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“I have achieved a lot: organising women’s self-help groups, getting the children to attend school, and providing basic needs such as water, electricity and street lights. Even men could not have done so much. ”
Haiti Earthquake
A massive earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale has caused widespread devastation in the poor Caribbean nation of Haiti, killing and injuring tens of thousands of people and leaving countless more without homes. Please donate now for urgent relief and longer term recovery. Download appeal leaflet and donation form here
Latest news
>>Arts Help Haitian Children Heal 2/3/10 Drawing, music, painting and dance are helping children deal with the stress of displacement. More >>CWS supports health care in Haiti 27/01/10. ACT Alliance members in Port-au-Prince continue to support medical care for Haiti’s most vulnerable providing food for malnourished children and a tent hospital. More >> Situation Update 25/01/10 The situation continues to be desperate for the people affected by the earthquake in Haiti but material aid is reaching them. More >> Clean water from filthy 23/01/10 A water purification system, with pipes, filters and pumps brought in by CWS partners is providing 10,000 homeless Haitians with crystal clear drinking water. >> Urgent needs outside Port-au-Prince 20/01/10. CWS partners are focusing on communities outside Port-au-Prince, where the damage has been greater but little help has been received. More >>Aid reaching Haiti. 19/01/10 CWS partners are getting much needed relief into Haiti. More >> No one immune from devastation 19/01/10 Latest reports of reality facing Haiti and relief services. Includes first hand accounts. Read more >>A journey to Port-au-Prince 19/01/10 ACT Alliance’s Sarah Wilson describes the tough journey to Port-au-Prince, highlighting the problems all aid agencies share moving to and from the disaster area. More
>> Healing the traumatised 16/01/10. This ACT Alliance project gets local people engaged in community based activities; repairing houses, cleaning streets, rebuilding schools etc. It is a way of offering hope for the future. Water and hygiene are another important focus. Full report >>People buried alive when houses collapsed: The first reports from ACT International on earthquake damage, the latest in a series of disasters to strike the improverished state. read more >>Disaster background 14/01/10 |
A Prayer for HaitiLoving and gracious God, |
Arts Help Haitian Children Heal
Sh e’s small, but her smile easily lights up a room. Eight-year-old Rosedaline Revolis grins as she plays the pandeiro (tambourine) for capoeira, a martial-arts inspired dance native to Brazil that is now helping Haitian children cope with the changes in their lives since the January 12 earthquake.
The capoeira training is part of a comprehensive psychosocial program by Viva Rio, a partner organization of ACT Alliance member Norwegian Church Aid. Kay Nou, the space formerly used as Viva Rio’s community center in Port-au-Prince’s downtrodden Bel Air neighborhood, is now a tent encampment housing about 1600 people. Children living in Kay Nou are benefiting from daily opportunities to learn creative endeavors like art, music and dancing, helping them deal with the stress of being displaced.
The program existed prior to the earthquake, says Viva Rio staffer Aila Machado, who has worked with the Haiti program since last year. Since 2006, Viva Rio has focused on urban development in the beleaguered Bel Air neighborhood, providing community services and working to diminish street violence. After January 12, 2010, their focus shifted to providing for the immediate needs of affected people in the neighborhood, including providing safe and constructive activities for children.
Such activities serve several purposes, explains Anna Oliver, an experienced relief officer with NCA. They engage the children immediately and give them a rare but much-needed break from the trauma, shock and loss all around.
Stealing children
“At the same time, it is a way of offering the children a degree of protection,” she adds. After the earthquake, many experts predicted a dramatic increase in illegal trafficking of children. “Engaging and registering the children in our activities – even providing them with small wrist bands – is one important way we can help protect the children from such threats,” Oliver explains.
“This helps the children to not occupy their minds on this situation,” says Musset Payant, a Haitian painter who teaches art to children as part of Viva Rio’s program. “For the time they are here, they forget everything. In this room, they are completely relaxed and they just fly.”
Help to help ourselves
The children eagerly watch as Payant begins to draw a fish on the chalkboard in front of the room. Using donated materials, they too begin to sketch, intently focused on their work.
“What happened to us in this country caused people all over the world to come and help us,” Payant adds, “But this helps us to help ourselves.”
On the other side of the camp, capoeira lessons are starting. Viva Rio has been teaching capoeira to children here for more than a year, but since the earthquake, the number of children in the program has grown by more than 100. In the shell of a building that locals say gang members used to use for hiding kidnap victims, about 30 children remove their shoes and sit on a rug in front of a line of musicians for the morning class. The music is key to capoeira, and the morning session focuses just on the songs, while the afternoon session teaches the components of the martial-arts based dance.
Children are fragile
“Children and adults are not the same,” says Rodney Jean Marc, one of eight assistants who help lead the classes. He has studied capoeira with Viva Rio since 2008. “Adults are used to hardship and difficulty but children are fragile . . . Capoeira helps them get the stress out.”
The songs are taught in Portuguese, and the teachers then explain them in Creole. The songs’ themes are about living in peace and respecting others – things that can be challenging for children in the best of situations, but especially difficult in the trying circumstances in which these kids now find themselves.
The art of capoeira
After about a half hour of practicing the songs, the children stand up and make a circle around the rug – it’s time for the teachers to demonstrate the art of capoiera. The pulsating beat of the music creates a frenetic energy as the masters take to the rug and engage in capoeira play – a physical and acrobatic dance performed either solo or in pairs. When danced with a partner, capoeira resembles a sparring match, but without actual physical contact.
Their acrobatics delight the children; their claps and cheers and the sheer joy on their faces belie the difficulty of their situation. For a little while, at least, they are able to just be children.
“I like it because doing capoeira gives me courage and strength,” little Rosedaline says. “It helps me a lot.”
Emily Sollie, ACT Alliance 2/03/2010
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CWS supports health care in Haiti
ACT Alliance members in Port-au-Prince continue to support medical care for Haiti’s most vulnerable.
As it had done long before January 12, ACT Alliance is caring for the children. Traumatized, ill and suffering loss of limbs, hundreds of children need round-the-clock care.
At Port-au-Prince’s Aprosifa malnutrition clinic, which is supported by ACT, staff feed 15-20 children and their mothers every day. The dedication of Antonine St Quitte Dimanche, who has worked at the clinic 12 years, has not diminished since the earthquake. She continues to make sure the children get enriched milk, spinach, beans and rice every day. The most severely malnourished are given plumpy nuts, a specially formulated paste full of essential vitamins and minerals.
But she fears for the future of these children. “There are so many children now without parents and those whose parents survived now have no means of earning a living.”
Elsewhere in Port-au-Prince, another children’s malnutrition hospital is being kept open with ACT support. But now it is running as an emergency clinic as injured men, women and children arrive daily. The clinic has 100 beds but 140 patients. ACT has supplied two large tents for those recovering from surgery.
One of the younger patients, six-year-old Kevine Scemoaes is about to have surgery on a badly injured foot. He has a high temperature but is in a good mood as he tells his story. Walking through the streets of Haiti, the earthquake toppled a wall, burying him. He wriggled free but found he couldn’t walk because of his injured leg. Kevine crawled to the middle of the street and cried for help until he was brought to the hospital.
The level of treatment at the hospital is high, even as surgery goes on around the clock. Most of the surgeons are Italian or American. Most cases are bone fractures, and able to be treated. The hospital is treating around 40 cases of complex fractures of the upper leg.
ACT Alliance 27/01/10top
The situation continues to be desperate for the people affected by the earthquake in Haiti. Material aid is slowly reaching them but, due to the lack of data and weak government coordination, the organization and distribution of aid is still a challenge. Some incidents of fighting for aid have been registered but they are mostly due to lack of proper organization of the distribution.
The Government has declared the search and rescue phase over. Still people continue trying to find loved ones by scratching into the rubble with rudimentary tools. Otherwise, some normality is coming back to the country for the privileged ones unaffected by the earthquake. Gas stations and supermarkets are reopening and fuel and food are now available.
It is estimated that more than 130,000 people have moved from Port-au-Prince to the rural areas and provincial cities (some very vulnerable such as Gonaives) with the consequent negative impacts on the precarious economy in these areas. Fortunately, no reports of communicable disease outbreaks have been registered. The two big challenges now are to scale up the relief operation and the clean up of the rubble. The death toll is now at least 150,000 people.
ACT Alliance 25/01/10top
A water purification system, with pipes, filters and pumps that was brought from freezing cold Norway to burning hot Haiti, is providing 10,000 homeless Haitians with crystal clear drinking water. The ACT Alliance has brought in specialist water and sanitation facilities, desperately needed in earthquake-hit Haiti. The "water factory" is based in the Belair neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince. The water coming from these taps is the first clean water these people have had since the earthquake.
More equipment has been sent to homeless families in Jacmel, on Haiti's southern coast where the ACT Alliance is distributing tonnes of relief materials including four million water purification tablets, jerrycans, blankets and enough healthcare kits to last 10,000 people three months. The ACT Alliance is also involved in psycho-social treatment of the traumatized population.
ACT Alliance 23/01/10
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Urgent needs outside Port-au-Prince
CWS partners are focusing on communities outside Port-au-Prince, where the damage has been greater but little help has been received. One local group has already arranged the evacuation of severely injured survivors. Blankets, jerry cans, water purifiers, medical supplies (wheelchairs, crutches, bandages), and hygiene kits (containing towel, washcloth, comb, nail clippers, soap, toothbrush, plasters) are going to Leogane, Petit Goave, Jacmel and Miragoane as well as assistance in Jimani, Dominican Republic. Tent hospitals have been set up on the Dominican Republic at Jimani, on the border. ACT Alliance members are now sending funds for emergency first aid and healthcare for injured refugees. Hospitals in Jimaní are attending to hundreds wounded and will be soon overwhelmed. Churches have offered to act as hospital wings.
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ACT Alliance support reaching Haiti
In the chaos of aid distribution, CWS’s global partner, ACT Alliance, is managing to get food, temporary shelter, water cleaning materials and expertise to the Haitian capital.
Prospery Raymond, country manager for ACT Alliance member Christian Aid, reports he is concerned there may not otherwise be enough food in the country to last more than a few days.
The streets are still thronged with homeless people, walking for hours to find food and water. As well as widespread destruction of homes, schools and other buildings, major damage has been done to key water, electricity and road systems. Port-au-Prince’s heavily congested airport is finally allowing some aid to get through, however it comes as Haitians turn on each other, increasingly desperate for food and water.
ACT Alliance is one of the largest relief organisations working in Haiti. In a January 17 teleconference members reported on progress to date:
• Christian Aid has started distributing food and tents, hygiene kits, blankets, jerry cans and water purifiers to 15,000 people in eight communities, targeting areas getting little help from other agencies. It has also sent in a medical team through a specialist healthcare organisation. CA hopes to source food from markets in Haiti if possible, but all other items will definitely need to come in from outside. The team in Haiti is co-ordinating with colleagues in the Dominican Republic to source materials there where possible.
• Lutheran World Federation is constructing a camp for ACT members at its compound, with additional space for member staff. Cooking facilities are provided, and Internet connection is good. Water supply is problematic. LWF plans to recruit supplementary staff.
• Diakonie Katastrophenhilfe has programmed delivery of 15 tonnes of food relief together with Caritas Germany.
• Lutheran World Relief plans to send a shipment of food products.
• Church World Service and Christian Aid offices are ready to serve as a base for receiving emergency items. ACT Alliance member staff in St Domingo are on the way to Haiti.
• Norwegian Church Aid is prioritizing water sanitation equipment and psychosocial work. It has sent a team of water engineers, a communicator and a logistician. Two Norwegian advisors with expertise in gender and childrens’ protection are also going.
ACT members report that buildings remain very fragile and continue to collapse. Rain has compounded the situation of the million people without shelter. The border with the Dominican Republic remains insecure. Health risks of contagious diseases are getting serious. Other towns are also badly affected and many areas outside Port-au-Prince remain unexplored. A number of staff from ACT members in the country remain unaccounted for.
The United Nations has launched an appeal for $562m intended to help three million people for six months. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon describes the situation as one of the worst humanitarian crises in decades and implored for calm in the beleaguered capital. The number of dead is still unknown, with estimates ranging from 50,000 to 200,000, the BBC reports.
ACT Alliance 19/01/10top
No-one immune from the devastation
The earthquake has affected every part of society, including the people normally in charge of vital services, CWS partner, Christian Aid reports. The UN chain of command was badly hit by the loss of staff, although MINUSTAH (United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti) started collecting dead bodies from the streets on Friday. The Government had already started putting bodies into mass graves. Some people in Port-au-Prince have lost all their money because it is in their collapsed homes.
Phones have not been working although Irish telephone company, Digicel, said that it has got its network going again and that calls were free, to allow people to call their families and let them know they are alive.
There has been a lot of social solidarity, with people helping rescue each other from the rubble. Christian Aid's country manager, Prospery Raymond, was pulled from the wreckage of his office by a passerby. A large number of people, perhaps 100,000, have left the city to stay with friends and family in other parts of the country.
Prospery has neighbours staying in his front yard. Both he and ACT communicator Sarah Wilson slept in cars last night while others are sleeping in tents, too afraid aftershocks will cause buildings to collapse further. Aftershocks are still occurring and people in the DKH office fled the building yesterday when one occurred. Fortunately, no more damage occurred.
There are also reports that the Dominican Republic has closed its border with Haiti.
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A journey to Port-au-Prince
ACT Alliance’s Sarah Wilson describes the tough journey to Port-au-Prince, highlighting the problems all aid agencies share moving to and from the disaster area. She Skyped from an NGO office in Port-au-Prince, which many people are sharing. The office lacks enough computers for everyone but does have electricity.
Sarah reached Port-au-Prince on Friday morning local time, having earlier flown out from Santo Domingo only for the plane to turn around and return because it was unable to land. There was chaos at the airport in Port-au-Prince. The air traffic control tower was damaged and the US military had brought in radar equipment as a substitute.
Sarah and her fellow passengers rushed off the plane and had to walk down the runway as other planes were trying to land. Normal airport safety procedures had been abandoned. As soon as the luggage was unloaded, the plane had to take off again to make way for others landing.
In Port-au-Prince, everything is in short supply, including petrol and food. Supermarkets are open but it is almost impossible to get near the food, which people are fighting for. On Friday, Sarah and Christian Aid country manager Prospery Raymond each had one potato for supper. They had eggs and bread for breakfast today.
Shortages are even affecting the Dominican Republic now, where supplies of tents and water purification equipment are running low. CWS is a member of ACT Alliance, a global coalition of churches and agencies engaged in development, humanitarian assistance and advocacy.
ACT Alliance 19/01/10top
Healing the traumatised
Thousands of people in Port-au-Prince - injured,hungry and desperate - have spent days outdoor in the demolished apital of Haiti without food or shelter. Desperate Haitians have blocked streets with corpses in anger. Food is stocking up at the irport, but has not yet been distributed. A great deal of the population is traumatized, and ACT Alliance is now sending in
experts on psycho-social support.
The psycho-social specialists will assist the population of Haiti to get going in their difficult state of life, support them n getting together and be able to talk and process their traumatic experiences. ACT Alliance, a global coalition of church ased humanitarian agencies, has long experience in psycho-social work under emergencies.
Local ACT field workers will be trained in psycho-social activities. Maria Lundberg, head of the emergency unit of ACT member Church of Sweden, is responsible for the ACT psycho-social activities. “We can’t heal a whole city”, Lundberg says, “but we ave an approach to lead people through harsh difficulties.” This kind of support has to be done closely together with the affected
Haitian community, who knows best about the needs and resources among themselves. To be enabled to support each other and take a constructive part in the rehabilitation is an important step forward in such a chaotic situation.
The ACT Alliance psycho-social project involves the population in community based activities; repairing houses, cleaning treets, rebuilding schools etc. It is a way of imposing hope for the future. “In Haiti we have seen people crying, asking for the eaning of life: Where is God? We will help people to live and deal with these existential questions”, Maria Lundgren says.
Water for 10 000 people
Port-au-Prince is without water. ACT Alliance is sending water-purification equipment that will serve 10,000 people. Clean ater will be hugely important in the coming days to fight the risk of cholera and other water-based diseases. ACT member Norwegian Church Aid is sending an emergency plane packed with 45 tons of water-purification equipment, water istribution systems, water tanks, and pipes and tapping systems.Tools for building latrines are also on board, together with several hundred tents.
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Port-au-Prince “looks like a war zone”
More than a million people in Haiti’s capital will this evening be without shelter and no immediate prospect of accommodation in camps. Between 60 and 80 percent of the houses in Port-au-Prince were brought down or are uninhabitable by Tuesday’s 7.0 magnitude earthquake.
In a city that ACT Alliance members say looks like a war zone, hundreds of thousands are roaming the streets looking desperately for relatives and other loved ones. Rescue and humanitarian operations are complicated because the United Nations is paralysed following the collapse of their building leaving over 100 staff missing.
These are the key points to come out of a teleconference by ACT Alliance members this evening, one of the rare opportunities to receive updates about the earthquake-struck city. Communications with Port-au-Prince have been unreliable, with Skype and other Internet-based communications providing the only news from Haiti.
ACT member LWF reports their staff have a fortnight’s worth of water, food and fuel for their personal needs but stress that any extra staff need coming to the city need to bring their own tents, food, sleeping bags and cash. All shops and banks are closed. Compounding the work is the fact staff – like everyone in Port-au-Prince - are traumatised from the disaster.
ACT members around the world continue the anxious wait for news of missing colleagues. Staff from Lutheran World Service and UMCOR are among the tens of thousands missing, prompting requests from ACT Alliance for prayers.
ACT Alliance General Secretary John Nduna said that for the organisations with staff affected, ACT sent its heartfelt concern, solidarity and prayers. “Let’s hope that those missing will be found alive.”
He has written to the two members and has also sent a letter of condolence to the UN for the 16 UN staff confirmed killed in their building collapse.
From some quarters there has been good news. Evelyne Margrone, a programme office of ACT member ICCO has been recovered alive from the debris and was taken to Dominican Republic suffering multiple bone fractures and possible internal injuries. Her grandson was found unhurt.
The earthquake wreaked devastation on Haiti, a country already struggling with the worst poverty in the western hemisphere. The situation in Port-au-Prince today remains grave. The BBC reports that rescue teams and medical services are overwhelmed. Many people are still sleeping outside fearing aftershocks or because homes have been reduced to rubble. President Rene Preval estimates the death toll could be 50,000, Reuters Alertnet reports.
ACT members reported yesterday that blocked streets continued to make needs assessment visits very difficult. Many houses in the slums have collapsed, triggered by the shallow nature of the quake. Little heavy equipment can be found to free trapped survivors, remove rubble and clear streets. Even shovels are in short supply.
ACT International 15/1/10
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People buried alive when houses collapsed
Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people were buried alive when a major earthquake struck Port-au-Prince, the capital of impoverished Haiti on Tuesday. The magnitude 7.0 quake sent panic-stricken people into the streets. Offices, hotels, houses and shops collapsed, and people were screaming “Jesus, Jesus”, not knowing where to run. The presidential palace lay in ruins, and many churches have been destroyed. Members of ACT Alliance are already in place, assisting those affected by the earthquake. The ACT Secretariat in Geneva is coordinating the relief operations of its members,
and more details will follow in the coming hours.
The city is without electricity, the telephone network has broken down. The UN headquarter has collapsed. People are sitting in the streets with nowhere to go. The ffice of ACT member Christian Aid was destroyed, but staff were unharmed and are now responding to the emergency.
John Nduna, the General Secretary of ACT Alliance expresses condolences with the affected families and with UN and other organizations that have lost their people in he buildings.
World Council of Churches general secretary Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, also expresses condolences and solidarity with the people of Haiti. “Once again they have xperienced the great burdens of anguish, damage, and death because of a natural atastrcophe. They have already carried many burdens of political instability and poverty,” Fykse Tveit says.
In 2004 more than 3,000 people died because of Hurricane Jeanne which passed over the northwest city of Gonaives. The same area was hit again in 2008 when four tropical storm systems passed through the region. In 2004 political instability led to the ousting of the President Jean-Baptiste Aristide.
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The quake struck 15km southwest of the capital Port-au-Prince just before 5pm on Tuesday 12 January 2010 (Haiti time). The Red Cross estimates the death toll is at least 45,000 - 50,000. Others report up to 100,000 people have died. Tens of thousands are injured and countless have lost their homes. It is estimated that 60-80% of buildings collapsed in the capital, Port-au-Prince. Even shovels are in short supply. It is still too early to know the full extent of the damage but given the underlying high level of poverty the need is desperate.
“The reality for many Haitians is that they are already trapped in what is a very harsh form of poverty,’’ said Nick Clarke who visited Haiti in May last year. Haiti is already the poorest country in the Americas, ranking lower than Kenya or Bangladesh on the UN’s human development index. Most people in Port-au-Prince live in flimsy slum housing, so an earthquake of this magnitude is catastrophic.
CWS partners in ACT International are helping with recovery. Outside assistance in the form of extra staff, water, sanitation services, hygiene kits and basic supplies are on their way to help meet the needs of survivors.