As support from around the globe continues to pour into the earthquake ravaged city of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, a coalition of Chicagoland faith groups banded together and announced Sunday that its main mission would be to provide aid to the Caribbean natio
As support from around the globe continues to pour into the earthquake ravaged city of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, a coalition of Chicagoland faith groups banded together and announced Sunday that its main mission would be to provide aid to the Caribbean nation and partner with the natives in rebuilding their homeland.
Flanked by Senator Roland Burris, leaders of local and international Haitian organizations – including a representative from the Haitian consulate of Chicago, elected state officials, and a host of faith leaders, Rev. Stephen Thurston announced Sunday the formation of Chicago Churches United for Haiti.
“We join together as one blood, one kin, to see Haiti rebuild,” he said.
While the faith organization is new, Thurston, pastor of New Covenant Baptist Church and head of the National Baptist Convention of America Inc. , said the work the group would be doing in Haiti is simply a continuation of the ongoing work some of the group’s members had already been doing in the poor nation.
“We are not new on the scene, we’ve been there,” Thurston said, adding that the crisis in Haiti now – after experiencing a magnitude-7.0 earthquake – is bigger than any one faith-based organization could address by itself.
Speaking passionately at the press conference, Claude-Joseph Pressoir, executive director of Remember the Children organization, reiterated that outreach to the poverty-stricken nation was going on even before the earthquake occurred.
“We are people that love Haiti and for years we have toiled the land … and been blessing them over the years,” she said, pointing to heads of other organizations that aid Haiti. “We have been the laborers in the community.”
Marc-Anthony Senat, executive secretary of CHAI, said this group committed to Chicago Churches United for Haiti “in order to have a concerted effort (with aid to Haiti) that’s more powerful.”
CHAI’s work over the last 19 years the organization has been in the country had been mostly concentrated north of the capital city where the earthquake took place, but Senat said some of its resources would be shifted down into Port-Au-Prince.
Thurston praised the global generosity and outpouring by individuals and other organizations, yet acknowledged that there are some snafus with getting supplies, food, water and other essential things directly into the hands of the Jan. 12 earthquake victims.
He said that without alternate plans, like the ones CCUH will use to try reach more victims, the death toll, which now stands at over 100,000, could continue to rise.
Further, at least 1.5 million have been left homeless and tens of thousands of corpses lie in streets.
“We’re gonna continue to see people who are starving and who are dying of dehydration. They’re not looters, they are people that are simply trying to survive,” he said.
He was speaking to published reports that seemed to show Haitians breaking into already-crumbled establishments and other places, trying to get food and other items.
U.N. missions and other organizations have plane-, truck-, and shiploads of supplies waiting to be distributed to the Haitian people, according to the White House, but there has been a bottleneck in distributing them.
Medical supplies and help have been slow in flowing into the country, as well, according to published reports. And Pressoir hopes medical bottlenecks could be remedied soon so that outbreaks of diseases-including cholera and typhoid fever-could be avoided and dead bodies lying in the streets or buried beneath rubble could be recovered.
The faith organization will be accepting money, food and other items at New Covenant and other locations around the city, for the next two weeks, to send to Haiti, Thurston said.
The organization plans to transport the items to Lake Charles, La. where they will then be taken by ship into Haiti and the NBCA’s foreign missions leader will work to get the goods directly into the hands of those there who need it, the reverend explained.
“We want to see that the money and the items get to the people on the ground,” Thurston said.
In addition to supplies, state Sen. Kwame Raoul, who has family in Haiti and recently found out that they are OK there, said Sunday that getting medical personnel-especially Haitian ones-into the country has posed a detrimental challenge.
He is a part of International Child Care, a doctors organization his late father helped to found which runs the Grace Children’s Hospital in Port- Au-Prince, and said that doctors were met with some difficulties with U.S. and other international officials when they tried to enter Haiti to help.
Acknowledging that some of the problem have “been smoothed out,” Raoul said at the press conference that “there are some organizations that are better politically connected than others” which helps them to get onto official lists that easily allow them entry into Haiti.
Rescue and recovery efforts continue in Haiti, portions of its capital city crushed by the powerful earthquake two weeks ago. But Thurston and other leaders at the press conference look forward to the city’s rebuilding and they were adamant that the natives have a hand in it.
“The Haitian people have a right t be a part of this reconstruction effort,” Thurston said.
He added that Chicago Churches United for Haiti’s mission was to walk “beside them, not in front of them” in the rebuilding of their country.
In the days shortly after the earthquake, as the U.S., United Nations and other countries sent in not only supplies but also military personnel to assist with security, President Barack Obama pledged U.S. support to Haiti and vowed that this country was not looking to occupy the island nation.
Burris echoed that Sunday.
“We are not in any way trying to take over that country,” Burris said of the U.S. He said the U.S., located only 700 miles from Haiti and which once occupied the island nation, was only there to help this time.
“This is so large. This is such a catastrophe. This is a situation where you’ve got so much happening,” Burris told the Defender, pledging his office’s support in helping doctors and Haitian-Americans in Haiti wanting to get back into the U.S. or here wanting to go to Haiti to do so.
All projections point to a slow recovery for Haiti, which declared its independence in 1804 and became the first free, Black republic in the world. Paying taxes to France, foreign occupation – including by the U.S. in the early 20th century – as well as internal political corruption over the years has left a Haiti marked by stark poverty and destitution.
But Haitian organization leaders and Raoul spoke of a resilient Haitian people who, according to the state Senator, “can survive in conditions most people can’t.”
CCUH called for not only rebuilding Haiti but allowing the people of Haiti to help in the process, providing them with much needed jobs and skills to help sustain them.
“All Haitians want to do is take care of themselves,” Raoul said.
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