When the television cameras go dark, the journalists return to their newsrooms, and emergency relief stops being, well, emergency, there will still be people helping Haiti.
“I think that we will always have to raise the issue and be a voice to Haiti,” said Herman Mendoza, a pastor with Stepping Stones Ministries (SSM) in Flushing. “It’s going to be a massive reconstruction of the city.”
Three weeks after the earthquake, the news of the devastation in Haiti has indeed fallen off the front page of most newspapers. However, before the quake, some organizations already had firm roots in Haiti and they will continue their work there.
Since the quake, some new people feel compelled to get – and stay – involved.
Mendoza, 39, along with his wife, two other pastors, and a group of chiropractors, arrived in neighboring Dominican Republic and drove to Port-au-Prince, the devastated Haitian capital, a few days after the crippling 7.0 magnitude earthquake of January 12. SSM had established ties in 2003 with a local Haitian pastor, and, since then, the Dominican-American Mendoza had returned at least twice each year to engage in reconciliation efforts along the Dominican-Haitian border.
“My calling is to send a message through Christ to help thy neighbor,” he said.
For this trip, however, SSM’s mission had a vastly different purpose – to bring food and water.
“It’s going to entail worldwide help in building Port-au-Prince once again,” said Mendoza, who upon his return organized a collection for water, food, tents and cots at the Dominican restaurant Rancho Jubilee in East Elmhurst. They filled and have already shipped two 40-foot cargo containers to the Dominican port of Caucedo. Mendoza will return to Haiti to distribute the items in a few days when they arrive there.
“After the cameras are out of sight, Haiti will be forgotten again,” Mendoza said. “People need to be proactive and reach out to organizations like mine.”
Another individual moved by the plight and fearlessness of the Haitian community, FDNY Emergency Medical Technician Walter Adler, wants to return to Port-au-Prince in March with a group of 4,000 volunteers to train a Haitian volunteer ambulance service.
Adler, who received his training at LaGuardia Community College and at the FDNY Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Academy in Fort Totten, said that after the second earthquake struck on the morning of Wednesday, January 20 – this time 6.1 on the Richter scale – his team helped evacuate people from the General Hospital. The next few days, they decided to teach Haitians simple EMS drills.
“On Sunday, I came back [to the hospital] to 300-400 Haitians who wanted to learn how to do EMS work,” he said, hoping to organize and train them with a few other EMT/EMS workers when he goes back.
Along with the individual stories of commitments, multilateral organizations such as the American Red Cross and the United Nations (UN) have also committed to long-term involvement. By Wednesday, January 27, the Red Cross had spent or committed a total of $67 million in response to the Haitian earthquake. Of that amount, 79 percent will go towards food, 18 percent towards shelter and three percent to health and family services.
As of January 31, 2010, the UN World Food Program had delivered 22 million meals to feed nearly 750,000 people and had started to give food coupons to facilitate the distribution of food rations due to price inflation and “rising tensions among the population.” They predict that the cost of operations in Haiti will cost $279 million – $246 million in food and $33 million in logistical support – and foresee the time frame of their involvement to last until at least December 2010.
But in Queens, people like Mendoza realize that they do not have the influence or monetary reach of these organizations. Mendoza said that to ship each container costs $2,800 and in the Dominican Republic to move the items will cost another $2,000 between the trucks and customs.
So far he’s paid for one container himself, the owner of Rancho Jubilee Carlos Dominguez Juarez paid for the other and he’ll have to fundraise for the rest. He sounds optimistic though.
“We are grassroots,” said Mendoza. “We are not like the Red Cross, but we do big things.”
