Aid Organizations Provide Relief as They Try to Locate Their Employees
By NICOLE WALLACE
Features Editor
January 14, 2010 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Aid organizations working in Haiti are scrambling to provide relief at the same time they are trying to account for their own staff members and assess damage to their facilities.
On Tuesday night, Louise Ivers, clinical director in Haiti for Partners in Health, a nonprofit organization that has provided medical care in Haiti since 1985, sent an urgent appeal for assistance to her colleagues.
“Port-au-Prince is devastated, lot of deaths,” she wrote. “SOS. SOS… Temporary field hospital by us at UNDP needs supplies, pain meds, bandages. Please help us.”
Partners in Health’s hospitals and surgical facilities in Cange, roughly two hours outside the capital, experienced a strong shock during the earthquake, but there was no major damage or injuries.
By Wednesday, the charity was organizing the logistics to set up field hospital sites in Port-au-Prince to triage patients, provide emergency care, and act as bases from which they can send people who need surgery or more complex treatment to their facilities in other parts of the country.
The American Red Cross had 15 staff members in Haiti at the time of Tuesday’s earthquake. By Wednesday, the organization had been able to account for the safety of three of its employees.
The group’s office was destroyed. One wall is missing, and everything has collapsed inside the office. Staff members distributed the supplies they had, but exhausted them quickly. They are waiting for a delivery from a Red Cross warehouse in Panama.
By Wednesday afternoon, Save the Children had been able to account for the safety of 36 of its 58 staff members in Haiti.
Employees surveyed the damage on foot and by motorbike because many of the streets in Port-au-prince are impassible.
“The destruction is everywhere and it’s still hard for emergency responders to reach many injured people at this point,” Ian Rodgers, Save the Children’s emergency response adviser, who is in Haiti, said in a written statement. “This is a major disaster that will require an intensive long-term response.”
