VIA CBSNEWS:

First Lady Michelle Obama has landed in Haiti for an unannounced visit to the country still struggling to recover following a 7.0 magnitude earthquake on January 12th.

Accompanied by Dr. Jill Biden, the wife of Vice President Joe Biden, the first lady touched down in Port-au-Prince Tuesday at 10:40 am local time. They took a helicopter tour of the city upon their arrival. More than a million people are currently homeless in the Haitian capital.

The two women will spend the day in Haiti before continuing on to Mexico City.

“First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden are visiting Haiti to underscore to the Haitian people and the Haitian government the enduring U.S. commitment to help Haiti recover and rebuild, especially as we enter the rainy and hurricane seasons, and to thank the women and men across the whole of the U.S. government for their extraordinary efforts in Haiti during the past three months,” the White House said in a statement released when the delegation arrived.

“They will also reach out to the UN and international relief communities in recognition of the truly global effort underway to help Haiti,” continued the statement.

Source

VIA THE MIAMI HERALD:

The Archdiocese of Miami says it will spend $1.57 million for ongoing relief in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, including medical support, church rebuilding and assistance to new Haitian immigrants in South Florida.

“We have seen what the needs are in Haiti, not just Port-au-Prince but all of Haiti, and we are working church-to-church,” Archbishop John C. Favalora said.

Among the plans: building a $300,000 permanent mission center in Haiti for priests and medical teams that have been traveling on rotations from Miami, a $200,000 scholarship fund for Haitian students and $400,000 in donations to 10 Haitian Catholic dioceses to assist in ministering to quake victims and refugees. “The strongest structural system that exists in Haiti is the church. The church becomes the natural place for all these assistances to be given,” Favalora said.

Three out of five Haitians are Roman Catholic and the Catholic church was one of the nation’s hardest hit institutions. Dozens of Port-au-Prince churches collapsed in the Jan. 12 earthquake, which also killed top church leadership.

Additionally, the archdiocese will spend $30,000 toward transporting priests between Miami and Haiti and purchasing religious and liturgical supplies, $100,000 toward Catholic orphanages and $138,000 toward a temporary mission base in Haiti.

The efforts, announced Thursday, are funded through donations to the archdiocese from a special Haiti relief collection at its South Florida churches. In addition, the archdiocese’s Catholic Charities organization has raised $400,000 for Haiti relief. About half of that money will be given to earthquake victims who are now living in South Florida and to families caring for them .

Counseling is being offered for those affected by the quake at Notre Dame d’Haiti Mission in Miami and St. Clement Catholic Church in Wilton Manors, which are also still accepting medical, food and clothing donations for Haiti.

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VIA THE WASHINGTON POST:

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI — It was always hard to be old in Haiti, but after the earthquake, to be old and poor feels like a curse, say those who are both.

“We struggle to maintain a little dignity, but look at us,” said Lauranise Gedeon, who sat, embarrassed, in soiled sheets in the ruins of a municipal nursing home here in the capital.

Residents were bathed outdoors with a bucket, trying to cover their nakedness. They spent the long, hot afternoons in hospital beds lined up side by side, six to a tent, fanning themselves with pieces of cardboard. They begged for water to drink.

“No water today. We are waiting. We are waiting for medicines, for the doctors, for God to help us,” said nurse Yolette François. “I am serious. These old people have a lot of troubles.”

Her patients, about 80 men and women, were scooping rice and beans from dented metal bowls. Asked what they need most, one resident said, “Something for the flies.” Another complained that her spoon had been stolen and held up her fingers, sticky with food. “Look!”

The nurse whispered, “We have run out of diapers for them.”

In Haitian Creole, the old are called “gran moun,” and they are relatively few. Those 65 and older make up just 3.4 percent of Haiti’s population, compared with 13 percent in a developed country such as the United States, because to attain such seniority in a nation beset by high infant mortality, curable diseases, AIDS and poverty is an accomplishment.

But in the weeks after the catastrophic Jan. 12 earthquake, the elderly appear to be forgotten.

“They are invisible, and we need to do more to help,” said Ronald Blain, a Haitian government official working for the U.N. Human Settlements Program. “Because they are desperate.”

This week, a working group of U.N. experts has been created to look into the situation of Haitians with disabilities, especially the elderly, who have been disproportionately affected by the disaster.

In a statement, the chairman of the U.N. committee, Mohammed al-Tarawneh, said that, “while relief workers are struggling to provide aid to the people of Haiti and while the situation remains difficult for everyone, persons with disabilities are particularly affected by the crisis,” especially those whose caregivers were killed or injured.

The elderly hobble through the daily chaos of Port-au-Prince, forced into rubble piles by speeding convoys of aid workers in their big white SUVs. There are few sidewalks now, and no ramps, no rails. To use tap-taps, the ubiquitous public transport that is a pickup truck with a bench in the bed, the old are lifted like luggage.

With a cane and a sack, Pierre Louis Pierre crossed a busy road near the airport, helped by a random younger man who had watched as Pierre tried, repeatedly, to make his way. Pierre said he is not certain of his exact age, as most births and deaths in Haiti are not recorded. “I am old!” he said and opened his mouth wide to show missing teeth. Where does he sleep? He pointed at the ground. “On the earth,” he said. In a tent? “When they let me in,” he said.

Old women sometimes appear in the food lines, but since the wait for the heavy sacks of donated rations — what Haitians call “disaster rice” — can be five or six hours, the frail ones cannot compete with the younger, stronger and just as hungry.

Most elderly Haitians live with family or caretakers who are paid a few dollars a day by faraway relatives in Miami or New York or Montreal to care for a grandmother or elderly uncle in a back room. The earthquake killed as many as 200,000 people in all, according to the Haitian government estimates, which especially disrupted the tissue-thin safety net that protected the elderly.

“They don’t really have retirement homes. They are being taken care of by families, and those without families have neighbors or their church. Sometimes they go to the nuns and sometimes the government,” said Cynthia Powell of the London-based group HelpAge International, which has begun to bring food and medical care to a municipal nursing home here and pay workers’ salaries.

Before the earthquake, the city-run nursing home was not too bad; there were men’s and women’s wings, and an administration building and a wall that protected a garden. The women’s unit was destroyed, and four patients died on that day, and three more later. In the days right after the disaster, the residents slept on the ground, surrounded by rats. Now they sleep five or six to a tent, among clouds of mosquitoes. The ground floods when it rains. A few elderly women have moved back into the hallways of the men’s unit, which is still standing, but the edges of the darkened hallways are filthy, littered with excrement and used condoms.

After the earthquake, with no security to stop them, refugees swarmed into the garden compound, where they have now established a rough camp of several hundred people. The elderly have some protections, but not many. “The walls fell down, so people come and go as they like,” said Nickson Plantin, one of the security guards. “It is my personal opinion that if you want to give one of these old people something, you put it in their hand — and don’t give too much.” The neighborhood is surrounded by gangs.

Food in the early days came from the charity World Vision, but the soy-enriched bulgur wheat was hard for the elderly residents to digest. So the cooks now buy food at local markets.

Clervana Mondesir said proudly that she is 87 years old. “I’ve seen a lot,” she said. “In 13 years, I will be a hundred.” Mondesir said she came to the nursing home a few years ago, when she became confused and despondent after the death of her daughter, who was pregnant and beaten by her husband. “She fell down and died,” she said.

Mondesir said she has two sons, who visit. She said when the earthquake struck, she hid under her bed. “They were surprised when I came out alive,” she said. Her worldly possessions are now in a pillow case. Asked if she needed anything, Mondesir said some milk and malta, a rich carbonated nonalcoholic drink made of barely and hops.

“Look at us. We’re getting skinny and weak,” she said, pulling at her arm muscles, “and now you need to be strong to survive.”

Source

Angels of Hope Ministries, Children’s Outreach of Anacostia SE, D.C., is reaching out to the children of Haiti through practical Packages of Hope.

Packages of pampers, under garments and feminine sanitary items, will be personally distributed during a missions tour in Port Au Prince.

If you would like to donate items, drop them off Wednesday, March 10 and Thursday, March 11 from 6pm-8pm both days at 2430 Elvan Road SE, Washington, D.C. 20020 or call 202-344-6656. You can also contact Rev’s Alfred and Claudia Harrison via email at alharrison1@verizon.net.

VIA CNN:

Port-au-Prince, Haiti (CNN) — A man pulled alive from the rubble of a building in Haiti’s capital may have been trapped since the January 12 quake that leveled much of the city, doctors reported Monday.

The emaciated 28-year-old man was found in the wreckage of a market where he sold rice, his family told staff at a University of Miami field hospital. He suffered from extreme dehydration and malnutrition, but did not appear to have significant crushing injuries, CNN’s chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta reported.

The man told doctors that someone was bringing him water while trapped, but doctors also said he sounded confused and appeared to believe he still was trapped under the rubble.

Source

VIA THE WALL STREET JOURNAL:

Like at a lot of publications, Newsweek was forced to start its week over when the earthquake hit Haiti.

Give the magazine credit for an artful recovery. The Washington Post Co.-owned publication has tapped President Barack Obama to pen a cover story on Haiti for the Jan. 25 issue hitting newsstands on Monday.

Newsweek was readying a story about the Google-China row when the earthquake hit. Editor Jon Meacham scrapped his plans and hit the phones in search of the highest authority he could find to weigh in, according to a person familiar with the matter. He reached David Axelrod, senior adviser to Obama, who asked his boss if he was game.

Getting Obama to write an essay about the Haiti tragedy is a coup for the struggling magazine and aligns squarely with its new strategy. Newsweek lost $25 million in the first half of 2009, and the Post Co. last year reinvented the magazine, cutting its staff and shifting its focus from news reporting to commentary.

The list of contributors on many weeks reads like a who’s who of political operatives and academics weighing in on hot-button issues. The most recent cover story, “The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage,” was written by Theodore Olson, who also represented George W. Bush in the Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore and later became President Bush’s first solicitor general.

Newsweek’s Obama-Haiti issue will hit newsstands a few days before the one-year anniversary of the inauguration of Obama, who’s getting mixed reviews in the polls.

Source

If, by now, you haven’t heard about Pat Robertson’s remarks about the Haitian earthquake being God’s retaliation and judgment upon the country for their pact with Satan, made in order to free themselves from the control of the French government in the late 1700s, perhaps you’ve been living under a rock.

(You did know there was a 7.2 magnitude earthquake 10 miles off the coast of Port au Prince, Haiti around 5pm EST on Tuesday, January 11th of this year, 2010, right? Just checking.)

It wasn’t 24 hours later that Robertson made the following remarks on “The 700 Club.” (In case you don’t want to watch it all, below the video, you’ll find the text of his statement.)

And you know, Christy, something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, you know, Napoleon III and whatever, and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. ‘They said, we will serve you, if you get us free from the French.’ True story. And so the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’ And they kicked the French out, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free, and ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other, desperately poor. That Island of Hispaniola is one island cut down the middle. On the one side is Haiti, on the other side is the Dominican Republic. Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc. Haiti is in desperate poverty, same islands. They need to have, and we need to pray for them, a great turning to God. And out of this tragedy, I’m optimistic something good may come, but right now we’re helping the suffering people, and the suffering is unimaginable. (source)

Not long after this video aired, and was uploaded on YouTube, Pat Robertson became a top trending topic on Twitter (which is the best source for what’s going on at any given time in America — sorry Facebook) as well as was being widely discussed on Facebook and blogs all across the country.

Being a blogger, you sometimes feel an obligation to speak out about certain issues that happen, especially issues which seem to affect a particular group of which you may be a member. This is one of those times for me. I feel an obligation to speak up for the Christians who don’t agree with Robertson and his statement, for those who are standing with, and behind Haiti during this time.

However, had this very event happened four or five years ago, I may have stayed silent. I might have even agreed with Robertson. Why?

I was largely ignorant to Haiti’s rich and incredible history. I didn’t know about Haiti’s slave rebellion — the most successful in history — which, in many ways, paved the road for the rebellions that took place here, and lead Haiti to become “the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere and [the] first black-governed republic.” I didn’t know about how “the repercussions… extended far beyond the small island nation… [into] the United States, where Haiti’s slave revolt figured directly in two of the most significant events in United States history: the Louisiana Purchase and the American Civil War.” (source) I, like most Americans (and probably Pat Robertson as well), was never taught these things; I was taught that Haiti was an ugly, impoverished third world country, inhabited by savages, and full of witchcraft, voodoo, and Satanism, out of which nothing good has or will ever come.

Haiti is undoubtedly a third world country. It is, in fact, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere with 80% of the population living below the poverty line (source) and it is 50% poorer than the next closest country, Nicaragua (source).

And yes, it’s also true that witchcraft, voodoo and Satanism (the latter two of which are not as closely related as most have been lead to believe) exist there. (The also exist in the states by the way — just in case you thought we were special.)While Roman Catholics make up 80% of the Haitian population, Protestants at 16%, roughly half of the population practices voodoo (source). How does approximately half the country practice voodoo and Catholicism at the same time? (Unless you’re an expert on Haitian culture, you’re probably asking just like I was.) Well, that’s another story for another time, but let’s suffice it to say that it’s one of the effects of Haiti’s liberation (source).

But to think that nothing good could come out of such a strong heritage, a beautiful people, a wonderful country, is not only delusional and ignorant, it’s absolute absurdity.

I share that with you because whenever you want to talk about a particular country — in this case, Haiti — you have to understand the context of the people, of the country, and how their history plays a role in the current situation. Understand how the country got into the poverty that it’s in. Understand the history of the people, where they came from, and why voodoo is more widespread there than in other places. Get the facts.

Robertson compared Haiti to the Dominican Republic, which inhabits the other side of the island of Hispaniola, noting that there seemed to be a stark difference between the two. And he’s right. But couldn’t we also compare Mexico with the United States? They’re parts of the same island, but have developed differently because, just like Haiti and the DR, they are different countries with different leaderships and different histories. The same could be said quite a few places. It’s not the island; it’s the history of slavery and colonialism and development (or lack thereof) that has lead the country into such extreme poverty.

Perhaps this is a simple case where Robertson simply didn’t know what the history behind the country he was talking about; that’s a likely option, right? Ignorance is to blame.

Even if Robertson said is correct, I have to wonder about his motivation. This is the biggest issue for me — perhaps even more than whether his statement was correct or not. What good could have come from sharing that information with the public? Did it encourage, uplift, or help anyone in any way? No. It actually did quite the opposite — it stirred up hate (not only directed towards Robertson, but hate towards Haiti coming from those who stood behind and agreed with him) and it served to perpetuate the erroneous notion that the country is a backwards, no good place that won’t ever get itself out of its current state.

Hear me: I’m not negating the fact that voodoo is practiced there, nor trying to downplay it’s importance in that culture. Voodoo and its powers are very real and very serious. Does this mean that, because half the population practices a certain religion, they deserve any less help from us in this time of incredible need? Certainly not. Now is the time when we must show them love and compassion more than any other time. If you witnessed a horrible accident, would you find out the person’s religion before assisting them?

Haitian-born author, Edwidge Danticat says,“Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when It’s at its extreme. And that’s what they end up knowing about it.”

She speaks sobering truth. Yet now that we know about Haiti, we have a responsibility to do what we can to make it a better place. This is an opportunity for the country to rebuild and become even stronger, and more passionate than it was before. Jo Nubian writes: “We have to realize that we are Haiti, as we are Zimbabwe, as we are Chicago. We have to act now with vigor and earnestness, certainly, but we have to act again and again, because as Edwidge Danticat noted, we can not only consider Haiti and other places like Haiti in these extreme times.” I couldn’t agree more.

For all those affected by this tragedy, especially those who may be reading this who are Haitian, and perhaps have family or friends who they haven’t heard from: Please know that you are in our hearts and in our prayers. Don’t lose hope — God is the God of the impossible!

We will stand behind you and beside you through this process. We are better because of you. We are with you, Haiti.

[Note: If you would like to donate, you can text “Yele” to 501501 to donate $5 to Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti program or text “Haiti” to 90999 to donate $10 to the Red Cross. Both donations will be charged to your cell phone bill. Please donate now.]

[Additional Note: Ambassador Raymond Joseph, the Haitian Ambassador to the United States, made an appearance on Rachel Maddow’s show the other night and had something to say about Robertson’s comment. Watch the video here.]

[Written by Stuart McDonald for Elev8.com. For more from Stuart, follow him on Twitter and check out his personal blog]

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VIA HELLO BEAUTIFUL:

Actress Garcelle Beauvais, better known as “Fancy” from “The Jamie Foxx Show,” has been greatly affected by the tragedy that has struck Haiti. She herself grew up on the island, coming to the States with her parents at the young age of seven.

The news has continued to report on the status of the country, detailing the death toll, the emergence of rescue teams, and the unfortunate change in the behavior of its natives, as they are turning to looting in desperation and beginning to show less patience as the days pass.

She tells Larry King: “You have to question faith, in a way, you do. I mean, you don’t understand, especially a place like Haiti. We’ve been hit so hard by lots – why would this happen? I don’t know. This is the country that deserves this the least – not that anybody deserves it. But we are resilient and we are proud. Even if we have nothing, we are very, very proud. It’s unfortunate. It’s devastating.”

She continues: “We have family we haven’t been able to contact… cousins… We have no contact. We spoke to my brother-in-law through e-mail yesterday. We got an e-mail and he was in the car. He said it sounded like a bomb went off. It was just that loud.”

“It’s really hard to take. It’s really hard to watch. I mean, seeing the one picture of the baby covered under the rubble, because they couldn’t get to it… Those are my people. Those faces are my family. The worst is not knowing.”

Source

VIA CNN:

Pat Robertson, the evangelical Christian who once suggested God was punishing Americans with Hurricane Katrina, says a “pact to the devil” brought on the devastating earthquake in Haiti.

Officials fear more than 100,000 people have died as a result of Tuesday’s 7.0-magnitude earthquake in Haiti.

Robertson, the host of the “700 Club,” blamed the tragedy on something that “happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it.”

The Haitians “were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever,” Robertson said on his broadcast Wednesday. “And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.’ True story. And so, the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’ ”

Native Haitians defeated French colonists in 1804 and declared independence.

“You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.” Robertson has previously linked natural disasters and terrorist attacks to legalized abortion in the United States. Soon after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, killing more than 1,800 and wreaking unprecedented devastation on New Orleans, Louisiana, Robertson weighed in with his own theory.

“We have killed over 40 million unborn babies in America,” Robertson said on his September 12, 2005, broadcast of “700 Club.”

“I was reading, yesterday, a book that was very interesting about what God has to say in the Old Testament about those who shed innocent blood. And he [the author] used the term that those who do this, ‘the land will vomit you out.’ … But have we found we are unable somehow to defend ourselves against some of the attacks that are coming against us, either by terrorists or now by natural disaster? Could they be connected in some way?”

Source

VIA THE WASHINGTON POST:

The news that got through, spotty and sparse in detail, seemed too enormous to comprehend. Port au Prince’s main cathedral had collapsed in a devastating earthquake. So had the presidential palace. The biggest grocery store in Haiti was flattened at an hour when it would have been full of shoppers.

When word of loved ones seeped through, it was often grim.

“A friend called — her mom was stuck in the rubble — her mom just died,” said Arielle Jean-Baptiste, 50, of Silver Spring, who managed to receive text and Facebook messages from friends in Haiti early Wednesday morning. “The son of a friend, he was at the funeral parlor he worked in, he did not make it.”

But by mid-day, the trickle of information dried up.

“The ones who have Internet at home, they have a generator,” Jean-Baptiste said, adding that she believes they signed off to conserve power.

Similar stories of distress and uncertainty were told throughout the region and the country as anxious Haitian Americans desperately sought to learn whether relatives and friends had survived the 7.0 quake that struck Haiti Tuesday afternoon. Some called local radio stations, hoping for scraps of new information or advice on where to give donations. Most turned to an informal network of friends and relatives here in the United States, some of whom were able to reach Haitians on their cellphones.

That’s how Rudolph Chandler, a Haitian-born international health economist who lives in Northwest Washington, heard that an elderly aunt whose house collapsed around her was pulled from the wreckage alive, and is in a hospital.

But no word has come yet about the wife of a cousin who works at U.N. headquarters, said Chandler, who hoped she already had left work when the earthquake struck late Tuesday afternoon. Nor has he heard anything about a cousin who is a surgeon in Port-au-Prince. The doctor is adept at using mobile communications, Facebook and Twitter, making his silence all the more unnerving, Chandler said.

“I’m a little nervous, because it’s been more than 12 hours and nothing from him,” he said.

Many thousands are missing and feared injured or dead. A Fairfax County search and rescue team left for Haiti Wednesday to help locate people trapped in debris. It is taking 48 tons of rescue equipment, including medical supplies, listening devices and search cameras, as well as six search dogs.

Prince George’s County officials announced Wednesday that they are mobilizing a team of about 15, including firefighters, paramedics, building inspectors and engineers to deploy to Haiti if the U.S. State Department approves.

Vernon Herron, director of the county’s office of homeland security, said the financially strapped county would put up its own money, if necessary, to send support. In a statement, County Executive Jack B. Johnson said: “We must help the people of Haiti in their time of need.”

Two priests are among people with ties to the Washington area who have not been heard from since the earthquake. The Rev. Arsene Jasmin, who headed Haitian outreach for the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington was on a retreat in his native Haiti, said Susan Gibbs, a spokeswoman for the archdiocese. Jasmin, who lives at Sacred Heart Church in Columbia Heights, left on Monday. He was sent from the Port au Prince diocese in 2007 to minister to the Haitian community in the Washington area, which Gibbs estimated numbers about 20,000 — 80 percent of whom are Catholic.

His predecessor also was unaccounted for. The Rev. Andre Pierre worked and lived here for years before returning home in 2007.

Ten students from George Mason University, who were on a mission to Haiti for McLean Bible Church, were reported safe. But there has been no word about the fate of two students and two employees from Blue Ridge Community College in Harrisonburg, Va.

The students, Michael Aronoff, 21, of Vienna, and Megan Samples, 19, of Harrisonburg, and the employees, Rebecca Evans and Gail Foley, left on Sunday for a weeklong trip to Haiti as part of an outreach program. Students on earlier trips had helped establish a rabbit cooperative and garden plots. The students planned to be in the small town of Signeau, southwest of Port au Prince. A college spokesperson said there was no news from them since a blog entry the day before the quake.

From a distance of 1,400 miles, the not knowing was excruciating.

“Crying, that’s all we can do,” said Nellie Joseph, 66. “We love Port au Prince, we love the capital.”

A cab driver who lives in Silver Spring, Joseph said she has been unsuccessfully trying to reach relatives in Haiti since she learned of the quake.

“I just can’t contact nobody,” she said. “It just rings and hangs up. I have my cousins, my nieces, my brothers, uncle, aunt. I don’t hear anything. I just follow CNN.”

The thoughts of many went back to people and places that are no more.

Phara Rodrigue, who was born in Haiti and lives in Alexandria, returned from a Christmas trip to Haiti a week ago.

“We took pictures by the palace, we took pictures by the cathedral, and in just seven days, those buildings have been destroyed,” Rodrigue said.

While in Haiti, she attended a Catholic gospel music concert at the Rex Theatre in Port Au Prince. Sitting nearby was the city’s archbishop. This morning, she learned that the prelate was among the dead in the Haitian capital. “I can’t believe it . . . .” Rodrigue said. “He was one row from us.”

Jean-Baptiste said it was hard to comprehend that the city’s major landmarks disappeared in a flash.

“These things, they’ve been there forever,” she said. “Especially the cathedral and the palace. All the funerals, my father’s funeral was there. All the baptisms. These are fixtures.”

Several local Haitian Americans said the gruesome television images of once-familiar places are unrecognizable.

“There’s so little left, I see the name on TV, but it doesn’t look like anything that was before,” said Nadia Dubuche, 46, of Silver Spring, who was born and raised in the Carrefour neighborhood, one of the hardest hit in the earthquake.

Tuesday night was a sleepless one for Dubuche and her family, who stayed up all night trying to reach relatives in Haiti. They took turns at the phone, frantically dialing over and over.

“We couldn’t get through. There was no contact, no electricity,” said Dubuche, who tried calling several dozen times while watching television news before she had to leave for a late-night nursing shift. “My mother didn’t sleep at all. She just kept trying all the different numbers over and over.”

Dubuche and her family were among the fortunate. Wednesday morning, Dubuche’s mother finally got word from a family member.

“All he said was, ‘They’re okay,’ but not everyone is confirmed,” Dubuche said. “And no one knows what they lost, how bad the damage was for them, what’s still left.”

Dubuche belongs to Eglise Baptiste du Calvaire in Adelphi, one of the largest Haitian churches in the Washington suburbs, with more than 500 attendees weekly. She said her church had been preparing for one of its frequent relief trips to the country later this month.

“We had prepared food and clothes for people after a recent hurricane and after a school collapsed. We even sent the truck with the supplies already. We were just preparing to go and help distribute.”

There’s no word whether the truck survived the earthquake, and now, in any case, the church will have to prepare an even larger mission trip in response to the temblor.

At the Haitian embassy Wednesday morning, community leaders met to strategize on how they could help.

“We would like to be part of the first response,” said Albert DeCady, chairperson of the Greater Washington Haiti Relief Committee, a consortium of organizations that formed in response to a series of hurricanes two years ago.

DeCady said local Haitians were hoping to coordinate with larger relief organizations going to Haiti and offer their help, and added that they hoped to be able to leave as soon as Friday.

“We have the doctors, we have the engineers, we have the people who can go get their hands dirty, we have people who can go be a translator. But when it comes to the heavy machinery that we need, we just don’t have that capacity.”

DeCady said a few community members were able to speak with people there in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake.

Raymond A. Joseph, the Haitian ambassador to the United States, said information is sketchy, and might be for some time.

“We are in the assessment stage,” he said. “God has given. God has taken away. Let’s work with the living.”

With communications so limited, some Haitian Americans said they were having trouble imagining the scale of the catastrophe.

“The whole community’s simply dumbfounded,” said Marc Christophe, director of the Haitian Institute of Washington, D.C. “It’s impossible to comprehend what has happened.”

Given the difficulty of placing calls to Haiti, most Haitians in the Washington area were calling and e-mailing one another to check in.

“We’re just sharing, commiserating,” he said. “We feel this is a lot of pain and suffering.”

Source