Stories from the field

Giving Haiti the chance it deserves

May 3, 2010

It was just days after the earthquake struck in Haiti, in the early hours of the morning at the Red Cross base camp in Port-au-Prince, when Canadian Red Cross delegate Jean-Pierre Taschereau emerged from his tent, prepared for another lengthy day of conducting emergency assessments. “When I woke up at dawn, I heard gospel coming from a nearby church – which was barely standing amid the rubble. You could hear the people inside singing,” he recalls. “It was amazing to me that amongst all the tragedy I was hearing praise.”

Taschereau led the 29-member Red Cross Field Assessment and Coordination Team (FACT) in the days following the earthquake. “I remember feeling that the scale of our task was simply overwhelming, and to hear the hope and resiliency in the voices of those singing that morning was inspiring,” he says.

Canadian Red Cross delegate Jean-Pierre Taschereau (2nd from right).

With over 1 million people left homeless, the destruction of an already fragile infrastructure, and aid pouring in from all over the world, it had become abundantly clear that this was to be the largest humanitarian operation in the history of the Red Cross.

Later that day, as Taschereau was making his way through the base camp, an incident took place that could characterize the Red Cross mission to Haiti. “A woman had entered the camp and was screaming for help,” he recounts. “As I approached her, I saw she was carrying a very young baby that looked critically ill – I wasn’t sure the child would live.” Taschereau immediately called for emergency assistance.

Medical staff in the camp rushed the child to the Norwegian-Canadian Red Cross field hospital to stabilize the child’s condition and arrange an airlift to the American naval hospital ship, the U.S.S Comfort.

“At that moment, everything stopped. The only thing we were focused on was giving this child the best chance for survival,” Taschereau asserts. “It was like everything we were doing in Haiti, such as coordinating hundreds of aid workers, bringing in thousands of tonnes of relief items and reaching hundreds of thousands of people, suddenly became about one child – one life.”

“If you focus our entire international humanitarian response into this single action it really defines why we are here -- to give Haiti the chance it deserves.”