Samaritans Purse

A new fear gripped thousands of homeless families in Haiti when an evening downpour drenched makeshift tent camps across the Port-au-Prince area. It’s April and the rainy season has begun.

As the rains increase, people living under old sheets and scraps of plastic face a dilemma. They can stay outside and try not to get soaked, or seek shelter in earthquake-damaged homes and buildings that are ready to collapse. Sickness brought on by exposure and the spread of disease are also major concerns.

“Sometimes it rains all day and all week,” said Jean Francois, a man who lost his home in the earthquake. “People have no place to go.”

A group of five brothers and sisters were playing among piles of wet clothing and soaked mattresses beside a battered shelter in a camp outside Port-au-Prince. Last night’s rain flooded their home.

“It was loud and we were afraid,” said 11-year-old Christela, who was babysitting while her parents were away, looking for work. “We were up all night, trying to keep the water away. It was wet and cold.”

The scene highlighted the critical need for shelter across Haiti. Samaritan’s Purse is responding by creating family shelters that can be erected quickly, but are sturdy enough to withstand the wind and rain.

The shelters have a wood frame and a corrugated metal roof, with the outside walls covered with heavy duty plastic sheeting. Each shelter can house a family of 10. Shelters for 7,500 families are being built in areas devastated by the quake.

A 56-home community has been built in Titanyen, providing a safe and dry place to live for some of the area’s hardest hit families.

Before she moved into the Samaritan’s Purse shelter, a young mother named Claudia and her family were living under a flimsy tent made of old sheets and blankets.

“We would have gotten soaked because we had nowhere else to go,” she said, looking at her 10-month-old son in her arms and thinking about the recent downpour. “Last night, we didn’t get wet at all.”

A few doors away, Ziliane and her 9-year-old grandson, Rivaldo, set outside in the shade of their new home, saying hello to neighbors. Ziliane said she was grateful to God for the shelter.

“The Lord prepared this home as a gift for me and my family,” she said.

Ziliane was also thankful that God spared her life and the lives of her eight children and their families.

“If God hadn’t pulled us from the building, we wouldn’t be alive,” she said. “And now the Lord led me here because I still have work to do for the Master.”

The families living in the new village of blue plastic shelters in Titanyen feel connected by a shared tragedy and a sense of community.

Several people have set up little shops outside their doors—usually a small table displaying things like hand soap, candles, crackers, bouillon cubes, and cooking oil for sale. A tanker truck carrying clean water comes by three times a week. The women and children come running to fill plastic jugs and five-gallon buckets.

Samaritan’s Purse water and sanitation engineers also constructed a bank of latrines on one edge of the village.

Dr. Kara Gibson, the Samaritan’s Purse medical advisor in Haiti, even went out to the site to make house calls, checking on a sick child and discovering a woman who needed immediate surgery.

Evette Beneche stood in the doorway of her new home, holding her 14-month-old son, Kenif. Her 13-year-old daughter, Fedora, came and stood by her side.

Evette said that her family was thrilled to have a solid roof over their heads again. They lived for weeks in a lean-to made out of old blankets after the earthquake destroyed their home.

“We are very happy,” Evette said. “We thank Jesus and Samaritan’s Purse for this place. We would have been homeless without it.”

Posted with tags: haiti on Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 at 5:05 pm and is filed under April 10 Autumn Edition, Emergency Relief. 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.