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UPDATE:

AMURT & AMURTEL

GIVE YOUR HEART TO HAITI

AMURT-HAITI NEWS RELEASE — JANUARY 21, 2010

INITIAL RELIEF EFFORTS – FIRST RESPONSE
When the earthquake struck Haiti, AMURT-Haiti’s experienced and tested staff members were already on the ground, both in Port-Au-Prince and in the Northwest Arbonite. Building upon its community-based Emergency Management Response Plan, honed in Gonaives in the days and weeks after the 2008 hurricanes, and working to overcome numerous travel, communications and other challenges, our team’s response was immediate and impactful. During the first seven days following the disaster, AMURT & AMURTEL assisted more than 15,000 residents, providing daily mobile medical clinics, hot soup kitchens and the distribution of dry food rations. The first steps involved facilitating the transfer of food, medical services, water, and non-food items from the large aid agencies into the hands of smaller community-based groups who are best positioned to effectively facilitate distribution. Supplies arrived last Saturday on a truck overland from the Dominican Republic. The initial intervention targeted those most heavily impacted by the earthquake, providing transport of the wounded as well as supplies to hospitals, and assisting residents in the slum areas of Boudon, Cite O’Kay and Cite Jereme.


CONTINUED & ONGOING RESPONSE

Food
For a number of years, AMURT-Haiti has been one of the World Food Program’s principal partners in Haiti, providing emergency food distribution and food for work development projects in both Port-au-Prince and the Northwest Arbonite. On January 20th, the two agencies signed an open ended Emergency Management contract, that allows AMURT & AMURTEL to distribute food to its local community-based partners. AMURT & AMURTEL have already begun the first major food distributions, initially prioritizing orphanages, refugee camps, slums, local charity groups and community organizations. In the first week, the distribution will include 15 metric tons of rice, beans, canned food and oil for approximately 20,000 area residents of Boudon, Cite O’Kay and Cite Jereme. This will increase in subsequent weeks to include the greater population of these areas, which is over 40,000. AMURT & AMURTEL are also preparing their local partners in the areas of Delmas and Boudon to gradually increase these distributions to include 60,000 people a month over the next 3-month period. The NGO’s goal is to transition from emergency food distribution to food-for-work community-based programs within the first 3-month period of intervention.

Medical
AMURT-Haiti has been providing daily mobile clinics in the valley communities of Boudon, reaching out to the most isolated slum areas. In Delmas, AMURT & AMURTEL are working with our community-based partners providing logistical support and community facilitation, transport of medicine and patients, and providing support for the additional medical volunteers who are beginning to arrive in greater numbers. On January 24, our first formal AMURT & AMURTEL medical team will be arriving to provide mobile clinics in the areas of Delmas and Boudon. Teams will rotate in week or two week long shifts. Over the next weeks, AMURT & AMURTEL will continue expanding support for their established network of community-based partners, to help ensure that supplies arrive in time, are directed to where they are most needed, and that no one remains without medical support.

Ecological Sustainability
Simultaneous with its emergency response, AMURT-Haiti is maintaining and strengthening its long-term focus on developing sustainable solutions for Haiti’s historically challenging problems. In this regard, in collaboration with its long-term partner Trees, Water, People, AMURT & AMURTEL will bring more than 300 Ecological Rocket stoves, a low-cost and sustainable cooking solution using scraps of wood and branches. AMURT & AMURTEL are initiating a stove usage training workshop for the informal camp committees in Boudon and Delmas in the use of the stoves, helping in this way to mitigate the environmental impact of the disaster. The stoves will be part of AMURT’s facilitation allowing local committees to manage mass canteens for the neighborhood’s most vulnerable groups – children, elderly, sick, and people with disabilities.

Community Facilitation
AMURT-Haiti’s greatest strength has always been its development of and relationship with grassroots organizing and local leadership. AMURT & AMURTEL have continued facilitating this work through daily assessments of needs and capacities, holding community forums, and implementing strategies to a decision-making process that is all-inclusive, systematic, and efficient. Our community facilitators have been covering the affected areas immediately surrounding our two bases, in Boudon and Delmas 31, identifying leadership structures, attempting to provide seamless coordination in ongoing food distribution programs. Once stability has been established, the next phase— at present planned to begin in 2 weeks — will be the initiation of regional coordination councils that will maintain overall communication and coordination of our community-based disaster response. The goal of this process is the reduction of inevitable coordination and communication gaps inherent in large-scale disaster response, and the preparation and implementation of a sustainable community-based recovery phase.

Education
At present, AMURTEL runs two Ananda Marga schools with over 200 students at each school. One in the border town of Anse a Pitre and the other one at Bourdon, Port au Prince. They have drinking water and food. One school building is doubling for the time as a communications center. The staff and volunteers at the Bourdon school are distributing cooked food and have established a medical clinic beside it


RECOVERY
AMURT & AMURTEL will continue to align both their immediate and long-term responses through the lens of the human rights-based framework of community empowerment, self-determination, and leadership capacity-building. With its long-term strategic partners, AMURT has begun planning longer-term sustainable programs focusing on nurturing and reinforcing patterns of decentralization, sustainability, and local self-sufficiency so critical to Haiti’s future.

For a better understanding of this approach, please view our past and current community-based projects at our website, http://www.facebook.com/l/c0783;www.amurthaiti.org.

For more information on AMURT UK please visit http://www.amurt.org.uk

UPDATE:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

GIVE YOUR HEART TO HAITI PROGRESS UPDATE – JANUARY 15, 2010

AMURT & AMURTEL staff and volunteers are already on the ground and support teams are flying there in the coming days to assist with operation Give Your Heart to Haiti. Satellite phone contact has been established to personnel in Port Au Prince and the neighboring Dominican Republic as cell phone service is patchy at best. Arrangements are underway to help people receive life-saving services in two ways: through actively collaborating with other agencies to create an emergency and urgent care clinic in Port Au Prince in a badly hit neighborhood close to the airport, and by moving others out of the very volatile areas in Port Au Prince to the northern area, where they will have access to food, water, and shelter being brought in.

1,000 patients have already rushed to the clinic this morning for urgent and emergency care. AMURT & AMURTEL will be sending more doctors, medical and emergency professionals (some of whom have a pre-existing history of working with AMURT & AMURTEL before the earthquake, and have now switched to disaster emergency care), as well as medical supplies to aid several thousand more people that are expected to arrive at this clinic within the next few days. The current supplies have already run out.

AMURT & AMURTEL has more than two decades of experience with relief work in Haiti, and have facilitated many ongoing development projects there. AMURTEL focuses on the particular and special needs of women and children in time of disaster. The teams are responding to this calamity rapidly and effectively, and are committed to stay as long as it takes to alleviate the suffering brought about by this natural disaster.

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