SN Power visit Haiti

19-3-2010

Following the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti, employees at Statkraft (SN Power`s main owner) and SN Power launched a fundraising campaign to help the earthquake victims. In total NOK 745,000 (USD 130,000) was raised, which will be used for the reconstruction efforts led by the Norwegian Church Aid and the Red Cross. In March, SN Power`s emergency relief expert Halvor Fossum Laurtizsen went, together with Norwegian TV Channel TV2, to Haiti to witness the reconstruction effort. The following is reporter Terje Svabø`s account of their journey;

The line is long, the smiles are few and the suffering great. In the scorching heat, we see our fellow human beings wait for treatment at the Norwegian-run hospital in Petit Goave, Haiti. Every day, 80 new patients arrive at the hospital, operated by the Norwegian Red Cross. Without this hospital, the town would be without medical services. The funds donated by Statkraft and SN Power are put to good use right in front of our eyes.

I have driven two and a half hours west from the capital Port-au-Prince to Petit Goave together with Halvor Fossum Lauritzsen, former head of numerous Red Cross relief operations in disaster areas and, currently with SN Power. During the trip we have seen how the nature`s massive forces have wreaked havoc on this land and its people. We pass collapsed houses, where people sit on top of the ruins with apathy in their eyes. We know for certain that in many of the ruins, dead bodies remain. The stench of death confirms this.

Acute need for help
If there were one country on the planet that shouldn’t have been hit by an earthquake, it was Haiti. This was an impoverished and starving nation already before the catastrophe struck. Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere with one million orphans and an unemployment rate of at least 60 per cent. The crime rate may be the highest in the world. To be blunt, life was already hell on earth for the approximately 11 million inhabitants. Nature has now claimed another 250,000 victims and tens of thousands have been injured.

Haiti is in dire need of emergency help, short-term aid and long-term reconstruction of the country. To get this island nation back on its feet will not take years, but decades. In Port-au-Prince, 900 aid organisations are active. Most are making a difference, but many have also started to pull out. Haiti’s people now must rely on organisations such as Norwegian Church Aid (NCA) and the Red Cross, which both have long-term perspectives in their operations. These are the organizations that have received the USD 130,000 donation from Statkraft and SN Power.

Focus on providing clean water and hygiene
Both NCA and the Red Cross are significant players with long experience with international aid. In Haiti, NCA has a special focus on clean water and hygiene, two of the pillars needed if Haiti is to put an end to the suffering. Without clean water and without proper hygiene, all the aid work is in vain. NCA is therefore working to repair water and sanitation infrastructure, both in the capital Port-au-Prince and in the countryside. Through local contacts, NCA is doing a great job and aims to stay in the country for a long time.

The Red Cross is by far the largest aid organisation active in Haiti, and the Norwegian Red Cross forms an important part of this apparatus. This is why Halvor Fossum Lauritzsen and I have travelled to the Norwegian field hospital in Petit Goave, where are welcomed by a smiling, but worried, team leader Andreas Köstler.
Worry about upcoming rainy season.

He is smiling because he is meeting his former boss and friend Halvor, and worried because the tasks are so overwhelming, not least because the rainy season will make things much worse: The temporary camps could be washed away, buildings that more or less withstood the earthquake could collapse and there is a significant risk of waterborne epidemics such as cholera and diarrhoea. The malaria frequency will probably increase dramatically.
But Köstler is not a person who lets his worries get him down. He sees the opportunities, and knows that a lot can be done, if enough help gets through. Right now, he is focusing his attention on getting hold of plastic to protect the people once the rains start. He is also intensely occupied with organising the work at the field hospital, and has, as a matter of fact, assumed the responsibility for the only local hospital in the area. It closed around Christmas due to financial problems, which says it all about Haiti`s dire economic situation.

But Köstler has the energy to see beyond the tasks of the hospitals, despite the long line that has queued up to receive emergency medical attention, and the hundreds of operations which have already been performed. Not too far from the hospital he noticed a smaller camp, one of many littering the landscape. One day he decided to visit the camp to find out how the people there were doing. They told him he was the first to see them. Almost two months had passed since the earthquake and no organisation had visited the 149 families living there. Nobody knows how many other camps like this there are in Haiti. But, thanks to the Red Cross, at least one more is now receiving help.

Köstler tells us that the Red Cross originally planned to deploy the field hospital in Haiti for 12 months, but now it looks as if it will stay there for at least 18 months. To use Köstler’s own words: ”We are working in a society which has completely disintegrated. We need to rebuild everything – from scratch.”
Info about the earthquake:

Tuesday, 12 January 2010 an earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale hit the Caribbean nation of Haiti.  One month later the Haitian Government reports that over 200,000 people have been identified as dead, an estimated 300,000 injured, and around 1 million people left homeless.

Terje Svabø