General News and Announcements

March 31, 2010

The ACT Alliance and its members continue to work with homeless people in temporary camps in Port-au-Prince, Leogane, and other areas most strongly affected by the January 12 earthquake in Haiti.

Since March 23, Jim Hodgson, The United Church of Canada's Caribbean/Central America program coordinator, has been in Haiti working with partners and the ACT Alliance. He has been witness to the fact that United Church support is continuing to reach people.

In Pétionville, ACT implementing partner Lutheran World Federation (LWF) has provided support to families who lost their homes in the earthquake. One camp of displaced Haitians is situated on a soccer field behind the Ste-Thérèse Church. It is filled with tents that are home to 4,356 people. Another is on the site of the former Italian embassy, which is now a jagged pile of rubble surrounded by tents that are housing about 250 families, or about 1,250 people.

Over time, these tent communities have become well-organized, with committees that are responsible for various functions. In both places, LWF staff (financed in part with contributions from the people of the United Church and other Canadian churches) have assisted with clean water, sanitation, basic food (rice, beans, milk powder, specialized food for infants, nursing mothers, and pregnant women), cooking utensils, charcoal, and buckets.

By the end of March, almost half of the funds committed by United Church supporters had been allocated through the ACT Alliance to support

• health, sanitation, and temporary shelter through the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee and LWF within ACT.
• work with people with disabilities, who are least able to join line-ups for food, water, and medicine, and need special attention. Church World Service supports an innovative program of the Haitian churches' ecumenical development agency, Service Chrétien d'Haïti. The program promises enabling people so that their circumstances will be better after this experience than it was before the earthquake with skills, job training, and counselling.
• small radio station restoration through the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC), a United Church partner.
• seeds and tools for small farmers for the upcoming planting season through Agricultural Missions, Inc.

Of concern in the weeks ahead are plans by the Haitian government and World Food Program to scale down food distribution in the capital city. The idea is to get people to move out of city parks and plazas to new camps where they can be supported more efficiently while rubble is removed from the city. But not enough concrete information is getting to the people. ACT Alliance members are working with communities and continuing to talk to the officials.

Hodgson has also worked alongside United Church bilateral partners: the Methodist Church of Haiti and the Karl Lévêque Cultural Institute. With United Church support, both are responding to urgent needs, and developing plans for longer-term reconstruction. The Methodist Church will hold a round-table meeting with its Canadian, British, American, and Caribbean partners April 19–23 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

The United Church, working with sister Canadian churches through Canadian Churches in Action, is continuing to explore options in support of Haiti's long-term reconstruction needs, in particular, the need for permanent earthquake and hurricane-resistant housing.