ReliefWeb

In October of 2016, Hurricane Matthew devastated the southwest region of Haiti, leaving at least 1,000 dead and 1.4 million in need of humanitarian aid. Tzu Chi Foundation deployed its volunteers to implement its post-disaster recovery programs in the most devastated cities of Jérémie and Les Cayes. Two of these programs were the cash-for-work and hot meal services. The cash-for-work programs, instituted in Jérémie, tasked willing locals with either cleaning city streets or assisting with the assembly of temporary shelters with home-repair materials provided by Tzu Chi.

For 4 days, 60 locals were employed to clean the city streets of Jérémie, and by the end of the program, exactly 240 locals were benefitted, each paid an equivalent of $8 USD per day. In total 8 dollars was paid per person per day with the currency exchange amounting to $1846.16 and $2000 spent on buying tools. The cash-for work on temporary shelters also came out to be 8 dollars per person per house, with 5 people per team, which came out to be $2880 and along with $231 each for 72 families in total which came out to be $16,632 with a total of $19,512 spent on the cash for work on temporary shelters program. The final program was a hot meal service program where we supplied $500 per day for 16 days to buy food with a total of $8000 spent in Jeremie with spending on supplies at $6785.5 in Les Cayes. In Jeremie, Tzu Chi hired a local cooking team instead of implementing a different team. In the cities of Les Cayes and Jeremie, there were no noticeable shortage of food supply and no noticeable inflation on food prices. However, more rural areas were more difficult to access by motor vehicles and food supplies. Even non-governmental-organizations, like the World Food Programme, which brought a lot of food into the country had difficulties reaching the rural areas. The area is generally secure especially due to the presidential election that happened on November 20th, 2016. Occasionally there have been concerns of local setting up road blocks and attempting to rob supplies that had gone into the affected areas, but United Nations peacekeepers are present which means other than a few minor incidents, the security situation has rarely gotten out of control.

Future goals include the development of a local volunteer network to directly help with the health situation and community support. This network will allow the locals to help one another instead of relying on the non-governmental-organizations so heavily. Water, sanitation, hygiene was sub-standard before Hurricane Matthew, but it is worse now with safe drinking water being relatively limited, and when available, usually have to be bought. Underground water is available but is mainly meant for laundering, showering, among other needs.

Jeremie has seen many public schools converted into temporary shelters with the poor conditions. Some people still refuse to leave shelters and students are protesting to go back to school. The general ethnic backgrounds of people we helped were Haitian people and blacks with Haitian Creole being the main language that they spoke. There are now plans on implementing future programs in creating job opportunities, increasing education opportunities, and increasing access to health care. We are also planning on developing more partnerships with the local organizations although nothing specific has been planned yet.

Tzu Chi Foundation