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Haiti quake: Red Cross aid worker diary – Thursday

By Emily Knox
January 21, 2010 at 10:51 am

Hola! Well, the team were looking distinctively bleary-eyed this morning at breakfast. It’s been a stressful couple of days with the pressure of planes landing in a congested airport and challenges with storage in Haiti. Then there was the further tremor in Haiti, which I have to say I didn’t notice here but quite a few others did!

I’ve spent most of the day behind the computer… it’s like a bombardment of emails about a million things – mainly flight and cargo details, and changes for flights and changes back again. Everyone is doing all they can to get one of the precious ‘red’ slots at Port-Au-Prince airport to land. If they don’t make it, they get diverted to us often with little or no notice.

Recently, our airport has become congested and some planes have been diverted to Puerto Plata airport. All this makes my job of tracking goods more complicated and I spent a long time pouring over the schedule of flights and trying to match it to what David said had arrived at the airport.

Today, with the help of a lot of Dominican Republic Red Cross volunteers, David unloaded the massive Antonov plane that carried 10,000 blankets, 5,000 tarpaulins, 8,500 jerrycans, 1,500 mosquito nets, 1000 kitchen sets, 4,000 buckets and six vehicles.

Meanwhile, Peter our team leader has been called to Haiti to lead the mass sanitation ERU, which London will be arriving on Thursday evening. The mass sanitation ERU builds latrines and carries out hygiene promotion work to help prevent outbreaks of serious disease, which is always a danger.

Anyway, for me this means sadly we lose both Peter and Theo! Our team will be merged with the Spanish Red Cross team by borrowing two of their logisticians.

Well, I’m not too sure how to make my world of stock reports, finance and airway bills an exciting read for you. Just to say that the small pleasures I am enjoying are the warm breeze (it’s about 25-28 degrees here) and fried plantain! However, I can never fully relax as there is always the pressure of the urgency of everything that hovers in the back (or forefront!) of my mind. Nothing like a situation report from Haiti to sharpen the senses and help me focus on the job at hand..

If you would like to make a donation to the British Red Cross Haiti Earthquake Appeal please visit the our website or call 0370 60 60 900

Listen to an interview with Sharon Reader, mass sanitation ERU delegate, on her way out to Haiti.

Image 1 © Matthew Percival/BRC

Image 2 and 3 © Emily Knox/BRC

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Tags: emergency response, emergency response unit, ERU, Haiti, Haiti earthquake, haiti earthquake appeal, logistics, sanitation, video, water and sanitation

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 10:51 am and is filed under Emergencies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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