Haiti Udpate Saturday January 30, 2010

It has been a dizzying week with Susie returning to Aspen after two weeks in Haiti, coordinating logistics to get the security team in place for the arrival of major supplies this upcoming week, and some continuing questions regarding the fate of the 32 children at the abandoned baby unit.
We did receive some news in the past several days in our continuing attempts to track down the 32 children from the abandoned baby unit.  We have now determined that the staff of the General Hospital has moved 30 of those children to another hospital.  Two of the children are still missing. There are so many corrupt trafficking issues in Haiti right now, there is no infrastructure to track children and many US agencies are trying to identify where all of their children went.

It is remarkable that things that we have been trying to bring to the attention of the public over the past 16 years are now becoming well known and publicized on television.  For instance, the “restavek” children – the child slaves of Haiti. This has been a scandal for many years, and only now all are organizations finding out about the over 300,000 restaveaks - indentured servants in Haiti. In Focus did a program: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhdttD70GEw from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. We hope that these efforts will shine the light on some of the darkest places in the world.

Through donations from World of Children, Feed the Hungry and Sun Electronics we have acquired some 120 tons of supplies and we are anticipating arrival shortly, in the port of Saint Marc.  We have had to put a security team in place to be ready to arrange delivery from the port to the Williamson project, once we navigate the vagaries of the Haitian customs system.  Even before the earthquake, the system was corrupt, had rampant abuses, and we have on numerous occasions had food spoil while waiting to be cleared by customs.  Mercy & Sharing does not pay bribes, and so in the past our shipments have often gone to the bottom of the list. We are planning to share these supplies with other like minded organizations serving children in Haiti and hope that the troops from the US and other countries will help us to get these supplies through to the children..

As now being reported, adoptions are completely on hold, except for those who were already in the “pipeline” prior to the earthquake. Child trafficking is prevalent in Haiti, and under the auspices of preventing child trafficking, the Haitian Government has stopped all new adoptions.
We reported last week on two of our children who were in the pipeline and who were successful in departing Haiti to their new homes in Canada. We receive a very touching report from their adoptive parents and we are grateful for their safety.

Once again we want to thank everyone for their donations in support.  We are not taking volunteers to Haiti until the conditions change substantially. We have received an overwhelming number of requests to volunteer in Haiti, and unfortunately simple logistics in that country are in total disarray and we cannot assure safety for foreign nationals even though we need translators, medics and security personnel.

We request all our friends to encourage the international community to impose new requirements on the Haitian government or to establish a protectorate in order for redevelopment of the country to take place.  The United States sent over $175 million to Haiti last year, and frankly we could tell very little difference, the country is extremely corrupt and we are, like other nongovernmental organizations working in Haiti, always competing with the government for funding.  Of course the funding that goes through Mercy & Sharing is not diluted, as our Board of Directors and Co-Founders contribute more than 100% of the administrative and overhead costs, thus assuring that outside the donations will go 100% of the projects in Haiti.  This is not the case when funding goes to the Government!

We thank all our friends and partners for working so hard to help us help Haiti’s children in these terrible circumstances. The effort is just beginning.

Susie and Joe