PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – At 4 a.m. there was a tremor. I heard some neighbors quickly vacating their home. Later, our workers at the warehouse were talking about it and I heard from our customs broker that no one was working at customs for fear of buildings collapsing.

I was wondering if we would have any kids in school today. At 9 a.m. we pulled into Dadadou camp and there were about 60 kids. I hoped that more would join in shortly. Since it was the first day of school for these kids, the plan was just to have a time of fun and games. The kids began to sing the popular hymn “How Great Thou Art.” They sang beautifully and the teacher said a prayer. Within minutes children were coming from every corner; by the end of the day we had about 500 kids.

Dr. Jounie, the camp coordinator, was so excited to see the kids go to school. “These kids were traumatized and they need a place where they can be themselves. My dream has come true through Operation Blessing…this school will change lives,” she said.

Eight teachers and 7 volunteers were registering the kids and categorizing them into age groups. The school will offer grades 1-6, going from 9 a.m. until noon. Kids were singing and having lots of fun all morning. According to Dr. Jounie, this is the first school in operation.

Dadadou has around 7,000 people. As the word gets out, more and more children will be attending the school. At the end of the school session, each child was given a bottle of cold water, an MRE (meal-ready-to-eat) and peanut butter.

Smiles were everywhere; every kid had something to take home. Dr. Jounie said, “Operation Blessing is the best organization. You do what you say. Thank you.”

Lifesaver Jerrycans – Haiti from OB UK on Vimeo.

Lifesaver and Operation Blessing are working in Haiti to impact the lives of villagers living in extreme poverty.

 What a strange thing it is to wake up and have a new taste in your mouth. I wonder if, after living through something like the loss of all your furniture, your family photos, your clothes, your silverware and good china and car and neighborhood, if salt tastes the same.

Or if that salt would remind you of the sea, of the wind and waves that washed your life away.

I am wondering if Texas can ever look at the ocean the same way again.

The team and I are working on Colleen’s home. We haven’t met her or her family yet, but we know what her house looks like on the inside, and that is quite an intimate thing given that most people probably haven’t even seen the inside of their best friends’ medicine cabinet.

We don’t know Colleen, but we do know her house and material things mean more when you’ve built a house. In this case, that makes the loss of Colleen’s things all the more tragic.

I know that we cannot give her back what she no longer has. But I do have hope that these new things will replace something inside her- not because they are new, but because her home and all the things in it have been brought together piece by piece by a group of people who think she and her family are worth something, and that what they’ve gone through and lost mean something.

May we bathe your home in prayer and peace and hope- that you and your family may start anew with strings of pearls in your hands, and celebration in your hearts.

YAO JIN VILLAGE, China – We had a successful meeting with the local party leader this morning. We told him OBI wanted to help other villages in his region and asked him for suggestions of places that might need some simple projects done such as latrines.

He is arranging for us to visit three new villages on an assessment. It turns out the reason we were stopped from dumping our debris yesterday is the landfill site now wants to charge a fee. After talking to the villagers about the dilemma, we changed our game plan. They now want to keep as much of the debris as possible. So in short, we are making a huge pile in one corner of the village. This will save thousands of dollars in truck hiring and dumping fees and the villagers will be able to take advantage of the debris at a later date. This will also mean cleanup will require less time.

When we got approval to resume work in Yao Jin we had the machines return. There were a few houses in Yao Jin that survived the quake, meaning they were still partially standing. Any other houses still standing were so badly damaged they were condemned by the government and destined to be demolished. Not many structures were repairable.

We brought in a much larger excavator this afternoon. It’s an absolute beast and started dissecting buildings like a monster. The operator only needed to swipe at walls with the bucket and they came crashing down.

We had a great time with the villagers today as we had to relocate lots of pigs out of buildings that needed to be destroyed. There were pigs running all over the place. I joined in the chase to help herd them, much to the delight of the villagers who roared with laughter every time I failed to grab a leg.

One pig had a litter of piglets yesterday – life goes on in the quake zone.

By the evening any homes that had survived the quake were lying in rubble like the rest of the village. It is now a case of scooping and moving.

After one house came down and the excavator moved on, the family came to search the rubble for any possessions they could find. Before it was demolished, the house had been too dangerous to enter. When it fell, a shower of yellow corn poured from the roof where it had been drying.
The women were quick to collect the corn – any commodity is precious when you have lost everything.

As I stood watching the huge excavator make easy work of one house, I asked the crowd whose home it was. An elderly couple stepped forward, Mr. and Mrs. Chen. They told me how the house was less than a year old. They hadn’t even moved in yet and were living in a much smaller shack of a house on the property. They were just about to put the finishing touches on the interior when the quake hit. The house was still standing but huge cracks filled almost every wall. It was beyond repair and condemned.

When I asked what the Chens did for a living they told me they were pig farmers and had saved money for 40 years to pay for their home, it was their pride and joy and lifelong achievement. As they told me this our excavator was swiping at its walls and bricks were falling in huge clouds of dust. It took 40 years for the Chens to build that home but only 1 minute of the earth moving to violently destroy it.

As I stood behind the couple, watching their home collapse, I felt a deep sense of sadness for them. They have lost everything. Then when I thought it couldn’t get any more heart-wrenching, once the machine had finished leveling the house, Mr. Chen turned around and said, “thank you.”

After turning in around midnight last night, I was still answering my mobile under my pillow. The Director of Children’s Hope International (CHI) and a representative from the China Social Work Association called. OB China had secured a donation of infant formula valued at nearly $200,000 USD and they were going into Dujiangyan to deliver some of it to a facility housing mothers and children. 

Tomorrow morning we will most likely join the China Red Cross and CHI to focus distribution of our relief efforts on infants and young children and assess their needs.
 
We’re also networking to find the foster homes (similar to a privately-run orphanage) as well as government-run orphanages to check on the children’s status.  I heard last night that rescuers had reached an orphanage in Wenchuan where there were 36 children, 20 of whom are under 2 years old.  They say that 75 percent of people in this area have lost their lives, and we have not yet heard about the status of the children at the orphanage.
 

They estimate death totals are at 50,000 now.  The figure took my breath away after a long day of organizing relief and supplies.
 
Everyday people are doing extraordinary things here in response to the crisis.  Having lived in China for many years, relationships matter. For those you know, you do everything you can to help your friends and they do the same for you.  But generally, you don’t go the extra mile for a stranger.
 
This is not what is happening now in China.  The scale of the disaster has seemed to tap into everyone’s heart.  Strangers are helping strangers.  Everyone is going the extra mile.  One man interrupted my TV interview to give me a bowl of hot noodles because he thought I looked tired. 

Thousands of Chengdu citizens are buying water, supplies, food and blankets, and stockpiling them at huge drop off areas for the Red Cross to deliver.  It’s something I’ve never seen before in China and it has brought tears to my eyes several times today.
 
50,000 lives gone, 3.5 million homes destroyed… there is a lot of work to do…