Konbit Pou Ayiti

Report from Sasha Kramer with SOIL

Working with KONPAY's Amber Munger at the Matthew 25 House in Port-au-Prince

January 19, 2010

This afternoon, feeling helpless, we decided to take a van down to Champs Mars (the area around the palace) to look for people needing medical care to bring to Matthew 25, the guesthouse where we are staying which has been transformed into a field hospital. Since we arrived in Port au Prince everyone has told us that you cannot go into the area around the palace because of violence and insecurity. I was in awe as we walked into downtown, among the flattened buildings , in the shadow of the fallen palace, amongst the swarms of displaced people there was calm and solidarity. We wound our way through the camp asking for injured people who needed to get to the hospital. Despite everyone telling us that as soon as we did this we would be mobbed by people, I was amazed as we approached each tent people gently pointed us towards their neighbors, guiding us to those who were suffering the most. We picked up 5 badly injured people and drove towards an area where Ellie and Berto had passed a woman earlier. When they saw her she was lying on the side of the road with a broken leg screaming for help, as they were on foot they could not help her at the time so we went back to try to find her. Incredibly we found her relatively quickly at the top of a hill of shattered houses. The sun was setting and the community helped to carry her down the hill on a refrigerator door, tough looking guys smiled in our direction calling out “bonswa Cherie” and “kouraj”.

KOFAVIV, The Commission of Women Victims for Victims, sent this message to me on January 18, 2010 and I wanted to share it with the many people who have know and supported them over the years. It was written by Eramithe Delva and Malya Vaillard.

Greetings, we are to write to you today because God has given us a chance that my family and Malya also are alive.  Because of where the catastrophe hit in Haiti the majority of victims are woman of Kofaviv and many of them died with all of their family, the rest that are left are sleeping under the stars, their houses destroyed with everything in it in the process.  Actually many women are sleeping in Chanmas in bad conditions, in the damp night air, where the sun beats on them, rain falls on them, damp air hits them, many of them lost a lot of their family, we can say, many of them already did not have anything to their name, now hunger almost kills them.  We followed the example myself and Malya who left for Chanmas with 20 children with us with other families who are sleeping under a tarp. We do not process anything again. Our house is destroyed and everything in it and we lost a lot of members of our family.  The office of Kofaviv is damaged along with our materials that were inside.  We have people who died in the office, like Madame Gadyen, office of Wesnel, actually after our survey we made we have around 300 women of Kofaviv who are victims along with their families, we have some areas that we have not yet entered to know what the situation is there. We know if there is not a rapid intervention for the women to find medicine, food, clothes, shoes and everything that is possible to have we have those that will have to return to their homeland, but with out the ability to pay for transportation they cannot go.  To end we will make you know that even the school KOPADIM was damaged also.  We have a lot of children who died.

As of yesterday we have a new route in place for teams to travel into Jacmel and points south over sea. This is how it works:

1. Teams travel to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic by private or commercial plane at their own cost.
2. Our coordinators in SD, working out of the FUNGLODE office, arrange transport of teams to the port at Pedernales, Cabo Rojo.
3. If major supplies are coming in, we have a trucking company and warehouse, Atlantic Packaging Company, on hand to meet planes, unload supplies, transport to the port or safeguard in their warehouse.
4. DR Navy boats will take our teams and supplies directly to Jacmel as soon as we make them available at the port in Cabo Rojo.

*solar powered equipment
LED head lamps
walkie talkies

tools (shovels, pick axes)
work gloves
tents
tarpaulins
ropes
3M particulate filter respirators
work masks
eye protection
water purification filters and tablets
buckets/pales

Haitian Professionals of Philadelphia's comprehensive medical supplies list:  http://www.hpphilly.org/?page_id=53

Progress Report on Coordinated Rapid Response to Haiti Earthquake
January 18, 2010
Konbit Pou Ayiti/KONPAY – Working Together for Haiti

We have made substantial progress this weekend on finalizing logistics to get supplies and critical medical teams into Haiti and now have three points of entry to Haiti: direct to Jacmel via boat from the Dominican Republic, direct to Port-au-Prince over land from the DR, and to points north of PAP and the capital via Cap-Haitian and Santiago, DR (crossing at Dajabon-Ounaminthe).

This report includes progress made on transporting teams and supplies into Haiti, the latest summary assessment for Jacmel from the UN in PAP and details of our headquarters and operations in Santo Domingo.

The City of Sydney will donate up to $175,000 to help the victims of the Haiti earthquake.

An earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Ritcher Scale devastated Haiti on Tuesday 12th January 2010 and latest news reports estimate up to 150,000 lives have been lost.

Council held an extraordinary meeting this morning and agreed to provide $100,000 to the humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières, which is offering emergency medical assistance to the victims of the Haiti earthquake. With 400 projects in around 60 countries, the City will be directing its donation towards Médecins Sans Frontières Australia’s pool of general funds to allow the organisation to respond to various humanitarian crises around the world.

Petit Goave – Urgent Need for Medical Team
Report from Gerard Fils Nelson to KONPAY
January 17, 2010

Many buildings collapsed during the earthquake in Petit Goave; at first it appeared as though every brick building in town crumbled. The buildings still standing are very dangerous and we need engineers to come in and check the structures to see which are safe. We have not yet had any relief efforts from outside come to TiGwav, so the first priority is the urgent need for a medical team on the ground as soon as possible.

January 16, 2010 - Report from Reed Lindsay, journalist with TeleSur and head of Honor and Respect Foundation, partner of KONPAY:

I spent the first half of the day in the airport, full of airplanes and helicopters and dozens of journalists. One journalist who had worked in Iraq told me it was like another Green Zone. The military was taken over by the US military, which insists that planes are arriving as fast as possible, although countries such as Brazil, Russia and France have complained they haven't been able to land planes, as well as non governmental organizations. The airport was a zoo (even Geraldo was there), and like being in a completely different world. Outside, I saw an aid distribution for the first time, WFP was giving out high-energy biscuits. People are lined up for  them by the hundreds, and the UN troops were keeping them in a line. I had seen this type of food distribution get out of hand before, and expected it to happen again, but it didn't, at least while I was there, I think because the Haitians don't care much for those biscuits. One 15-year old girl I talked to after she got the aid said she had expected real food (rice) and not something that won't even fill her stomach.

Three nights ago a nightmare we hadn’t imagined possible began in  Haiti. Like any shocking and horrifying tragedy, we will all remember  and tell stories of where we were when we heard about the 7.0  earthquake that shattered Haiti on January 12, 2010. Haiti KONPAY has  been playing a critical role coordinating a rapid response to the  crisis in both Jacmel and Port-au-Prince. We are currently  coordinating efforts to identify and assess needs and also working out  
logistics to get much needed human and materials resources onto the  ground.

Missionary Gwenn Mangine uploaded many photos of Jacmel to a Facebook album.