108/108 - Gade yon mirak!

Dear Friends,

"Gade yon mirak" can loosely be translated as "Behold a miracle." Today we tracked down the 2 students who we had not yet heard from. Starting earlier this week, we had sent students out looking for Weaventz Fougette. Today they finally located his neighborhood; however, about the same time they arrived in a remote suburb of Port-au-Prince and met his mother, Weaventz strolled into the HELP student house about 10 miles away, blissfully unaware of the manhunt launched in his name. For the final student, Jovaski Rejouis, we received an email from a friend confirming that he was fine. It is no minor miracle that all 108 students and 8 staff members are alive and well; truly cause for celebration among the HELP family, in the midst of tragedy and loss.

There was lots of activity at the student house today, broken only by students racing outside at the first hint of aftershocks. We now have 20 students staying at the house and another 7 commuting, and Garry declared HELP open for business. Students not volunteering for the Red Cross were put to work getting our temporary office up and running. Electrical engineering students wired the house to run off a small generator and inverter, while an alumni accountant worked with computer science students to retrieve the accounts from a rescued hard drive. Another student, who had worked as a carpenter for a year before applying to HELP, installed new locks on doors and a team of students cooked the traditional lunch of rice and beans. We have been able to recover all but five student folders, and two student advisors began organizing and filing them. ESL teacher Samson Charles braved the destroyed HELP Center to extricate his computer and library books; Samson will begin intensive English classes on Monday.

While we will be able to keep the students busy in the short time, getting HELP and our neighbors back on their feet, we have started to think about how we can get the students back in school. We will be meeting with the universities in the coming days to see what their plans are and then formulate ours. Our goal is to put as many students back in school as quickly as possible and to keep the other students as productive as possible in the relief efforts.

Again, I would like to thank everyone who has donated in the past 10 days. It's hard to explain the conditions I found here. All gas stations and banks were closed, drinking water was scarce, roads were blocked by debris, and the electric grid was down. Water and gas have become less scarce, but banks remain closed, and I think it will be some time before the city's electric grid is back up. In the midst of destruction, scarcity and uncertainty, it has been a tremendous relief not to have to worry about how were were going to fund our relief efforts and to have the resources at hand to do what we thought best. Everyone at HELP is truly grateful! Barely a week after the quake we have accounted for all students and staff, found medical care for those in need, retrieved everything we could from the HELP center, set up temporary headquarters and assigned students to relief work with the Red Cross. None of this would have been possible with you.

Conor