“Loads” of hope
by David Darg
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – My day started with a distribution in downtown Port-au-Prince with The Salvation Army. OBI teamed up with them to hand out our collapsable water kits to 2,000 families. The Salvation Army has been working with a specific camp and do distributions twice a week, usually handing out food.
At today’s distribution the recipients snaked in a long line next to a drainage canal and the UN provided crowd control. One by one they filed through and first collected the OB water kits, then a box of high nutrition food from The Salvation Army. The water kits will help them collect and store clean water.
The next stop was the General Hospital on an assessment to see if we could place the Proctor & Gamble “Tide Loads of Hope” mobile laundry trailer.
I had visited the laundry facility at the hospital a few months back and only 2 washing machines were working. Now none are working and all laundry for the 700-bed hospital has to be done by hand.
The offer of the laundry trailer was of course a big hit and we will hopefully be able to proceed with that program and make it happen. While at the hospital I had a chance to check out the latest water system that Eric installed yesterday, right outside the pediatrics center.
The system was running great and lots of patients, staff and family have already been able to benefit from it. On the way to warehouse 1 we stopped into Dadadou to check on the school and the water unit, both of which were running great. The kids have started decorating the big tent with colorings and paper decorations.
Around lunch time, the first 6 of our medical containers arrived into Port-au-Prince, so it was all systems go getting them unloaded into warehouse 2. At 3 p.m. I had a meeting with the World Food Program and outlined our distribution network. We have been earmarked 20 tons of MREs for our distributions and I’m hoping to finalize the deal tomorrow.
By around 4 p.m. Larry Foltz had managed to unload all 6 40-foot containers into the warehouse–quite a feat! We locked the metal doors and our armed security guard started his patrol.
We will have armed guards on the door 24/7. Tati and our local staff will be back at the Dominican Republic border tomorrow morning to escort the next 6 containers to Port-au-Prince, and we should have all 12 in the nest by tomorrow afternoon.
Tags: Caribbean, clean water, Dadadou, David Darg, Disaster Relief, Earthquake, Haiti, Laundry, Medical Supplies, MREs, OBI, Operation Blessing, Port-au-Prince, Proctor & Gamble, The Salvation Army, Tide, Tide Loads of Hope, UN, Water Kits, Water Purification System, World Food Program
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April 7th, 2011 at 6:05 pm
Hi there. It has been more than one year since the Haiti earthquake tragedy happened; the world was shocked and tons of help were forwarded but still, those don’t seem to be enough. Glad there are people like you extending your help to these people. Hope sooner or later, Haiti can finally recover from this disaster. My prayers are with them, and with people like you for all your help.
-Bruce Gow