Haiti: The Way Food Moves

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti—When a food ration is placed in the open hands of an earthquake survivor in Haiti, the aid has reached the end of a journey that most likely began inside a cluttered United Nations office near Port-au-Prince airport’s only runway.

On this day, as UN staff, humanitarian workers, and international peacekeepers mingle in what has become a busy meeting point within the expansive UN Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) compound, Luiz Camargo, an ADRA emergency response team member who is overseeing food procurement in Port-au-Prince, and Jean Max, the volunteer coordinator, arrive with every intention of leaving with more than 90 metric tons of rice, pinto beans, oil, and salt.

The paper work is first. While a food request was submitted earlier in the week to the UN World Food Programme (WFP) office, which works with humanitarian agencies like ADRA to deliver food more efficiently, the food will go nowhere unless Luiz and Jean Max can find enough trucks to pick it up. They take a cell phone and do some quick calculations to determine the approximate number of food bags that will need moving- more than 4,000.

Walking in and out of offices, they contact a Frenchman with the WFP who seems to have a keen understanding of food and logistics. Luiz gives him a cargo movement request detailing the weight and type of food that needs to be released.

“C’est pour la bouffe”—“It’s for the food”— says the man showing the form to a fellow staffer who looks up from his computer to give the go ahead.

The food will go on four trucks—two large ADRA trucks and two other ones provided at no cost by Handicap International, a non-profit organization working with the UN—but the actual delivery will need to happen elsewhere, a few miles away on the road to Port-au-Prince.

At the gate of the large Shodecosa depot where the WFP is renting hundreds of thousands of square feet of warehouse space to store the food it intends to distribute to hungry Haitians, the process of getting into this restricted area of the city with trucks requires that one have the right combination of approved paperwork, contacts, and language skills to relay in Creole the urgency and importance of being let inside and then out again with dozens of tons of precious, in-demand food. A mob gathers outside. These are mostly young Haitian men looking for work or food. Cars and trucks push forward, inch-by-inch, every time the gate opens wide enough to let a vehicle inside. The traffic in the main road behind starts to pile up. The chaos and the heat appear to have fused together here in this one place.

“Everything is complicated, and it’s the same every day,” says Jean Max.

On the other side of the gate, after the convoy of trucks gets through, the city seems to disappear behind it. Jean Max, who is from Port-au-Prince and knows how to get things done quickly, jumps out of the ADRA pick-up truck and goes to find anyone with authority that will know in which warehouse the food can be located.

It’s early afternoon already and the process of procuring this shipment has been underway since seven o’clock in the morning, if you include the drive from the ADRA command centre on the opposite side of the city to the UN by the airport, and then to the depot.

When the food is found, the loading seems to be the easy part. The trucks file in, one at a time, and men load each truck with remarkable efficiency, evidence to the fact that the process of food procurement is not being slowed down here. While they work, they trade jokes and some sing as they load bags of pinto beans from Argentina, rice and vegetable oil from the United States, and salt.

From here on, the movement of food takes on new momentum, as the trucks cross the congested streets of Port-au-Prince on their way to Carrefour, a neighborhood located in the southwest part of the city where ADRA has been distributing aid to thousands of people in recent weeks.

UN peacekeeping troops, already a common sight in the streets, accompany food shipments leaving the depot. Their absence would jeopardize the successful transit of food through the city and, more critically, the safety of those who are responsible for ensuring its delivery.

With the help from Haitian volunteers, they themselves touched by the tragedy, the food will quickly go where it’s needed most.

“Most of them are victims helping victims,” says Jean Max of the volunteers he supervises. “They work with courage and I appreciate what they do.”

Food soon starts arriving in distribution points where it will reach displaced families who are too afraid to return to their homes, mothers and children who are living in makeshift shelters because they lost everything during the earthquake, and to orphans in various parts of Port-au-Prince who have become increasingly vulnerable.

“We just gave 32 bags of rice to two orphanages around Carrefour,” says Luiz in a message he sends a couple of days later.

The satisfaction woven into the words is palpable.

If you would like to support ADRA’s relief efforts, give online to the Haiti Earthquake Response Fund, or by phone at 1-888-274-2372.

Author: Hearly Mayr, ADRA International