Red Cross Blogs

Life at the Haiti Hilton

By Sarah Oughton
February 9, 2010 at 9:00 am

Paul Jenkins is one of hundreds of  Red Cross workers currently in Haiti. As part of a  field assessment and co-ordination team (FACT) he is helping co-ordinate the complex and demanding emergency response operation. Here are his initial reflections after arriving in Port-au-Prince:

I’m staying at the ‘Haiti Hilton’. It must be the first Hilton where the best room in the house is a Red Cross tent shared with five other delegates. This is Red Cross Base Camp, the site from which the enormous International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement response to the devastating Haiti earthquake is managed.

The camp is growing all the time as more delegates and equipment arrive to support this amazing response. I understand that there were plans to build a Hilton Hotel here some years ago, but due to the insecurity in the country the site was abandoned. All that is left is the shell of a building and several acres of very dusty land.

This was our good fortune. The building has become the office for the International Federation’s Field Assessment and Co-ordination Team (FACT) that is responsible for coordinating this complex and demanding operation. No doors and no windows, but an unbelievable amount of commitment and determination. What might have been luxury apartments are now the offices of the relief, water and sanitation, health, shelter, telecommunications and support services teams. It’s hot and dusty, but I can only reflect on how much easier it is here, than for the many thousands of people all around us whose lives were turned upside down on 12 January.

Surrounding the building are the many tents of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Emergency Response Units. These are the teams that go out each day to the many hundreds of camps in the city, where the people who fled their devastated homes have established make-shift shelters.  Our own British Red Cross sanitation team is doing a fantastic job in trying to provide sanitation to some of these people and reduce the risk of a disease outbreak in the overcrowded conditions. The challenges for them are enormous, as there is very little space in the displaced camps to construct latrines for the population. They are really having to be creative to find ways of supporting people in these challenging circumstances. It’s incredible that these Emergency Response Unit teams can provide support so effectively, to so many people, from the grounds of an abandoned hotel. From these hot and cluttered tents, the Red Cross and Red Crescent is providing more than 1 million litres of water a day to people affected by the earthquake.

Helping to keep the Red Cross base camp going is one of the many things I’ve been doing since I arrived here ten days ago. As more delegates arrive to support the response, the big challenge is to accommodate and feed everyone and ensure that they are safe, secure and healthy. We need to maintain the incredible energy of the people here. Everyone here works at least a fifteen hour day. It takes its toll and there are a lot of very tired looking people around. But there is an amazing spirit in the place. We all know it is tough, but it’s an enormous privilege to have the chance to be part of this operation. There is a huge amount of collective experience here. There are delegates from dozens of national societies that bring with them their experience of many disaster operations. But they all say that this is different and the challenges here are like nothing that humanitarian organisations have faced before.

I would have loved to have seen this country in happier times. What always strikes me is these terrible situations, is the resilience of the people. I can’t help wondering what it must have been like for them when the earthquake struck. Despite all they have lost, driving though Port-au-Prince today I saw people just trying to do the things they have always done. It’s Sunday and I watched a family dressed in their Sunday best walking past the ruined buildings on their way to church.

Building something better from the ruins of this place will not be easy. It will take a lot of support for many years to come from the Red Cross and many other agencies. It will be the resilience of these people that provides the cornerstone on which all our plans will be built and will depend.

I’ve been a humanitarian aid worker for thirty years, but this operation is definitely something special. And I’m certain that the Hilton Hotel will never seem quite the same again.

Images © Paul Jenkis/BRC

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Tags: emergency response, emergency response unit, ERU, Haiti, Haiti earthquake, haiti earthquake appeal, logistics, red cross, resilience, sanitation

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 9:00 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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