Please turn your attention back to Haiti for a moment
May 24th, 2010
While U.S. attention
on Haiti is waning, the needs there
are great. Here, a young boy walks through cesspools
gathering near Champ de Mars Plaza in Port-au-Prince…
A spontaneous settlement popped up in the hillsides
near Meyotte, despite fears that these tents
are at imminent risk of landslide
and flooding…
“What does Haiti
need right now?” Answers included
shelter, safety from sexual violence, translators for troops,
the provision of water, election support, diphtheria immunoglobulin,
infrastructure development, political capacity building, a free-trade
agreement, agricultural investment and schools. Even with
billions of dollars headed to Haiti, it was clear the list
of needs far outweighs the
funds available.
Mr. Chairman,
members of the committee,
my name is Sean Penn. I have been in Haiti
as Director and CEO of my NGO J/P Haitian Relief
Organization, and have been on the ground in Haiti since
the first week following January’s earthquake. Since that time,
my team and I have lived in a tent camp in the Bourdon area of Port au Prince,
adjacent to and administering aid to a 55,000 person IDP camp, one
of the largest ad-hoc camps in the country. My organization
has been designated by the UN International Office
of Migration as camp management
for this IDP camp.
From our first days in Haiti,
my team and I witnessed amputations without
anesthesia or IV pain medication, things we soon were able
to supply to hospitals and clinics throughout the city and the country.
Limbs severed in spontaneously raised tent operating rooms, dusty and mosquito
ridden. Limbs severed from children with tools more familiar to our local
hardware store than to those we traditionally expect in the hands
of surgeons. It is true that this stage of post quake
trauma and drama has largely
subsided.
Only 2 weeks ago
however, a less tangible, visible
or fundable emergency raised its head.
Our camp clinic diagnosed what became the first
confirmed case of diphtheria. I rode in the back of the
ambulance while the patient was refused from several hospitals
because the 15-year-old boy, Oriole Lynn Peter, was diagnosed with
a disease for which those hospitals had no treatment capability. In this
city of ruins, 5 fully functional hospitals have been allowed to close despite
these emergent disasters, facing financial under-support and over-scrutiny.
In many cases, the bureaucracy of international aid is protecting people to death.
Diphtheria is among the first five things that an American traveling to Haiti is
inoculated against, and yet, in this devastated country with hundreds of
millions of American donated dollars of dedicated emergency aid and
billions pledged for reconstruction, there were no isolation wards,
few ventilators, and despite the all out last minute efforts…it
took 14 hours between all of these organizations to locate
a single patient dose of the immunoglobulin that would
likely have saved this 15 year old boy’s
life had it been readily
available.
As we rode through
the rubble and traffic blocked streets
in search of his care I held the ankle of an animated
and normal 15-year-old boy who to his own knowledge was merely
suffering from a sore throat and a bit of a fever. He couldn’t
have known that the grey hued bacteria would
kill him within a day and
a half and it did.
