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By Jim Coggins
“IN 30 YEARS of disaster relief, it is one of the worst crises I’ve ever seen,” said World Vision (WV) Canada president Dave Toycen.
The pictures of the “massive destruction” in Haiti are “true and accurate,” concurred his colleague, WV Canada’s church relations director Willard Metzger.
Both emphasized, however, that the faith of Haitians is the outstanding factor
in this grim situation. This phenomenon has also been noted by secular news
media.
Toycen noted a common assertion that Haiti is 10 percent evangelical Protestant,
90 percent Catholic and 100 percent voodoo. The majority of the Haitian people
are descendants of African slaves brought there by Europeans.
There is no doubt that voodoo, a derivative of African animist religions, has
played a significant role in the country’s history. Its practitioners claim there are 60,000 voodoo priests in the
country, and there is no doubt that many Haitians mix voodoo cultural practices
in with their Christianity. However, this is not true of all Haitians, and
Canadians should not doubt the genuine Christian faith of many of the people.
Toycen found many Haitians “praising God in the worst circumstances in the world.” They “found strength in their faith,” and many of those rescued “talked of the power of prayer and a sense of God being with them.”
Metzger remembers going for a walk in the middle of the first night after the
quake. It seemed to him that the wailing which occurred frequently had become
more organized. He asked what the noise was.
Someone responded, “They’re crying.” Then a voice from the back of a pickup truck said, “No, they’re praying.”
Both Toycen and Metzger talked of impromptu prayer meetings breaking out all
over the city, all through the night.
By Wednesday, Metzger said he was hearing people chanting, “God forgive us,” and the response, “God, we forgive you.”
Toycen said there is “some sense of God’s judgment” among some Haitians. Other news media reported Haitians saying that this
judgment was particularly for the corruption in government.
Metzger remembers struggling with the question of why he and his team survived
(they had at first wanted to stay in a different hotel, which collapsed) – it was obviously God’s protection, but why had they been protected when so many Haitians had died?
In that light, Metzger was challenged by what he saw among the Haitians: “the deep, abiding faith among a people accustomed to suffering.”
He added that, as a North American Christian, “It was a lesson to me with our expectations that God will protect us and we will
have no suffering. They know life is cruel and unfair. Yet even if they lose
their life or what little they have, they still have faith that God is their
only hope.”
Metzger arrived in Haiti with a group of volunteers just hours before the
earthquake.
The Villa Creole Hotel in Petionville, where the team were staying, was damaged
but not destroyed. After the shaking stopped, as Metzger went to gather up the
team, he heard “an intense and massive wailing.”
It was a clue to how extensive the damage really was. An estimated 200,000 died
in the quake, and hundreds of thousands more are now homeless.
Toycen said the death toll and destruction were similar to those of the 2004
tsunami. However, there are factors that make this disaster worse.
For one thing, the Haiti earthquake struck a tightly packed urban population who
were already poor and often unemployed.
For another, the 2004 tsunami carried out to sea most of the debris it had
created. In Haiti, the debris is still on the ground, choking the streets and
making it more difficult to bring in aid.
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“There is a grey dust on everything,” Toycen said. Most buildings were made of cement because the country has been
largely denuded of trees. Metzger noted that his hotel cracked, but was held
together with rebar metal embedded in the concrete; many other buildings weren’t built that well.
Like many Haitians after the quake, Metzger and other people in the hotel
thought it safer to go out into the streets to sleep for the night. What they
hadn’t expected was the flow of injured people coming to the hotel for help.
People from the hotel did the best they could with a first aid kit, iodine and
splints made from torn bedsheets and baseboards ripped from the hotel walls.
A “sullen moment” occurred at 2 am, when the first body was placed in a makeshift morgue. The
next morning, instead of hope, first light brought more throngs of injured
people.
Without medical training, Metzger and the team were evacuated within a couple of
days to “get out of the way” of the relief effort.
Toycen, on the other hand, arrived shortly after the quake to assess the damage.
One of the first things he saw was a large hospital moved outdoors, with one
doctor, one nurse – and a teacher who was given a quick lesson in first aid – trying to help hundreds of patients lying on doors, rags and rusty beds.
Virtually everybody in Haiti has been traumatized, Toycen said, but he praised
WV staff for continuing to help in spite of their own pain. “I’ve been a helper most of my life,” one staff member said. “Now I’m a helper and a victim, and that changes everything.”
Relief was not getting in as fast as it should at first, Toycen said, due to a
lack of drivers, trucks, fuel and security.
WV was in a somewhat better position because it has its own warehouses and
trucks. It also distributes much of its aid through churches, which is less
public and more controlled. Without controls, there is a danger young men will
take most of the relief supplies.
Thievery and violence are always a concern in relief situations, but Toycen said
his staff on the ground are saying that the security situation is not much
different than it was before the quake.
Most World Vision aid was reaching people who needed it within a day or two of
arriving in the country.
Fortunately, there was little rain in the first two weeks after the quake. Given
the lack of sanitation in makeshift refugee camps holding tens of thousands of
people, rain could easily spread contagion and kill thousands more of disease.
Within two weeks of the Haiti earthquake, WV Canada had raised about a third of the $30 million or so it raised for the
2004 tsunami. Toycen said WV has a 90-day plan to provide basic relief supplies
such as food, water, temporary shelter and medical aid. But that is only the
beginning.
“If we get Haiti back to where it was (before the earthquake),” Toycen said, “our mission will not be a success.”
February 2010
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