Port-au-Prince is PEOPLE! It's People!

Quick update - we haven't heard word if our children are safe. Isabelle, if you read this please email me @ lolorosen at rapidwave dot net

Our creche is called Hope for Little Angels of Haiti. It's very small - only 68 children. ONLY 68 children.

It's located in Carrefour. That's where the epicenter of the quake was.

We were watching MSN last night and there was a video of the scene at the Presidential Plaza. It's that Plaza that gives our hotel the name LePlaza. We know these places as the camera scanned around and went down side streets.

And then, suddenly, there was the orange wall. That's our hotel. That WAS our hotel. We love those orange walls because you can pick them out from blocks away in the back of the taptap and know that we're almost home.

I want to have someone front-kick whoever the "Former US Ambassador to Haiti" dude was that was on CNN all night last night. From the sounds of it, he must have been great. To hear him talk about how the population in PAP went from the 250K mark in the 1950s to the 2 million+ mark now and for him to say that it's "all due to a lack of birth control and basic overpopulation".

Bastard.

Have you MET these people, Mr. Faux Ambassador?? They aren't fornicating rabbits. Yes, there is a lack of birth control in Haiti. There's also a lack of education. There's also an astronomically high instance of rape. There's also a lack of skills for people to farm or otherwise take care of their families elsewhere.

People live where they can get water and there isn't an infrastructure for that to be accessible elsewhere. People live where they can find a way to get food for their families (you know... the ones they created by fornicating, you big jerk). If you didn't have a skill or a trade and all you could do to try to survive with the people you love was try to find something to sell on the streets - you go where there are people there to see whatever it is you're trying to sell.

I've met some of these people, Mr. Former Ambassador. I have friends behind that broken orange wall that I saw on the news.

People like Valdimir and Jean Claude and Michael. There are staff at the hotel that I've seen more often in the last 2 years than I've seen my own family members.

When we were there last October, Vladimir brought his fiance down to meet us all.
He introduced us to Vanessa as his mother, his father, his grandmother, his son, his daughter. Because he thinks of us as family. We take care of each other. We care about each other as people, and not just as numbers of the victims in that rubble.

Somewhere in that mess is Mackenson and his family - our Haitian Roots child.

Somewhere in that mess are all the other Haitian Roots kids and their families.

Somewhere in that mess in Petionville is our friend, Harry, who is the LDS Bishop in Petionville. That means that he's told Heavenly Father he'll be responsible for the temporal and spiritual welfare for all the people in the congregation. He's also our coordinator for our orphanage. Our contacts are desperately trying to get in touch with him. We need to know that they're OK, not just because of our kids, we have friends that feel like family there. And right now, if they're OK, they're in the middle of trying to make things better for a whole lot of people.

It's not just our two children in Haiti that we're worried about. It's all the people of Haiti.

I've had many people tell us that they want to help. What can we do? Or "you're in our prayers."

Our coordinator also happens to be the Haitian coordinator for the Joint Council on International Children's Services. She's working with her resources right now to figure out where the best next steps are. She's also working with the State Department and the LDS Church Charities to see what we can do to get aid specifically to the orphanages in Haiti. We'll update as soon as we get direction.

But in the mean time, please pray for Haiti - and mean it when you say it. Pray for the people behind our beloved orange wall. Pray for the school children. Pray for the families. Pray for the leaders of all the different churches that are trying to help their congregations. Pray for the orphanages. Pray for the governments to work together. Pray for the best way to help individuals to be found. Pray for relief.

And remember that those are families in Port-au-Prince. They're people.