** Guest blog by Katie Kallio, Information and Reporting Delegate in Haiti. Katie is part of the team working in the new Canadian Red Cross field hospital.
They say home is where the heart is, and you don’t get much more heart than at the Red Cross base camp in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. We arrived on Friday evening and were welcomed with warm smiles by our fellow Red Crossers (over 150 of th
em!) some of whom have been working here since the earthquake in January.
The site is not fancy, but it is comfortable. We are divided into two sleeping tents with five of us in each. Our travel kits are fully stocked with mosquito domes and sleeping bags, so we did what we could to make our new digs a bit more comfortable. There are latrines just a few steps away and a shower tent around the corner.
Already we have met colleagues from over a dozen countries all here for one shared purpose – to help. With every person I see here I think of the thousands of staff, volunteers and donors from all over the world who made this response possible.
Yesterday, I went out with a colleague to pick up some supplies. Having seen many images of Port-au-Prince after the earthquake I felt prepared for what I would see. I wasn’t. Although the images were familiar, seeing the damage in person is very different. Even now, almost a year later there is still rubble in the streets and collapsed buildings.
We drove back to the camp the same route we came in, however, this time, what struck me wasn’t the rubble or the damaged buildings it was… hope. In spite of all the challenges people here continue to face, they are survivors. Everywhere I looked I saw children playing as their mothers fill buckets with clean water, fathers selling goods at the local market, congregations singing hymns on Sunday morning. If you take a moment and look beyond the rubble, you will see that sometimes the earliest signs of recovery can be the most meaningful.