We have received about 2 dozen emails this afternoon, all very similar...
"We just saw on the news...", "..what about the boy's school?", "...where is it at?"
This is a great tragedy & my stomach knotted as I watched in the news cast on American T.V. the young students being pulled from the rummage covered in concrete dust & blood, arms outstretched, face turned upward. Without hearing it, I heard the familiar Haitian cry, "Amway! Amway!". They struggle for a better life & the privilege of going to school is such an honor; an opportunity.
To answer a few questions quickly, simply put, Petionville is between us & Port au Prince. Stephen & David's school is below Petionville & was unaffected by the incident.
A short while ago we received a phone call that a local phone company was trying to rally rescue supplies & could we give. As Stephen, Ron & I rode up to the Gramothe medical clinic on the ATV's, I busied my mind thinking of what I'd need to grab in record time & where I'd go to find it. As we traveled quickly back down the mountain with 3 overflowing backpacks & a big suitcase full of bandaging materials, exam gloves, protective eye wear, face masks, eye drops, bags of i.v. solution, Tylenol, antibiotic cream & just about anything else I thought usable, all I could think of was, "I wish we could have carried more". I know what we sent was helpful, but it's overwhelming to think about.
After we rushed into the gate we placed the bags in the car & Willem was off to meet the person that would take the supplies to the scene of the collapsed school. Since arriving on the scene, Willem has called, reporting another tragedy. A trailer loaded with supplies coming into the area lost it's brakes & ran into a crowd of people, killing many & injuring others.
If you're up for it, below are 3 articles that are quite accurate. I will try to keep everyone posted on further news.
Please pray for the injured & for the families of those who have passed. Please pray for those helping with the rescue efforts. Thank you in advance.
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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (CNN) -- At least 50 people have died in a school collapse in in Petionville, near the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, officials said Friday night.
Haitians try to help victims at a school that collapsed Friday in Petionville, near Port-au-Prince.
At least 100 people have been injured, the Haitian Civil Protection Bureau said. The death toll is expected to rise.
Officials said the school could have held as many as 700 people when the collapse occurred at 10 a.m. (10 a.m. ET) Some students were in class while others were in a playground, Haitian media reported.
"We are looking at major casualties here," Claudon said.
He said dozens of students appeared to be trapped inside but couldn't give an exact number. However, he said it was a typical school day and the building had been crowded.
Most of the students at the College La Promesse Evangelique range in age from 10 to 20, he said, but there are younger ones as well. Haitian press reports said the school has kindergarten, primary and secondary students.
President Rene Preval and Prime Minister Michele Pierre-Louis toured the disaster area.
"I heard and saw with my own eyes children appealing for help," Preval was quoted as saying on the French language www.haitipressnetwork.com.
"We are taking all necessary steps," Pierre-Louis said. " The government has mobilized to save those who can be saved."
Preval asked residents to stay away from the area so police and rescue officials could do their work unimpeded.
Michaele Gedeon, president of Haiti's Red Cross, said she heard the voices of distraught children as rescuers tried to calm them while she was on the phone attempting to coordinate emergency rescue efforts. Watch as the Red Cross official describes the scene »
"On the phone, you can hear so many children, you know, crying, crying and saying, 'this one is dead,' 'that one is dead,' " she said.
Claudon said hundreds of bystanders and rescue workers were digging through the rubble, but "what we need right now is heavy search-and-rescue equipment."
Claudon later said, "local authorities are doing their best."
Fifty to 60 patients, 30 of them severely injured, were taken to Trinite Hospital in Port-au-Prince, said Isabelle Mouniaman Nara, the head of mission in the capital for Medecins sans Frontieres.
Another 150 patients were treated elsewhere, Nara said Friday night.
The situation at Trinite "is under control right now," she said.
Trinite is the only hospital open in Port-au-Prince, the group said. The other two -- General Hospital and Hospital de la Paix -- are closed by strikes.
The school is in an extremely poor part of town, and the roads are nearly impassable, local journalist Clarens Renois said.
A United Nations helicopter was unable to land, Renois said.
"The school is poorly built," said Amelia Shaw, a journalist with United Nations TV who visited the scene.
Renois described the building as "not quite solid" with "weak construction."
The school consisted of two floors with an addition built in the rear over a 200-foot ravine, Shaw said by telephone. The steep hillside, she said, is covered with shanty-like housing on both sides.
The disaster occurred when the second floor crumbled onto the first, Shaw said.
U.S. Ambassador Janet Sanderson expressed her condolences in a note,
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Death toll in Haiti school collapse rises to 30
Jonathan M. Katz, Associated Press Writer –
31 mins ago AP –
People help a person out from under the rubble of a school after it collapsed in Petionville, Haiti, …
PETIONVILLE, Haiti (AP) — A hillside school where roughly 500 students usually crowded into several floors collapsed during classes on Friday, killing at least 30 people and injuring many more. Rescuers used bare hands to pull bleeding students from the wreckage.
More children were believed buried in the rubble of the concrete building, and the death toll was likely to go higher, Yphosiane Vil, an civil protection official, told The Associated Press at the scene.
Neighbors suspected the building was poorly rebuilt after it partially collapsed eight years ago, said Jimmy Germain, a French teacher at the school. He said people who lived just downhill abandoned their land out of fear that the building would tumble onto them, and that the school's owner tried to buy up their vacated properties.
The concrete building's third story was still under construction, and Petionville Mayor Claire Lydie Parent told the AP she suspects a structural defect caused the collapse, not the recent rains.
Police commissioner Francene Moreau says the minister who runs the church-operated school could face criminal charges.
Parent said roughly 500 students from kindergarten through high school attend the school, College La Promesse, in the hills above Port-au-Prince. She did not know how many were inside when it collapsed late Friday morning.
The aid group Doctors Without Borders pulled out 85 people, half with life-threatening injuries, said Max Cosci, director of the group's Belgian contingent in Haiti.
Volunteers arrived with shovels and axes and said they would try to deliver water to others trapped inside.
A swelling crowd erupted with wails and prayers as the injured were carried away and emergency vehicles raced up a winding hill to the school.
"My child, my child!" one mother yelled.
"There are no words for this," the mayor said as the search for survivors intensified.
Haitian President Rene Preval visited the scene to offer his sympathy, and asked onlookers to come down from surrounding buildings that engineers feared might have been destablized by the collapse.
United Nations peacekeepers and Haitian police tried to clear a path for three battalions of military engineers from Brazil, Chile and Ecuador to assist in the rescue.
The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, was sending two helicopters to help, Dominican health minister Bautista Rojas said. France's foreign minister Bernard Kouchner promised to send a rescue team as soon possible.
U.N. military commander Maj. Gen. Carlos Alberto Dos Santos Cruz had to walk uphill to get through the crowd.
"This is going to be an all-day affair," Red Cross official Matt Marek said.
Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, has been struggling to recover from widespread riots over rising food prices, a string of hurricanes and tropical storms that killed nearly 800 people.
The U.N. peacekeepers were sent to Haiti following the bloody ouster of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004 and have improved security by fighting gangs and training local police.
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Twenty killed in Haiti school collapse
Published: Nov. 7, 2008 at 7:53 PM
PORT AU PRINCE, Haiti, Nov. 7 (UPI) -- At least 50 were killed -- including children -- when a school collapsed Friday in an affluent neighborhood outside the Haitian capital, Haitian officials said.
An earlier count of 20 fatalities rose to 50 as rescue personnel worked into the night to search the rubble, Red Cross officials told CNN. Officials said as many as 700 people may have been in the school when it collapsed at 10 a.m. EST, CNN reported.
Those killed when the Promesse College Evangelique school collapsed included students, teachers and neighbors from the Petionville neighborhood, police said.
Poor construction was blamed for the building's collapse, The Miami Herald reported in its online edition.
© 2008 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
& shortly before our departure, Stephen & some of the older girls made turkey & cheese sandwiches for all the children, serving them with chips, juice & yogurt for dessert. The only one missing...
was Melynda, she was getting her hair done!
Who's this?!
