Flight to Savanette
by David Darg
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – This morning I joined a Haitian Pastor, Pastor Volner, on a helicopter flight to a remote community that we have been serving with food supplies. On the way we landed in a village called Pouille, home to a rural community of 1,800 people.
The pastor took us on a tour of a school he founded. The children were dressed in their red-and-white checkered uniform and looked amazingly neat considering the sparse environment outside the school walls.
This village is completely cut off by a snaking river, and the only way in is by air or boat. It was nice being in a place with no cars after several weeks of traffic in Port-au-Prince.
The Pastor showed me their primitive water system powered by an aging and difficult-to-run diesel pump. He also showed me an area he was hoping to turn into a vegetable farm for the school, but needed irrigation.
Our pilot told me of a helicopter he could access to help us sling load one of our water purification systems in to Pouille. The solar pump could provide clean drinking water for the school of 300 students and feed a drip irrigation system for the vegetable farm. We’re working to make that happen.
We took off and climbed over some high mountains. Martin, our pilot with Samaritan Air, used patches of exposed white rock to generate lift as the morning sun heated up the air. After a short flight, we landed in a field in the village of Savanette.
Pastor Volner told me that the 2,500 villagers live from day to day on the crops they can grow. If the crops fail, they sometimes eat sugar cane all day long as their only meal. Before the quake, they would try to supplement their diets with food bought from Port-au-Prince, but that supply chain had ceased since the quake.
The pastor had collected a large kit form the OB warehouse the day before and had trucked it for 5 hours overnight to reach the village. We walked to the center of the village where the distribution was taking place.
A huge crowd was bustling to get a place in the distribution line. Today we were distributing MRE’s, rice and baby food and the distributions went on longer than we could stay.
It was great to see how far reaching our partner network is. From our warehouse in Port-au-Prince, food is getting out to places of need in many parts of the country. On the way back to the city, Martin flew us over Lake Azuei where I was able to get some aerial photographs of our fish cages and our adopted village, Medan Belize.
We then followed the road back into the city and hovered over the fish farm where OBI will be helping to produce millions of tilapia, creating thousands of jobs.
Tags: Caribbean, clean water, David Darg, Disaster Relief, Earthquake, Fish Farms, Food Supplies, Haiti, Lake Azuei, Medan Belize, MREs, OBI, Operation Blessing, Port-au-Prince, Pouille, Samaritan Air, Savanette, Teach a Nation to Fish, Water Purification System
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