Recovery Hurricane Haiti

In August and September 2008, four hurricanes and tropical storms surged onto Haiti’s shores, bringing floods and widespread destruction to the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. As many as 1,000 people died and an estimated one million Haitians, almost 12% of the population, were displaced, as storm waters washed away houses, deteriorated roads already in poor condition, and destroyed six key bridges. Whole cities were flooded, including Gonaives in the Artibonite Valley and Hinche in the Central Plateau.

Although Partners In Health (PIH) is not a disaster relief organization, we have been working in Haiti for over two decades, and our sister organization, Zanmi Lasante (Creole for Partners In Health) has become an integral and trusted resource in the many poor communities in Central Haiti and the Artibonite Valley, where we serve a catchment area of more than 1 million people. Our presence in some of the hardest hit areas allowed our staff to not only provide medical care for displaced, injured, and sick people, but also to distribute food, drinking water, clothing and other basic needs to thousands
who sought refuge in shelters.

PIH’s approach has always been to meet the immediate needs of our patients but also to address systemic issues, such as poverty and inequality, that put people at risk for disease and ill health in the first place. Thus our work in Haiti regularly includes not only medical care but also educational initiatives that enable children to go to school and better their life prospects, clean water projects that bring potable water and sanitation to entire communities, food support and agriculture programs to improve food security among the rural poor, and housing construction to enable patients to better withstand the elements.

Therefore, in the context of the devastation wrought by the storms, PIH sought to respond with both short-term relief measures and long-term efforts to “build back better” in Haiti so that the public health system and local communities are better able to respond to future disasters. To garner the necessary financial resources, immediately following the storms PIH published our first “Call to Action” to raise funds for hurricane recovery in Haiti. We were truly overwhelmed by the response: our call to action was answered by an astounding 800 donations in just the first three days after sending the call, and we raised $2.2 million in two months. Overall we raised $3 million in grants and donations to support our short and long-term initiatives.

Thank you for your immediate response for the communities we serve in Haiti - your promt support through this GlobalGiving project page was truly remarkable. The following report describes relief and recovery activities that PIH and Zanmi Lasante (ZL) have undertaken in the last six months, as well as our ongoing efforts to continue to rebuild the communities we serve.

Attachments:

• May 2009 Hurricane Update (PDF)