Another Earthquake in Haiti

I started this hours and hours ago, but my phone has rung off the hook today, the lapttop shut down unexpectedly, we have family traveling in an ice storm, family who have just lost their jobs, a bored dad with dementia who keeps wandering about, and I had furniture to rearrange. So some of this is prolly stale, but maybe not all of it:

From The Anchoress:  Ed has noted that the aftershocks and tremors have not ceased since the first large quake; this morning, Petit Goave was the epicenter of a second quake registering 6.1 on the Richter scale:

Ed, the missionary in Haiti the Anchoress is following and passing on information from most regularly, says he thinks there wasn't much damage done because everything that was going to fall down already did.

Tara Livesay reports as well:

All of a sudden the house was rocking. It was the strongest aftershock we've felt yet. I looked on line and see that they are saying it was a 6.1. I cannot begin to describe how totally afraid everyone here is ... these aftershocks stir everything back up to the surface. I would have to imagine that lots of buildings that were hanging close to collapsing may have now collapsed. This aftershock lasted about 15 seconds. The original 7.0 lasted a good 45 seconds. Every time someone opens the front gate (makes a large noise) we all jump to our feet to get out of the house.

Licia, an American missionary married to a Haitian missionary,was able to get her three children back to the states-her story of how that happened is pretty impressive.  So is the picture her husband took of a Haitian hillside on Monday, impressive, but in a different way, sort of like the older use of awesome which used to carry with it a deeper connotation of fear and trembling.

Ben and Lexi are in Haiti, and they are collecting information- you may want to pass this on to anybody you know in Haiti:

I am currently working on a database for IOM of the camps of internally displaced peoples (IDPs) that are springing up around with city so that those can be matched with the aid that is coming in. This is for the coordinated international relief effort - which we think is very important to be plugged into, more on that later (UN, WPF, IOM, Red Cross etc). One of the problems here is that these major organizations have security restrictions right now and can't be moving around the city without a military escort. Since we don't have those restrictions, I'm looking for volunteers that can email us a basic needs assessment of some of the IDP camps that might be near you. This is extremely important work since as I'm sure you're aware, people WON'T receive aid until these agencies know where they're located.

Here's the information we need:

Name of camp

Area

Address (GPS coordinates as well if that's an option for you)

Department

Commune

Communal Section

Population in camp

Population in general area

shelter condition (improvised tents/covers etc?)

the structural safety of the area

Organization that did the Assessment

Contact point for organization

contact for representative at camp

Is there a water source?

Is it accessible by vehicle?

And anything else that you think might be relevant or important to know

Email to shelterhaiti2010@gmail.com with "new needs assessment" or "new camp" as subject as also ask to be added to the contact list.

More at the link, and you can also email him for a spreadsheet of the shelters around and about.

In another post Ben says:

Thanks for your payers, there is in fact a lot of work. My MCC interview (http://mcc.org/stories/podcasts/world-shaken/))was the first time I broke down since the earthquake but it sounds like a lot of people were moved by it, so thats okay. The violence has been isolated and if you have a big distribution that is not done right it's going to go badly, so far that's been blown out of proportion by the media. There is a lot of solidarity among everyone here that is not been captured by the news. Most of the rescues that have happened have been by Haitians pulling their neighbors out of the rubble, the outside emergency is helping in factories and big places that had a lot of people.

Last night I came across a group that had just found a kid that was stuck but they didn't have flash light or a hacksaw so I was able to help them with those and they got a live 6 year old kid out who was weak but okay. A lot of the people who have been working don't have simple things like hammers, saws and picks but they've pulled a lot of people out alive. Right now we only have a little food to give away that we were able to score from the countryside and we've been distributing food to only a hundred people. We're carrying it in backpacks and doing it all secretly. We're trying to buy and secure more food to distribute from the D.R. and the countryside.

Ben's interview is a podcast you can listen to, pretty short, but long on heartache.  He made it just two or three days, I think, after the earthquake.  Very moving. 

Michael Deibert writes about Haiti one week after the quake. Hungry, alone, without supplies or shelter, mostly:

In the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in the capital's southern Carrefour neighborhood, several hundred people lay on makeshift surgical tables, on benches, or sprawled on the floor. Half a dozen people groaned with severe suppurating burn wounds caused when a gas cylinder exploded during the great tremor. Nine-year-old Michel St. Franc lay with blood caking his face, his leg in a primitive cast and tears in his eyes.

"This is the worst situation I've ever seen," says Julien Mattar, project coordinator for the hospital. "We have huge needs in terms of human resources, medical supplies, and materials."

Mattar tells me that a supply plane that was unable to land in Port-au-Prince was instead rerouted to the Dominican Republic. From there, the supplies made the seven-hour overland journey to Haiti.
 

The injured who were able to reach the hospital were the lucky ones.

I could have picked any paragraph, really.  It's all painful to read and imagine, and far more painful to endure.  That's what I keep thinking- how can it be too 'hard' for me to read or write about in the comfort of my warm, safe, well lit home with my readily available clean water right next to me, when there are precious souls, fellow human beings, who are living right in the midst of it- some of them (ie all the missionaries I quote) by choice, most of them with no choice in the matter at all?

Chris Rollins explains why he thinks Haiti should be an American protectorate.  Do you remember that name, Chris Rollins?  I posted a link to his blog a couple days back- he was traveling the day of the earthquake, and happened to be near a school when it hit.  He was working to dig out a child, a little girl he could hear and speak with.  He worked for hours, but night fell, he had no tools, he had moved all the debris he could manage by hand, so he made a hard decision and left to go find more help and more tools.  He returned the next day and the child had died.  In this post he shares one of the comments he received about that, and his thoughts on issues bought up.  It's a good and thoughtful post, provoking much thought, and prayer.  I know I throw a lot of stuff out here and tell you to read it all, but... I am not stopping anytime soon.  Read it all.  Please.  I am a great believer that compassion without information can be harmful, and any prayer is better than none, but informed prayer is better, still.  Chris' post contributes toward an informed compassion and understanding of Haiti.


And here's another long one that I just cannot do justice to.  Laurens and Cheryl Van Der Marks have been living in Haiti and working with a mission;  she's a doctor.  They have a large family.  She has been too busy to update her blog until yesterday, so she tries to pack a lot of information in.  When the earthquake hit, they did not at first realize what was happening:

I remember seeing the concrete walls moving violently in a wave like at a wave pool. One to my right, one to my left and then one in front of me moving in a different direction. I also remember the ceiling was moving in a wave above me. The floor beneath my feet did not feel attached to me.

Her husband recognized their danger first, and ran through the house yelling for everybody to run, get out of the house, go- they ran, grabbing children as they went, racing against an earth gone mad:

When I got to the end of the driveway, I looked around and counted kids, I could not see Bridgely. I turned back to the building and screamed "BRIDGELY, BRIDGELY, BRIDGELY" as I thought he was still on the upper level at our neighbours. Then there he was in front of me. He had been holding my hand the whole time.

There were more aftershocks.  They seemed to go on forever.  They seemed to be over in no time at all. 

Then I stood up and turned around......From our rural hill not far from Port au Prince, we have a few of the whole city. As I looked out towards the city and the ocean, that is when I realized what had just happened. The entire city went up in dust. One huge even dust cloud arose from the entire massive city. It was like a bomb had gone off and it was the smoke rising. I looked to the right and saw a similar smaller cloud over our local village Source Matlas. I looked to the left and saw a large cloud of dust and smoke from the flour factory. I was speechless regarding what all this may have meant.

They had a visiting team of over fifty Canadians there for a short term mission, and Cheryl is the medical coordinator for their mission's clinic, so they gathered people and supplies and headed to the clinic, which was still standing, but structurally damaged enough that they were afraid to take people inside the clinic.  So in a sort of grim and macabre relay race, they would run gather supplies and then bring them out to operate, because the injured were flooding into the clinic:

Their arms and legs were crushed, their bones sticking out of their bodies, their heads gashed open. Some crying in pain, some barely alive. 5, 6, 7, people per truck.

After a few minutes I left the gate and security took over letting them all in and I rushed back to the hospital. For the next 33 hours straight we worked on the traumatic cases that lie before us. It looked like war.

They are not set up to be a full service hospital, just a clinic.  But:

we started to get reports that the biggest hospital in PAP, General hospital had crashed down, Doctors without Borders had crashed (the only 2 main ER's in the entire city!). We got further reports that other hospitals were down. We started to realize, that we were all there was for miles and miles and miles.

At the 20th hour, we told the gate we could not accept anymore patients as we still had to get through many many more. We sent our nurses (except for a few) and our helpers to work in shifts and Grant and I worked on. We reduced (tractioned bones back in place) open compound fractures.......putting tibia bones, back into people's legs that were sticking out. We reduced and set many many femur fractures, lower leg fractures, arm fractures. We sutured arms, legs, heads. We put scalps back together and we cleaned concrete out of wounds for hours. We stabilized pelvic fractures and we helped babies with head trauma breath on oxygen.

We had 3 die. 1 baby, 1 two year old and 1 ten year old. We had 4 others on the brink of death.

For the few medical centers that were still standing, the doctors who normally worked there were presumed dead, or perhaps distracted with the death and destruction in their own neighborhoods. They weren't at their hospitals or clinics.  After six hours of sleep, they went to work at the clinic again for ten hours straight.  The tidal wave of incoming wounded slowed down, not because there were no more wounded, but because there was no more fuel to bring them in.

We have 160 staff on our mission and we already know of one that has died and we still have not heard from about 100 staff. Everyday that someone shows up is joyous to see that they are alive. Most everyone has a family member that has died. One security guard has 4 children that died. Many of our Haitian staff suffer severe post traumatic stress after what they have been through or seen. One of our friends was trapped in his school next to 50 of his classmates that were crushed by the building. He heard them screaming but could not save them. He watched them die, as he was trapped inside for 3 hours with a dead man on his chest. He was pulled out eventually.

 She writes of the number of buildings destroyed, including the one holding all the adoption paper work for the country.  Places of power and corruption are gone, along with entire neighborhoods where the poor and humble lived. 

So many things destroyed....yet most of the Christian missions survived.

From Rachelle's blog:

Rose Milaine has been through the unimaginable. She’s a quiet 13 year old with scared eyes and shrugged shoulders, she looks defeated and for good reason. A week ago Rose Milaine was sitting in her classroom, located on the second floor of a six story building when the earth quake hit. The building came crashing down on top of her and her classmates; they were trapped. For the next 13 hours Rose Milaine waited, sometimes screaming, sometimes crying and sometimes calling out to her friends in other classes. The building’s remains shook violently throughout the night from many aftershocks.

Wednesday morning someone was able to smash through a piece of the concrete., creating an opening large enough for the children to crawl through. Rose Milaine and some of her classmates were able to squeeze through the hole, and find freedom from their concrete prison. She escaped with a large gash on her chin and a badly banged face and head. Her family was not waiting for her when she was rescued. She was on her own.

The next few days are a bit of a mystery, alone, injured and on the streets she somehow wound up outside a Hospital in Port au Prince. I’m not sure how she got there, or how long she was there exactly, but from what I gather it had been a few days at least.

 Rose had blood in hair, but it wasn't hers.  She's had a warm bath, food, love and attention, and they are trying to find her family- if she has any family left.

Twenty-six more orphans receiving travel documents to come home to the states where 23 of them already had adoptive families in place, hoping and praying for them. 

So many stories, so much sorrow, heart-ache, and then bits of happiness and joy, like gems glittering in a pool of muck.
My hope is that by what I write here, somebody will find another way, however small, to rinse away some of the muck.



Hope for Haiti’s Children
Healing Hands Internationa
Haiti Christian Development Project

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