PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — As Haitian authorities confirmed the toll
from the Oct. 6 earthquake at 17 dead and 333 injured, Caritas and other
grass-roots organizations working with the victims highlighted the critical
humanitarian situation facing survivors, who now lack shelter.
More than 7,700 families are now in need of urgent humanitarian
assistance; their houses having been destroyed or seriously damaged. And in an
Oct. 8 situation report, the Catholic charitable agency Caritas Haiti said
health, housing and education had also been hard hit by magnitude 5.9
earthquake. The Haitian Ministry of the Interior reported the destruction of or
severe damage to at least 46 institutional buildings, including St. Michael the
Archangel Catholic Church in Plaisance, and four schools in Pilate, east of the
epicenter.
"Because this area of Haiti is very remote and poverty is
extreme, it will be important to work with our partners to make sure that we
help families rebuild their livelihoods and damaged homes," said Beth
Carroll, head of programs in Haiti for Catholic Relief Services, the U.S.
bishops' international relief and development agency that is part of the
Caritas network. "CRS is starting now by working with the government to
deliver tarps and house cleanup kits."
Rosnel Jean-Baptiste of the Tet Kole peasant organization — with
members throughout the northwest of the country, where the earthquake struck —
said four members of the organization were killed by collapsing buildings in
Port-de-Paix, 13 miles from the epicenter. Jean-Baptiste added that the
earthquake has caused a mass exodus from Port-de-Paix, where several buildings,
including the police station, were severely damaged.
"People are panicking and fleeing the city for the rural
sections," Jean-Baptiste said. "Either their houses are too seriously
damaged for them to stay, or they fear further aftershocks and that their house
will collapse on them."
Caritas workers said the memory of the 2010 earthquake — which
caused the death of more than 220,000 — is still a recent one, and the new
quake with three aftershocks has sown terror among the people.
Jean-Baptiste said those fleeing the city are scrambling to take
tap taps, the Haitian public transport vehicles, on some of the worst-furrowed
mud track roads in the country, to stay with relatives and acquaintances in the
more rural areas. In these areas, many of the flimsy, roughly built houses with
corrugated iron roofs collapsed on families but were not heavy enough to kill
their inhabitants.
In Gros Morne, south of the epicenter, the Institute of
Technology and Animation, ITECA, a nongovernmental organization that works with
peasant organizations, reported a very difficult situation facing survivors.
Chenet Jean-Baptiste, ITECA director, reported that in one section of Ravine
Gros Morne, where ITECA has a team, many people are sleeping outside.
"Their houses are so badly damaged that they cannot be
repaired, and they cannot sleep in them," Jean-Baptiste said. "Many
have taken refuge in the cooperative building, but there is not room for so
many people. There is an urgent need to find a solution to the shelter
problem."
Caritas is responding to the situation by distributing emergency
food supplies, sanitation kits, tents and shelter materials as well as solar
lamps, shovels and wheelbarrows.