Earlier this week, we distributed diapers, baby formula, baby bottles, food and baby food to two orphanages in Port-au-Prince with approximately 140 children combined. One of the orphanages focuses on babies, where over 30 infants are living outside under a tarpaulin, so the baby food was a God-send.

Several of the babies were there because their mothers were killed in the quake and their fathers don’t know how to take care of them. The orphanage will feed and take care of them, and later reunite them with their families when they are able to properly care for them.

In the orphanage for older children, school had restarted with one group of kids holding class under a large tarpaulin while another group held their math class with the chalk board leaning up against a pile of rubble.

We distributed personal hygiene kits to every child. And it was great to see the children enjoying the MREs (meals-ready-to-eat) we had delivered the previous day.

We also delivered a Lifesaver jerrycan and trained the orphanage staff on how to use it. Clean water is vital in the preparation of baby formula, and with the orphanage in ruins and the children working outside in the heat all day, it is important that they have plenty of clean water to drink.

Naomi worked with a group of students and orphans to draw their experiences of the quake. Because the school teaches English, most of the kids also wrote captions and some even wrote full stories about what happened.

OBI will continue to serve these orphanages with food and water, and we will also start distributing relief supplies to a network of pastors in the community, who will then distribute supplies to the families with the most critical needs in their churches.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 2:04 pm 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.