Communications were especially difficult today. I did manage to get through to the US team a couple of times but only for brief periods and only after calling all the cell and sat phone number dozens of time. Today the US Team spent most of the day surveying the school and feeding project in the slums of Cite de Soliel. I am attaching some of the photographs from that visit.
As many of you may know, we built one project in Cite de Soliel, and recently had to relocate the children to another temporary facility while we were having repair work done. Our project did not suffer as much damage in Cite Soliel as the other projects, and we had the roof inspected by some of the US team and the rebar is rusted, and that particular roof is concrete, so we have decided that it is not safe to have the children inside that building. We are exploring possibly putting a new roof on the building and replacing it with the type of roof that we use at Williamson, which uses wooden trusses and a tin roof so you do not have the weight of a concrete roof and the potential it that may collapse. The temporary project that we were using was also damaged, it is not fallen down, but it is also not safe.
Saint Louis Joseph Berkain, who is the person in charge of our Cite de Soliel feeding program and school, was not injured (thank you God!) and met with the US team today. Berkain is looking for a location where we might be able to have the school, but it is extremely unlikely that any schools in Haiti will reopen the remainder of this school year. Depending on how the efforts go throughout Haiti, there may be schools reopening this fall, and we certainly intend to do our best to get the Cite de Soliel school reopened as soon as possible.
For those of you may have been familiar with this slum, it is located on a garbage dump and land fill, occupies approximately 27 mi.² at the lowest drainage point in the watershed above Port au Prince, and even before the earthquake it had no electric, it has open sewers, and until the UN built a few wells down there at number of years ago, there were only three sources of water in the entire 27 mi.² slum. The reason it is called Cite de Soliel (the “City of Sun” in French) is because it is only a “city” when the sun is shining. When it rains, torrential mudflows and debris flows through the streets, through the open sewage canals and into the houses, and most of the houses as you can see from the photographs, do not have adequate roofs to protect against rainfall. These are the poorest of the poor, they survive on less than $1.00 dollar per day on average. Many of the children there have no clothing, and we frequently see very young toddlers without anyone to care for them. This is the poorest slum in the Western Hemisphere, and one of the poorest areas on earth. Frankly it is a disgrace that such a place even exists when its only 500 miles from the US.
The rest of the day was spent trying to arrange logistics to replace the US team, get security forces out to Williamson, and to coordinate additional relief supplies. We ran out of the diesel fuel that we received yesterday, but the US team was successful, after several hours of searching, in buying about 100 gallons of diesel fuel on the black market.
Our next challenges are to begin rebuilding our staff at Williamson, they are for the most part missing, or in shock and unable to work, or busy searching for and burying their family members. The majority of the children at Williamson are special needs children that require care 24/7.
What would seem to be very simple things have become extraordinarily complex and convoluted without communications and infrastructure for logistics. For example, we have not paid our staff their salaries for two weeks, they need money and we have no way to move money into the country because the banks are all closed, many are damaged, and they are trying to address their own problems.
While we have approximately 100 tons of relief supplies on the way to Williamson, we are grappling with how we are going to unload the goods. Ordinarily we would simply remove the containers and leave the containers there and hence secure all of the goods. However, we have no equipment to remove the containers from the trucks, and bringing in locals to help unload is only going to draw attention to the extremely valuable commodities in this upside down world of Haiti, because everyone in the community will know where the food is located and we are going to create security problems. This is the reason why we are going to have to send in a security team, and get them armed so that they can protect the children and the food. I know that may be hard to understand living in the comfort that we have, but when people are starving, water is scarce, and the local people have their own families and children to think about, things frequently get out of control.
We thank everyone for his or her prayers, support and donations. Sleep well and try to appreciate the simple things in life and what we all take for granted!
