International aid begins to arrive in Haiti. Getting it to remote areas still a struggle.
Desperation was growing among Haitians in the most remote parts of the country on Friday but international aid was finally, slowly reaching Haiti’s devastated southwestern peninsula nearly a week after a catastrophic earthquake.
In the city of Les Cayes, hundreds of people surrounded shipping trailers carrying supplies for earthquake victims, waiting for food and other basic necessities. In one part of the city, residents forced open the doors of a Haiti Red Cross truck and ran off carrying mattresses. In the outskirts, residents in Camp-Perrin looted a truck doing food distributions.
Food for the Poor, a Coconut Creek-based charity, confirmed Friday night that four of its trucks were attacked in the areas of Duchity, Katuche and Camp-Perrin.
United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed, the first notable international figure to visit Haiti in the aftermath of the 7.2-magnitude quake, landed in Les Cayes to tour what she called “a dire and tragic situation.”
“To see so many babies, so much trauma, with women and with elderly people,” Mohammed said. “We need for the community, the international community, to get behind the Haitian government and people to recover as soon as we can.”
Unlike the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake that nearly destroyed Port-au-Prince, killed more than 300,000, left 1.5 million injured and an equal number homeless, the Aug. 14 quake left much more dispersed damage. It overwhelmingly affected remote communities outside of the main urban centers in the three regions of the Tiburon peninsula closest to the epicenter of the 7.2 magnitude quake.
That reality, along with the insecurity along the main road from the capital, has added to the response challenges, said Achim Steiner, who is with the United Nations Development Program and joined Mohammed on the visit.
“On the one hand, you see a lot of suffering and you see on the other side, the limited ability of the government with the emergency and humanitarian response to support people. Probably because this is a different kind of earthquake to the one in 2010,” Steiner told the Miami Herald. “This morning in the hospital, we still saw people arriving today from remote villages seeking medical support.”
Steiner said the overall situation in southwestern Haiti is “becoming more clearly and rapidly a priority.”
“Hopefully, the next few days we will see a significant surge in precisely the kind of support that Haiti needs right now,” he said.
Still on Friday, accessing outlying areas remained challenging even as government work crews unblocked roads that were blocked when first the quake brought down boulders, and then Tropical Storm Grace also blocked access.
Early in the day, there was no road access to the southwestern city of Jérémie, as pictures circulated on social media showing damage to the Dumarsais Estimé bridge, one of the main access routes. The public works department was working early afternoon to secure an alternate route.
On the encouraging side, the airport in Les Cayes, near the earthquake’s epicenter, had become a busy landing ground for relief arriving into Haiti and for injured people headed by airlift to hospitals in Port-au-Prince. U.S. Coast Guard helicopters hovered over the port city, en route with quake victims, and several U.S. military aircraft landed with provisions.
U.S. Southern Command spokesman Jose Ruiz said the Department of Defense and the U.S. Coast Guard joint task force in Haiti have delivered a total of 33,000 pounds of “vital aid” as of Thursday. They included deployments of a surgical team, 200 Marines, and multiple aircraft, including over ten different helicopters sent from Honduras and Puerto Rico Army National Guard that are supporting Urban Search and Rescue teams on the ground.
Ruiz also said the USAID’s Disaster Assistance Response Team has reached hard-hit communities, including being the first response team to reach the Grande Cayemite island, an island off the coast near the epicenter.
One of the helicopters, loaned to former Haitian Senator Richard Herve Fourcand, was en route to Pic de Macaya, a mountainous region in the outskirts of the city to airlift a victim, one of many injured when tremors brought down parts of the mountain.
Almost a week since the initial tremor, victims were still in need of immediate medical care in rural and remote areas. Fourcand and others laid injured and sick residents on their laps to transport them back to Les Cayes.
Other international organizations — including Swiss Humanitarian Aid, Medic Corps, Samaritan’s Purse and the United Nation’s World Food Program and International Organization for Migration — were on the ground assisting earthquake victims. Aid workers dragged suitcases and boxes packed with supplies and loaded them onto vehicles.
World Central Kitchen took a helicopter to survey two of their sites nearby where they have a team of about 40 people providing hot meals with local vegetables and ingredients. Hospital Albert Schweitzer, from the Central Plateau region of Haiti, had sent a team to deal with the response’s logistics.
Three army ships from the Dominican Republic were also stationed on the sea of Jérémie to aid earthquake victims. And in a special meeting of the Organization of American States’ Permanent Council on Friday, the Antigua and Barbuda’s Ambassador to the U.S. Sir Ronald Sanders announced a lofty payment of $40 million to Haiti, funded by the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility. The first installment of $15 million will be paid to the government early next week, and the other $25 million will be paid within the next two weeks, he said.
The Haiti National Police, meanwhile, said Thursday that it also was reinforcing the road to Martissant in Port-au-Prince with specialized police units to protect humanitarian aid from gangs and other threats.
The announcement was made after Haitian artist Widler Octavius, known as Wid, complained to the Miami Herald Wednesday that the police commissioner assigned to Les Cayes had refused to provide him with a police escort to the hospital in nearby Port Salut where he was donating cooked meals and toiletries kits to quake victims. The police’s refusal left him at the mercy of bandits, he said, who attacked his group as they headed to the beachfront community.
“The police has taken all the necessary steps to reinforce its presence along the Martissant route,” police spokeswoman Marie-Michelle Verrier said during a Thursday press conference. “There are still threats along this road …Everyone who has donations to take to the Great South, we will remind you again that the police are here to accompany you.”
On Friday, Food for the Poor, the Coconut Creek-based charity, had four trucks looted as drivers tried to deliver desperately needed food and water to quake victims in Jeremie and other communities in the Grand’Anse.
Bishop Oge Beauvoir, who heads the charity in Haiti, said the trucks were delivering rice, water, beans, sausage as well as picks and shovels for people to start cleaning up, when the first one was attacked coming down a mountain, and soon after the others.
“They took everything,” Beauvoir said, adding that the trucks were headed to four hard-hit areas in the Grand’Anse.
The deliveries were being made without police escort, said Beauvoir, who added that they will now be reinforcing security to deliver food to the population.
“It’s shocking because it’s people who you are going to help and then the population decided they are going to loot the trucks,” Beauvoir said.
Beauvoir said the charity will not let the incident stop its deliveries because people in need should not be punished because of the actions of a few.
“We have no choice but to continue because you have people dying of hunger. We have to make an effort to take the food to them; we are going to reorganize ourselves now to have security.”
A Food for the Poor-Haiti spokeswoman told the Herald Friday night that five other trucks were able to reach their destinations.
“Although this unfortunate situation took place, our drivers were able to remain safe and the trucks were not damaged,” said spokeswoman Soraya Louis.
The hectic day in Les Cayes was also marked by preparations to receive former Haitian president Michel Martelly, who arrived after 1 p.m. to survey damage from Saturday’s quake and powerful aftershocks. So far, 2,189 people have been reported killed and over 12,200 injured. An estimated 136,800 families are homeless and nearly 700,000 people are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance.
Martelly and his wife Sophia Martelly came in a private charter flight, reportedly from the Dominican Republic, bringing supplies with him. He said he was in the area as a private citizen in the name of his humanitarian foundation, Fondation Rose et Blanc.
“We are here to do what we’ve always done with the foundation. It’s not the former president that’s here, it’s the foundation that’s here,” said Martelly, who was greeted by a small crowd and quickly loaded into a Black Toyota SUV to tour damaged areas.
Martelly said he intended to distribute some medicines but his main focus was on ensuring hospitals were running smoothly and had enough gas to power generators. He also would try to bolster spirits, he said. “We are going to visit some people and let them know we are with them,” he said.
He had no comment about whether Haiti’s government was doing enough to aid victims.
“I haven’t been around to see firsthand what’s being done. But one thing I know, they always blame the government,” said Martelly, who after his 2011 election was responsible for quake-rebuilding and not immune from criticism.
His biggest, concern, he said was the need for Haitians to “change the way we’ve been doing things.”
“The way we’ve been building, the way we’ve been thinking, the way we’ve been acting. The way we drive ourselves and our society, I think all of this has to be retaught,” he said, before driving off to distribute supplies.
U.N. officials also expressed concerns about Haiti’s building codes, but for now the priority is highlighting the need for the support for the humanitarian response, which they said is now critical and needs international support.
“When you hear the figures of the destruction of schools, people’s homes, the numbers that have died... it’s tragic,” said the U.N.’s Mohammed, who was also accompanied by Helen La Lime, U.N.’s special representative in Haiti, U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres, and Director General of Haiti’s Health Ministry Dr. Laure Adrien.
Meanwhile, U.S.-based aid groups continued their appeal to help. Hope for Haiti told the Herald they issued an “emergency appeal” to raise $5 million to fund earthquake relief and recovery efforts, in partnership with the Bob & Renee Parsons Foundation, which kicked off the effort with a $1 million gift.
The organization plans to fund medical supplies to support health partners on the ground, provide medicine and health consultations, rubble removal and rehabilitation of homes and other damaged buildings, water filtration systems and micro-grants aimed to support education and businesses.
“It is a terrible earthquake,” said Steiner, the UNDP official. “It has killed thousands, it has destroyed tens of thousands of homes, so imagine. The humanitarian support right now is critical and therefore we appeal to countries and the public to mobilize support for Haiti.”
This story was originally published August 20, 2021 at 12:54 PM.
