Wyclef Jean distributing food to Haitians in 2008 (Thony Belizaire/Getty Images)
The 7.0 earthquake that struck near Port-au-Prince on January 12 is the worst Haiti has seen in over 200 years. Haiti's government says it buried 170,000, and millions are still in need of help. It was already the most impoverished country in the western hemisphere and nobody yet knows the extent of the devastation.
MoreYesterday, The Haitian Red Cross released its first estimate of the death toll after Tuesday's earthquake. It said between 45,000 and 50,000 people might have died. As the body count rises, relief efforts are intensifying. President Obama promised $100 million and more than 5,000 soldiers and marines, but the aid workers are facing many obstacles reaching the victims.
While most of the relief is still on its way, some aid workers were already in the country before the quake. One of them is Chloe Gans-Rugebregt, a health delegate to the Haiti delegation of The American Red Cross.
For the stateside perspective on relief work, we're joined by Adrian Kerrigan, who is organizing medical relief from New York as president of the Catholic Medical Mission Board.
“I have a friend who's not working for the Red Cross, who's working for another humanitarian organisation, who had five people die in her arms yesterday."
--Chloe Gans-Rugebregt
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Comments [3]
I listen to The Takeaway from 5 AM on in Salt Lake City. But I object to the policy of KCPW of shortening the second hour and ending at 6:40 PM. I thus miss 20 minutes of The Takeaway. Hockenberry does a promo for the program for KCPW in which he says the program goes for two hours from "5 to 7." That statement is of course not true. Can you please help me hear your full two hours.
I was very disappointed by The Takeaway this morning. You had an independent journalist on the phone from Haiti - Ansel something, perhaps? - but cut him off the second he said he didn't see any aid workers. You promised to come back to him and never did. Could this be because you had the US military relief effort coordinator coming up on the show and didn't want to contradict what he might say about aid efforts? To cut off someone on the ground just because he contradicted the comforting narrative that "aid is coming" was shocking to me.
Why can't the US airforce just go and repair the airstrip in Port au Prince, so supplies and help can get in. My father who fought in WW2 described how the army was able to construct an airfield in 2 hours when they needed to, and that was in 1944.
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