Haiti Day 4 – Putting in Work
After sleeping in the parking lot of the Hotel Oloffson the night before, we headed to David’s mother’s (Mama Tita) house. Her home, which was mostly destroyed
After sleeping in the parking lot of the Hotel Oloffson the night before, we headed to David’s mother’s (Mama Tita) house. Her home, which was mostly destroyed, will serve as our home base.
These words destroyed, demolished, leveled … they have new meanings for me after seeing things in Port-au-prince and even more so in outter areas where the condition of things is worse.
There are some blocks inside the city that might have one or two buildings dropped and 5 or 6 still standing. But when I say dropped, I mean flattened, obliterated. Complete. Sometimes a building still standing (perhaps with a more modern construction) will be right next to a building reduced to a vast pile of rubble. There does not seem to be any industrial effort to clear rubble – where there are people still working on it, they are individuals with mallots or small groups of folks with hammers and wheel barrells.
It is not hard to imagine – when going by a huge 8 story building that has been pancacked – that there are people inside these spaces. One doesn’t even really need imagination, the strong smell of decomposing bodies in such places makes it quite real.
WATER FILTRATION
A part of the team spent the morning and afternoon setting up the water filtration system in Mama Tita’s front portion ofthr house. This system is capable of filtering 700 gallons of water per hour. There were a number of fits and starts getting it to work (a generator that had to be disassembled and repaired, multiple leaks, sparse assembly instructions, lack of certain tools) but in the end the system was pumping strongly and making much water potable for the neighborhood. This was one of two systems that David and the team has brought with them with plans to bring more.
MEDICAL SUPPLIES
Supplies that we all brought with us were organized and inventoried and prepared for distribution. This was no small task considering the amount of supplies that we had on hand and the range of needs that we knew people had in general and that they expressed needing in person as word spread in the neighborhood that there were medical supplies here.
AREAS OUTSIDE OF THE CENTER OF CITY
Towards the end of the day a small group of us went to view two areas in the hills outside of the center of the city. This was where we witnessed the most extreme devastation. Community leaders and first hand accounts reported widespread problems but no assistance and no communication from state or aid agencies. As Regine had indicated in her thorough and lengthy reports on the status of things, these are the areas that need the most. Medical, water, and food – basic survival stuff. So this is the work that we will be engaging in.
