Tag Archives: Haiti

Building the best shelter for the displaced

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Betsy Baldwin, WV Humanitarian & Emergency Affairs in Causes, Disaster Relief

Late last week — after months of hard work, design, and planning — students from three different schools gathered at John Brown University to present their solutions to the growing need for shelter of displaced people worldwide. World Vision has been on the front lines, responding to the challenge of providing contextually appropriate shelter that offers privacy, security, and refuge from the elements — all while being resistant to future disasters, like flooding and earthquakes. As a part of the World Vision team that responds to emergency situations, I have firsthand knowledge of the importance of temporary shelters and was called upon to judge the student’s designs....

Answers from aid workers about Haiti

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Elizabeth Ranade-Janis in Conversations

Today is the two-year anniversary of the massive earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, leaving the nation in ruins and triggering an international relief response. In the time since, aid workers and relief organizations have experienced an unprecedented level of scrutiny surrounding the response: What is really happening there? Are donations going to good use? Is there hope? To gain some insight into these matters, we hosted an open mic for questions about Haiti this past week. Your submissions have been collected for responses from World Vision aid workers who have been focused on the relief efforts in Haiti — Jeff Wright and Liz Ranade-Janis. Jeff and Liz were deployed to Haiti following the 2010 quake to coordinate...

Haiti will never be a lost cause

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Meg Sattler in Disaster Relief

Haiti, two years later: Never a lost cause | World Vision blog

Last time I flew into Haiti, I was reading Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” I finished it just as the plane hit the tarmac of the broken-down Port-au-Prince airport. As I closed the book, I looked up and realized why it had resonated. The protagonist and his struggles at sea reminded me of this fascinating and broken place I’d come to call home — a country where work happens, struggles continue, and yet “success” or any kind of respite seem so often out of reach. It’s now been two years since the largest earthquake to hit the country in 200 years shook the life out of Port-au-Prince, causing chaos, destruction, death, and leaving more people homeless than...

Do you let the media influence you?

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Elizabeth Ranade-Janis in Conversations

On a recent Friday afternoon, I happily engaged in my favorite nerdy end-of-week work habit, the kind only indulged on a slow week in the world of disaster relief: catching up on the week’s news in disasters while listening to talk radio. While perusing various news sites, I happened to catch an interesting interview with Nobel laureate and psychologist Daniel Kahneman, whose renowned work focuses primarily on behavioral economics, which is more or less the study of why we do the crazy things we do. During this very interesting discussion on cognition and biases, the subject of the media briefly arose, in the context of how we decide what issues are important to us. Kahneman noted that we “tend to...

From heartbreak to hope in Haiti: Two years in photos

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Heidi Isaza in Disaster Relief

From heartbreak to hope | World Vision blog

This week marks the two-year anniversary of the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010. It was the most powerful quake to hit the nation in more than 200 years. The impact was devastating, triggering an international relief and recovery response. Haiti was the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere even before the 2010 quake. * * *...