ADRA-UK News Update

Official agreement between ADRA-UK and ADRA Ghana, pictured Dr William Brown, ADRA Ghana Country Director and Bert Smit, ADRA-UK CEO.

How to spend £1.2 million in just 20 months. That is the challenger ADRA-UK has in Ghana.

Working together with its local partner ADRA Ghana, ADRA-UK is implementing a new project in Northern Ghana were the food situation is very precarious. Recent increases in the cost of food combined with extensive drought and reduced rainfall have created an almost desperate situation for tens of thousands of people. This short project will help 10,000 small farmers to receive better seeds, fertilizer and training in improved agriculture and business management.

ADRA Ghana will teach the farmers better business practises including reserving a portion of the produce as seeds for new harvests. This may sound logical but in these areas where people are often experiencing four to six months of hunger each year, living on perhaps just one meal a day. Seeds retained for new planting are thus a very tempting food source. And yet, through the process of reserving and revolving seed, farmers can increase their fields and harvest more in years to come.

Better harvests mean more food and, where possible, surplus to sell on the market. Often farmers will use this extra cash to send their children to school. This is one possible solution to help end poverty in Northern Ghana.

This project, which will benefit over 70,000 people, is made possible by a significant grant from the European Commission. For each pound ADRA-UK raises, the EC gives another £11. This year’s Annual Appeal will help provide the funding for this project.

For more information or to make a donation to this project see our website, adra.org.uk.

You can donate to ADRA here!

While the need for humanitarian aid remains critical in Haiti, the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) is extending increased assistance to hundreds of thousands of affected people through the distribution of basic necessities, including food, water, hygiene items, and medical assistance, says the agency.

Here’s ADRA’s response by the numbers:

4,200,000: Water treatment tablets currently being distributed by ADRA to provide additional access to clean water for affected persons. It takes 20 minutes for one water treatment tablet to purify one liter (33 ounces) of water.

1,300,000: Meals that ADRA has distributed to survivors to date.

1,000,000: Worth of aid in U.S. dollars that ADRA committed to the Haiti earthquake response within hours of the disaster.

200,000: Number of Haitians benefiting from ADRA’s largest water purification system, which was installed on January 28. The new system can provide approximately 17 gallons (or 64 liters) of water per minute, and is currently being managed by a team of ADRA volunteers and local leaders.

153,000: Number of people that ADRA expects to feed during a massive two-week food distribution currently underway in Port-au-Prince, which is being coordinated by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). Each day, ADRA will provide 55 pounds (25 kilograms) of rice rations to 1,700 families, or approximately 10,200 people, which will be enough to feed them for two weeks.

100,000: Number of pounds (45 tons) of rice, beans, oil and salt that were distributed on January 25 to thousands of displaced survivors currently living on the campus of the Haitian Adventist University in southwest Port-au-Prince.

71,000: Value in U.S. dollars of a shipment of medical supplies sent by Orlando-based Florida Hospital on January 21. The donation included 23 palettes of IV solution, IV lines, antibiotics, analgesics, masks, and other emergency supplies, which were given to the Adventist Hospital of Haiti.

55,000: Number of people who have gained access to clean water through 12 additional water points installed by ADRA and partner GlobalMedic across the Carrefour region.

15,000: Value in U.S dollars of medical supplies given for response from Heart to Heart International.

1,000: Number of pounds (454 kilograms) of medical supplies donated by partner International Aid.

40: Pallets of tarps, heavy plastic sheeting, water, hygiene items, generators, infant care supplies, and medical supplies sent through ADRA to Haiti by Harvest Time International, a Florida-based organization.

11: Number of ADRA network offices providing personnel for the ongoing emergency response.

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Source: ADRA International

A massive food distribution scale-up is underway in Haiti to provide food to more than 2 million people in some of the most affected areas of Port-au-Prince, announced the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA).

ADRA expects to feed 10,200 people per day by providing 1,700 food rations. Each ration includes 55 pounds (25 kilograms) of rice and can feed up to six people for several days. As part of the food distribution strategy, only women are being allowed into the distributions sites to receive food. This will help ensure that the food is redistributed equitably among families, according to the UN World Food Programme (WFP). At the end of the 15-day distribution, ADRA will have provided food to 153,000 Haitians.

“This food distribution will bring greatly needed relief to thousands of families in the Carrefour area,” said Mario Ochoa, Executive Vice President for ADRA International and director of ADRA’s Emergency Response Center (ERC) in Haiti. “We believe it is our moral imperative to help these families.”

ADRA, as part of a group of key non-governmental organizations supporting this operation, is working in coordination with the UN Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), including the WFP, to deliver the aid during the two-week period. As part of the plan, 16 distribution points have been designated, including one in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Carrefour, which ADRA will be managing.

“WFP is working with all of its partners to mobilize a regular flow of food to reach all of those devastated by the earthquake,” said WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran.

Sheeran also added that the size of this distribution drive will not only allow for food to reach more people, but also provide increased food stability to affected Haitians.

To read more about this distribution and the key agencies involved, go to CNN.com.

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For donations by telephone call 0870-49 55 808 (only during office hours).

Source: ADRA International

(Photo Credit: Hearly G. Mayr, ADRA International)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti—When a food ration is placed in the open hands of an earthquake survivor in Haiti, the aid has reached the end of a journey that most likely began inside a cluttered United Nations office near Port-au-Prince airport’s only runway.

On this day, as UN staff, humanitarian workers, and international peacekeepers mingle in what has become a busy meeting point within the expansive UN Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) compound, Luiz Camargo, an Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) emergency response team member who is overseeing food procurement in Port-au-Prince, and Jean Max, the volunteer coordinator, arrive with every intention of leaving with more than 100 tons of rice, pinto beans, oil, and salt.

The paper work is first. While a food request was submitted earlier in the week to the UN World Food Programme (WFP) office, which works with humanitarian agencies like ADRA to deliver food more efficiently, the food will go nowhere unless Luiz and Jean Max can find enough trucks to pick it up. They take a cell phone and do some quick calculations to determine the approximate number of food bags that will need moving. More than 4,000.

Walking in and out of offices, they contact a Frenchman with the WFP who seems to have a keen understanding of food and logistics. Luiz gives him a cargo movement request detailing the weight and type of food that needs to be released.

“C’est pour la bouffe”—“It’s for the food”— says the man showing the form to a fellow staffer who looks up from his computer to give the go ahead.

The food will go on four trucks—two large ADRA trucks and two other ones provided at no cost by Handicap International, a non-profit organization working with the UN—but the actual delivery will need to happen elsewhere, a few miles away on the road to Port-au-Prince.

At the gate of the large Shodecosa depot where the WFP is renting hundreds of thousands of square feet of warehouse space to store the food it intends to distribute to hungry Haitians, the process of getting into this restricted area of the city with trucks requires that one have the right combination of approved paperwork, contacts, and language skills to relay in Creole the urgency and importance of being let inside and then out again with dozens of tons of precious, in-demand food. A mob gathers outside. These are mostly young Haitian men looking for work or food. Cars and trucks push forward, inch-by-inch, every time the gate opens wide enough to let a vehicle inside. The traffic in the main road behind starts to pile up. The chaos and the heat appear to have fused together here in this one place.

“Everything is complicated, and it’s the same every day,” says Jean Max.

On the other side of the gate, after the convoy of trucks gets through, the city seems to disappear behind it. Jean Max, who is from Port-au-Prince and knows how to get things done quickly, jumps out of the ADRA pick-up truck and goes to find anyone with authority that will know in which warehouse the food can be located.

It’s early afternoon already and the process of procuring this shipment has been underway since seven o’clock in the morning, if you include the drive from the ADRA command center on the opposite side of the city to the UN by the airport, and then to the depot.

When the food is found, the loading seems to be the easy part. The trucks file in, one at a time, and men load each truck with remarkable efficiency, evidence to the fact that the process of food procurement is not being slowed down here. While they work, they trade jokes and some sing as they load bags of pinto beans from Argentina, rice and vegetable oil from the United States, and salt.

From here on, the movement of food takes on new momentum, as the trucks cross the congested streets of Port-au-Prince on their way to Carrefour, a neighborhood located in the southwest part of the city where ADRA has been distributing aid to thousands of people in recent weeks.

UN peacekeeping troops, already a common sight in the streets, accompany food shipments leaving the depot. Their absence would jeopardize the successful transit of food through the city and, more critically, the safety of those who are responsible for ensuring its delivery.

With the help from Haitian volunteers, they themselves touched by the tragedy, the food will quickly go where it’s needed most.

“Most of them are victims helping victims,” says Jean Max of the volunteers he supervises. “They work with courage and I appreciate what they do.”

Food soon starts arriving in distribution points where it will reach displaced families who are too afraid to return to their homes, mothers and children who are living in makeshift shelters because they lost everything during the earthquake, and to orphans in various parts of Port-au-Prince who have become increasingly vulnerable (click here to read more.)

“We just gave 32 bags of rice to two orphanages around Carrefour,” says Luiz in a message he sends a couple of days later.

The satisfaction woven into the words is palpable.

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Source: ADRA International

Gregory Bien-Aimé, 13, is among many Haitian orphans who have become increasingly vulnerable since the quake.(Photo Credit: Hearly G. Mayr, ADRA International)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti—“We’re not asking for food. We’re begging for food,” says John Dubois, a man who spends his days looking for food to give to hundreds of orphans living in Port-au-Prince.

While humanitarian assistance has reached an increasing number of survivors of the devastating January 12 earthquake, many orphans have not been so fortunate, as the thrust of the international aid that has arrived in the country has gone to displaced populations in and around the affected areas of the Haitian capital.

At the Centre d’Accueil de Carrefour, an orphanage caring for 650 young boys in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Carrefour, the need for food, water, sanitation and shelter has become critical, if not desperate. Since the earthquake, food supplies have decreased dramatically and water access has become unreliable. Children now sleep outdoors in the open, fearful that another earthquake will bring down their dormitories. Meanwhile, access to sanitation is dismal; there are only two functioning toilets for all the children and orphanage staff.

Food in particular remains the biggest concern for Dubois who, on this day, receives a shipment of food at the Adventist and Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) warehouse and delivers it to the orphanage. Since the quake, the staff has been forced to reduce the number of meals from three to two—breakfast and lunch—although the quantity served has not changed, according to the staff.

“We try to keep the children busy playing games so they don’t think about the food,” says Henri Bernard, 50, a staff member of the orphanage whose responsibilities include procuring food and materials.

The situation at the orphanage has never been worse, says Bernard. The few food supplies they have, namely rice, maize, wheat, legumes, and flour, will run out in a few days. Fuel to power a water pump is also nearly exhausted.

“There are only five gallons left,” says Bernard.

On a normal day, the pump, which provides water to the orphanage, can use as much as 10 gallons a day.

“It’s not clean water, but it’s all that is available,” adds Bernard.

Before the quake, the orphanage received public subsidies to cover the cost of day-to-day operations, including fuel. However, those stopped after the disaster. Now, Bernard says, they have to depend on organizations such as ADRA to receive food and other assistance to care for the children. The staff works to make the best out of the current situation.

In an open school courtyard, kitchen staff prepares a meal. A woman stirs a bean stew in a large pot that sits on a bed of hot coals. Others sitting around a table knead a large lump of dough made with maize flour into long single strings. The dough is then tossed into the boiling stew.

“They are making a meal like this, because they don’t have rice,” says Dubois. “Other places don’t even have this much.”

Eleven-year-old Eddy Pierre-Louis came to the orphanage from Léogâne, west of Port-au-Prince, two years ago. His mother died and he was living with an aunt. His father works in a sugar cane plantation, but they haven’t seen each other in years. He speaks in a shy, almost inaudible voice.

“The aftershocks worry him the most,” says Dubois who translates Eddy’s words from Creole.

Since the quake, his prospects, and those of other children like him, look increasingly bleak. While aftershocks continue to instill fear among Haitians, it is the lack of food and water that are likely to make life miserable for Eddy and thousands of orphans.

Meanwhile, devoted volunteers like Dubois will continue to ensure that Haiti’s orphans are not forgotten.

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For donations by telephone call 0870-49 55 808 (only during office hours).

Source: ADRA International

Young children like 2-month old Talia are among the most vulnerable residents of the displaced persons camp in Carrefour, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where ADRA is working to provide relief.(Photo Credit: Hearly G. Mayr, ADRA International)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti—“We slept in the open for three days,” says Suzete Edmond, a 51-year old woman from Martissant, Port-au-Prince, who was at a hospital with her ill son when the earthquake struck Haiti on January 12. The disaster is still clear in her mind.

“Everyone ran outside,” she says. “My heart was pounding. We prayed, because we thought we were going to die.”

Elsewhere, in Port-au-Prince’s Carrefour neighborhood, Michelle Nirline, 21, was inside her family’s house caring for her month-and-a-half old baby girl named Talia. The moment the earth started shaking, she grabbed her child and rushed outside while the house collapsed behind her.

“I was afraid,” she said.

Whether through fortune or providence, Suzete and Michelle managed to survive the worst earthquake to strike Haiti in recorded history. Suddenly, they found themselves without a home, displaced.

The impromptu tent city where they arrived within hours, sits between classroom and administration buildings, a laboratory, and the main school chapel inside the expansive grounds of the Haitian Adventist University in Carrefour. It’s a city of bed sheets strung together, propped up with branches cut down from a nearby stand of trees and cinder blocks from downed walls. Here is where thousands came, shocked and fearful, convinced that buildings were no place to be inside anymore, and where the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) began to assist survivors several days ago.

Suzete sits on the ground inside her makeshift shelter to talk about the situation she is in now. She looks tired. Each day, she does her best to hold her immediate and extended family together—seven children, an ill sister, and two nieces. However, the last 15 days have strained her ability to care for her loved ones. Her sister Magalie Lapaix, 46, lies on the ground on a bed sheet spread over a floor mat. She hardly stands up, as she has been struggling with a sickness that has kept her bedridden since April last year. Since she came to the camp, she has become dehydrated due to vomiting and diarrhea that has not been treated yet. A doctor, working with ADRA partner GlobalMedic, will come within minutes after this interview to give her care.

The disaster also strained the family’s small budget. As a result, Suzete started buying small quantities of food on credit at a local market—rice, maize, millet, and legumes. She did this for days, but now is unsure how long she will be able to do this.

“Food has become two or three times more expensive,” she says. Looking up to the sky, she says, “God, He provides.”

As food distributions increase in the camp, ADRA expects that displaced persons like Suzete will be able to eat better.

“We don’t know how long we will be here,” says Michelle, who is concerned about what will come next for her and her baby girl.

In the last week ADRA has distributed more than 351,000 pounds (159 tons) of rice, beans, oil, and salt inside the camp in Carrefour and among other displaced populations in Port-au-Prince, including another camp where approximately 7,000 displaced persons are staying. ADRA is working in close collaboration with the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) to distribute food to earthquake survivors in Haiti.

“ADRA’s primary concern is to ensure that displaced Haitians receive the aid they so desperately need as quickly as possible,” says Luiz Camargo, a member of the ADRA emergency response team who is coordinating food procurement and distribution with the WFP.

We need your gifts now. Please donate to help!

For donations by telephone call 0870-49 55 808 (only during office hours).

Source: ADRA International