Ian McInnes – Haiti Diary 2 With Images

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.

I’m finding it hard to get to sleep at night, because of the incessant noise of the street dogs and my own racing thoughts. My mind skips from images of spontaneous slums where the silhouettes of children run against a backdrop of multicoloured cotton shacks, to steep rutted tracks winding their way through fragile mountain terrain, long since stripped of its productive forest.

I think of the beautiful children I have met and the elderly man called Eliot, who lives on a steep mountain ridge high in the hills and sits with his head in his hands in the doorway of his hut, just a stone’s throw from the ruins of his family home.

During the day I ponder more mundane things like the next inter-agency meeting in Port-au-Prince, the contents of a field report I’m sending to HQ, how to align our staff policies with Haitian labour law and whether our team will move from tents to a staff house before the wet season turns our camp into a swamp.

Our office feels like the centre of our universe. It is 9pm and as I write, six other staff beaver away around me on the myriad of tasks required to establish a multi million pound relief programme. I could be anywhere in the world but for the size of the creepy-crawlies at night (particularly the tarantulas) and the drone of relief helicopters by day.

I spent last week visiting just some of the many communities Tearfund is assisting. People are too afraid to live in what’s left of their homes, so they camp instead in flimsy shacks, some perched on windswept mountain spurs. I spent a day on one ridge line with 400 villagers waiting for a UN helicopter to arrive, only to have the pilot wave me on to an adjacent ridge where the landing site was easier to navigate. He was delivering waterproof tarpaulins for roofing and ground sheets along with ropes and materials for tying them down. This was the last of 10 days of distributions to 30 communities – many involving helicopters into mountain areas, others using trucks to reach crowded urban environments.

As I ran with the village committee members along the steep paths for 20 minutes between villages, I wondered if our aid would be carted off by the neighbouring community, as it would certainly be unloaded before we got there. Instead the neighbouring village had organised themselves to safeguard the supplies while we caught up. It was encouraging to see this level of compassion and consideration, in contrast with urban sites where police supervision has been required at some food distributions.

Click on the following thumbnails to see a larger image. All images are copyrighted with Ian McInnes so please request permission of you wish to use any of them. Use the contact page to find the appropriate email.