Haitian mission for Didi

WHEN Didi O’Driscoll travelled to Haiti in February to work with aid agency Amurtel, her expectation was to stay for a matter of weeks but having been handed a special task on her first day, she felt compelled to remain on and extended her stay for five months.
She returned to Whitegate recently to tie up a few loose ends on her farm but she expects to return to Haiti in September to continue with aid efforts.
“In one minute the earth shook and a million and a half people lost their homes; lives were lost and people were left homeless, can you imagine?” she begins.
“I was expecting it but you still can’t believe what it looks like when you are there. You need a four-wheel drive just to get down the streets of Port au Prince because there are rocks and rubble and holes in the road and most of the roads are not paved. Most of the people are living in tents; it’s just unbelievable. After the earthquake no one wanted to live in their houses even the ones that were still standing because they were afraid of aftershocks,” she describes.
Didi went to work with Amurtel, an aid agency offering disaster relief, international development and community assistance in Boudon Valley, Port au Prince. Amurtel have a school there, the Sunrise Education Trust, for the last 12 years and it was here that Didi was based.
She vividly recalls her first assignment. “When I got there they handed me this baby. She had red hair, not because she was Irish, but because she was malnourished. Doctors had found her in an orphanage just lying on the ground, five minutes from death and they said she’s got to go to the hospital or she will die. After spending two weeks in hospital with pneumonia, the doctors didn’t want her to go back to this orphanage so they gave her to us and we took her in.
“She was really tiny. We couldn’t decide what age she was at first. She looked like she was one but by her teeth we knew she was older. Later we found out she was two. She couldn’t walk, she couldn’t talk, she couldn’t cry, she just had no energy. So they said to me ‘this is your first thing to do, here’s all her meds, take care of her’. I’ve never been a mom and all of a sudden I was a mom, at 58. That was an amazing experience. At first it was scary, as in ‘oh my God what do you do’, but then it is somehow natural that you want to take care of this little baby.
“I’m changing diapers and I’m up in the middle of the night feeding her. Then I realised what it was like to be a mom and what women go through. Some nights she was in tears and I’d be in tears and you say ‘what do I do, I’ve changed the diaper, I’ve given you a bottle and she’s still crying’. But handing her back was difficult. She’s still there and that’s another reason why I’m going back,” Didi said.
While she was there, baby Malika walked by holding onto the wall but Didi has since learned that she has taken her first steps.
She said poverty and the earthquake has a harsh effect on children.
“Half the population is under 18 and people are always trying to give us kids. They’re living in tents and they have no money. I was thinking what is it like not to have food to give the children. It was 49 degrees also so it is really hot and can you imagine these people are living in tents and tarps; it’s unbearable in the middle of the day and there are no trees. The hurricane season is starting now too so that is going to be a real problem for them,” she said.
Didi explained there are a large amount of children in the Haitian capital and surrounding areas, whose relatives had died or had lost families as a result of the earthquake.
“There are a lot of unaccompanied children – they won’t call them orphans. Someone I met said to me ‘I know my child is alive because I saw them get out on the street and I got trapped in the building and I never saw them again’. There are so many kids that have lost their families. There are no schools in the countryside and so people are sent to Port au Prince for school,” Didi recalled.
Her organisation is looking at removing rubble, setting up basic sanitation, building roads, getting water into the communities and helping to move people out of the tents.
Since Didi has been there, Amurtel has set up child-friendly spaces where children could have something to do rather than just being in the camps. They run school in the mornings and then feed the 130 children that come to the spaces. Then in the evenings, the children are involved in music, art, yoga or sports.
Amurtel operated 14 camps in the area where they were distributing basic food, medicine, tarps and water to some 14,000 people.
“Every aid agency you could ever imagine or ever heard of was there, but it is kind of like a bottleneck. There were different clusters; there was a food cluster for those just giving out food, then there was the water and sanitation cluster and then the child education cluster and then the housing. We are very grassroots, as the school had been there before the ’quake, so we were good working with the people and getting things to the people. We also worked with animators, who were Haitians that were trying to empower the people and try to get them to work together. We were providing them with water filters, but then they would teach the people how to use the water filters. One of the other things that we are trying to set up is a micro credit system. Because a lot of the Haitians have small businesses, like a market stall where they would sell rice, fruit or food they made, they need capital. So we’re working on a project that involves helping to develop the people’s literacy and business skills and then we would give them small loans just $50 from our organisation,” she revealed.
Didi said she is definitely going to return to Haiti to continue efforts there and part of her plan is to assist in building a children’s home. She is also looking forward to seeing baby Malika again.
She added that she is keen to share her experiences with groups in East Clare who may be interested in getting involved in the aid effort or who would like to fundraise.
Didi has also made a short film on the situation in Port au Prince, which she is open to screening.
To contact Didi, phone 061 926932 or email sunrisefarm@eircom.net