Some Facts on Haiti

- Two million people need food. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon promised that by the end of January, the World Food Program and related organizations would feed at least half of those. In fact, the number fed was 600,000. "It has been slower than anyone hoped or expected," UN humanitarian aid co-ordinator John Holmes said.

- Ban was also pushing a cash-for-work program. Jobs are to be created clearing the rubble at $4 to $5 a day. He appealed for $41-million for this program. By end January, $4.3-million had been donated.

- A "donor" conference for Haiti last April, 2009, after hurricane season, saw $402-million pledged. Actual disbursements were $61-million, about 15 per cent of funds promised. This is quite typical of many such pledges, not just to Haiti. Typically as well, we rarely hear of these broken promises.

— "Some facts Stephen Harper should have on Haiti", The Globe and Mail (includes many more points)

Matthew 25 News

I've been getting email updates directly from Vivian at Matthew 25 House:

Don Lafont, and Lynn Blair-Anton, the members of our volunteer mobile clinic, left yesterday. It was difficult to see them go. Every day for two weeks, they packed up needed medical supplies in a tub, bags, and boxes and went work in various areas throughout the city. No one was ever turned away.

We had a fresh medical team that arrived from New Jersey. They had planned to work in a different area of the country where a large influx of patients was expected to be evacuated from the U.S. Comfort hospital ship. That did not occur, and we were fortunate because the field hospital here was shorthanded. The first day they split up into two teams. One group went to an orphanage. Like others in Haiti, as well as families, most children in orphanages sleep outside on the ground. The doctors were able to at least check them over, provide antibiotics where needed, and give them vitamins. Again, the need for tents is urgent! We still have not received the promised vinyl sheeting to at least cover the tops of the sheet tents.

Since then the team has worked in the field hospital of Matthew 25. Julie Morrison, a Doctor of Physical Therapy and a member of the New Jersey team, has been invaluable in helping the amputees. Julie has been able to rewrap stumps so that they will eventually be able to hold a prosthesis, and also has been working with each patient so that they learn exercises particular to their new disability that will strengthen their muscles. Before her arrival they would just be lying down. She has them up and walking. At first they were really afraid, in pain and not used to their body’s new imbalance, but after three days they can walk on their crutches for more than 300 feet, and also climb up a step. It seems strange to refer to someone who has lost one or more limbs as “fortunate”, but the fact that those here are already learning to cope, to wrap their own stumps in the particular way necessary for accepting a prosthetic makes them so much more fortunate than the hundreds and hundreds of others.

Something that happened the day before yesterday made me and many others very angry about the arrogance of the United States government. The day before yesterday several thousand Haitians arrived at the U.S. embassy because (as we heard it) there was a rumor that travel visas were being issued. The embassy response was to blockade not only the embassy compound, but the whole road that fronts it. This region of the metro area of the city has three main “trunk” roads. The embassy is located on one of these. To close it off for something like that was a terrible thing to do to the people having to function in this vital area. I needed to go out to buy supplies, and had to turn around after almost two hours in traffic, advancing less than a mile. Pat had started out to pick up the medical supply order for three clinics, and he too, could get nowhere, and had to turn back.

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