Mimose Dazouloute-Geffrard’s with Anna Pierre, her 97-year-old mother, at the St. Francois de Sales Hospital. Photo by Robyn Fieser/CRS

Mimose Dazouloute-Geffrard dropped bills into special collection trays for Catholic Relief Services during mass at her Clarksville, Maryland church over the years. She wrote a check after cities in her native Haiti were damaged by storms and flooding. She figured the money would be used to help CRS “do good work.”

She never imagined she would one day be the recipient of that work.

Then the ground shook in Haiti for about 35 seconds on January 12. Mimose, a nurse for the state of Maryland, pledged $20 a month for Haiti and checked in on her 97-year-old mother, Anna Pierre, in Haiti. Everything was fine, friends said, “your mother just has a blister between her toes,” Mimose remembers being told. A few days later, the blister was described as a little cut. But in the Haitian tradition of not giving bad news, the friends and neighbors caring for Mimose’s diabetic mother weren’t telling her the whole story.

“Then I got a call on Sunday night, we were about to sit down to dinner,” said Mimose. “A friend of the family, a woman who had been caring for my mother, told me the situation was complicated, that her foot was all black. And if someone in Haiti tells you the situation is complicated, it is complicated. I knew I had to go.”

It took four days to get to Haiti. On February 25 before dawn, Mimose arrived in Petit-Goave, a town two hours and 30 minutes south of the capital by road. She found her mother asleep in a wheelchair in the trash-laden yard of a local school.
She couldn’t unwrap the dirty bandage to see the foot. It was stuck to the skin. But the smell left no doubt.

“I knew we could not save the foot,” said Mimose.
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A heavy rain the night before an early morning distribution of emergency shelter kits in Haiti presented a challenge to Niek de Goeij, CRS distribution manager at the Petionville Club. CRS communications officer Liz O’Neill recorded the process, as Niek explains how it unfolds.

Those first few days in Haiti still stand out to me: Haitians covered in concrete dust, carrying friends to hospitals on doors busted off their hinges; the smeared ointment under their noses to ward off the smell that hung over the city. At night, many streets closed and people bedded down on the asphalt, wedged together like cigars in a box. When I asked people where they slept, the response was usually the same: “I sleep under the beautiful stars.” It was a romantic veneer on Dickensian conditions.

Haitians were in a daze; they didn’t know who to turn to. Spray painted signs went up pleading for help. Haitians stopped CRS employees on the street and begged for food and jobs. Local radio stations broadcast rumors about where food was being handed out.
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Recipients of a CRS shelter kit distribution line up to show their registration tickets – essential in any distribution to keep track of who will receive the items available. Photo by David Snyder for CRS

Of all things I have seen and photographed for aid agencies, distributions are always among the most interesting. It seems a simple thing in theory, to hand out the items people need in the wake of a crisis like the Haiti earthquake, but when you see one in action, you realize every detail must be carefully attended to.

Today CRS distributed shelter kits in the Petionville camp. It is the largest camp in Port-au-Prince—home to more than 40,000 people. That alone presents challenges, because unless you are distributing to every single person in the camp—a near impossibility with so large a site—some people simply will not be receiving items today. If you can image crowding into a camp of thousands, having lost everything and being nearly completely dependant on others to provide you with even the basics, you can imagine the tension in such a place when trucks show up with the tarps, nails, and rope you need to build a shelter.
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Catholic Relief Services logisitician, Shannon Oliver, at the Petionville Club camp Photo by Sara A. Fajardo/CRS

By Shannon Oliver and Sara A. Fajardo

I was in the middle of collecting food vouchers at a massive distribution of World Food Program rice when the three-star general arrived. It was my second week overseeing the delivery of relief supplies to needy Haitian families. I’d been assigned to manage food delivery in the Tabarre region, a large swath of urban sprawl on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince.

Typically my day begins at 4:30 a.m. when I hop in my car and set out to pick up volunteers and local government officials, who are key elements in any successful distribution. We begin early in order to deliver the food at a time of day when people are calmer, and also to give ourselves sufficient time to hand out vouchers for the following day’s distribution. Throughout the morning, I coordinate with the U.S. military and U.N. peacekeeping troops, who accompany us on these missions to help with such logistics as loading and unloading the food, monitoring for counterfeit vouchers and crowd aggression.
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Proper and safe hygiene facilities are essential in any camp situation where the outbreak of disease is real threat. Photo by David Snyder for CRS

By David Snyder

Good emergency workers are, above all else, problem solvers. Every day here in Haiti CRS staff spend their time doing just that—finding quick, simple fixes to vexing problems.

It’s a process that takes many forms, often much time and sometimes frustration amid the hectic pace of disaster response. There are experts here from all over the CRS world who bring with them their skills in security and logistics, coordination and management, finance and shelter—and fit it like a ragged puzzle piece into the context of the Haiti response.

Yesterday I spent an hour with Paul Hicks, a CRS water expert here from El Salvador to help out. Pinched between a day of coordinating watera access for thousands of displaced people in the camps, and a coordination meeting among CRS staff, he had yet another problem to solve.
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It’s amazing what students have rallied to accomplish on behalf of Haiti’s earthquake survivors. Here’s another example from Sacred Hearts Academy in Hawaii as reported in the Hawaii Catholic Herald.

Linking to this Wall Street Journal article on the exploits of Sister Jane Meyer is a thinly disguised excuse for us to once again say thanks (and “wow”) to Sr. Jane for leading a fundraiser for CRS’ Haiti relief effort.

Also, thanks to St. Agnes Academy in Houston, TX, for backing Sr. Jane and helping to raise more than three times her challenge of $25,000.

There are many many stories of adults and children helping Haiti through CRS. We cannot begin to express our gratitude for their spirit and efforts.

At St. Francois de Sales hospital, where CRS teams with doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center, Dr. Wilfried Cadet, a CRS pediatrician who oversees the coordination between doctors and support staff, told CRS communications officer Liz O’Neill how much he appreciates the outpouring of support for victims of the Haiti earthquake.

St. Raymond’s Elementary School in Parkchester raised $15,000 for Haiti relief. The students presented a check to New York’s Archbishop Timothy Dolan, chairman of the CRS board. NY1.com has a story and video here.