Concern Blogs

82nd Airborne provide security at a distribution in the Place de la Paix camp. Photo: Tom Dobbins, Concern Worldwide.

I have just spent the day visiting Concern’s emergency team in the poorest areas of Port-au-Prince. It was a long, hot day—but it was a great day.  I feel very energized and excited about what we have been able to achieve in the past few weeks, and also excited to be able to tell you how  your support is allowing us to make a real and immediate difference here.

We have a great team of more than 250 staff now working in Port-au-Prince; 230 of them are Haitian, and we are recruiting more every day.

It’s one of the strongest, most experienced teams we have ever been able to assemble for an emergency, with people like Per Andersson, our Emergency Engineering Manager, who is more experienced in water and sanitation than anyone else I know; Tom Dobbin, who has being doing large-scale food distributions in emergencies in Africa for 20 years; Kate Golden, who has led Concern’s emergency health and nutrition programs for the most vulnerable malnourished children on the frontlines in the Darfur region of Sudan, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Democratic Republic of the Congo; Ted Shine, who has worked in every large-scale emergency around the world in the last 10 years; and many more. It’s an impressive team–and we need every single one of them because we have a huge job to do.

There is nothing fancy and nothing small about what we are doing here –we are simply ensuring that thousands of families have the bottom-line basics for survival.

We are already providing clean water and latrines to over 50,000 people and more than 30,000 have received a shelter kit, blankets, jerry cans and a hygiene kit.  Thousands of children have been screened for malnutrition and in the coming weeks we will be providing 15,000 children with supplementary food. We are providing education for 30,000 children and seeds, tools and goats for 5,000 farmers. Teams of workers have been employed on cash-for-work: 15,000 will be reached in total.

The areas where we are responding now are the same areas in which we have been working for years: Port-Au-Prince, La Gonave and Saut d’Eau. All of them tough, remote and deeply poor. The most affected and most challenging areas are the slum communities in the city of Port-au-Prince, in particular the areas of St Martin and Martissant.

On distribution day, for the particularly difficult neighborhoods, security is provided by the 82 US Airborne, who guarantee a degree of order and control that we simply aren’t equipped to handle.

Smiles indicate that the wait was well worth it. Photo: Ed Kenney, Concern Worldwide

It’s tough work that sometimes feels more like Beirut or Belfast in the 70s, but the formula works, and when I visited today, it meant that 1,300 women were able to safely collect plastic sheeting, blankets, jerry cans, water treatment tablets, soap, and shampoo. The smiles on their faces said it all.

But shelter isn’t the only thing we distribute: water distribution has been a big priority from day one of the operation. Our “wat-san” team proudly announced that, as of yesterday, using eight water truck and bladder tanks installed in key locations around the city, Concern is now providing 188,500 liters of clean drinking water to 53,000 people every day!

I am very proud of how we are working and what we are doing, and I am deeply grateful for the support we receive that allows us to do this and more.  Please check in tomorrow for more updates on our cash for work and nutrition programs, which you have made possible.