Gerda Genece’s Lombard Street home is filled with donated items meant for earthquake-ravaged Haiti — tents, food, a wheelchair, a thousand T‑shirts. She fears the donations won’t ever reach their destination.
Genece (pictured), who’s Haitian, said for years she’s been sending money to 15 family members in and around Port au Prince. Five of them died in the earthquake that devastated Haiti in January and sparked a worldwide outpouring of help, including efforts like Genece’s in New Haven.
Seven months after the earthquake, bottlenecks are preventing some of that help from arriving.
Since 2008, Genece also been helping to support 30 children in an orphanage and 40 other people. After the earthquake she started her own informal organization, Hope for Haiti One Family At A Time. She stood outside C‑Town in Fair Haven, the flea market across town and the Western Union, where she was able to collect $4,000 in cash. She sent $2,500 to Haiti, and has saved the rest toward shipping.
Her problems had just begun.
First, she said, it will take $3,500 to ship a 20-foot container, plus another $1,000 to have it released to her contact there once it arrives on the dock at Port au Prince. And, money aside, it’s just very hard for a tiny unofficial organization to get through all the red tape.
“I’m so depressed,” she said in an interview in her home dining room. Her living room, pictured at the top of the story, is filled with boxes and closed off with a curtain from the rest of the house.
“I crashed in the last two weeks. It hurts so much to know the kids there need everything and it’s just sitting here.” She began to cry. “What happened to humanity?
Melinda Tuhus Photo
“I’m not asking people for the money” for the shipment, Genece continued. “I am asking for bodies, for people to help me” raise the money. Asked if she can’t collaborate with a larger, more established group sending aid from New Haven, she said then there’d be no way to make sure what she’s collected gets to the people she collected it for. She’s trying to get it to a man who works at an orphanage in Carrefour, a community in Port au Prince.
That was exactly the problem Church on the Rock ran into in its initial efforts to help her. Pastor Todd Foster the church had no trouble sending a shipment of 100 tents shortly after the earthquake. It was shipped directly from the manufacturer to Louisiana, where it went by ship to Haiti.
“It is such a nightmare of a place to do business,” Foster said, but he had good help in navigating through the red tape. He got help from a pastor at a sister church in Port au Prince. “He’s been down there 25 years and knows how to work the system.”
Foster said his church has just wrapped up a massive collection of items it plans to ship in the next couple of weeks: duffel bags, knapsacks and 2,000 pairs of shoes. Of Genece’s efforts, he said, “She had asked me for help and I said I’d see what I could do. We ran into a road block because she’s trying to get it specifically to a family and we’re trying to get it to an organization to distribute to whoever needs it.”
Sherman Malone, who lives in East Rock, cofounded an organization called Haiti Marycare about 15 years ago. It works with Haitian partners in both Port au Prince and a small village called Jacquesil on the north coast of Haiti, near Cap Hatien. She sympathized with Genece’s plight.
“She’s one of thousands of Haitians here who are suffering from the earthquake,” Malone said.
“There are so many ways to ship,” she added. “It’s really difficult, with huge, long, unexpected waits. The entire port was destroyed by the earthquake and then partially rebuilt by the Americans. But you’re going to be in line behind the Red Cross and other major players. We’re totally different. We operate in collaboration with the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Education and the Catholic Church. We shipped to Cap Haitien; we could not find any way into Port au Prince. We found a shipper out of Miami, then drove a truck down and they took it to Cap Haitien. We recently used a third party to send a second shipment and it took a month longer than they thought it would.”
Corruption aside, Malone said, it’s expensive. “You have to pay port fees and customs fees, and pay people to unload.”
Her group also sent a donated plane full of urgently needed medical and surgical supplies to a hospital in Cap Haitien “because we heard refugees were heading there from Port au Prince for care.”
Allan Appel File Photo
Peter Dodge, proprietor of Edge of the Woods Market on Whalley Avenue, has worked for years with Friends of Haiti, which is part of the Ananda Marga Universal Relief Team. He leapt into action after the earthquake. (Click here for a story about that.)
“We sent a tractor trailer with 96 tents that sleep six, clothes, shoes, pots and pans and tools,” he said on Wednesday. “It left in mid-March, and to get through all the different bureaucracies it took three months.” Then when it arrived, he said the United Nations would not handle the shipment, for fear of it containing contraband because it was shrink-wrapped. “We had such angina trying to get it there. Finally, the World Food Program was able to get it through for us.” He called the process “very depressing,” but noted that everything is needed just as much now as back in January, and that all the tents have been distributed and colleagues in Haiti are in the process of distributing the other items. His group also recently bought land and is planning to build an orphanage.
Dodge said, “It was so lovely when I spoke to people who actually got the things we sent. It was like gold to them. When I found this out I was very happy. This has been one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in my life.”
Asked if he thinks Genece will succeed in her efforts to ship her supplies to her people in Haiti, he replied, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
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