PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – With a whopping 29 shipping containers arriving at the Operation Blessing warehouse on Monday, we will be working flat out next week. Each container is packed with essential relief supplies to serve the network of camps, churches and orphanages OBI is supporting. 

The U.S. Navy is delivering the containers fast and our warehouse will be overflowing with aid, but not for long. As they have for the past few weeks, the supplies will get out to the people who need them fast, but with so much volume we need more room. So I toured Port-au-Prince this morning looking for warehouse space with a Haitian friend, Ralph.

We met Ralph while looking for a forklift. His glass company was literally smashed into millions of pieces during the earthquake. Ralph had just left his office and was driving home when the quake hit. He said the car bounced in the air and that he thought he had driven over a big hole. As he looked in the mirror, he saw a building fall behind him. Ralph realized it was a quake, and by then buildings were falling all around him.

Ralph took me to see a warehouse nestled deep in the heart of a neighborhood called Cite Militaire. When we arrived at the compound where the warehouse stood, the whole place was a tent city. Over 2,000 people are living under temporary shelters in the camp, but none of them were there. They were all in one corner of the compound under an unfinished factory that had been turned into a church.

Today was the second of three official days of mourning. All over Port-au-Prince, people have been dressing in white and converging on churches and national monuments to pray and remember those killed in the quake. The impromptu church I visited in the camp was jammed full and the crowd was singing worship songs to a Caribbean tune. Between songs, most would go to their knees and pray. At one point, they were praying and chanting in unison and my colleague leaned over and said, “They are asking for God to bless Haiti.”

We left the service to survey the needs in the camp and found that water was needed urgently. Some of the camp’s elected leaders showed us an empty cistern on the compound. We immediately called for a water truck to make several deliveries to fill the cistern and promised the leaders that we would return in the morning to install a purification unit.

In the afternoon, I was invited to fly to a remote airstrip with our longtime aviation partner Mission Aviation Fellowship. Operation Blessing has been supporting MAF to make food drops all over Haiti in places where there are large, hungry groups of displaced families. On this particular route, we flew two Kodiak aircraft capable of short take-offs and landings on dirt or grass airstrips. The Kodiaks are new state-of-the-art planes and perfect tools for this type of work.

We took off from Port-au-Prince and climbed to where the tent cities looked like patchwork quilts below. Our cargo on this run was boxes of ready-to-eat meals, destined for a mission group supporting over 1,500 people. We landed on a grass strip and had only just stopped the engine when the plane was approached by a large group of men eager to see what our cargo was. A group of American missionaries met us and pulled their truck up to the plane.

We formed a tight human chain and began to unload the boxes of meals. Hardly any supplies had reached this area despite a huge displaced population. As we unloaded the second plane, the men in the crowd motioned to their mouths and bellies to say they were hungry, but these MREs were destined for families already identified as in urgent need. To get supplies to this place by road would take a long time and be dangerous; in times like these, the Kodiak is an amazing tool.

With a completely empty plane, the pilot wanted to demonstrate the short take-off capabilities of the Kodiak. We taxied down the bumpy grass strip, opened up the throttle, and were in the air in a time that seemed to truly defy gravity.

Descending back into Port-au-Prince, I saw a valley full of rubble where there were once homes. In the streets, streams of people dressed in white walked home from their all-day church services.

Tags: Caribbean, Cite Militaire, clean water, David Darg, Disaster Relief, Earthquake, Haiti, MAF, Mission Aviation Fellowship, MREs, OBI, Operation Blessing, Port-au-Prince, Relief, Relief Camp, Relief Supplies, Tent City, US Navy, Water Purification, Water Purification System

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 at 10:26 am and is filed under Caribbean, David Darg, Disaster Relief, Earthquake, Haiti. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.