Day Minus 1: Food Distribution

Tuesday went fairly well. We got one of the trucks stuck in a muddy ditch for a while but overcame it pretty quickly.

As we went to each location, I expected to see the desperate and dying like I had seen on previous visits to Jacmel. However, it became clear by the afternoon that in the few months that had passed since my previous visit to Jacmel that food security in the area was improving. There were far fewer cases of critical need than we had expected. By early evening we had decided to redirect the planned 2000 sacks of rice to an area of greater need. There is an area near PaP called Cite Soleil that is nearly always in critical need. I’d spoken to the head of another NGO in Haiti we will call Bill. Bill’s organization had been operating in Cite Soleil for many years. We had teamed up with them a few times in the past in order to get food distributed in Cite Soleil. We were planning to distribute a few thousand sacks with Bill after our Jacmel distribution. When we saw the need level in Jamel, we decided that the more critical need was in Cite Soleil and diverted the next rice shipment to Bill’s warehouse in PaP for staging. I called Bill and told him that we would meet his team at the warehouse the next day and also told DJ to prepare to travel back to PaP in the morning.