Buck Close’s account of a trip through Port au Prince and what you can do to help.
One privilege that Spokane Mayor Mary Verner and I share is having worked at one time with one or more of the Close sisters, Frances and Gracie, activists, philanthropists, and humanitarians from South Carolina who’ve touched lives all over the world. Frances is my daughter’s godmother and Gracie, among many other things, was an early backer of the Spokane-based Hanford Education Action League.
One of the Close family’s special interests over the years has been humanitarian assistance and hands-on economic development in Haiti. Frances’s and Gracie’s brother Buck was working on the outskirts of Port au Prince at the time the magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck on Tuesday. By Wednesday he had written an initial report on the events he witnessed that day that appears, in full, on the popular blog site The Daily Beast. He’s followed it up with another dispatch, circulated earlier today, that offers additional insights and advice for those who want to put their donations to work in assisting and re-building the ravaged Caribbean nation. I’m going to share it below, and then add some earlier information we received from the Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane, and the Community Building on how to lend assistance to Haiti. Buck has been working in Haiti for four decades and directs a non-profit organization called 1,000 Jobs/Haiti.
–Tim Connor
Excerpt from the Daily Beast post:
When we finally arrived at the Provincial House, we saw that it had withstood the quake. The Sisters and the 45 orphans who live there with them were all outside in the darkness. Jacky, Dieuseul, and I slept in the truck to the extent sleep was possible. The night was filled with sounds of screaming and grief and singing. One very loud and didactic preacher bellowed out a sermon that lasted until about 2:30 or later and seemed to come from about a foot from our vehicle.
We remained outside until around 5:30 and then went up the hill to the Provincial House and decamped. I slept for a couple of hours and had vivid and violent dreams that I found hard to disentangle from the previous night’s experience. Now it is the day after–very bright and sunny. From where we are you can look down on most of Port au Prince and almost miss the fact that things are not normal. But the sounds of emergency vehicles and helicopters let you know better. We are planning to go back out shortly and check on Amelie, Dieuseul, and some of the Sisters’ other locations which did not escape the quake unscathed.
12:03 PM – January 13, 2010 – Port au Prince
To read the full post at The Daily Beast, click here.
Friday, January 15, 2010 en route to Boston from San Juan
This is no longer an account of my observations from the scene in Haiti but a look back at the period from my last entry, Wednesday morning, till the present. We are now 3 days post quake.
On Wednesday, we went back out into Port au Prince and the situation was markedly worse because more people were in the streets and they had been there longer and were thirstier and hungrier. Yet we saw no violence or near violence. This, I would add, was a remarkable thing. I don’t believe that huge crowds in other countries would have behaved as well as the long-suffering Haitians. The big difference on Wednesday afternoon and evening were the number of bodies in the streets. While we had seen bodies Tuesday night, they were not everywhere. On Wednesday, they seemed to be multiplying by the hour. Some were covered, others not. On Thursday the trend continued with many bodies in each block and people beginning to wear masks because of the smell and the danger of contagion. We still didn’t know the extent of the quake as communication was still down.
At present I am on a plane to Boston and trying to figure out how the people in Haiti are going to make it through the next weeks. Now that I am “out,” I find that I have the usual mixture of guilt and gratitude that I have every time I leave Haiti. But overlaid on this familiar feeling is, I confess, an ebb and flow of grief that leaves me in and out of tears especially if I talk about it.–Buck Close
The Sister’s school in Petionville had been hard hit and the Sisters and students who lived there were now homeless and arrived at the Maison Provinciale. Some were injured and one Sister had lost two family members. I got back to the area of the convent but couldn’t get to it in the truck because the road was now blocked by people camped in it. So I walked up the hill through the sea of refugees. Wednesday night we had about 80 or 90 people at the house – or, I should say – outside the house. All the people sat or lay quietly in the courtyard in front or on the patio in back of the house. I went inside around 9 and lay down on my bed at the urging of my friend Sister Nicolle who has the same deficient sense of safety that I have. About 11:30 the house began to shake and I ran outside and stayed there till early morning.
That morning, Thursday, I got up determined to “do” something and it didn’t take very long to figure out what. We were going to run out of food and water pretty quickly and finding any in Port au Prince was not likely. Two Salesian Sisters from the DR [Dominican Republic] had arrived the day before by bus to see how their Haitian counterparts had fared (this is a pretty good story in an of itself but I won’t recount it here). They were going back to the DR and suggested I come with them as there were not going to be flights from Haiti anytime soon. So I proposed to Sister Marie Claire that I take a truck to the DR for food and water. She was eager for me to do that and wanted to come along with another Sister (Mariangela) who is a good friend. We set out that morning and, after another long slog through the city, finally got on the highway to the border crossing. We traveled across the border and went to the first town – La Descubierta. There we bought as many basic food stuffs and as much water as our truck would hold and they headed back to Port au Prince after dropping me off at a rural bus stop to wait for the bus to Santo Domingo. That trip was a comedy that is best left for another time when comedy is possible.
At present I am on a plane to Boston and trying to figure out how the people in Haiti are going to make it through the next weeks. Now that I am “out,” I find that I have the usual mixture of guilt and gratitude that I have every time I leave Haiti. But overlaid on this familiar feeling is, I confess, an ebb and flow of grief that leaves me in and out of tears especially if I talk about it. This isn’t unusual since I am always emotional and it doesn’t help anyone but… there it is. A first person account should be honest. And if what we saw since Tuesday at 4:53 doesn’t reduce me to tears, what is wrong with me?
WHAT CAN ONE DO NOW FOR THE EMERGENCY RELIEF EFFORT?
I have been thinking about this non-stop since Tuesday. For right now, all anyone can do is support the rescue effort – i.e. support those major organizations which are there now providing food, water, shelter, and medical care to the immediate victims of the quake. I saw some TV in the airport and the advice that CNN and President Clinton were giving was right on target. Send money to the organizations doing the big job now and in the next few weeks. The organization that I know best and work with every week is Partners in Health (PIH) of Boston/Zanmi Lasante in Haiti. They have set up a hospital in Port au Prince and are on the front lines. I talked with their co-founder Ophelia Dahl last night and would send my money nowhere else for this immediate purpose. I promise you that they will do everything in their power to render service to the people of Port au Prince whether or not anyone sends them a dime. But they deserve our donations now. And, of course, they will be there next month, next year and the year after and so on into the future. Many of you who receive this know them because of Paul Farmer’s deserved notoriety but please be assured that they have a truly wonderful organization in Haiti with many dedicated people. Lucy, Katy and I know many of them and they are single minded people. You should support them. You can go on line to www.pih.org or send your check payable to Partners in Health to Lucy Close, 316 West Main Rd., Little Compton, RI 02837. She will be sure it goes straight to the Haiti effort and will see that you are then directly plugged into PIH.
WHAT CAN ONE DO BEYOND HELPING TO PAY FOR THE EMERGENCY RELIEF?
I would go so far as to say that what you do beyond helping to pay for the immediate relief effort is more important than what you do to help pay for the emergency operations. Of course, both are essential. But the emergency will be done and paid for due to the power of the media. The long hard slog toward recovery started on Wednesday and is a lot more problematic. Please be there for that. I am going to give you several options in that regard. The common thread between them is that Lucy and I are directly involved in all three and can vouch for how your money will be spent. Since you asked our opinion, we don’t hesitate to give it and we very confident that our recommendations will directly benefit individual Haitians rendered helpless by the quake. We literally are face to face with these people (i.e. the people who are part of 1000 Jobs, the Salesian Sisters, and Fonkoze) every month in Haiti and are partners with them in many projects (i.e. the people who are part of 1000 Jobs, the Salesian Sisters, and Fonkoze) every month in Haiti and are partners with them in many projects, all of which are aimed at fighting extreme poverty. In each case I am going to talk about the needs related to the present crisis as opposed to more long term work which, while equally worthy of support, must take second priority for the next few months.
The Salesian Sisters of Haiti – As most of you know, my family has been involved with this order continuously for over 50 years. My own involvement dates from 1966 but has been seriously escalated over the past 20 years. I live with the sisters when I am in Haiti and they formed two of our 1000 Jobs womens’ cooperatives for us. At least four of their 15 schools are heavily damaged or destroyed. They have a refugee situation at their Mother House since the residence housing the sisters in Petionville was destroyed. There are now over 100 orphans and Sisters living in the Mother House and more on the way. We were close to running out of food on Thursday when I went over to the Dominican Republic with a driver and two Sisters to buy all the food and water we could. That full truck load might last them several days. We need donations now so that we can rent trucks in the DR, fill them with supplies, and drive them to the Sisters locations in Port au Prince. The situation at the schools in Carrefour, Cite Soleil, and Port au Prince is dire and they need everything. To help with this, make checks payable to 1000 Jobs/Haiti, Inc. and mark it “Salesian Sisters.”
1000 Jobs/Haiti, Inc. – This is the charity we founded in 2008 at the urging of Paul Farmer and others at Partners in Health . Our normal work is job creation but we are authorized to respond to any dire need in Haiti in emergencies. We need to help our direct employees (2) and the women who work in the coops we formed and direct in the Port au Prince area (24). Both our direct employees lost everything. Amelie (our embroidery coordinator for three women’s groups) lost her home and everything in it. I was with her when she arrived at what was left of it a few minutes after the quake. She has one son and is a widow. Dieuseul, our driver, has 5 kids and a wife and no house at all. He had one shirt to his name when I last saw him on Thursday. The 24 women who work in our two embroidery coops are all living in extreme poverty and it is likely that the majority lost their homes given where they live. Our job today, tomorrow and for weeks thereafter is to create a bridge for them from destitution to stability. That means paying them even when they cannot work because their two work places are destroyed. That means finding a way to finance new places to live via some combination of grants and microfinance – probably through Fonkoze (see below). It means finding a safe place for them to work. We need to be there on site with these women and Dieuseul to show that we stand with them in more than words. If you wish to help the people working with 1000 Jobs, you should make your checks payable to 1000 Jobs/Haiti, Inc. and label it “employee assistance.”
Fonkoze – Because of the situation in Haiti, I have not been able to contact our partners at Fonkoze. But I am going to keep trying in order to include them in this fundraising effort. They are a microfinance organization that has worked in Haiti for a long time. We at 1000 Jobs work very closely with them. We essentially do projects together and consider them as part of us and vice-versa. They will be doing immediate and important work during the emergency and that work would also deserve your support. We will probably launch some sort of housing initiative the links financing for houses with job creation in the construction area. But I cannot give you details now. I do urge you to visit their website at www.fonkoze.org to learn more. I would always recommend donating to Fonkoze.
So, if you have read this far, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your endurance. Join us to bring some hope to Haiti.
Buck Close
1000 Jobs/Haiti, Inc.
316 West Main Rd.
Little Compton, RI 02837
401 635 2414
The Peace and Justice Action League, in addition to encouraging donations to Partners in Health, is also encouraging contributions the following organizations:
For those in and near the Community Building/Saranac, both Teresa Pisani (2nd Floor Community Building, Suite 280) and Jamie Borgan (Fourth Floor, Saranac) are taking direct donations for the Red Cross’s Haitian relief effort. You can also donate to the Red Cross on-line here.
–CFJ
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