Obstacles slow Triangle aid to Haiti

A country already stricken by poverty is worse off after Ike. Flooding has delayed help

Before it ripped through Texas, Hurricane Ike visited its misery on the Caribbean nation of Haiti, where four storms this season have killed at least 337 people, flooded more than 158,000 out of their homes and turned an existing food crisis into a calamity.

Churches and aid groups throughout the Triangle have been using longstanding connections in Haiti to try to channel assistance to its stricken people.

Dozens of churches in the area support missions in Haiti, including orphanages, schools, churches and medical clinics. Many send groups from their congregations to do physical labor, or what Kathy Walmer of Family Health Ministries calls "a ministry of presence," where they spend a week or two with residents and offer friendship and emotional support.

Triangle aid efforts following Ike are splintered by a lack of infrastructure in Haiti and stymied by conditions on the ground. In the heavily flooded coastal city of Gonaives, as much as 40 percent of the city still was unreachable Friday.

Food deliveries, where they have been possible, required military escorts in some places because recipients were so desperate they pushed one another through concertina-wire barriers.

"Our concern is, we were having trouble meeting the needs for nutritional programs before this. This will make it worse," said Walmer, who with her husband, Dr. David Walmer, organizes Duke medical and divinity students and medical teams for trips to Haiti. Their organization, based in Durham, also runs a children's sponsorship program and works to improve access to education, nutrition and health care in Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

Walmer said that she has been told by partners in Haiti that the markets where the organization has bought food for schoolchildren, infants and mothers are flooded, that local crops, meager already, have been washed away and cattle drowned.

"There is not any local food available," Walmer said.

The destruction of thousands of homes throughout the country also will exacerbate the problem of inadequate housing, aid workers say.

United Methodist churches in the area recently collected gently used clothing to send to the MERCI Center in Goldsboro, a disaster-response warehouse that grew out of the denomination's effort to help victims of Hurricane Floyd. Last week, the MERCI Center's program director, the Rev. Jim Huskins, said workers were sorting the items by size and season and would pack them in a shipping container to be delivered to Haiti within the next few weeks.

The MERCI Center also stockpiles "flood buckets" containing supplies needed to clean up after water rushes into a home or business, and layettes, with infant clothing and supplies bundled into a cloth diaper.

"People are so generous," Huskins said. "I think the hearts open and the pocketbooks open when they see people really need it."

Taki Donavan, who volunteers with Hearts with Haiti, says that without that aid, many in the country wouldn't survive.

"Haitians live on the edge 100 percent of the time," Donavan said. "So when this kind of weather stuff comes through, they just fall off."