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UUSC Partners in Haiti Respond to Multilayered Emergencies
Friday, February 26, 2010
By Martha Thompson
February 6–13, a UUSC assessment team visited program partners in Haiti to gauge the current situation and work to develop a mid- and long-term response to the January 12 earthquake and its devastation. While there, Martha Thompson, manager of UUSC's Rights in Humanitarian Crises Program, witnessed new layers of emergency response.
Despite their own personal losses and the tragedy around them, UUSC's Haitian partners are responding quickly and effectively to the emergency in Haiti. UUSC made grants to four grassroots organizations in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake: Lambi Fund, the Regional Coordination of Southeast Organizations (CROSE), the Platform of Community Organizations of the Port-au-Prince Metropolitan Zone (COZPAM), and the Papaye Peasant Movement (MPP). "We have to provide help to people in a way that honors their dignity" — UUSC staff heard this over and over from the partners we visited on our February assessment trip.
During our time in Haiti, we found two emergencies layered on top of the unimaginable tragedy and massive destruction of the earthquake. That the massive relief operation remains inexplicably tangled comprises one new emergency. Six weeks after the earthquake the majority of people in Port-au-Prince are still struggling for regular access to food, water, and adequate shelter. Over and over, Haitians we spoke to asked why relief organizations were not distributing through Haitian community and grassroots organizations to ensure that people got orderly access to badly needed supplies in the capital.
The second emergency is growing in the countryside as more than half a million Haitians have left Port-au-Prince and are scattering all over the country to their relatives' homes, seeking food, shelter, and medical care. We interviewed many of these internally displaced persons (IDPs) on February 7 and 8 in Papaye in the Central Plateau. Many are bunking with their families, and small wood houses are now crammed to bursting with 23 and 25 people in cases we witnessed. Peasants who scrape by on a bare subsistence are scrambling to find food to feed up to 16 new people in their homes. In many areas farmers are having to cook the corn and beans they were saving from last year's harvest to plant.
UUSC's partners are responding to both of these new emergencies. CROSE and COZPAM have both used their community networks and mobilized volunteers to organize camps in Mariani and Jacmel. Their workers and volunteer teams help camp populations set up coordinating committees of members, making sure to include women. These coordination committees organize food distribution, facilitate water access, coordinate food preparation and care of orphans, and represent the communities when new agencies come in to offer services. COZPAM and CROSE use UUSC funds to purchase food, buy other essential items, particularly for women and children, and pay their workers a slight honorarium. COZPAM, the first group to bring assistance into the Mariani neighborhood, has also organized 104 volunteers to begin training in trauma response.
In the countryside, UUSC supports MPP in the Central Plateau and the Lambi Fund in the Artibonite to provide support to the tens of thousands who have fled Port-au-Prince. In the Artibonite, Lambi Fund has worked for years with the peasant women's groups and, with UUSC funds, they are using those networks to provide funds for the families hosting IDPs. In the Central Plateau, UUSC funds enable MPP to provide food to patients in the hospital in Hinche, shelter up to 100 IDPs in their training center, and provide food to host families who are under the most strain to find food for their visitors.
During our assessment trip, everyone requested support for trauma-healing work. In response, UUSC is sending down a four-person team from the Trauma Resource Institute who will do an initial visit March 11–22. They use a unique trauma-response method that helps people stabilize emotionally and builds their resilience, which is critical in this ongoing emergency.
We left Haiti on February 13, deeply sobered by the magnitude of this emergency and the terrible losses suffered by every single person we met. On the other hand, every person we met in our partner organizations strengthened our admiration for how ordinary Haitians are doing extraordinary things.
