*Guest blog by Jean-Louis Lukenson, Community Mobilization Officer for the Canadian Red Cross, Léogane, Haiti
It seems like everything can be divided into ‘before the earthquake’ and ‘after the earthquake.’
Before the earthquake, I had been working for the Haitian Red Cross for the past two years. Promoting the values of the Red Cross was important to me, but this was just one of many aspects to my life along with school, family and friends.
It wasn’t until after the earthquake that I understood how essential the Red Cross Movement is for saving the lives so precious to me.
January 12th was a beautiful sunny day. But, as the world now knows, in five short seconds around 4pm, the Haiti that we knew crumbled to the ground.
At first, I couldn’t comprehend what had happened. I wandered out into the street in a daze. People were screaming from all directions. The people who had been in their homes were buried under the rubble. The people who were in the streets lay half buried by falling buildings.
I had only one response in my bones: to save them. These were our sisters and our brothers trapped in graves; we all had the same blood in our veins. I formed a group with other survivors and we got a hold of some axes and shovels. We began to work through the night, pulling people from the rubble, administering first aid and transporting them to the hospital.
As the night turned to day and the days turned into nights our needs changed. We said goodbye to those we could not reach beneath the rubble and began to concentrate on saving the living. For the following three months, I distributed clean water to survivors for the Red Cross.
As the emergency subsided, a new priority became apparent: providing shelter to those who had lost their homes in the earthquake. I then began working as a volunteer in the legal department for the Red Cross shelter program. For the Red Cross, it was imperative that the victims of the earthquake owned their shelters so that they would not find themselves homeless yet a second time. Yet no legal framework existed to assure this. We worked to develop a legal agreement that guaranteed their home would remain their home and they would not face eviction.
Our lives will never be the same as before January 12th, but in the last 12 months I have given all my heart and effort to improve the lives of those who have no possibility, and today we see the results of those efforts. For me this is what it means to work for the Red Cross.