Haiti earthquake: Jacmel pleads for help

A girl waits for medical attention in front of a damaged hospital in Carrefour, on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, Friday, Jan. 15, 2010. Urgent medical care is also badly needed in Jacmel. Danielle Saint-Lot repors that a general surgeon, an orthopaedic surgeon, and two anasthesiologists are needed in the city. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos) 
 

Aid is now flowing into Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince, but that is not the only city hit hard by Tuesday’s earthquake. The port city of Jacmel, one of the most popular tourist spots in the country, was badly damaged and thousands of people are in need of immediate help.

“In the Jacmel region, around 2,000 families has been affected, leaving around 20,000 people in very bad conditions,” wrote Danielle Saint-Lot in a Facebook message. “For the moment, we have an estimate of 150 deaths, but some children are still under a shool building. We have set up four camps, one of them with 4,000 persons.”

Saint-Lot works with Vital Voices, a global aid organization for women.

“We are doing our best to manage the situation in Jacmel with the assistance of the UN and local authorities,” she added. “But we are still traumatized and are waiting for humanitarian assistance. The earth is still shaking at night.”

Saint-Lot reported that the historic center of the city “is completely destroyed.”

Another person trying to get aid for Jacmel is Mark Stuart of the Christian rock group Audio Adrenaline, who met with the mayor of Jacmel last night.

“The mayor has the infrastructure and connections to get major things done if we can help rent equipment and buy food/supplies,” Stuart reported in an email to the Conduit Mission charity. “But the city has no money. There are big machines here just sitting because the money is gone… There are dead bodies in the rubble and maybe one small front loader doing everything.”

Scavengers look for goods amid the rubble of collapsed buildings in Port-au-Prince, Friday, Jan. 15, 2010. A powerful magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti on Tuesday, also causing extensive damage in the port city of Jacmel. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)
 

Darren Tyler, president of Conduit Mission, said late this afternoon in a phone interview that only “a trickle of aid” is reaching the city, and the need is urgent as supplies start to run low in the city of 40,000.

“Even just from last night to this morning, the mood changed dramatically,” he said. “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say the entire population is in trouble… They’re definitely low on water, if not out of water. There’s no electricity and they’re getting dangerously low on diesel fuel.”

The diesel fuel is needed to power generators that are providing the only means of communication in and out of the city currently available, satellite Internet service. Phone service remains out.

Tyler said he has been working the phones all day trying to find a way to get supplies into the city, which has a deep water port. He’s hoping perhaps an aid ship can be diverted to the city.

Tyler noted that the only other way to get supplies to Jacmel is overland from Port-au-Prince, but the road between the two cities is currently impassable.

Conduit Mission feeds 75-100 kids each day in Jacmel and also provides them with clothing, Tyler said. The group sends 75 children to school. Many of the children live in shacks with single mothers. The organization is working on a building to provide better housing for some of the children, which Tyler said was spared damage in the quake.

He described a feeling of helplessness as he struggled to try to get them help.

“I know those kids. I know their moms,” he said. “They’re our extended family.”

He encouraged people who want to help to make a cash donation because cash is urgently needed. The mayor of Jacmel has been using his personal credit card to try to buy supplies for the city. One possible group to donate money to is the Hands and Feet Project operated by Stuart.

“The mayor said we were the only ones who have helped at all,” Stuart noted in his email. “I told him we could give 10K tomorrow and he almost cried.”

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