A meeting in Miami to map out the Order’s future actions
Immediately after giving birth in the Darbonne health centre, a young Haitian mother decided to name her baby Jim Malte in recognition of the assistance given by the Order of Malta’s international relief corps. Little Jim, one of the latest to be born on the island, was helped into the world by Malteser International. The corps has concentrated its humanitarian and medical aid on the children, the orphans and the mothers who had survived the earthquake which caused two hundred thousand deaths and over a million homeless.
Over the first two months the Order’s relief corps assisted over seven thousand survivors in the capital Port-au-Prince and the townships of Léogane and Darbonne. In cooperation with local partners, the Order’s volunteers managed to distribute food, soap, mattresses, blankets and basic necessities to over a thousand survivors and to ninety children from an orphanage completely destroyed by the quake in Léogane. In Petit Guave, together with the Arche Nova organization, Malteser International provides drinking water for seven hundred families. In Milot, in the north of the country where the Order has for many years supported the Sacre Coeur hospital, volunteers distribute thousands of food rations daily to those injured in the earthquake and their families who have found refuge in the health centre.
Little Jim Malte is one of the signs of hope to gladden the hearts of the Order of Malta’s international team, consisting of doctors, nurses, logistics experts and local volunteers.
Taking stock and future strategies in a meeting in Miami
The day after the meeting in Miami among all the associations and the Order’s international relief corps who had arrived in Haiti to help the earthquake victims, the Order’s Grand Hospitaller Albrecht Boeselager specified that the Order’s action priorities in Haiti will be basic healthcare with clinics and mobile units, vaccination campaigns, psycho-social assistance, access to drinking water and reduction of poverty. The aim – as always after disasters of this magnitude – remains that of integrating the assistance into the local infrastructure to support long-term reconstruction.
Photo: Westfälische Nachrichten/Jürgen Peperhowe.
