UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has asked former US President Bill Clinton to coordinate relief and reconstruction efforts for Haiti, battered by a 12 January earthquake. Ban asked Clinton “to assume a leadership role in coordinating international aid efforts, from emergency response to new construction of Haiti”, reports CNN. Clinton told Ban he would do the best he could. By some calculations, over $1 billion worldwide has been raised for the relief effort and money is still being collected.
The official death toll from the earthquake has reached 200,000 people, according to Haiti’s Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, who added that another 300,000 are in hospitals and health care centres. He said that over one million people were made homeless and estimated that 250,000 homes and 30,000 businesses had been destroyed.
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Geneva UN and Red Cross groups work on sanitation, health problems
Installing a water reservoir in the women's prison at Petion-Ville. (photo: ©2010 ICRC/M. Kokic/ht-e-00577)
Work for cash, UNDP programme, Haiti 2010 (photo: ©2010 UNDP on flickr)
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The arrest of 10 Americans accompanying a busload of children being illegally carried out of Haiti and into the Dominican Republic 30 January by a US religious organization has raised fears that children may be separated from members of their family who survived the 12 January earthquake in the country. Two Geneva-based groups, the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) and the Geneva office of Unicef, are active in the fight to ensure that children do not become victims of a new Haitian disaster, child trafficking, whether they are orphans or not.
The arrests come as fears are reportedly rising among Haitians of the ancient loup-garou, similar to a werewolf but a predator of children’s spirits, according to the Washington Post.
ICRC’s tracing service, usually deployed in times of conflict, is working closely with the Haitian Red Cross to re-establish family links. Working with lists provided by hospitals and first aid stations, the workers collate information to get families back together. ICRC says almost 1,500 people have been able to make “safe and well” phone calls. So far, it has a list of 25,600 names on its site www.icrc.org/familylinks.
The UN Children’s Fund (Unicef) concentrates on reuniting children with their families.
Estimated site of earthquake, west of Port au Prince. © 2010 ReliefWeb. Click to enlarge
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Relief operations are being coordinated for the victims of a massive earthquake in Haiti, which struck the island nation late afternoon 12 January, and rocked the nearby capital city of Santo Domingo as well.
A Swiss emergency rescue team is on its way to Haiti, the Swiss Department of Foreign Affairs said early Wednesday 13 January. The team will “strengthen the SDC programme office and the Swiss embassy in the country, identify what needs to be done and initiate emergency measures”. The Swiss government is considering deploying Swiss Rescue, a dedicated earthquake search and rescue team.
