Haitian American Friendship Foundation
P.O. Box 3421 North Fort Myers, Florida 33918-3421
Haiti cell 011.509.3726.2017 email: USOffice@HAFF.org www.HAFF.org
La Fondation de l’Amitie Haitiano-Americaine






18 January, 2010 HAFF Haiti Earthquake Response Plan


Dear friends of HAFF,
So many of you have emailed or called us over the past few days, expressing your sadness for Haiti’s situation and your prayers for the people here. This has been such an encouragement to all of us and to our Haitian friends and neighbors. Thank you for reaching out and enveloping us with your support.

Many of you have also asked us how specifically you can help with the situation down here. We apologize for being so late in getting back to you, but because so many of our community’s young people were in Port-au-Prince at the time of the earthquake, our primary focus was finding them and getting them back home. We also have been focusing on helping the local community find information about the situation in Port-au-Prince and the status of their loved ones, as well as helping them grieve during this initial shock.

We are now prayerfully considering, as a staff, which specific course of action HAFF should next take as an organization in the coming days, weeks, and months. There is so much need and so much devastation that we want to help in the wisest way possible – in the way that God wants us to respond. After discussing and praying together, we feel that we should focus our efforts on our local community, in helping the refugees and displaced victims who will be moving here from the city. There are many relief and aid agencies that are better equipped to address the needs in Port-au-Prince. And while the majority of the devastation happened in Port-au-Prince, this is profoundly impacting people and communities all over the country – include our own community. There is in progress a steady stream of refugees who are leaving Port-au-Prince and returning home to their families in the provinces. Many of our Haitian colleagues, for example, have multiple displaced family members coming to stay with them, since their houses in Port-au-Prince were destroyed. And it is only beginning. Many native Port-au-Prince residents don’t have anywhere else to go, and many could eventually begin coming to our area looking to start a new life. With this new influx of people to our community, many local people are going to be facing more financial challenges, when they didn’t have enough funds to begin with, at a time when food and gas prices are soaring as a result of the quake. We feel strongly that God is leading us to help our local community members as they open their arms to those who have been displaced.

When a disaster strikes a nation, relief is done so that there can be rehabilitation, and then eventually development. While there are many, many areas of Haiti that desperately need pure relief, we feel that our community is in a unique position. It has been actively developing for years, and this means that our period of relief can be shorter than other areas of Haiti might need. It will be applied within the context of a community that has been growing stronger and more stable throughout the years. HAFF’s long-term goal has always been to train up leaders for tomorrow’s Haiti, and we know that God has been preparing and equipping this generation to rise up and help their fellow Haitians. We believe that in this time of immense crisis and need, God is calling HAFF to stand alongside and support our Haitian community.

HAFF has spent over 25 years in the Bohoc/La Jeune community, playing a role in its development and the equipping of its local leaders. Over the past few months, several of us on the HAFF staff have remarked to each other how truly special this community is compared to many other Haitian rural communities. There is much poverty to be sure, but there is a certain stability and together-ness here that is not seen in many other places. God is clearly and visibly at work in this area. Over the past few days of this crisis, the community has demonstrated that they are strong enough to survive this hardship. Many, many families have personally affected by the earthquake (having friends and relatives unaccounted for in Port-au-Prince), yet they have banded together to support each other – in both spiritual and practical ways – and it has been beautiful to see. And many community members – young and old – have taken the initiative by beginning to organize themselves to act. Just this afternoon, for example, two of our former students approached some of the staff with an idea for starting a disaster-response committee, the majority of which would be composed of young university students from our area. And this is just one example of the leadership within our community.

We have been so encouraged by this, and feel that as HAFF responds to this crisis, we do it in a way that gives the community ownership from the very beginning. In the next day or so, we hope to sit down with wise and respected community members, both young and old, to ask them how we as a community can respond and the role that HAFF can play. We hope to follow their lead and support them in tangible, practical ways. For example, as funds become available, we would like to help local families host refugees by providing resources such as bags of food, tarps and blankets, gallons of kerosene, and other much-needed supplies. We also would like to supplement our employees’ salaries to help cover the added costs that they will incur by housing these refugees. We also foresee that there may be a need to transport refugees into the community. When the immediate crisis is over, Haiti is facing months and even years of recovery. We know that relief money doesn’t always last as long as the need is there. But long after this earthquake disappears from the news, the country will be fighting to recover. We hope that by trusting and empowering our Haitian neighbors to rally together and help their countrymen, we will be establishing a good foundation for long-term, sustainable progress in this area.

So here is how you can get involved: if you feel led to donate, please mark your gift to be used as it is most urgently needed, both to meet immediate needs in the community and also to continue to help HAFF support the community in the future. Funds will be used to assist the community’s own efforts to help refugees and those who have lost loved ones, and to continue to invest in the development of the community in the future. Bohoc/La Jeune will still exist long after the relief and aid agencies pull out. We’ve been so encouraged this week as we’ve seen how this community is determined and capable of taking action to help those who have been most affected by the earthquake by welcoming them with the love of Christ. We want to help them do that and hope to support them in whatever ways we can. We hope that you will catch this same vision.

Finally, many of you have expressed the desire to come down to HAFF and help. We are so appreciative of your willingness to drop everything and serve. However, we all feel strongly that, for the moment, in these first few weeks, it is critical that our Haitian brothers and sisters feel empowered to take the lead. Once they have figured out how they as a community want to respond – knowing that we are there to help – there may be some tangible ways that some of you can be of assistance on the ground. And we will let you know when we sense that it is the right time for that. But until that time, please PRAY and GIVE as you are able, to allow us to have resources to pull from as we help the community through this crisis.

Thank you again for your outpouring of love, support, and prayers. We all feel truly blessed by your encouragement, and are passing your encouragement on to everyone that we see.
God bless you,

The HAFF staff
Bohoc, Haiti, W.I.