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Aid Helps Haitians Rebuild After Storms
FrontLines - July 2009
The storms that pounded Haiti last year affected more than 825,000 people in eight of Haiti’s 10 regions, causing 800 deaths and $1 billion in property damage to an already impoverished island. Extensive flooding destroyed roads and bridges and isolated affected areas.
USAID delivered relief supplies, food, and water from the flight deck of the USS Kearsarge, keeping the loss of life from famine and disease from mounting even higher.
Kearsarge sailors went ashore in Port-au-Prince to load helicopters
and conduct aerial surveys of damage for a USAID Disaster Assistance Response Team.
Camps were set up for 600 families. One camp, on private land of the Ebenezer Church, still functions—it shelters 50 families.
Families got basic building materials to rapidly reconstruct modest new homes: corrugated metal roofing, plywood, and waterproof plastic sheeting. Neighbors helped each other with construction, copying a model home that still stands on-site on a concrete base with a thin wire supplying some electricity.
The Rev. Michel Morisset, 40, is the pastor of the Ebenezer Church and oversees the camp.
He is aided by Claire Chappuis, a medical doctor from Toulouse, France, who came 24 years ago and shares in his missionary work. She helps run a school, modeled decades ago on the French scholastic system and admirable for a “rigor” it still maintains, she insists.
Many families were scattered
to “who knows where” in the aftermath of the hurricanes, Morisset said. “This is not the case here.” These are a very “courageous” people and draw strength from each other. It is very important to keep a community
together, he said.
Morisset insisted on taking a visitor on a small trek down a dirt and gravel road to illustrate
where three young men could be seen wheeling crushed stone. “They’re helping build this community,” he said.
A few hundred yards further on and the road inexplicably stopped at a large lake. Out in the center was the carcass of a half-submerged building—the terminal of the Duvalier Airport, constructed in 1986, just before President-for-life Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier fled the country. The airport was a victim of Haitian politics as well as the caprice of nature in this ecologically stressed country.
★ —J.W.
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