ShareThisDozens of North Carolina aid groups and churches are scrambling to raise money and send relief to storm-ravaged Haiti.
A year after Hurricane Ike swept away the tiny house where 13 members of the Jean-Baptiste family lived in Haiti, the Hearts and Hands for Haiti relief agency is rebuilding their home.
It's just one example of what North Carolina and Raleigh-Durham area residents have done to help in Haiti since Ike capped a stormy summer over the Caribbean nation last year.
Hearts and Hands for Haiti plans to give the Jean-Baptistes a new, sturdier home in their northern Haiti community of Sous Raille, one built on a taller foundation and safely away from the river. It is building about 30 homes in the area, among the hardest hit by the storm, using $150,000 it raised after Ike to rebuild housing.
Dozens of North Carolina churches and aid groups support orphanages, schools and medical clinics there. Hundreds of missionaries from the state travel to Haiti every year, while thousands of others send money for causes as big as building clinics and as small as sponsoring a child's schooling.
The damage and shortages of food and medical supplies caused by four big storms last year had state residents scrambling to raise money and send relief. They are still at it, along with the Haitians they work with, because the damage still isn't all repaired and because there's always something needed in the Western Hemisphere's poorest country.
This week two Haitian community leaders with strong ties to the Raleigh-Durham area visited for annual planning sessions and to share their stories with churches, civic clubs and other groups. Jean Pere Nadieul, director of a group of churches and schools in the Gonaives area, visited Hearts and Hands for Haiti, which provides his group's support. Leon Dorleans came from the capital, Port-au-Prince, where he heads a group of churches and three schools, including a compound in the nation's worst slum, that receive much of their support from North Carolina.
Nadieul said the Jean-Baptistes' new house should be ready within days. With the money that Hearts and Hands raised, his group has built three houses in Sous Raille, and about a dozen more are planned there. It has about $50,000 left and will build until it's gone, said Stan Wiebe, who, along with his wife, runs the aid group out of their Raleigh basement.
The group had provided materials for about 40 homes in the area before the storms, and most were lost. This time, Wiebe said, it was building fewer -- about 30 total across the region -- but making sure they are sturdier, higher off the ground and in safer places.
The Haitian government has dug out the riverbed in the area so that it can accommodate more flow and is less likely to flood, and also built huge dikes along the banks to contain flooding. The downside to the deeper riverbed, though, is that in normal times the water level is lower, so irrigation canals don't work and the farms have dried up, Nadieul said.
"Hunger is certainly increasing now, because so many there rely heavily on irrigation," he said.
Several members of the Jean-Baptiste family are among those still living in tents. Before the storm, they had been lucky by the modest standards of their country, to have the house and that breadwinner Dieule Jean-Baptiste had a motorcycle he could use to sell taxi rides for a couple of dollars to supplement the food they grew themselves.
But when Hurricane Ike hit, it swept away their modest good fortune. The roaring floodwaters ripped the house apart and snatched away the shattered remains, the motorcycle and their few other possessions. They were reduced to living under the branches of a mango tree and had given up looking for food in the flood-ravaged gardens and fields.
"We are just waiting for support because we don't see any way we can help ourselves now," family member Wilfred Jean-Baptiste said then.
Among the families for which Nadieul's group has homes already under construction in Sous Raille is Edette Henry's.
Henry and other family members survived Ike by climbing into the branches of trees as their home was swept away. Her new home should be complete by the end of this week, Nadieul said, though the family was also struggling to find food.
Port-au-Prince, too, has lingering damage from the hurricane, said Dorleans, a minister who is widely adored in the city's most notorious slum, Cite Soleil. The roofs on thousands of shacks had been damaged in the hurricane, and more had been damaged before, he said.
A bright spot, he said, has been a year-old relationship with the Raleigh relief group Stop Hunger Now. It has been sending a 40-foot shipping container of prepacked meals every three months.
That charity and N.C. State University started the annual Million Meal Week program at several universities around the state. They packed more than 1 million meals last year and this year for people such as Dorleans' students.
E-mail reporter Jay Price at jay.price(at)newsoberver.com.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit The News and Observer of Raleigh, N.C.
