Storm Damage

While we were away at a retreat with our CrossWorld colleagues, Port-au-Prince was hit hard by a storm this week.
Week before last, our friend, Kevin Belmont came and put in a nice, sturdy "staircase" made of discarded car tires filled with dirt so that Francoise could get up and down from the ravine to walk anywhere she needs to go and to tend to her garden that she has planted on the side of the ravine. You can see what looks like a big boulder next to her is actually the ground (the property she is renting to own) where she had planted some corn. Her house is up on the left and the blue tarp is her outhouse, which is now slanting down toward the ravine.


Sadly, many poor people live in ravines or on the edges of them. People like this were hit hard. Of course, certain sections of tent cities were also washed out. Thankfully our friend, Francoise was fine, but the water carried away earth, stones,and some of the "tire stairs". Please pray for the people of this ravine (Puits Blain & Vivy Mitchell) and another one on the other side of our neighborhood in the Delmas 75 area.


The picture below shows the lower tires that got washed away.


There is a good side to this, in that the path where Francoise's neighbors used to walk to get to anything outside of their "neighborhood" is gone--taken away by the water. So now lots of people are appreciating the tire stairs that Kevin built and at the bottom, they hop over to the "earthen boulder" and then hop to other chunks of land or rocks to get to or from their houses.
The down side of this is that something was stolen from Francoise this week and she's concerned that more things will be stolen.
It's interesting to me that her garden doesn't need to have a fence around it. She says that as long as people see her tending the garden, they won't take her produce, only if they think she doesn't live there anymore would they take it.
Another point of good news is that Francoise says that people who had lost everything were going around asking for sheets and clothing and we just received some sheets and towels that were intended for earthquake relief but sitting in customs for about a year. The reason for that was that the person they were sent to went back to the US because of health problems. So, now we have these available to give out.
In the picture below you see Francoise's next door neighbor's house. There used to be vegetation on the side of the ravine and it went gradually down to the bottom. Now it's cut away. The neighbor said that it would cost a huge amount of money to try to fix this.