Dateline ACT

Haiti 03/04

ACT-Haiti responds to Gonaïves flood disaster

For additional background information, see sidebar at bottom of page

By Kent Annan, ACT-Haiti

Gonaïves, Haiti, December 8, 2004—The grim reminders will take a long time to fade. On entering many homes in Gonaïves, Haiti’s fourth largest city, you see the mark on the wall where the water finally stopped rising during September’s devastating flood. Unleashed by the rain of Hurricane Jeanne, the water reached almost eight feet high in many parts of Gonaïves. The deforested mountains had no topsoil to absorb or slow the rushing water that began with heavy rains at around 2:00 p.m. on September 18. When it finally stopped rising that night, more than 2,000 people had been killed, many washed out to sea.

Ten weeks after the flood, Mervil Goldwilber, who lives in downtown Gonaïves, was sitting on a bench helping his children to study before they left for school. The children were dressed in their blue-and-white checkered uniforms. Goldwilber said that more than two months after the disaster, his children’s school was one of the few that had reopened. He pointed above his head to the mark on the wall and recalled how he and his wife had grabbed their children and rushed them up onto the roof. There they prayed and waited. All their food was ruined. Neighbors shared. That’s how they made it. When the neighborhood food ran out, he said, the emergency food packet provided by members of the global alliance Action by Churches Together (ACT) International in Haiti, known as ACT-Haiti, helped them make it through.

As Evans Larose and his wife, also Gonaïves residents, point out the mark on their wall, he said, “In the first weeks after the flood, we had almost nothing. Everything was gone, inside and outside.” Leftover debris is still piled around their yard. Scared, he and his family waded through the rising water to the two-story school next door, where they waited out the night with ten neighbors. To survive the first few weeks, neighbors shared what little food they had. “When the food packet arrived,” he said, “it was a kind of deliverance.”

ACT-Haiti had quickly decided to give these packets for families like Larose, Goldwilber, and others. Designed to provide for a five-member family for one week, the packets came in a useful five-gallon bucket and included 14 pounds of beans, 7 pounds of rice, 5 pounds of sugar, 3 packs of spaghetti, 1 liter of cooking oil, 4 boxes of matches, 4 candles, 60 packets of 6 ounces of water, one can of herring, one container of salt, one can of tomato paste and hygiene items for babies and women. Four days after the flood, Louis Ernst Bijou, ACT-Haiti’s emergency relief coordinator, had flown into Gonaïves with other ACT partners to assess the situation. (ACT-Haiti is composed of Christian Aid, Christian Service of Haiti, Federation of Protestant Churches in Haiti, Diakonia Germany Emergency Aid, and the Lutheran World Federation, which is the coordinating partner on this project.) The only access was by UN helicopter.

“It was a shock,” Bijou said, “because though there is generally little rain in Gonaïves, the whole city was under water. It was like a pool. To get around after the helicopter landed, our team had to jump into the back of a truck that had just been collecting bodies. It had just deposited bodies of those who had drowned and was going back to collect more. We jumped in because you couldn’t walk through the streets. So much water, so much mud.”

The water in the city, which took weeks to completely recede, was just the beginning of the problem. “There is no national response capacity here,” said Michael Kuehn, country coordinator of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF). “Zero from the state. Little from the Haitian private sector. The infrastructure cannot handle a disaster like this. Immediately after the flood, no one could get into the city. For more than a week you couldn’t get to the city by car or truck. Thank God the UN was here and their helicopters were made available for the humanitarian response.”

Before the flood, ACT was not working in Gonaïves. But by the first week of October, it had set up its first food distribution. One thousand packets were given out during the next few weeks, but serious security problems made it unwise to continue with the same strategy of using central distribution points. International organizations were battling not just the flood results—but also hungry crowds and local gangs—to keep the humanitarian disaster from getting even worse.

“The need for food, water, and schools have extended the disaster and the misery for long after the floodwaters began receding,” said Kuehn. “The situation in Gonaïves has been difficult. There were food distribution points in the city that were accessible to everyone, but when there is so much need, an open, central system results in the supplies basically going to those who are strong enough to go out and get what they need. Some distributions turned into fights. Six weeks ago UN soldiers had to fire in the air to control a crowd clamoring for food aid. Gangs prey on the supplies. But then what about the people who are most vulnerable, who are unable to fight for what they need? This is why we modified our approach and began partnering with local churches, who helped focus our efforts on getting aid to the most vulnerable.”

ACT-Haiti began partnering with twenty local Protestant churches. Through this partnership, the ACT members and the pastors will ensure security because distribution on a smaller scale through churches is more orderly and safe. Large crowds or gangs don’t know about the supplies.

The night before the first distribution, during a planning meeting of the pastors’ executive committee, the pastors all expressed gratitude for the international community’s effort, including this ACT project, to help their city and congregations. They sat around a kerosene lamp in a dark living room as their association’s president, Pastor Coulanges Bernier, prayed, “God, we need your help during this great storm Haiti is enduring—yes, the flood, but also the hunger, the politics, the unemployment, the suffering.”

Hermano Exinord is ACT-Haiti’s logistician who has moved to Gonaïves to oversee the project coordination, verification, and reporting. He talked about the importance of working with local churches as he clutched a black communication radio (it hadn’t worked all day, though they thought the problem had just been solved) and a cell phone (no signal in that part of the city) in his right hand.

“If you don’t know people’s reality here,” said Exinord, “if you don’t understand the demands and pressures they’re facing, you can’t help. At least not efficiently.”

Working with pastors ensures the aid reaches those who need it most, including some who have still been unable to return home and are sleeping in churches, schools, or with neighbors.

This includes Jèsula Tercy. Most of Gonaïves is now dry, though reminders of the flood—collapsed buildings, piles of rubble, a long line for potable water—are never far away. But on the edge of the city a new lake has been created, which has submerged the national highway. Near the lake, Tercy, who is forty years old and wearing a loose-fitting, polka-dot dress, can’t point out how high the water rose in her house, because she can’t get close enough. It sits in the middle of a new pond of water and mud. She has eight children, ranging from ages two to twenty. During the flood, they all scrambled to the second floor of a nearby school. They lost their goats, their chickens, everything to the water. Now she says her three biggest needs are housing (hers won’t be dry for some time; she’s staying with others at the pastor’s house), food (she’s surviving on aid, including ACT food packets), and finding a way to make a little income (she’s starting a small roadside stand that sells fried bread and plantains).
Despite it all, and not denying the difficulties, she was quick to smile. Asked about her little roadside stand and the effort to rebuild her family’s life, she smiles and says she makes good pikliz, a tangy cabbage salad that goes on the deep fried bread and plantains. Are she and her family going to make it through this difficult situation? She replies, “Oblije.” We have to.

The main elements of ACT-Haiti’s second stage of intervention in Gonaïves, from mid-November to the end of December, consists of (1) distributing more than 6,000 food/water packs at a rate of about 1,000 per week, (2) distributing 10,000 personal medical packs and 57 medical boxes (vitamins, antibiotics, etc.) to local hospitals and clinics, and (3) analyzing the best way to help the residents in 2005. The personal medical packs include a toothbrush, toothpaste, a bar of soap, comb, two towels, and bandages. Beginning in January, ACT-Haiti will start digging twenty deep wells for Protestant church-associated schools to help with the lack of potable water for students and their families. Also, work continues with the pastors to assess needs in the ever-shifting landscape of a major recovery. So far, the ACT appeal has raised more than half of its budget of just over one million dollars for the Gonaïves project.

“Immediately after a disaster, for those who have lost everything, you have to give them food, water, clothes, shelter, medicine, and tools,” said Kuehn. “Then, typically, after three months the crisis stage should be over and the state and other structures should step in. But this is not possible in Haiti, where the systems are so poor and people are so vulnerable.”

ACT-Haiti is seeking the best ways to help people reestablish their lives, with the hope that its partner churches will play an important role in rebuilding the community. Yet, it is challenging to ever transition out of an emergency stage here.

“Though the floods and political crisis rightly attracted a lot of international attention,” said Kuehn, “there’s an ongoing, silent disaster in Haiti that daily affects almost everyone who lives in the country. People say Gonaïves was a hurricane disaster, but it was just heavy rains from a hurricane—and suddenly the entire city is under almost ten feet of water. This shows the extreme vulnerability of people here.”

ACT Home Latest news Other Datelines Photos from Emergencies