Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade is offering houses and land to Haitians who were affected by the earthquake. He says his country will offer them a place to live and even a region if the number of Haitians who are interested is great enough. The land would be in fertile country, not the desert, he specified.He referred to Haitians as sons and daughters of Africa, noting that many are thought to have gone to Haiti from Senegal, as slaves.
Basel, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Roger Federer was behind the idea to add an exhibition game to the Australian Open, in order to raise funds for Haiti, and the event was a giant success, says the Open’s organizers. The event raised $200,000 in aid for Haiti, with 15,000 tickets sold, a full house, for Aus$10 each. More money was raised in the stands during the exhibition games. Another 5,000 fans who could not get into the stadium watched on the giant screens outside.
Federer’s team lost 6-7 to Rafael Nadal’s team in a doubles competition.
Team Federer: Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Lleyton Hewitt, Samantha Stosur
Team Nadal: Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Andy Roddick, Kim Clijsters
Links to other sites: Guardian, Roger Federer, TSR (Fre)
© Chappatte, distributed by Globe Cartoon. More cartoons on Chappatte’s web site. Geneva-based Patrick Chappatte works for the International Herald Tribune, for Geneva newspaper Le Temps, and for NZZ am Sonntag. All cartoons reproduced with permission.
UNHCR calls on countries to stop repatriating Haitians
Red Cross offers advice on burying dead
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) -The International Red Cross (ICRC) opened a missing person’s site following the Haiti earthquake, Family Links, Wednesday evening 13 January. It has registered 14,000 messages in less than two days, says Robert Zmmerman, deputy head of the ICRC Central Tracing Agency and Protection Division in Geneva. The ICRC is working closely with the Haitian Red Cross Society, as well as several other national societies, to connect those who are missing, or knowledge of them, and their families.
At the moment there are”primarily two users,” Zimmerman told GenevaLunch. “People outside Haiti and those who are able to register, to make themselves known.” But he adds, this is obviously limiting as long as communication lines are down. Many people “won’t be able to register themselves so we have people, our colleagues, who are feeding in information about the injured” or dead as they find it – in hospitals and on the streets in Haiti. “This is being set up right now, on the spot, but we don’t have details yet for how this is going to go. We’re faced with the same communications problems with our own staff.”
People seeking information about persons missing in Haiti are advised to use the Family Links site. The list can be viewed publicly.
Update 14:45 The continuing struggle to get aid to Haiti after it 7.0 earthquake is creating a massive stream of media coverage. Some of the best sites for keeping up with the unfolding story, from media that already had staff in Haiti:
- BBC’s Americas page
- CNN news updates page
- Reuters, with factboxes
and local sources, which are managing to get news published: Haiti Press Network (Fre) and Haiti United Press (Fre)
Meanwhile, companies and organizations throughout the world are soliciting donations, causing massive confusion for consumers, says Ad Age in the US. Twitter and social networks are being heavily used to ask for money and tell people how to send it, but consumers should be wary and companies should proceed with caution, the advetising industry daily warns.
Haiti earthquake, the aftermath (Photo: Matthew Marek/American Red Cross)
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Several organizations based in Switzerland are spearheading much of the relief effort in Haiti, and they are appealing to the public for funds. Aid has begun pouring into the country, more than 30 hours after the 7.0 scale earthquake that ravaged the capital, Port-au-Prince.
If you live in the Lake Geneva area and you would like to contribute to funds going to Haiti, here is a GenevaLunch selection of key groups, with fund appeals and explanations about their work in the area on their web sites:
Tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of lives may have been lost in the Haiti earthquake late Tuesday 12 January, the United Nations says, but with no official disaster recovery programme underway, measuring the damage and counting the missing from the population of two million is at best difficult. The Roman Catholic archbishop is dead and the senior UN envoy is missing. Medecins Sans Frontiers, which employs 800 people in Haiti, says its three emergency centres were badly damaged and doctors, who are able to provide only first aid, are overwhelmed with trauma patients. Humanitarian agencies and governments are gathering information with diffculty, given broken communications and the scale of the damage, but supplies have begun to arrive in Port-au-Prince, the capital that was badly damaged by the 7.0 earthquake.
Links to other sites: The Globe & Mail, Miami Herald, Medecins Sans Frontiers, Reuters AlertNet, list of major companies pledging aid, updated “snapshot” list of devastation, Times, UK
A major earthquake, 7.0 on the Richter scale, struck Haiti early Tuesday evening, trapping thousands under collapsed buildings, and killing an undetermined number of people. The earthquake hit only 16 km from the capital Port-au-Prince and has been followed by numerous tremors since the main one. The five-story United Nations building collapsed, trapping employees, says the UN, and the presidential palace was reportedly also destroyed. Communication is limited but several countries immediately said they would send emergency teams, food, water and other supplies. Haiti is one of the world’s poorest countries, and has long suffered from a mix of poverty and political instability.
Links to other sites: Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, Guardian, NPR, Xinhua
Shadu, age 3, has lost his mother, DR Congo (image: ICRC June 2009, P Yazdi)
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – More than half of the civilians directly touched by the world’s eight major conflicts have been displaced, and half say they have lost contact with a family member. One in five have lost their livelihood.
These are some of the findings of a statistical and interview set of surveys ordered by the International Red Cross (ICRC), based in Geneva, to ascertain the extent to which civilians today are affected by major conflicts.
The greatest fears mentioned by people surveyed:
A school collapsed in the centre of Port-au-Prince, the second in a week in Haiti, but there are reportedly no fatalities and the extent of the damage is minor compared to that from a school that collapsed in a nearby town last week, killing at least 90 and injuring another 150 people. CNN
