Blogs from Haiti, Central America Caribbean - page 19

Hi Our adventure starts in 5 days. Sionfonds medical trip to Haiti. My hope is that we will be able to post on this blog our experiences, to share with all of the people at home while we are still in Haiti. a.... read more

The Kearsarge provided a HUGE amount of assistance in Haiti, with the helicopters lifting more tons of food, water, and relief supplies than I can even imagine. We left there to go to Guantanamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba to get supplies and fuel (try to imagine this: we took on 750,000 gallons of fuel for the ship and another 250,000 gallons for the helicopters!). But we left 3 helicopters, work crews and some US Public Health Service (PHS) people behind to continue working while we were gone for 60 hours. The PHS folks were doing assessments in remote villages of the food, water and sanitation situation. They reported increasing malaria because of so much standing water, and while there wasn't severe malnutrition, the food shortages were becoming more urgent. I learned that one bag of ... read more

We're off the coast of Haiti near Port-au-Prince, providing assistance to areas in the north and southeast of the country cut off when the roads washed out in the flooding from the recent hurricanes. Our helicopters are transporting hundreds of thousands of tons of relief supplies (mostly rice, beans, flour and oil) to people who have no food and no water. At the moment, the helicopters from the USS Kearsarge are the only means available in the country of moving these goods. Some areas are so isolated even our helicopters can't reach them. People are getting more and more desperate. There was fighting the day before yesterday over the food (you may have seen it on Fox. Hurricanes and flooding are only a part of the problem for this small country, the poorest in the Western ... read more

Well, I'm sitting around at work waiting for the ride home, so I figure it's time for update no. 2... First, something about the temperature here. Last weekend, it got up to about 30 degrees, which is warm, but actually colder than it was in Toronto! It's currently 30 degrees, so the temperature hasn't been too bad at all. Considering my housing doesn't have aircon or a fan, i'm happy about that. It's not nearly as bad as Guyana was in the summer... it's even better than London is, since at least i'm up in the mountains a bit. So, since last Friday, what have I done? Friday night I went out to a lebanese restaurant, which was my first time to a lebanese restaurant since I overdosed on lebanese food in Abu Dhabi (there was ... read more

Hi so i guess ill write about this past weekend. which was one of my favorite experiences here in Haiti. A couple of us whent with "the brothers orphanage" on a rice feed about an hour out of port-au-prince. Peeople were told to sit in a line as we did prayer and leanrt a bible verse and sang a song after that We handed each person a bag of rice. it was an experience i'll never forget. each person ranged from enfants to grandmothers. After that we traveled back into port-au-prince and delivered more food supplies to other orphanages. ... i never really thought that an orpghanage wouldnt be able to support its own needs. the first one we visited was jsut a small dark building full of children, and the second was an abdoned bulding ... read more