The United States announced Thursday that it’s providing an additional $32 million in humanitarian assistance to Haiti to help with the response to its deadly 7.2 magnitude earthquake earlier this month.
The money is part of a broader American response to support those affected by the temblor, said Samantha Power, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, after she flew over the areas ravaged by the early-morning quake that rocked Haiti’s southern peninsula on Aug. 14.
The additional funding will help humanitarian partners deliver urgently needed aid, including healthcare services, emergency shelters, food, safe drinking water, hygiene and sanitation assistance, and protection services, including gender-based violence prevention, child protection and psycho-social support services.
Already the U.S., which has helicopters flying injured Haitians to hospitals in the capital and bringing in aid to the earthquake region, has assisted or rescued more than 450 Haitians and delivered more than 200,000 pounds of vital aid.
”Today we had a chance to witness the impact of the earthquake and the response firsthand,” Power said. “Just to see the mountains and the narrow roads, many of which were damaged, were blocked with landslides, is to be reminded of the challenge of accessing many, many parts of the affected area.”
Power also visited a particularly hard-hit community, Maniche, in southwest Haiti, where she said she saw a school that had been completely flattened, throwing into question the start of the school year next week. She also met with families she said are “in dire need of shelter.”
More than half of Maniche’s 9,800 homes have been destroyed, town Mayor Jean David Brinard told Power. One partially destroyed health center is being overwhelmed by requests for care, while the other health facility in town, a health clinic operated by Catholic nuns, is in ruins.
Many people in Maniche have taken to sleeping in the streets. A lucky few have made makeshift shelters by dragging out soiled five-year-old USAID tarps that were handed out after 2016’s Hurricane Matthew.
“The needs we encountered in Maniche,” she said, “are being experienced in many, many families and citizens of this country.”
The quake killed more than 2,200 Haitians and upended the lives of 800,000 people in three regional departments: the Southwest, Nippes and the Grand’Anse.
The Haiti crisis has come at a time when much of the world’s focus is on Afghanistan. But a senior administration official said President Joe Biden is very much focused on the situation in Haiti and is pushing U.S. officials to be really responsive on Haiti.
The president receives regular updates, including the humanitarian situation in the quake-affected areas and the U.S. coordination of the international response to the disaster.
A top priority is to not repeat the mistakes after the 2010 earthquake, when billions of dollars in international aid were promised, but not delivered, and some of the responses pushed by the international community did not serve the country well.
To avoid this, the administration has been coordinating closely with the government as well as the Haitian community both abroad and in Haiti. Power said that USAID, for example, has told Haitians and others who want to help that cash is best rather than sending canned goods and other aid that doesn’t get used.
“There is a lot of willingness by the White House to be responsive to the needs of Haitians,” the senior administration official said. “We are focused on a lot in Haiti, not just the earthquake response.”
At the same time, the administration has reached out to the Haitian diaspora, which even before the quake and the July 7 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse had called on the White House to focus more on the country.
Power was joined by Adm. Craig Faller, head of the U.S. Southern Command; the U.S. ambassador to Haiti, Michele Sison; Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry; and the head of the country’s disaster response agency, Jerry Chandler.
Also making an appearance at the airport, though not part of the press conference, was actor Sean Penn, whose rebranded charity is active in removing rubble in Maniche, and Lt. Gen. Ken Keen.
Keen led the U.S. response in 2010, and Penn’s J/P HRO charity led an aggressive rubble-removal campaign. But when their involvement in the quake response helped lead to the creation of the biggest post-quake slum on the outskirts of the capital, they were criticized. The then-head of the U.N. Habitat in Haiti described their role in Haiti’s quake recovery as, “This is what happens when Hollywood and the U.S. military get together.”
Power warned that one of the lessons from the major earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010 was that no “development agency, and no army or diplomatic corps can just import a perfect humanitarian response from afar. You need local expertise, and local leadership to reach communities in need.”
Haiti’s government and its international partners have been criticized for the slow response in rolling out aid. Henry said that in response to the quake, the government put on the ground everything it had — people, resources and, for the first time, a coordinating mechanism that requires all donors, charities and non-governmental organizations to go through one door.
He acknowledged that his government, which has been in place less than two months, is facing many challenges. But despite its ongoing political, economic and insecurity crises, it is addressing the crisis created by the earthquake.
“In the arrival and distribution of the aid, there is no chaos. That has not happened,” Henry said.
He added that top officials in the government agreed to coordinate the aid through the country’s Office of Civil Protection in order to prevent uneven distribution or waste.
“It’s true that we had friends who helped us, and some friends have given us extraordinary help that honor us,” Henry said. “To my knowledge it is the first time that a government decided to put a single person of contact in the highest level of government … so that all the aid that they are given is coordinated at the highest level.”
The earthquake, he said, has aggravated an already difficult situation, and he thanked the international community for its assistance.
“From the first hour, from the first minutes after the earthquake, I can testify that our friends were present. They came to see what we needed before we even had to ask,” Henry said.
Faller said the Southern Command is in Haiti helping quake victims, and is working closely with others in Haiti “to deliver the needed aid as rapidly as possible.” There are a large number of helicopters, ships, transport planes and “more importantly willing and passionate people. Members of my team here to help.”
He added, “The suffering we saw today indicates that we still have a lot of work to do.”
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