HAITI: Earthquake plus 1
It is hard to believe that it has been just over a year since the devastating earthquake that rocked Haiti on January 12, 2010. I traveled there in April of last year and just returned on January 27th from another trip. This year I took a group of 20 made up of about equal parts of construction and medical help to our missions on the North coast of Haiti at Port de Paix.
What is even harder to believe is how little has changed since April. The total lack of progress on what would seem to be the most basic of needs throughout the country is the most discouraging. I won’t lay blame as there is enough to go around for just about every organizational and governmental body both inside and outside of Haiti. What hasn’t changed that gives me hope for the future is the spirit and resiliency of the Haitian people, but even that is beginning to wear thin.
We don’t spend much time in Port au Prince, where most of the damage remains and much of the aid money and effort has been sent, without much evidence that anything has really been accomplished. Our missions are over a hundred miles away but are still being affected by the aftermath of the quake. The numbers of internally displaced residents (people who had moved to the Capital for jobs, but returned home after losing everything) has swelled the populations in both the urban and rural areas of the country.
This population increase makes the unemployment figures of 70% or more an astonishing figure. There simply are NO jobs of any kind, while promised and donated funds are being held hostage because of flawed elections in Haiti. Again, there is plenty of blame for shoddy elections when meddling by outside interests are involved, each trying to impose their own will to elect a chosen Government for self interests.
Our time was spent in support of our two missions. LaPointe is 5 miles, a one hour drive, to the east of Port de Paix. Passe Catabois is
about 20 miles west and a difficult 2 to 3 hour trip through a number of river crossings in the best of conditions.
I have been helping at the House of Hope www.houseofhopehaiti.blogspot.com , a children’s medical facility at LaPointe, since 2003. We do maintenance on their mission vehicles and facilities maintenance for the mission compound, a regional Hospital, Centre Medical Beraca, as well as a CEF school and other facilities supported by Crossworld Missions, www.crossworld.org. This year there was a new, larger generator to provide power, but the water system had developed even more serious problems than in the past, and with cholera on everyone’s minds, we needed to take additional precautions, even with the filtered water available. From a high of 175 cholera patients a week (at the Beraca Hospital alone) to less than a dozen now, at least the epidemic proportions are under some control with the help of ongoing teams from around the world showing up to help.
After a week at LaPointe, I took the 6 others who had gone with me out to the other facility at a place called Passe Catabois. Our teams have worked at this location for the last 4 years. In 2007 the facilities were a partially completed guesthouse for workers and a Hospital and clinic under construction. Medical care was dispensed in a small two room clinic building with basic medical care in one room and minor surgery performed in the other. The hospital building was little more than a covered shell with gravel floors and no windows or doors. The missionary and his doctor wife had carved out this place with sweat and prayers and little support from anyone in the U.S. Most of their support had come from a foundation in Holland that has since been radically reduced in size. This is where we came in along with a few other church groups from the U.S. and Europe.
Today this facility is a fully functional medical facility that will continue to provide support and medical care for this primitive area of Haiti. A second Doctor from Germany has been spending time at the Hospital and there is now a functional operating room that rivals almost any other in this poor country. The operating room is even air conditioned!
The difference has been the work of teams from around Snohomish and other parts of Western Washington and the U.S. Nearly all of the ground floor is tiled, plumbed and handling patients, including a few with cholera, most of them from out of the immediate area, as water quality is not a common problem here. The water system here is one of the best in Haiti, built by a former Boeing engineer by piping water from mountain springs many miles away.
The most impressive part of the transformation of this facility has been the installation (now complete with our recent work) of a solar system that can easily handle the load of medical equipment and provide around the clock lighting that was previously unavailable except with the expense of burning fuel in generators. Many emergency procedures were done in the dark with battery powered headlamps the only source of light.
The one word that best describes Haiti today is difficult. Every piece of life in Haiti is hard, rough and tough. But don’t count the people of Haiti as a beaten or disheartened population. Every Haitian that I have come to know is a survivor because of their national pride and knowledge that they still have so much more than the ancestors who were brought to this place and abandoned by the World when they would not bow to the colonial powers who enslaved them.
Time works at a pace in Haiti that maddens many, working its way from one disaster to the next. It will take more time, and a lot more of the energy that our team gave to overcome the missteps of past generations, rulers and disasters. If a small team from 4000 miles away can make a difference like this, why is it taking so long for more to be done?
I wish to commend the members of our team for giving of their time and money to make it possible for a few more drops to be put into the bucket that will one day fill to make the lives of the Haitian people less difficult.

Larry Bailly is short term missions coordinator for Snohomish Community Church and a member of RESULTS www.results.org a grassroots organization working to bring education, medical help and the end of poverty to the World. He has been to Haiti 11 times since 2002.
Comments are welcome at baillybusbarn@juno.com , future trips are planned, but signup lists fill fast.
The photos are above, in reverse order.

The Hospital at Passe Catabois


The solar panels provide enough energy to provide around the clock power.


Our transport to Passe Catabois, a farm tractor and 4 wheel trailer with only 3 wheels.


Everything that winds up in Haiti is recycled. Containers become patient wards.


Kids are kids wherever you are! I told them to go crazy!