TIME Reports on ADRA’s Arrival in Port-au-Prince
Text the word “ADRA” to 85944, reply “YES” and donate $10 to ADRA’s Haiti Earthquake Response Fund.
TIME magazine reports on ADRA’s arrival in Haiti:
Leaving the Dominican Republic and entering Haiti is as abrupt as ocean meeting desert. The country’s green forests were long ago slashed and burned, giving way to dry, brown hills scarred from mining and from mudslides caused by deforestation. The valley floor is barren, over-farmed long before the devastating earthquake. Our caravan was composed of four Adventist Development and Relief Agency semi-trucks, a bus chartered by GlobalMedic — a Canadian NGO — and a rented SUV. We were packed with water purification devices to help alleviate the shortage of clean drinking water in Port-au-Prince.
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We saw only one international rescue team but plenty of local Haitians digging through the rubble for their loved ones. In one narrow alley a man knelt with a hammer over a tiny wooden coffin, the bloated body of what looked to be a heavily pregnant lady beside him, wedged between two other corpses. An older woman, who looked to have been fleeing with her possessions, lay amidst suitcases and stuffed plastic bags, legs stiff with rigor mortis. Nearly half of the Port-au-Prince residents we saw sported white moustaches of pungent spices to ward off the smells of death and raw sewage. “Put down the camera and help us,” yelled one man in English. “F—- you,” screamed another.
That Haitians are angry that aid hasn’t come more swiftly is evident everywhere you look. “I am your property, nothing else,” sneered a girl, sponge bathing out of buckets with a group of topless friends. Nearly all of Port-au-Prince’s three million residents have been reduced to street-side bathing out of buckets of dodgy water. What looks to be half the city is living in tents on sidewalks, boulevard medians and every other square inch of space. “The sky has already fallen, and now you come,” bemoaned a teary man in French, arms outstretched as if to God, as our caravan passed. “Too late, too late.
Read the whole TIME report here.
Hearly Mayr writes:
SILVER SPRING, Md. —Extensive displacement and the lack of clean drinking water in Haiti’s devastated capital of Port-au-Prince are rapidly contributing toward a mounting humanitarian crisis, as survivors struggle to find water access and safe areas to stay four days after a powerful quake struck the city and surrounding rural communities, according to an Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) emergency response team that arrived in the Haitian capital yesterday.
Water is at a premium,” says Raymond Chevalier, who is helping coordinate the logistics for ADRA’s emergency response in Haiti. “In the following days, we expect civil unrest to grow especially in some of the overcrowded areas where people have sought shelter, unless an abundant supply of water and other forms of aid are quickly made available to them.
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ADRA is staging relief operations at the campus of the Haitian Adventist University in Carrefour, located in Port-au-Prince, where some 30,000 IDPs have sought refuge since the quake struck on January 12.
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Text the word “ADRA” to 85944, reply “YES” and donate $10 to ADRA’s Haiti Earthquake Response Fund.
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Photo: Survivors examine the devastation left by the earthquake in one of the hardest-hit areas of Port-au-Prince. (Photo Credit: Matt Herzel/ADRA International)