Another perspective

I've copied and pasted an abridged version of an email from a colleague working on the same team as I. Him and his wife have been living in and out of Haiti for many years.

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Dear all,

Hello again from Port au Prince (or near to it). I guess we are officially residing in Petionville and the Siloe neighborhood where much of our time has been spent is part of Delmas. All the places blend together so it is not obvious they are different cities. Today marks 3 weeks for us being in Haiti. We supposedly have one more week left. Probably we will extend it a little bit and will maybe transition into stove building with some of the folks in Siloe who have expressed interest in them before heading off to other parts of the country.

F did successfully get a large nearby house rented and the owner is frantically making repairs. The place we are in now that is serving as both a guest house for all the out of country people here and office space will transition into being just a guest house. With all the new people hired this week this place is bursting at the seams. Every available space inside is being used and there are a number of temporary pseudo offices set up around the yard.

F has also made great strides on her map work with Google Earth and all the different teams have really been a great tool to use from her efforts. We still have people coming and going and the people leaving all seem to mention to F how grateful and blessed they are to have been around her. We say to each other almost every day how wonderful it has been to have been doing this together.

Progress is being made in the field but the programs are still a long ways from being up on their feet meeting the needs of all the vulnerable people. The situation for homeless folks and those with damaged houses got more complicated early this week as we had a series of aftershocks Sunday and Monday night that really rattled the nerves of people that were beginning to finally begin to let their guard down. We were awakened at 1:26 am by one of two 4.7 aftershocks but fell back asleep pretty easily. For everyone who had been through the January 12th shock though they basically lost two nights of sleep. We had some rain a couple of other nights so many people are ending the week pretty tired and miserable.

The tent cities grew as a result of the aftershocks and at the very same time the powers that be who make big decisions decided that the crisis mode was over and it was time to stop giving out tarps and move to beginning to provide transitional shelters. Just when we had our distribution system to the point where we expected to be able to deliver 6,000 tarps this week we instead did two deliveries of 150 on Monday and that has been it. It will take a while to be able to pull off the implementing of a program for providing semi-permanent transitional shelters but we are at work now setting up the foundation for that.

The days are warm and humid. We have been pretty healthy for the most part although I spent a number of days with loose bowels. F and I are sleeping in a tent out in front of the house. We found ourselves laughing to ourselves a couple of mornings ago when the guy who was washes the vehicles out on the road just on the other side of the wall from us started washing the cars before 4 am. That made enough noise to wake us up but the pounding on the gate to try to wake up the watchman so he could get more water kept us awake. To make sure we didn't fall back to sleep the sensitive alarms on some of the vehicles kept going off in the washing process. We were glad we could laugh.

Last night just as supper was being served I was asked to go help get one of the drivers released from police custody. He had gotten pulled over because the license plate on the new vehicle wasn't in the proper location and was covered by all the supplies he was hauling. We made it home a couple of hours later without having to pay any fines or go through any big hassles. I was intrigued at the radio program that was listened to while we slowly made our way in the slow traffic up to to the police station. On two different stations we heard Haitian comedians making jokes about the earthquake and tarps and tent cities. I couldn't follow everything but it was obviously very clever humor and it seemed quite healthy to be laughing at such dire circumstances.

There continue to be numerous instances of people being in the right place at the right time to help needy people out. They feel like more than coincidences. We appreciate those of you thinking and praying for us and the folks here. One instance was a gal who had flown in to work for us and somehow none of us knew anything about her coming. Someone from here went through all kinds of struggle, delay and hassle to get to a meeting that ended up getting canceled. Just after that she ran into our new colleague who was very glad to see someone from the office. It doesn't feel like anything big or exciting has happened since we last wrote but we are still glad we have been able to be here.

There are more stories to tell but I will stop for now. There are also lots of photos but for some reason I am having trouble attaching them. Take care. Love, J and F.