Dispatch: Delivering Supplies to Haiti

Port-Au-Prince has always been a chaotic and dusty city, says Charles King. So when King, the executive director of Housing Works, drove inside last weekend after flying down from New York to deliver aid supplies, the outskirts of the city didn’t look too different to him.

It wasn’t until he started hitting the city center that he started to comprehend the horror. Collapsed buildings, piles of rubble; the heavy odor of corpses lying out on the street, exposed. But the longer he stayed, he says, the more he saw that the aftermath of the disaster wasn’t just one of terror -- it was also a testimonial to the strength of the Haitians responding around him.

“You’d see a rescue crew with all their technology and equipment,” he says. “But a few buildings down, you’d see a crowd of people digging with their hands.” He recalls the case of one man he encountered on the street, who was taking a sledgehammer into a building with the fiercest of blows. “When I got closer,” Charles says, “I realized that he was sobbing the whole time he was trying to break inside to whoever was there.”

For the past two years, Housing Works has worked with the Haitian group PHAP+ to support people with HIV/AIDS in their health and housing. Those relationships, Charles says, have helped the organization see the crisis from a different perspective, and also cultivated his skepticism about the extent of what aid groups parachuting without those ties in can do.

“I’ve seen some pretty horrible things," he says, "including 170 medical professionals waiting for four days at the airport with nothing to do but hand out water, because they all got on planes and went down with no clear strategy of how they were going to engage or find a place in the community."

What’s important, King says, is “being responsive to the people -- that is, the Haitians -- who clearly have the interest in making sure things work.”

Looking back on his trip to Haiti, says King, the worst part was getting on a plane to leave -- the emotion he describes as "feeling that we were like reality show participants, and we could just pack up and say we're out of here -- and meanwhile we were leaving so many people behind who were trapped.”

Every day when he talks with Housing Work’s partners back in Port-Au-Prince, he says, he can hear the fatigue and panic in their voices. On Monday, he says, he was talking with one of Housing Work’s partners in Haiti, Edner, of the media organization CECOSIDA, when he heard a crack in the man’s voice on the other end of the line.

“I said, what’s wrong?” King remembers. “He said he was doing fine. I said, ‘No, you’re not,’ and suddenly he started to sob, and said, ‘Well, it’s just now started to rain.’”

Yesterday, King got another email from Edner, this time about the 6.1 aftershock that Haiti experienced in the early morning. “I’m scared, and they’re scared,” says King. “There are some very heroic people there….I think we all need to do what we can to help.”

(King is keeping a record of his reflections from his time in Haiti online. You can also contribute to Housing Work’s relief efforts here.)

Photo Credit: American Red Cross