A few moments of bliss

Marie-Ange laughs out loud, flashes one of her beautiful smiles, and I can't help but smile back. "Louis, you ask too many questions, just finish your mango!" Marie-Ange is sixteen, just like her sister Ange-Marie and her brother Jean. They're triplets. "Your hair is just no good for dreadlocks, Louis", she says and starts laughing again. There's a gleam in her eyes that makes me forget the terrible things we were talking about just moments ago. "What are you doing here already" asks Ange-Marie, who is just coming in through the door, "food won't be ready until half past six". She's right: I had come a bit earlier, to learn more about their work. "Just a minute there, Louis", says Ange-Marie, "don't call it work. It's my passion!" This passion Ange-Marie is talking about is her work with the children in the village.

Every Friday, a group of seven teenagers meets with the five psychologists working in the village. They discuss the schedule for the coming week and sum up the preceding one. Every day, from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM and again from 2:00 to 4:00 PM, the seven girls organise activities for the 5- to 13-year-olds in the SOS Children's Village in Santo. Marie-Ange and Ange-Marie are two of them. The mornings are spent drawing, writing or singing, and the afternoons are used to create and rehearse dance routines. Their programmes are developed together with the psychologists, each of them takes care of 30 children. Asked why they do it, they tell the story of one of their brothers, who lived outside the village and died of his injuries the day after the earthquake. "Even if none of the houses here in the SOS village collapsed, we can still relate to what many of these children have been through. Spending time with my friends and keeping ourselves busy helps us take our mind off things, and that's exactly what we want to do for these children".

Marie-Ange starts to dance to the song her sister has started singing, and even though my hips are having trouble finding the right rhythm, for just a moment, I feel relieved of all burdens. We keep on dancing for a few minutes, and Marie-Ange tells me that this is exactly what they do with the children - help them forget for a few happy hours, just let them have fun and allow them to stop thinking about anything. What these two girls are doing here is a great help, and they do it gladly for others in spite of what they have been put through themselves. I obviously have a lot to learn from these two.

Wake-up calls from the rooster

It's still dark at six o'clock in the morning, but the rooster has crowed for the fifth time already, so I peel myself out of the bed, pour a bowl of water over my head and start walking towards the office. I quickly scan the fifty-odd emails, all either updates from UN cluster meetings or requests from other NGOs and join Carlos, the head of the emergency relief team, to discuss the relevant issues of the day. After that I make sure the newly arrived SOS co-workers from other countries have everything they need. Then I head out to the UN airport, where many UN bodies have set up their headquarters. One of them is the Logistics Cluster, relevant to me because of the tranports I have to organise frequently. I speak about the emergency relief goods stocked in the warehouse of the WFP to Cristophe, a Frenchman, and Mike, from Britain. The World Food Programme lends us two trucks to transfer the goods (today, it's 5,000 sleeping bags) to the village. From the airport I drive back to the village, which can take anywhere between 15 minutes and an hour, depending on traffic conditions. In the meantime, my colleagues from German Help have contacted us and confirmed they would fly in 600 kilos of noodles as well as four members of a Spanish foundation by helicopter.

As I bring Gustavo the 5,000 sleeping bags and huge amounts of food, he sighs in exhaustion. Gustavo is in charge of stocking the goods, and he is using the school building for storage, since we don't have an actual warehouse and there never seems to be enough space. Despite the difficulties, we find a solution for the storage of the goods and I tell him when the trucks will be arriving. I head back to the airport and into the warehouse, where I am loudly and cheerfully greeted by the 50 Haitian workers there. I show them the goods that need to be loaded onto the trucks, then drive back to the village ahead of the truck drivers, to make sure they find it.

We get to the village right on time, the helicopter is just landing and I just barely make it over to greet our guests. After a tour of the village and a brief conversation, they promise to supply us with medicine and food. I am relieved, but don't have time to dwell on these good news, since it's 06:00 PM and I need to get back to the airport as soon as possible, in fact, I'm late already. Frantically, I try to get a car, but they're all out at the community centres. But I'm in luck: it turns out the helicopter has to return to the airport for fuel and the pilot offers me a ride. Once there, I talk to Veronica (somehow everyone seems to be on first-name terms), who is in charge of the Food Cluster: We discuss how we might be included in the planned UN programme "Food for Schoolchildren", but we disagree on details, so she offers me 15 tons of army food for the meantime. I guide the drivers through the traffic again, which this time includes five cows who refuse to leave their position in the middle of the road, which means it's 8 PM by the time we get back to the village. The teenagers of the village lend us a hand unloading the goods and the trucks are empty in no time flat. I haven't eaten all day, so I devour the army rations in seconds and go to join the day's final meeting. Carlos thanks us all for our commitment and dismisses us with a few rallying calls. Back in the office we write a budget plan for the donations of the Spaniards. It's midnight now, I've finished my blog entry and it's time to go to bed - the cock will be up well before me again.

Unbureaucratic help

18°35'44.30"N 72°15'6.69"W. These are the coordinates of the SOS Children's Village in Santo. That's pretty important, because there are virtually no street names anywhere, so help organizations locate each other by using coordinates. It took me a while to get used to that, but by now I automatically ask for coordinates, not for addresses. Among other tasks, I am in charge of coordinating relief work with other organisations. Every Friday, all the German relief organisations working here in Haiti meet at the German Embassy. The meetings, at which we decide on matters of cooperation, are moderated by the German organisation THW (Technisches Hilfswerk, the Federal Agency for Technical Relief). Whenever we receive donations in kind that are of no use to us at the moment, I offer them to other NGOs or, when the donations consist of medicine, to hospitals. We are grateful for everything we receive, and there is good use to be made of everything, but it's still most helpful when people donate money, since that allows us to buy everything we need right here while simultaneously stimulating the Haitian economy.

My days are always different, since there are so many different things to do. I'm often at the UN airport, where help is organised into different clusters. For me, the most relevant are the food cluster and the logisitics cluster. I go to the food cluster when our supplies are low and then to the logistics cluster, where two dispatchers arrange for trucks to deliver the food or other supplies to the SOS Children's Village in Santo. What makes all this so efficient is the complete absence of bureaucratical paper-pushing. Just today, I went to the food cluster, asked for some food and promptly had 15 tonnes of ready-made dinners put at my disposal. I went over to the logistics cluster, and was promised two trucks for delivery of the goods tomorrow morning. Without all the bureaucracy, so common in everyday life, working here is so much more efficient. It never ceases to surprise me how even huge organisations like the United Nations work in such an uncomplicated and swift way.

I'll tell you more on that tomorrow.

The next rain will bring the next disaster

Most people here in Haiti have been literally living in trash ever since the earthquake. Thousands live cramped in improvised tents, the stench downtown is unbearable and there are hardly any toilets to be found anywhere. Up to ten people sleep under small tarpaulins, the heaps of trash are scavenging grounds for food. Living conditions are unhygienic beyond imagination. It rained again last night, even though the rainy season isn't supposed to begin until April, but it seems as though we might expect it to start raining very heavily indeed as early as mid-March.

The earthquake only lasted a few seconds, but the consequences are overwhelming. Now, there is a new threat, not as visible, but just as dangerous. The rickety tents will offer no real protection against the torrential downpours; epidemics of all sorts will be unavoidable in the countless tent cities. This is why our chief engineer and architect Francisco spends his days and nights pouring over the plans for temporary houses. None are here yet, but as soon as they arrive, Francisco and his team will put them up on already prepared foundations. In other words, the plans are here - all we need now are the actual houses.

Francisco is incredibly busy anyway. In theory, there is a school building annexed to the village, but it can't be used at the moment due to the fact that it is currently being used both as a warehouse for emergency supplies for the children and as an office for the emergency relief team. Francisco and his team are currently constructing a large warehouse to store the goods. Once it is completed, we will move our office to a group of tents, so that we can continue lessons for at least some of the children.

Will they see each other again?

In our SOS Children's Village there is a kindergarten that is invaded by 250 children every morning. The children paint, sing, play and learn there. As I have to pass it on the way from my sleeping quarters to the kindergarten office, I often pop in briefly in the morning. By way of greeting, the children always shout out "White", because my hair and skin are so white. Then I let them touch my hair and my big nose. The children here learn to read and write through playing. Yesterday's task was to "paint a picture showing what you wish for most of all". Some painted horses, others big sweeties, but as you might expect, most of them painted pictures to do with the disaster in some way. Viola is eight years old, and she painted a pile of stones with a little stick man beside it. When I asked her who the stick man was, she told me it was her brother.

"My brother is sleeping just now under this pile of stones, and I call him every day but he doesn't come out. My brother is very stubborn!" Viola's big sister (13 years old), who I went to the kindergarten with, says in an exasperated voice, "Viola, I've told you a hundred times already, that he's dead and isn't coming back." I actually knew what had happened to her brother, but hearing it said aloud and so definitely by her sister produced quite a different effect on me. My heart began to pound and I didn't know what to say to Viola, as she looked at me questioningly. Luckily she spoke first, and said "But that doesn't mean that I'll not see him again, does it?" I replied "Of course you'll see him again, just not here and not for a while." This answer obviously didn't satisfy her, so she stood up and went over to one of the psychologists, saying "I'll only speak to Tharun about my brother." Tharun is a girl here in the SOS Children's Village who works with the children on a daily basis and is currently being trained by the five psychologists who work here. How exactly this works and what the young people do with the children - more of that another time. Today I am too tired and really have to get to bed now, so that I can be fit for getting up at 6 a.m. again tomorrow.

Saving Marevie

On my first day in Haiti I tagged along with a group of social workers who were going to a community centre to distribute food. All the children, about a hundred of them, seemed happy and sang a welcome song. One child, however, was barely moving and lying in the lap of another child. I went over to the two and saw immediately that this child was much, much too thin. Marevie is about a year old and weighs about four kilos. I took her, jumped in my car and took her to the hospital as quickly as I could. Marevie didn;t even have the strength to cry anymore or even keep her eyes open. It took doctors two full hours before they finally found a vein they insert the IV in. By this time, my nerves were wrecked. In the meantime, the team that had stayed at the community centre had found the mother, so I picked her up and brought her to the hospital. The next day, I received a call from the doctor, who said "Louis, that is not Marevie's mother". It turns out that she was not, in fact, the girl's mother, who had died giving birth to her, she was the vanished father's girlfriend. She never fed Marevie, since she never considered it her own responsibility to take care of someone else's child.

While the other children, who were the girlfriend's biological children all received planty to eat, Marevie went hungry. I was infuriated. I have yet to understand how a mother can give food to all the children in her home except one. Marevie is doing a bit better by now. The most important thing, according to the doctors, is that someone be with her and take care of her. Since I can't be with her all the time, a Haitian girl, the girlfriend of one the interpreters has taken her in. By now, I have taken Marevie to a different hospital, where she is in the care of specialists. I told the doctor what had happened to Marevie and he said "this girl is your daughter now, at least for as long as she is here with us. We have put down your name as the father on the registration form - that means you're responsible for her"! I gently placed Marevie in the doctor's hands asked for hundredth time if the Central Hospital was the right place for her. Whereas in the beginning I was very concerned about Marevie's future, I am now confident that she will be alright. Once she's feeling better, she will be admitted to the SOS Children's Village in Santo, where her future family is already eagerly awaiting her arrival. I know she will be well looked after and never neglected again.

"Why does the earth move?"

The children of the SOS Children's Village in Santo ran screaming from their houses last night, utterly terrified. The traumatic experience of the earthquake is still very fresh in the children's minds, and when the earth started moving again during yesterday's aftershock, they panicked. They spent the rest of the night in tents and didn't dare go back inside the houses until the next morning, when some of them went cautiously back inside. The fear of a second heavy quake is ever-present. I had gone to bed very late myself and would therefore have slept through the whole thing if it hadn't been for Jean, a Haitian volunteer who shook me awake and dragged me outside. This morning, a little boy with tears of rage running down his cheeks asked me why I thought the earth moved sometimes, if all it achieved was to scare people. When he saw that I couldn't give him an answer, he stomped his foot on the ground as hard as he could, as if saying "Don't you dare do that again, or else!"

Aside from the aftershock, something else occurred last night that deeply troubled me. One of the drivers working for SOS Children's Villages here in Haiti was shot, his condition is still critical. It must have happened close to the UN base. Luckner was getting on his pick-up truck with a bag of groceries when a man brandishing a gun started banging against his window. Luckner stepped on the accelerator and the man fired. With a bullet lodged in his back, Luckner just barely made it to the UN base before he ran the car into a lamp post. Today, the staff gathered and prayed for his life. Songs were sung in Spanish, French and Creole and all attending whispered their hopes for him into a candle. As the population here grows more desperate, the situation becomes more threatening.