Michelle Hough: The challenge of delivering aid in Haiti
How hard can it be to get food, water and medicines to three million people? When you’re talking such a large number of people who have been without food and water for days, the answer is “very hard”.
Today we follow a Caritas convoy from the border of the Dominican Republic. Caritas is the international federation of catholic aid agencies and Trócaire is working with them on the response to the Haitian earthquake.There are five trucks containing water, ready-to-eat food and hygiene kits. The journey goes smoothly and we unload quickly into the Caritas warehouse in a suburb.
People have been out on the streets for six days. Some manage to cook and eat with things they’ve salvaged but there are corners of the city where people don’t have access to water and food. Aid agencies have to do assessments to see where the people are, how many are there and what they need.
Caritas has been doing small emergency distributions through parishes but nothing large so far as it’s difficult to identify appropriate sites and also carry out the assessments. I wonder why they just can’t just go somewhere with a couple of trucks and start giving out food.
“Finding suitable distribution points is a big challenge because you have crowd control issues when a big crowd arrives,” says Donal Reilly, a Dubliner and deputy director of the emergency response team for Catholic Relief Services (CRS – an American member of Caritas). “When we’ve got so little to give compared to the needs it’s difficult as you may not have enough for everyone.”
We go to the Ministry of Mines where around 500 families are camping in the enclosure. We take food such as juice, nuts, sausages, corn and peanut butter, as well as drinking water and things to wash with. The people in the camp already have a little food but water’s another question.
“We don’t have any water for either drinking or washing,” says Bobby Lacroix, a teacher who lives in the camp. “Apart from this, what are we going to do to earn a living now? The schools are destroyed – where am I going to teach?!”
The frequent flyovers of cargo planes tell me that after the initial problems, aid is starting to arrive. Caritas has 80 containers of food in the port, 20 truck-loads of food, water and hygiene items arrived today and two planes-full of food, tents, mobile clinics and other things are coming in on Monday and Tuesday.
The question now is: how can we get all of these things out to the largest quantity of neediest people in the quickest and safest way possible?
