*Guest blog by Nicole Robicheau, Canadian Red Cross delegate in Haiti.
The Red Cross shelter team in the La Montagne region of Jacmel recently discovered an innovative way to get their supplies to the shelter site. Finding it challenging to transport items to the bottom of a mountain by hand, the team decided to enlist the help of a local fisherman’s association to transport the shelter kits across the bay.
“We were carrying the shelter kits for 30 to 40 minutes by hand down the mountain for more than a week,” says Valerie Verougstraete, shelter construction delegate in Jacmel. “The mountain is just on the other side of the bay from where the Red Cross office is in Jacmel so for two days we used 35 foot boats to transport the shelter kits, four kits per trip.”
The United Nations also agreed to help. It volunteered to taxi the carpenters and team leaders in the morning, and bring them back in the afternoon. The rest of the workers were hired from the community to build the shelters.
The shelter team built all 16 shelters in the community by the end of last week.