has aided a small company, XelaTeco, that builds hydroelectric projects for rural villages.
“We’re really not trying to dump some new expert solution on the population,” Mr. Haas said. Working through local businesses, he said, ensures that ideas that do not work do not stay around. “If a business fails and the market doesn’t accept the product, it disappears,” he said.
In a telephone interview, Haas warned that victims of the earthquake are fanning out from the capital to smaller centers across the country, raising the potential for problems beyond Port-au-Prince. To avoid a long-term refugee crisis, he said, the central government and its international supporters must help not only victims in the capital but those who have fled elsewhere.
Haas estimated that several thousand people a day are arriving in Cap Haitien from the capital and are largely left to fend for themselves.
“I think the immediate concern is intake and tracking [the displaced] for support,’’ he said. “Then they can be moved to temporary shelters and more permanent residences.’’
He sees ways to combine the postquake relief work and the longer-term rebuilding. For example, he has been talking with a Virginia company called Shelter 2 Home that builds prefabricated shelters designed to serve as a refuge in a crisis and then be improved to become a permanent house.
Catherine Laine captured this scene among countless other similar while driving through Delmas 33, Port-au-Prince on January 16
Dear readers,
Here is a brief update on our activities in Haiti.
We have established an operations center in Cap-Haïtien with our partner SOIL to serve as a hub for coordinating volunteer efforts and supplies coming into the country, especially those coming in through the port of Cap-Haïtien and the Dominican Republic (one of the few open routes into Haiti these days). Our presence in the north, away from the destruction zone, has allowed our communication and logistic abilities to continue relatively intact, which has been extremely useful in coordinating efforts on the ground with other partners and aid groups.
As an immediate priority, we are recruiting and mobilizing teams of engineers and other technical experts to directly support relief efforts of key partners. As I write this, we are preparing to send our first teams of engineers into Haiti to support the medical response efforts of Partners in Health, an organization that, as we previously noted, is having a significant impact here. We are particularly interested at this moment in placing French or Creole speaking civil and structural engineers. If you are, or know, an engineer that might be interested in volunteering in Haiti, please send a resume or CV to helphaiti@aidg.org.
AIDG will also be helping to coordinate the distribution of a large number of cookstoves in affected areas. Even before this week’s disaster, AIDG was in discussions with several leading stove groups (including Prakti Design, WorldStove, and Trees Water People), and in fact had been planning to host these groups at a conference in Cap-Haïtien next week to strengthen our collaboration in Haiti. Our focus has obviously shifted in the past couple days, and the group is now mobilizing very quickly to bring in as many stoves as possible, while at the same time developing local manufacturing capacity.
Aside from these immediate response priorities, we are also already hard at work developing a longer term strategy for supporting reconstruction efforts in Haiti, including a collaboration with our friends Architecture for Humanity to promote the development of low cost earthquake resistant housing. More details on this will follow in the coming weeks.
As you can imagine, we have all available hands on deck right now to support the response in Haiti. But WE NEED YOUR HELP to make sure we have the resources to continue these efforts. These next weeks are critical for us and for Haiti, and we are asking you to make a donation, whatever you can, to support our work here. Every dollar helps, and every dollar will have an immediate and direct impact in the wake of this tragedy.
You can make a secure donation online here, or if you’d like to mail us a check, you can send it to the following address:
AIDG
P.O. Box 104
Weston, MA 02493
We can’t thank you enough for all of your support.
Quetsol is a new business that will provide high efficiency, low cost solar technologies that aim to increase access to basic illumination, electricity generation, and water pumping in Guatemala. Their mission is to help their clients save money and improve their quality of life through the use of appropriate technology.
At approximately 4:55 pm Eastern on Tuesday Port Au Prince experienced a magnitude 7.0 earthquake, with aftershocks of 5.9 and 5.7. There is widespread damage to infrastructure with numerous collapsed buildings. It is anticipated there will be a high casualty rate
The National Palace has collapsed (eyewitness photo)
The UN headquarters has been seriously damaged (source: UN)
The Hotel Montana has sustained collapse with 200 missing (source: associated press france)
A Hospital has collapsed (source:NYtimes)
We are currently developing opportunities for AIDG to aid in reconstruction with the help of partners. We will make another announcement on this shortly.
As you all know we are a small organization. We require some basic additional budget resources immediately to help run an assessment that will determine this longer term response aimed at infrastructure and reconstruction. If possible mail checks to:
AIDG
P.O. Box 104
Weston, MA 02493
We will actually receive these funds faster than online donations. We will be running a larger campaign in concert with our reconstruction announcement.
For those wishing to have an immediate direct impact on populations in Port Au Prince we are recommending supporting the medical response teams of Partners In Health. www.pih.org They are working with a field hospital set up by the UNDP that immediately needs pain meds, bandages and other medical supplies.
We ask you all to hold Haiti in your hearts and prayers as this tragedy unfolds.
Bill Easterly author of “White Man’s Burden” and ideological nemesis of Jeffrey Sachs gives the top 10 wrong ways to write about poor people.
My favorites.
6. Discuss only income, health, access to clean water, and literacy. Leave it to anthropologists to cover areas like happiness, traditions, ceremonies, festivals, friendships, kinship, love between men and women, or love between parents and children.
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8. Don’t show pictures of poor men, who make your audience think of drunkards, wife-beaters, or janjaweed.
9. These topics are only for Marxists: power, class, discrimination, oppression, or history.
Along the same lines, check out actor Djimon Hounsou (Blood Diamond, Constantine, In America, Amistad) reading Binyavanga Wainana’s must-read article How (not) to write about Africa.
Tens of thousands of people from nearly every nation on earth have descended on Copenhagen this month for the UN climate summit. As the delegates try to piece together a framework for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, they’re also absorbing lessons from one of the world’s leading cities in sustainable transportation. In Copenhagen, fully 37 percent of commute trips are made by bike, and mode share among city residents alone is even higher.
Come see “the busiest bicycling street in the Western world”, and lots of other you-gotta-see-them-to-believe-them features including bike counters (featuring digital readouts), LEDS, double bike lanes (for passing) and giant hot pink cars.
Tonight we’re having our 5th annual holiday party. Can you believe it? It’s been five years since AIDG got started with $800 and a bag of tools. We’ve accomplished a lot in a short amount of time and we couldn’t have done it without you.
Our holiday party is how we say thanks to all our friends, colleagues and supporters. So if you are in the Boston area come mingle and get an update on the work you helped make happen. If you’re new to the AIDG community or want to be a part of it, don’t be shy! Come out and meet everybody. Hear the stories first hand.
Come Celebrate with us
LOCATION: Our office space in Chinatown.
33 Harrison Avenue, 5th Floor, Boston, MA 02111 DATE: Tuesday Dec. 29, 2009
TIME: 6PM -9 PM
RSVP: Cat Laine claine@aidg.org 800-401-3860 x703
Directions:
On the T From the Orange Line: Stop at Chinatown. Exit near intersection of Essex St and Washington St. Go East on Essex towards Chinatown. Make first right on Harrison Ave. If you hit Beach Street, you’ve gone too far.
From the Green Line: Stop at Boylston Street. Exit near intersection of Boylston St and Tremont St. Walk East on Boylston/Essex St 2 blocks (away from the Common). Take a right on Harrison Ave. If you hit Beach Street, you’ve gone too far.
From the Red Line: Stop at Downtown Crossing. Exit near intersection of Summer St and Washington St. Go Southwest on West on Washington St towards Park Street. Turn Left on Essex. Make first right on Harrison Ave. If you hit Beach Street, you’ve gone too far.
