Relief proposal for Port au Prince, Haiti, from Johan and Jeannette Lukasse

Johan and Jeannette work in YWAM for 30 years. They are the directors and founders of YWAM Belo Horizonte, Brazil, a base focused on working with children at risk.

Johan took a team from YWAM Brazil the end of jan 2010 to PaP Haiti.

Jeannette helped organize this national team and organized the second team as well, which left the end of feb. 2010.

After being back from a 3 week relief outreach in Haiti (27 of Jan to 16 of Feb.), where we as a small YWAM team from Brazil served alongside teams from many nations in the central Police station in Port au Prince (PaP) Haiti, I Johan, would like to give a report and share ideas.

As Jeannette and myself have been discussing the situation there, let me try and put my ideas and observations in an as organized way as possible.

I am including this to as wide a group as possible and hope this will be helpful and am looking forward to a further discussion, maybe a forum should be created to discuss and polish these ideas:

A. Relief phase of 3-6 months:

1. Child care: We have been participating with meetings of UNICEF about child protection. Patrick McDonald, director of Viva Network came up with the idea of creating a “clearinghouse” or “webstore” for child care, which Jeannette underneath has worked out and shown what would be needed for that:

The problem:
Before the earthquake there were around 380.00 orphans in Haiti, according to UNICEF in 2007. Now it is estimated that that number doubled: 760.000 orphans. Also before the earthquake it was estimated that there were already 300. 000 children “Restavec”, children sold or given away by their very poor parents, to work as domestic servants (slaves) or even as personal sex slaves, in richer families, often in Port au Prince (PaP). There are children restavecs as young as 5 or 6 years old.

So we are looking at more than a million children in very difficult situations.

Patrick Mc Donald writes: “From the day after the earthquake we have been trying to coordinate with ICRC and IRC around the construction of a ‘child registry’ using the interagency database. This provides a consolidated list of children who have legitimate needs and who is caring for them and provides the premise for effectively networking in resources to further help them.”

So how do you care for them? We all know that orphanages are not the best long term solution for children, it is much better to stimulate foster care and adoptive families in existing local churches, but as a short term solution, orphanages are very necessary.

But the list, gathered by the UNICEF, of children who don’t have any family members at all, is bigger than there is capacity in the existing orphanages to care for. So one of the next steps needs to be optimization of existing children’s homes: In the UNICEF meeting the 4th of feb 2010, we were told that the UNICEF assessed 160 orphanages and current capacity to absorb children by visiting teams. But now we need to assess how we could expand these venues to host more children and what would that take?

We are conscious that many smaller NGOs and churches worldwide want to get involved but don’t know how or where. Linking them to real opportunities could be useful and might guide and motivate them.

How can that be done?

Think of the very famous webstore Amazon.com where people from all over the world can buy books and all sort of other things.

Could we make a “webstore” like that, but instead of selling books we would be “selling” care for the children at risk in Haiti?

By going to this site, people or churches interested in helping but not knowing someone personally in Haiti, would find several options:

Donating, praying, going.

Donating
Would you like to help an orphanage by donating? Here is how:
There would be a list of all the orphanages and clicking on one of them you can choose for example to feed a child for one day costs xx. You can then choose food for a number of kids and a number of days and put that in your “shopping cart”.

At the bottom of the page of the site you can see: “Frequently bought together”: which could show: food and drinks and medical costs.

And “Customers who bought this item also bought”: which could show: school uniform, monthly costs for school, dentist costs, etc.

Or instead of choosing at the first page one of the orphanages, people also can choose directly how much they would like to give, for ex US$ 100,- and see what this could buy: xxx meals, xxx beds and mattresses, xxx vaccines etc.

With the same boxes at the bottom of the page “Frequently bought together” and

“Customers who bought this item also bought”

The site would show the availability, for example if someone chooses to feed 60 kids in and orphanage for 100 kids, for a whole month, the next visitor of the site would see that there are still 40 kids to be fed in that orphanage for that month.

People can continue shopping (giving) or continue to check out, just like the Amazon.com site.

Praying
It can also be used for praying, with up to date prayer points all the time, people can commit to pray xx minutes a day for xxx orphanage etc. and put that in their shopping cart.

Going
And it can offer Christians or church groups to go short term or long term to Haiti and help practically.

For example it could have options to click on different skills and direct you immediately to the orphanages that need those skills at the moment.

Linked with places where a team could stay, like a walled garden of an orphanage or of a church where people can put up their own tents, to housing with local church members, etc. All this would be checked on availability and then could be put in the shopping cart.

What would it take to run a site like this?

I would need to hear from sites people who have worked already with this kind of sites, how many people it would take to develop and maintain the site, the security of the site, and the whole financial area. The program would be developed in a way that it would give detailed lists of which orphanage receives how much and for what. Who is praying, who is planning on coming etc.

But still people working behind the scenes at this webstore will need to check this and make sure the orphanages receive the donations that are given online, prayer commitments, volunteers etc.

But let’s say for this we need 10 highly schooled full time staff.

One of the huge efforts would be to keep it updated. How many kids are there really in this orphanage? Did the costs of food change? Or the costs of schooling?

Extra options in the second semester of 2010 could be that people could sponsor local Haitian Christians to receive training in dealing with trauma in children, bereavement classes, courses to train teachers, seminars for Christian families about adoption, bonding, etc.

I belief this is where YWAM, with short term outreach teams, could come in. For example the students from DTS outreaches could go in twos with big lists to fill in, and assess all the different orphanages. A team of 20 students can assess 50 orphanages in 5 days if they work in couples, every couple visiting one orphanage a day. I have heard of many DTS’s wanting to send their DTS outreach teams the next couple of years to Haiti.

I also belief, that we would need to work together with organizations as Viva Network, Tearfund, Compassion, World Vision, Micah network, etc. I belief that the Global Compassion Network, a track of the Call2all movement, can grow to be a way to help all those organizations work together.

Costs
There would be the costs to develop and maintain this site, the salary of highly schooled people and the costs of renting or buying an office and living space for those staff in Haiti. I understand some things can be done online from other locations, but other things still have to be done on site.

But working with volunteers like in YWAM would bring those costs down a lot.

I also belief, that projects like this, are very attractive for big businesses to sponsor.

Time
Seeing the destruction and need in Haiti, at least 5 years.

Other crises in other countries
Haiti could be a pilot program. With the development of an online webstore like this, this same structure could be adapted and used much faster in another crisis.

2. Medical help: Urgent medical needs related to the earth quake, are obviously over. Medics now treat ´normal´ day to day stuff. Of course that is very urgent as well, as so many more people live now in situations similar to slums than before. Food, hygiene and water continue important issues. When/if the rains come before people are put in more secure housing and have better sanitation, even a lay person like me can see a ´perfect´ cholera outbreak. As we were talking the other day to one of the police officers from the police headquarters where we were running the clinic, he expressed the following: “Please ask Brazil, and other countries not to give any money to our government, but please come and spend the money you want to give in rebuilding infrastructure like schools, hospitals, power plants etc. I thought this was very interesting coming from a very intelligent man, who speaks fluently as least 4 languages and is employed by the government!

3. Emergency Housing: Most people who lost their houses are still living under tarps and bed sheets, a reasonably number has small dome tents, and a minority has strong family tents. None of these will withstand hurricane force winds and rains. According to my evaluation, within the next 3 months, these people should be evacuated to neighboring towns where they have family in safe enough houses; or if they don’t have any family living in other smaller towns, they should be given safe hurricane proof prefabs. My estimate is that they would need 200,000 prefabs. The UN uses this kind already on at least one side where I have seen them. I would imagine that the US army, UN and other armies or big organizations have many of them in stock. We would need to find out who has access to this and make them available.

4. Sanitation and water systems: My estimate would be that we need one toilet for at the most 50 people. Should be chemical ones, I presume, as I don´t think the central sewage system (if ever existed) is working. Water systems have been put into many places, but need to be increased greatly. Hopefully Haiti has enough safe water to fill them even in rainy season. A proper prognoses on available water needs to be done. I cannot imagine a central water system being restored within the next 6 to 12 months.

5. Energy: Those safe tent/hurricane proof cities will need energy. There is urgent need for a study on how many powerful generators will be needed and then needs to be seen who will provide them. Would some of the moneys internationally gathered be able to go towards this? Has anybody any ideas who will decide on how these moneys will be spend? The city at night is a ghost city, totally blacked out with the exception of a few places that have powerful generators. I cannot imagine central power being restored widely within the next 6 months. Many of the houses still standing use their own generators and have a back–up system of car batteries for emergency lighting, internet connection etc. Some of the battery charging systems could be done with solar power. Who would be donating these solar power systems? Even better: Who would build a solar panel building plant in Haiti and employ unemployed people. Who would build a car battery plant and give employment to local people. This of course would be a longer term part of the development of Haiti.

B. Development and rebuilding Phase after 6 months to 2 years after the quake:

1. Training of Agents of change: We have been talking to UNICEF, and went to one meeting of the UNESCO as well. Based on talks with them, and contact with others, we believe that we as YWAM Belo Horizonte in cooperation with UofN, YWAM Haiti, local churches and child care organizations in Haiti should try and offer a training course with a strong emphasize or training workers in a combined area of Children at Risk, Education and Community development, training as many local Christian, from as many communities as possible so that they can become agents of change in those communities. I (Johan Lukasse) and my wife have trained in the past hundreds of workers for ministries with Children at Risk. We would like to make ourselves available to be in Haiti the second part of this year to help teach and coordinate this combined school of Children at Risk, Community Development and Teachers Training. We would like to suggest people like Ana Grego, Chris Colby, Steve Goode, Steve Bartel and others from YWAM to be involved, besides key people from Call2All and the Global Compassion Network, Viva network, World Vision, UNICEF, UNESCO, Compassion, SFAC (Substitute families for abandoned Children), trauma and bereavement counselors, etc.

2. Construction of schools and clinics: From the US, YWAM has traditionally been able to recruit many mission builders. The YWAM base in St. Marc located 100 km or 60 miles north of PaP, is a good example; they have received many teams already. Volunteer teams or Mission builders, could and should be intensified from all over the world, going to Haiti, where they are mostly needed in Port au Prince. For example a base in Brazil is planning to conduct a basic construction course and go on outreach to Haiti to rebuild churches and orphanages. Initiatives like that could easily be encouraged all through YWAM, churches etc.

C. Long term economic development 2 years and up after the quake:

1. A task group would need to be formed now. I suggest that the business track from Call2All could head this up, to discuss what long term sustainable businesses employing the maximum of local Haitians should be created, and then CEO´s, Heads of corporation etc. need to be found that will invest, develop such businesses (see my suggestion of solar panels and car batteries for example).

2. Where needed, money given to rebuild the country after the earthquake should be invested in services directly to the community, for example: Companies hired to rebuild, roads, power plants, sewage systems, schools, hospitals etc.

3. Vocational training should be linked to the different businesses planted and provided for by those corporations.

Johan and Jeannette Lukasse

(Please feel free to write us if you have suggestions or questions.)