Concern Blogs

A soccer stadium just four months ago, this tent settlement at Place de la Paix in Port-au-Prince is now home to 8,000 people.

By Mark Jafar – Vice President of Corporate Communications at MTV Networks – for Concern Worldwide

Walk around the edges of the sunken tent settlement at Place de la Paix in Port-au-Prince, and it’s nearly impossible to tell that this was a soccer stadium just four months ago.

The grass is gone entirely, replaced by bare earth and debris.  There are no goal nets or benches, just shelters made of tarp, cardboard, and rusted scraps of sheet metal.

And where kids and adults once gathered to watch soccer matches or to kick a ball across the field, an estimated 8,000 displaced people are now living in shocking, unsanitary, overcrowded conditions, often with nothing but a few pieces of plastic sheeting to shelter them from the rains, which are heavy this time of year. Read the rest of this entry »

Concern paves the way for the newly built settlement in Tabarre Issa, which can accomodate more than 500 families. Photo: Haiti, Concern Worldwide

By Mark Jafar – Vice President of Corporate Communications at MTV Networks. Mark is currently visiting Concern’s emergency operation in Haiti.

Bourdon Valley, Port-au-Prince – Tucked into the hills that rise above central Port-au-Prince lies Bourdon Valley, an enclave of beautiful, verdant forest flanked by the eastern suburbs of Delmas and Canape Vert.

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60 year-old Camila Avril sits outside her newly erected tent with daughter Lucienne Dorci, 34 and granddaughters Dudmicah Aladin, 6 months, and Esdrac Dorci, 17.

“The house jumped!” 60 year-old Camila Avril is describing what happened to her home on January 12, the day of the earthquake that devastated parts of Haiti.

Since then, she and the members of her household pictured here have been sleeping in the crudely fenced yard of a neighbor.

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Brian Tabben consults with La Gonave Vice Delegate Esper Feno on the island of La Gonave.

We arrived at the port of Anse-a-Galets, La Gonâve’s largest town, and nothing seemed amiss.  Boys were still fishing off the pier, roughhousing and mugging for visitors, and islanders were slowly trickling into the dockside with their bundles to wait for the main Port-au-Prince ferry, still a couple of hours away. Read the rest of this entry »

Why did it take so long to get the aid flowing?

Tom Arnold CEO of Concern Worldwide speaks with Concern partners in Haiti. Photo: Ed Kenney, Concern Worldwide

The sheer devastation of the earthquake was one of the main reasons for this. The airport traffic control towers collapsed. The port was destroyed. Roads were full of rubble and fuel stations were destroyed. People who would normally deal with an emergency were themselves affected, with loss of life, family members and homes. Under such difficult circumstances, it is unsurprising that the aid effort needed time to get going.

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Author is: Susan Finucane is a Program Officer for Concern Worldwide US, and was until only a few months ago, Documentation Officer for Concern in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where she lived and worked for over two years. She has been deployed to Haiti to help our team on the ground respond to the catastrophic humanitarian crisis caused by the January 12th earthquake, which utterly razed Port-au-Prince and has left 3.5 million in need of food, water, shelter, and medicine.

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