Ian McInnes – Haiti Diary 1

An article by Frank    No Comments

TEAR Fund NZ’s senior Programme Officer is currently in the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. He is there serving our partner, Tearfund UK, and will be acting as the Director of their Disaster Response Team as they go about establishing their work in the area over the next few months. Ian has kindly agreed to share his experience through regular blog updates. All the images and writing are contributed solely by Ian.

All was quiet last night in Port-au-Prince as I slipped into my tent and plugged my ears to drown out a yapping street dog. I had been warned that the neighbourhood rooster would start up around 2am. I woke instead to the clatter of a generator shuddering to life at the break of dawn. Power in Port-au-Prince is intermittent so the Quisqueya Chapel – who host Tearfund’s disaster response team camp in their spacious grounds – make their own electricity. The compound with its sparse collection of facilities had initially been packed with hundreds of desperate families in the days immediately following the earthquake on January 12th. Those families have moved on now to more permanent camps, or are making do in what is left of their shaken homes. Residents at the Chapel now consist of a growing team of Tearfund workers from around the world who are here to work on the relief effort alongside local Haitians and the churches and local Christian organisation that Tearfund has partnered with for some time.

Just getting to Haiti had been something of a challenge. My luggage went astray somewhere between LA, Miami and Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, but we found it eventually. The Dominican Republic shares the Island of Hispaniola with Haiti and, because Port-au-Prince has only recently re-opened for commercial flights, I travelled overland into Haiti instead. With a household income six times that of Haiti, the Dominican Republic is considerably more developed; the capital Santo Domingo has a grand old Spanish colonial quarter that became the administration base for Christopher Columbus as he set about establishing the New World. I enjoyed exploring it while I waited for two colleagues from London to join me.

As we travelled west into Haiti, however, we struck a border in total disarray. Small lorries with people and goods dangling off the back picked their way between a stationary queue of articulate trucks carrying steel reinforcing and cement bags. Between them they had somehow managed to block both sides of a road, snaking their way several kilometres to the border. The border itself funnelled all lanes through a single narrow gate.

Today I visited one of Tearfund’s local partner organisations, then saw first-hand the level of devastation around the city. Central Port-au-Prince was particularly badly hit with government buildings, universities, homes and shopping complexes all severely damaged or flattened. People congregated in large camps within parks, on the roadside and in streets that had been cordoned off and turned into makeshift camps. While many of the displaced were going about life on the fringes of the camps, central downtown on the other hand was unnerving; groups of young men roamed the streets in sealed off quarters with seemingly little to do. Under one shop canopy, police were beating a man with sticks and rubber rods – possibly for looting – in front of a group of onlookers. Elsewhere, foreign military units stood guard or US troops patrolled in open Humvies. Rob Schofield, Tearfund’s Senior Operations Manager from London described it as having an apocalyptic feel about it.

The Tearfund team have been distributing emergency shelters and essential home items today to 1,600 families in the most devastated earthquake area west of the capital. The logistics of such operations are immense and, with a wet season approaching within the next month, there is a sense of urgency. For my part I will spend the next few days visiting project sites, meeting partner organisations, meeting with key staff and taking in all that Tearfund has been doing ahead of next week when, with fear and trembling, I will take over from the current Programme Director.