Canadian back from Haiti with a warning
Country is ‘like a war zone,’ and delays in delivering aid will cost lives, advocate says
Canadian Morgan Wienberg spent the past two weeks in the centre of Haiti’s hurricane disaster zone, and she has a dire warning.
“Typhoid, cholera, famine — it hasn’t even started yet,” said Wienberg, 24, on Sunday. “People who didn’t die (in the storm) are going to start dying.”
Wienberg lives in Les Cayes, where she has run Little Footprints, Big Steps (LFBS), a child rescue organization since 2011. Her Haitian home bore the brunt of hurricane Matthew’s fury, which claimed the lives of at least 1,000 people on Oct. 4.
She said the devastation “looks like a war zone.”
“(Haitians) are survivors, but at the same time it’s really hard. People don’t really have hope. Even the social services agents are homeless or hospitalized right now,” she said.
“I have staff members who are homeless, and I’m asking them to go out and help other people. It’s extremely overwhelming.”
Wienberg spoke to the Star via telephone from the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince as she prepared to board a plane for Toronto. She’ll take part in WeDay celebrations here on Wednesday.
Wienberg said she was shocked at the slow response from international NGOs who claimed to be prepared for the storm.
“It was extremely frustrating,” she said.
“The afternoon after the hurricane, there were absolutely no NGOs or foreigners that I saw in the streets at all. It was like, where are the people who should be reacting to this? No one was doing anything, except locals trying to get to their loved ones.”
Claudia Blume, a spokesperson for the Canadian chapter of Doctors Without Borders, said the NGO sent four emergency response teams by helicopter to the region immediately following the storm. While teams in Haiti were unreachable Monday afternoon, an internal update email shared with the Star showed that Doctors Without Borders staff were on the ground in the Les Cayes area by at least Oct. 6.
A Doctors Without Borders statement issued Oct. 9 said there were 25 staff deployed to the disaster zone, but teams are still struggling to reach some remote communities cut off by Matthew’s fury.
According to Wienberg, the lack of response wasn’t due to a lack of resources. She and her staff attended civil protection meetings with other NGOs in the days after Matthew hit.
“All of these major NGOs were saying ‘These are the resources that we have available,’ but they were just sitting there explaining what was available and no one was doing anything,” she said.
“And in the meantime, you have these temporary shelters filled with people who have lost everything and they don’t even have clean water yet. And I’m talking a week later.”
Wienberg said her organization, along with UNICEF and local government workers, left the planning meetings and started working together on their own to get as much aid flowing as possible.
Though her organization doesn’t normally do emergency response, she and her staff have spent every day since the storm doing exactly that.
Wienberg and her staff started buying and distributing clean water. She hired local doctors and set up a mobile clinic at one emergency shelter, and bought $500 worth of medicine and baby formula on credit from a friendly local pharmacy.
Many of the orphans in Haiti have at least one living parent or relative, but their families are often too poor to support their children. So the kids are either given up or left to live on the streets.
Wienberg’s organization focuses on getting children off the streets, into transitional safe houses and — where possible — reconnected with their families. They work with 250 families around Les Cayes, each with between five and eight children of their own. But given the scale of the hurricane’s destruction, Wienberg can’t limit her outreach to only those families. “If I have five or 10 families that we work with who are misplaced, I can’t walk into a shelter with 300 people who are misplaced and hand food to only five families,” she said.
Thankfully, none of the children LFBS works with were killed in the storm itself, though Wienberg worries that if more aid — particularly clean water and food — aren’t delivered soon, her kids and everyone else will be at risk.
Now, two weeks after the storm, Wienberg said aid is starting to flow into Les Cayes and the surrounding area, but there are still rural communities that remain cut off.
The situation appears to be getting desperate. On Sunday, Reuters reported that the UN base in Les Cayes was shut down after desperate Haitians looted World Food Program trucks carrying supplies.
Les Cayes’ area is a key agricultural region for the country, but crops and infrastructure have been destroyed.
Wienberg said if shelter, food and clean water don’t start reaching rural areas soon, the death toll from the looming health crisis could overtake those lost to the hurricane itself.
Wienberg was 18 when she first travelled to Haiti in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake in 2010 to volunteer with Mission to Haiti Canada.
“People don’t really have hope. Even the social services agents are homeless or hospitalized right now.” MORGAN WIENBERG LITTLE FOOTPRINTS, BIG STEPS