MTH Canada BlogMission to Haiti Canada

We woke to a bright and sunny morning which is so typical of Haiti. The camp has dried up and it was amazing to sit outside early this morning to watch the Haitians living within the camp waking up to come out of the nine Red Cross tents on the site. These tents were provided and utilized heavily during the days immediately following earthquake. Now they are serving as homes for the displaced Haitians. The day’s agenda was extremely full, so after breakfast we head out on our way. The following hi-lites the experiences of our day.

• Our first stop was to do the food distribution at Christa College. The beans and rice had already been bagged and prepared by the ten young Haitian men that had offered to assist us. We arrived a Christa College to find 300 families from the school and community that we support sitting orderly inside of the Church. The rice and beans were unloaded quickly from the truck and placed on tables outside of the Church in the school yard. In groups of ten people at a time they came out of the Church to pick up enough beans, rice and oil for a week’s worth of food. It was exciting to hand the food packages to our sponsored children and their families in order to provide for them. Once we finished the food distribution to the 300 families we still had about fifty portions left so we re-arranged the tables and then started to hand out the food to the small crowd from the community that had gathered around the school.
• While doing the food distribution, we were able to assist and provide several crutches for people who had been hurt and were walking around with canes.
• Next we met with the board of SAEDT to discuss their needs for the Children and families of their sponsorship programme. They reported that one of their students and a teacher had perished during the earthquake but the remainder of the community was recovering. They are actively looking forward to getting the school open again, but there are some challenges and uncertainties how that can be accomplished.
• We then met with the director and the vice principal from Christa College to review the school building and grounds. Two outside walls on the second floor have fallen over along with several interior walls. Overall the concrete post and beam structure was still in place with no signs of stress, cracks or concerns. We told the director that we would be able to repair the school in about three days with our April team. To our surprise, we were told that the government and the education system in Haiti has told all schools that they must temporarily relocate to tents and that they cannot use their buildings until Codes have been put in place. This is a requirement for all schools regardless if they have sustained damage or not from the quake.
• We proceeded to leave the school and go with the Director to a piece of property close by that a local Haitian had offered to the school as a place to set up a large tent for the school to resume. The school is forced to relocate due to new government regulations however the government has not provided the tents for them to do this. This means that we are now faced with having to find tents to suit about 200 children for school. We told the Director that we would see what we could do in order to assist and that we would stay in contact with him to help find a solution.
• Our next meeting was with Michelle who was a construction supervisor who had worked with Mission to Haiti Canada for many years. We sat down with him to explain our vision of building houses for the Haitian people that were 12′ x 20′, two room houses to provide a living accommodate for a Haitian family. Our vision was to build twenty of these homes initially using Haitian workers and our technologies to build stronger homes as a place of refuge for the families. We will have them start with several members of our April construction team to build the first prototype house and then they will continue from there.
• We then travelled to the home of one of the sponsored families to visit the damage from the quake and to see how we could handle repairing the house for the two parents and the six children. The building needed a new roof and some floor repairs so we made arrangements that Michelle and his crew would start to work there in the upcoming week to repair the residence.
• We then broke for lunch and picked up some extra food to provide to people as we continued our travels around the City.
• Next we headed downtown to see the conditions that had been left by the earthquake. Many of the same pictures that we have seen on the TV reports are still in place. Several areas within the civic squares have been bulldozed flat and large gravel pads have been created to develop tents cities. We met with a Canadian police officer (Christian Ouellet) from Montreal who had been stationed in Port au Prince since last July and he was in charge of the security for a tent city that housed over 40,000 people. We talked with Christian about the conditions of the tent cities and the Haitian people at this time. He explained that even though many Haitians have lost many things including family members that they are resiliently trying to carry on. He was pleased to see that we as Canadians had been helping for many years prior to the hurricanes and earthquake and that we were continuing to come now rather than abandoning the Haitian people.
• We travelled further to the Palace area to see the devastation. It was quite astonishing the number of political dignitaries that were visiting the area and taking pictures of the palace while less than 60 feet away behind their backs people were camped out in tents made from blue tarps. We parked on a quieter side street and handled out the remaining tarps and left over lunch that we had to several people in the area.
• As it was starting to get towards the end of the afternoon we headed back to the camp so that we would not have to travel in the dark. The City was very congested as vehicles winded their ways around the rubble and debris of fallen buildings.
• After dinner at the camp, we sat down with Pastor Charles for several hours to discuss the situations at Cabaret and Faveau schools/communities. We were once again surprised to hear that even these two schools would have to meet outside in tents temporarily even though their buildings had no structural damages from the quake. A need for tents for 500 and 100 students respectively are required. We continued to review the needs and plans for these communities as well as discussed the work to be undertaken with the April 10-17 relief team.
• After a long day with plenty of things to absorb in our minds, we retired for a well deserved sleep.

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