Charity Helps Growing Number on Haiti/D.R. Border
COCONUT CREEK, Fla. (July 7, 2015) – As numbers of desperate people are reported to grow along the Haiti/D.R. border, the relief and development organization Food For The Poor is responding to an urgent request for help with food, water, hygiene supplies and baby-care items. Today, the charity is working to send a doctor to one of the camps where children appear to be suffering from malnutrition.
More than 30,000 people now make up the influx of people arriving from the Dominican Republic. The number has been reported by the governments of Haiti and the D.R., which share a border on the island of Hispaniola.
“What we are seeing is inhumane,” said Bishop Ogé Beauvoir, Executive Director of FFP-Haiti, who has traveled with staff members to deliver aid to several of the affected areas. “It is not normal for human beings to be treated like this.”
The charity is providing aid to Pacado and Téte-á-l’eau in the Anse á Pitre area, and in Malpasse. It was in Malpasse on Friday, in a camp called Fond Bayard, that the state of the women and children shocked even those used to serving people in desperate situations.
“The children were in a very weak state. The people there had no food and no way to cook, so we had to prepare food in our canteen in Port-au-Prince and take it out to them. We will continue to make regular trips, as they are in a dire situation,” said Beauvoir.
The relief team returned on Monday with clean water and supplies.
Aid is being distributed from the FFP-Haiti warehouse in Port-au-Prince, and from a second distribution center in Cap-Haitien. Eight tractor-trailer loads of aid were unloaded and delivered last week. Eight more are leaving the Coconut Creek headquarters today.
Food For The Poor staff are working to secure rehydration salts, rice meals, beans, corn meal, and baby supplies, along with dishes and eating utensils. Bleach and other cleaning supplies are needed to fight a resurgence of cholera and other threats of disease.
The situation is the result of a change in the D.R.’s Constitutional Court in 2013, which removed citizenship from anyone born after 1929 who doesn’t have one parent of Dominican blood. The country later decided that those affected could apply for a residency permit, with a deadline of Feb. 1, 2015.
Food For The Poor, named by The Chronicle of Philanthropy as the largest international relief and development organization in the nation, does much more than feed millions of the hungry poor in 17 countries of the Caribbean and Latin America. This interdenominational Christian ministry provides emergency relief assistance, clean water, medicines, educational materials, homes, support for orphans and the aged, skills training and micro-enterprise development assistance, with more than 95 percent of all donations going directly to programs that help the poor.
Kathy Skipper
Director of Public Relations
954-427-2222 x 6614
[email protected]