Sister Mary update

We returned to visit sister Mary Zinnick at the Matthew 13 house in Port Au Prince. Her operation has expanded admirably. There are currently more than 1200 people living in a tent city in her back yard. She has established a community school with a playground, composting toilets and clean bathroom facilities. She has also made several small business loans and is helping members of her community to reestablish their own economic activity so to sustain themselves once again. A more impressive independent operation cannot be found in Port Au Prince.

There is however, a considerable downside. Many of the foreign organizations that were originally helping her fail to see the immediacy of her need and many are no longer forthcoming with their support. She tells us that World Vision showed up some weeks ago promising support but she had not heard from them since. She tells us that Catholic Relief Services have also withdrawn support, at least for the time being. Matthew 13 house is in dire need of material resource support. Sister Mary says that feeding the people living with her is a dicey proposition at best and she is unable to provide for them in the manner that is required. She needs money, she needs food and she needs other resources as well.

We are therefore taking up her cause and are responding two fold. First off, we are attempting to find her support here in Haiti. We will, as we are able to locate them (once again a dicey proposition) be approaching the various large organizations in an attempt to procure for her the material resources required to meet the immediate needs of her community. We are trying to find the Haiti headquarters of organizations such as the Red Cross and Oxfam, even, once again, World Vision to try and bring to bear some of the already existing resources that have been allocated for relief. In our eyes, she is doing so much that she should be entitled to such help. Secondly, we will be reaching out directly to North American communities for donations which we will be channeling directly, in whole, to Sister Mary. If you are able to help and wish to make a donation directly to Sister Mary please contact us by email at ccrphaiti@gmail.org. Next time we visit we will be compiling a list of needs for her organization and any help YOU can be in obtaining these resources will be greatly appreciated. This is NOT the same as Red Cross donations, here, your money and resources will have a direct, crucial impact in helping this community to recover from the devastation of the Jan 12 earthquake. Any donations will be brought to bear within less than two weeks of donation date.

Haitian Organization

There are many barriers to successfully working as a foreign NGO in Haiti, some of which are due to not having an obvious local organizational and legal infrastructure to conduct business in the country. There is also the future potential for problems in accessing funds that were raised in Canada, if the organizational structure and the majority of the board of the CCRP are not in country, as will temporarily be the case at the end of this year.

To overcome these barriers and to ensure that all work in Haiti is clearly Haitian-led, the CCRP is currently in the process of establishing a Haitian non-profit that will be responsible for all of the CCRP’s Haitian activities, and will be directed by a board constituted of a Haitian majority.

The creation of this organization will be a big step in our work in Haiti, as the mandate of the organization will then be recognized by the Haitian government, and the accountability of the organization will officially be in the hands of the Haitian people who are working with the CCRP.

Getting Around

Travelling in this country is like nothing we have ever experienced before. Slow and difficult does not even begin to explain it. Getting anywhere is a chore. There are numerous was of traveling about the city and countryside, all which are inconsistent and unreliable if you do not have your own means of transportation. You can hop on the back of a motor bike or an unmarked rundown van or car which are used as taxis. Public transit vehicles are called Tap-Taps, they are small Toyota pick-up trucks with benches built on to either side of the box that people rush to claim a spot in, cramming in and sitting on each other’s laps along busy streets. Some Tap-Taps are similarly appointed larger trucks which would otherwise be used for hauling. Tap-Taps do not run on any specific schedule, but follow a specific route (marked in paint on their doors) that would lead you to an area where you could access another after a bit of a walk. These vehicles are all rundown and creaky, threatening to fall apart as they navigate the numerous holes and cracks in the road, expelling black exhaust as they go. Getting around this way is highly time consuming. It took us six hours to get to a bank that was actually working, walking long distances down dirty streets in the blistering heat and hopping in various taxis and tap-taps.

To get across the country from one city to another you hop on one of these forms of transport making your way slowly across the city with long waits for the next vehicle to arrive, or walking long distances to the next route one travels. You make your way across the crowed rubble strewn city to the edges of places like Cite de Soleil where old school busses wait to transport you from one place to another. The busses wait there till they are full, with 3 people to a single bench seat. Cramped, hot and sweaty, you travel across the county with windows down so you can breathe, the bus zooming by slower vehicles constantly honking the horn to let other vehicles and pedestrians know they are barreling through. When it rains, you put up the window, unless of course the window is broken, in which case you sit and smile while rain whips you in the face. Entertainment is provided by onboard vendors, inevitably of personal grooming supplies and supplements, who banter ceaselessly in Creole, only sometimes gaining enough of passenger’s attentions to illicit a response. A day’s travel in country without a private vehicle is hard work.

Community School

The future of Haiti is dependent on the education that its children receive, so the CCRP has committed to raising funds for the building of a school in a community that is in need of a primary school.

We are working closely with a local man in St. Marc who has successfully worked with a rural community to help them build a school, and over the next few months we will be following his successful model of community-led school-building to find and work with one of the many communities that are in need of schools.

The model is entirely community-based led, as we will be seeking out a community that is in need of and wants to run a school for their children, and will then work with the leaders in that community to ascertain what the local capacity is to build the school then work help connect them to the resources that are not locally available to enable them to build a school that is owned and controlled by the collective community.

Art School

We returned to the Haitian College des Arts National (National Arts College). Thierry, our Director of Haitian operations arranged for us to meet with some of the most accomplished young artists in the country if not the world. We sat with them for a good period and have decided to assemble a touring exhibition of the first works to come out of this school after the earthquake.

In inspiration and execution, those works which have already been completed are second to none. They reflect directly the experiences and reflection of these artists who are facing the largest existential challenges a given artistic community can face.

We are assembling an exhibition of 60 to 80 pieces, some paintings, some sculpture and some tableaus which will illuminate for the future viewing public the experience of having survived the single largest mass death event in the history of the Americas. We consider ourselves lucky to have even seen these works let alone having the opportunity to potentially bring these works to the North America viewing public. These artists have so much to say that it is incumbent on us to do what we can to help their message reach a larger global community.

This community is doing well in comparison to how they were immediately after the earthquake. There are a number of tents of campus where students without places to go are living communally in the hopes of being able to continue their creative work, work which will be crucial to the cultural survival of Haitian CREATIVE (as opposed to tourist) art. At this point, materials are in short supply. Shortages of canvas, paints, hand tools etc….. means that production has slowed to a crawl. We are therefore reaching out to our own artistic communities up North to help supply these people with the materials required to complete the pieces that will comprise the touring exhibition. If you have access to any such supplies, or if you can assemble these sorts of materials for donations to the national art school, please contact us by email at ccrphaiti@gmail.com.

Arrival and Overview

The three of us arrived at the airport in Port au Prince in mid afternoon on Tuesday, May 25th. We were immediately confronted with the situation at hand as we were driven through the city to Carrfour. You first see people everywhere, trying to sell clothing, fruits, etc., anything to make some money to get by. Things do not seem to have improved much since the disaster. There is still rubble everywhere of countless collapsed buildings. You see five story buildings pancaked together, now the height of a one story building. There are many of these cases, in which they have been able to even remove the bodies from the mess. Many of the buildings that are still standing are structurally unsound with large cracks and must also be taken down and cleared away before reconstruction can begin. Roads are difficult to travel on as they are covered in rubble or have been damaged themselves from the earthquake. We have seen only a couple of trucks working to clear the rubble in the time since our arrival.

Mass camps scatter the hillsides of Port au Prince where large portions of the population remain until progress is made in rebuilding process. After talking with the people it became apparent that some remain in the camps even if their house was not destroyed. They saw what it could do and no longer feel safe in their homes. Mental health has become a huge problem among these people after watching everything crumble before their eyes and taking with it many if not all of their family members and friends. Garbage litters the camps, streets, and waterways. There are too many people with no infrastructure set up to deal with it. These people are faced with crowded, unsanitary, unsafe conditions. Conditions remain the same throughout most of the city, but some areas are worse off than others. People have been displaced, some of them forgotten about. Many do not have access to food or any form of health care.

People appear to want to move on, or at least try. But it is difficult in a country where nothing seems to work as it should and with such devastation weighing so heavily on the shoulders of the people. There is much work to be done in this area before life can even begin to return to something similar to normal for the Haitian people.