SOS Children in HAITI

SOS Children in Haiti brief background

•SOS Children focuses on orphans
•We help with food shelter medicine as good neighbours
•But our expertise is providing safe shelter, trauma therapy, love and care for the children who have lost all their family
•Also family tracing and protecting children from exploitation
•We have local staff (98%) who are already approved carers and trained
•We will probably (as in the tsunami and Kashmir) end up caring for hundreds of earthquake orphans in our family homes

SOS Children in Haiti brief SOS in Haiti

• SOS Children has been in Haiti since 1978 - more
• We have two villages one near Port au Prince one 150km N in Cap Haitien (a third, and the 1978 one, was handed over in 2003 to the church)
• We also have two SOS Youth Homes, two SOS Schools, one SOS Vocational Training Centre and four Social Centres running FSPs.
• We have three villages and lots of infrastructure in the Dominican Republic, which is the other half of the same island with road links
• We are coordinating our emergency work from DR and have already started loading up trucks to send over

Haiti background

• Haiti is very poor (149th in the world), 78% of people living on less than $2 a day
• It is still recovering from the effects of hurricanes Fay and Gustav in 2008 which destroyed more than 10,000 family homes (and a family home there has nine or ten people in it). Rebuilding ongoing.
• Politically unstable. Rioting in 2008 over food prices and tax
• Shares an island with the Dominican republic
• 2% of the population have HIV antibodies (120,000) and about 7000 die a year of HIV-AIDs
• Tough life for children and orphans

The earthquake

• Happened at 16:53 on Tues 12 Jan, measuring 7
• Trapped our office staff in the office and blocked all the roads. Most had their own homes destroyed: some are still searching for their families
• I know our schools run 0730 to 1630 so we think most school children will have been out but parents and breadwinners more likely to be dead
• Badly damaged the office and less so our Port au Prince Village
• Damage is concentrated in a densely populated area near Port au Prince
• Our schools had finished for the day (0730-1630) but some other schools had not.

Key messages

• The people and especially in Haiti had a lot to put up with before this massive
earthquake, poverty, AIDS, storm damage, unstable government
• It was in office hours so lots of breadwinners and parents will be dead
• A child who loses their family is not a problem which goes away a week later when
we have lost interest.
• What is really needed to help is people setting up child sponsorships or small regular donations so we can see these children through to independence