We are in the new house now, and can finally get a full night’s sleep without interruption from street noise, mosquitos or a generator that growls all night like an angry bear.

Our cook and housekeeper turned down our offer to stay in our guest house, and prefer to sleep in their small tent on the concrete slab outside the kitchen door. They, like most Haitians, are haunted by visions of being crushed, and choose to sleep outdoors. We have seen this same fear in other parts of the world where earthquakes tear lives apart and aftershocks remind victims that they will never feel safe again.

We have had rain two nights in a row, so mosquitos swarm to any light in the night and add to the misery index. I am continually amazed at how tough the Haitian people are. Doctors tell me how injured patients lay quietly and bear pain that would have most patients screaming. The “normal misery level” has been so high for so long, that generations of Haitians have learned how to live with non-stop pain.

Meanwhile, in response to Saturday’s 8.8-magnitude quake that struck Chile, our teams have been making assessments on how we can help victims. Kumar Periasamy has left for Chile and will be joining a team of Humedica doctors and medical personnel on the ground to bring aid to those injured and in need of help. Humedica is a German nonprofit and long-time partner with OBI, and we’ve previously worked together in Haiti in response to the Hurricane Ike; aiding victims of the Myanmar cyclone; and helping victims of ethnic violence in Kenya and refugees in Darfur, Sudan, to name a few.

Here in Haiti, the road to recovery continues. We leased a second warehouse very close to our headquarters and the US embassy. Even though it’s a good neighborhood, we have contracted with a local security firm for 24/7 security guards. Each guard is dressed in a camo uniform and carries a shotgun and sidearm.

We helped The Salvation Army out of a jam yesterday. They were no longer able to use the storage area at the airport, and their warehouse is not yet ready for occupancy. We agreed to let them store 5 truckloads of rice and beans and other supplies in our warehouse until theirs is ready. Our team worked all day with US Army soldiers unloading the trucks and stacking pallets in our warehouse.

Looking to the future and how we might help create new jobs and improve quality of life in Haiti, we have decided to dramatically expand our Haiti fish program. The plan is to raise millions of tilapia and catfish fingerlings for stocking in all of Haiti’s major lakes. “Teach a Nation to Fish” is the name of this project. Our partner, Val Abe at Caribbean Harvest, has a Ph.D in aquaculture from Auburn and has already proven his expertise in our joint effort at Lake Azuei. Val will run the project and OBI will fund it and provide logistic and management support. This is a three year project that will result in between 5,000 and 8,000 new jobs and fresh fish for millions of Haitians.

More on that later…

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at 11:49 am and is filed under Bill Horan, Caribbean, 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.