Today was another 4:30am distribution that took place this morning in Tabarre, which is about 15 minutes from Port-au-Prince. We all got up when the moon was still happily hanging high in the night sky. All the Tzu Chi volunteers got into the 5 pick-up trucks/SUVs to head to a local Public School site for distribution for 800 families. When the gates opened the U.S. Army was already waiting for us, ready to assist in security measures. Everyone started to set up the site for distribution around 5:00am in conjunction with the U.S. army troops. I was put in charge of all the volunteers, because I am the only one that can communicate with them. We had a good turn out, 35 local volunteers showed up, I was super ecstatic. Super excited. We all got to work. We unloaded all 800 rice bags and waterproof tarps for the families. The distribution started at 6:30am and all the families started to pour in. Only one representative can come in for each family with one voucher to receive a bag of rice and a waterproof tarp. There were probably close to 2, 000 people outside the gates waiting to come in when we started. We started with the usual ceremony, where we introduce the Tzu Chi Foundation and we have singing/dancing segments. Mandarin sign language was also Incorporated into the program. Each distribution we would have the first group do an opening demonstration of distribution. So 10 Si Guo and Si Bro would stand in a line in front of 10 Haitians and bow to give them the goods. Today since we each had a bag of rice, it was super heavy. Oh my goodness. Normally carrying the rice was okay, but then when you have it in your arms, where the bag of rice rests on both of your forearms, the muscle group usually doesn't get used much. (There is a reason why you see everyone, mostly women, carrying heavy or large bags/container on their heads, this reduces the load due to your whole body working, instead of just your arms). So it was super heavy that way. It did not help that the person next to me kept on laughing because she couldn't hold it and then I started laughing. It was such an ordeal, we were trying to smile and laugh and cry all at the same time. The Si Bro next to us kept on saying, "Stop shaking so much and look forward." Yeah, needless to say, our forearm and bi-cep muscles had quite the shock this morning.
After the distribution ended, the U.S. army escorted each car, by foot, to the end of the road. There was a small mob/riot outside so they wanted to make sure we got out of there safely. I got to say, the U.S. Military has been the most reliable one and most organized/serious group we've worked with here so far. So a big thank you to our men and women in uniform. We returned back to the compound at around 9:00am and I had a quick second to grab some breakfast before being pulled out to do translations for the clinic. There were many new local volunteers that came today to help out with the clinic, since we are severely short staffed at this moment. We also hired some local doctors to help us carry the clinic onto the next rotation of Tzu Chi medical team.
Around 11am, a couple of of volunteers and I headed to the main UN headquarters here in Port-au-Prince. Oh my goodness, was I excited!!!! Eh, more like ecstatic. Going to the UN and working with the UN was on my priority to-do list for Haiti. I wanted to learn about how everything worked and how each department delegated tasks in the country. When we got to the UN compound, I was pretty much like a kid in a candy store, just looking at everything and smiling non-stop. I literally couldn't keep my excitement in. The whole UN is made up of disaster shelter boxes/trailers. They were especially designed to withstand natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons, etc. The section that we went to was especially for Army organizations. The sections were made into different clusters, such as food cluster, shelter cluster, gasoline clusters, etc. For all the organizations that are doing relief distribution here in Haiti, they must report to the UN to update them on the status of their relief efforts and to coordinate collaborations of project if need be. For Tzu Chi, we were going to conduct a distribution with food and shelter for the earthquake victims. Whenever there is food involve, one must head directly to the food cluster for approval. So that was exactly what we did. We got the clearance from the food cluster and then we headed toward JOTC to get further clearance and approval for army protection measures. Usually the UN has a daily meeting at noon, so as long as the distribution plan was administered before noon, we can all go attend the meeting together. So the four of us went and sat down at the meeting. So it was definitely a meeting at the UN because there were so many different races, ethnic backgrounds, languages, cultures, and occupations in the room. The different organizations consisted of: UNICEF, UNHAS, IMO, World Vision, Medicine sans frontiers, International Medicine, Red Cross (from various countries), World Food Program, Canadian Army, U.S. Army, U.S. Marines, Brazilian Army, Gendermaire (French Military Police), UN engineers, and Tzu Chi. We went over all the missions that were happening this week and next week to go over logistics and who was in charge of what mission. For Tzu Chi all the mission went to the Canadian Military Troops, because the U.S. army was too busy with other cases. We shall see how well the planning process goes. After the meeting was over, we headed to Delmas to do one of Saturday's distribution follow-up meeting. It was at a local church and we were going there to hand the father some vouchers to pass out to the families. After that we headed to Tabarre to do a site assessment at an orphanage/church camp. Many of the children were sleeping on the dirt outside with barely anything covering them. We talked about all the logistics and started to set up the procedures to do a distribution for next week.
We got back to the OECC compound at around 4pm and had a quick lunch to refuel myself. I grabbed some papers, shortly after, to go interview all the local translators, doctors, drivers, and dentists. All the translators and I started to get into this intense conversation about music and hobbies. I learned quite a lot about all of them. It was great. I think they were dying for someone to speak to them in their language who was closer to their age. We all hit it off really well. The new translators that came today were super cool, as well. We ended our conversations by breaking out into song. It was an awesome Haitian jam session I would say.
At around 5:15pm the trucks from Dominican Republic came to OECC. These were 40 feet deep storage trucks that came in with all of our shipments. One was from Taiwan and one was from LA. We started to unload the trucks with a line of people forming triangle shapes. It was going super fast until like 35min in, people started to get really tired. About an hour in, we were only half way done. It was pretty ridiculous how many boxes of instant noodles, rice, cookies, and bread there were. WOW! It was good though, because now there are a lot more food to distribute for the Haitians. It took us about two and a half hours to finish unloading the whole truck. HOLY MOLIE! I had a good work out last night. First it was the bags of rice, then the truck full of food. Man I should really go run a marathon. haha. probably won't last like 10 minutes.
After a quick dinner, we all headed to do the Skype meeting with Master Cheng Yen. Lots of report writing tonight...
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