February 1, 2010
The ecological organisation for Sosúa, Montellano and Cabarete (SOMONCA), has been working with the Civil Defence to send a Daf truck (10-tonner with four-wheel drive) to Port-au-Prince, loaded with eight 250-gallon containers of water.
The truck and accompanying Land-Rover were made available by the company 'Tractor del Norte' (Gerard Mulder) and Hubert Kotthoff.
However, the local authorities in Wassenaar (the Netherlands) made the entire trip possible through its generous donation of 21,000 euro!
The convoy (truck and Land-Rover) started out last Wednesday morning in the direction of Jimani, the last town before the Haitian border.
The route took us via Santo Domingo, Azua and Barahona.
We took empty containers with us to save fuel, and in Barahona we found a clean supply of drinking water where we could fill the containers before we started looking for a cheap hotel.
Next morning we set off again at 4am and continued towards Haiti.
There were no problems at the border.
The officials didn't even look at our passports, as apparently the flag flown by the Civil Defence was enough to give them confidence in us.
Truckful of drinking water to Haiti
The small road to Port-au-Prince was full of lorries, which crept forward at a snail's pace.
As we got closer to the capital we saw more and more walls and houses that had collapsed during the earthquake.
Everywhere we looked the Haitians were busy trying to repair things.
We finally reached the capital towards the afternoon.
Many buildings had collapsed, and we saw provisionally organised camps full of tents set up to house the homeless.
But the streets had been cleared, so that traffic could pass and, to our amazement, even the traffic lights worked!
Prort-au-Prince
Three organisations had asked us to bring water urgently: 'Doctors without borders', 'World parents' and the organisers of a refugee camp.
The town was in chaos and, despite trying everywhere to obtain information and call our contact persons, we couldn't find the aforementioned organisations.
Suddenly we met up with a reporter from BBC TV, who asked us if we would immediately take the water to an area outside the capital, where around 10,000 people were camped out under plastic sheets, and were desperate for water and food.
The humanitarian aid had not yet reached these homeless and desperate survivors.
We drove straight to the area indicated, and saw hundreds of tiny huts made up of plastic sheets and anything they could find.
Truckful of drinking water to Haiti
The circumstances under which these people had to live were simply dreadful!
The area containing all the huts was very extensive and, behind the hills, we could see many more rows of huts for kilometres into the distance.
We therefore chose a random hill from which to start distributing the water to the surrounding delighted and surprised residents.
They came from far and wide, adults and children alike, bringing pots and pans, kettles and bottles to the truck so they could be filled with drinking water.
They told us that they had some water, but it was brackish and only suitable for washing and bathing.
They had no clean drinking water whatsoever and, until now, no aid agencies had visited them to provide any sort of assistance.
They were also starving.
Despite the fact that they walked to the capital every day to forage for food, there was little to be had, and certainly not enough to feed everyone.
By coincidence, when Hubert took the BBC reporter back to the capital, they met a rich Indian entrepreneur who, when he heard the story of these poor homeless people, promised that he would return the very next day with around 1000 hot meals for the starving population.
Containers
Eventually, we left four containers behind.
One at the start of the area, two in the centre, and one further along.
The company Productos Sosúa had given us some pallets, which we used to mount the containers onto a higher plateau.
All the containers have a tap so that residents can easily obtain water as they need it.
The truck, led by Elias (a Haitian) and Jozef Meier (German) remained in Port-au-Prince to refill the four containers with fresh drinking water every day.
The money donated by the local authorities in Wassenaar is sufficient to provide clean drinking water every day for around two months.
The others participating in this trip (Gerard Mulder, Hubert Kotthoff, Milo Martinez (the chairman of SOMONCA) and Wim, Sosúa-News journalist) returned by Land-Rover to Sosúa.
The coordinator of SOMONCA (Garry Kooy) will try to contact the Doctors without Borders and World Parents organisations, to ensure that the promised water is made available to them.
SOMONCA would also like to extend its relief efforts because many more donations are expected.
Truckful of drinking water to Haiti
Finally, we'd like to thank the local authorities in Wassenaar for their generous donation, which has been named 'Water for Haiti project', particularly councillors Pim van de Locht and Jac Stienen, (both from Wassenaar).
We hope that the residents of this generous and prosperous town will dig deep into their pockets, so that SOMONCA can provide further assistance to these desperate Haitian survivors.
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