Wednesday, January 13, 2010

"Today, we are all Haitians." Part 3

Here is another roundup of stories that caught our interest in regards to the Haitian earthquake.

In this story from Canada's National Post, we learn about the death of a Canadian nurse that just arrived on the island.

An Ontario nurse killed while volunteering in Haiti when the deadly earthquake struck has been identified by her church as Yvonne Martin.

The Waterloo Mennonite Brethren Church identified Ms. Martin on its website, along with a written memorial to the nurse, who had arrived in Haiti just 90 minutes before the quake hit.

"It is with a heavy heart that I share with you the death of our dear sister, Yvonne Martin," said the statement on the Waterloo church's website. "Yvonne passed away as the result of the earthquake in Haiti, where she had just arrived to do medical mission work for the fourth time."

Ms. Martin, who would have been 68 this year, was part of a team of seven people from the Kitchener-based Evangelical Missionary Church in Canada who had arrived in Port-au-Prince Tuesday afternoon to provide humanitarian assistance to several northern Haitian communities. According to the church, Ms. Martin and her colleagues - all from southern Ontario - had just checked into a guesthouse when the earthquake started and the building collapsed. Ms. Martin was killed but her colleagues managed to escape. The church says it learned of her death Wednesday morning.

Ms. Martin was well-known in the Elmira area and worked at the Elmira Medical Clinic for more than 30 years.

Colleague Val Thomson told the National Post that Ms. Martin was "one of the most kind people I've ever met."

Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2438230#ixzz0cXxqM3eL
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The Kentucky Post has this video of the charity Matthew 25 which is prepairing to ship goods to Haiti.



In our first roundup of stories we linked to a story of a Michigan charity that lost contact with it's orphanage in Haiti. This story from MSNBC brings us the story for a church in Pennsylvania going through a similar dilemma.

“We lost [contact with] our building,” Crespo said after a magnitude-7 earthquake Tuesday crumpled most structures in Port-au-Prince, the poverty-stricken capital of 8 million people. He and three other staff members from the nondenominational church were desperate to get to the site as quickly as possible, taking with them food, medicine and a tent to house the 11 children and five staff members.

They don’t know what they’ll find when they get to the orphanage, which the church operates along with with Hope Point Community Church of Spartanburg, S.C., and Rice Bowls, a nonprofit ministry that partners with orphanages in underdeveloped communities around the world.

“We’re expecting the worst,” said Crespo, whose mission is just the spearhead of an effort that will see his wife, Luz, and numerous other church members flooding the Santos neighborhood, where the orphanage once stood, in the coming weeks.

They’re not even sure how they’ll get there, because most flights to the country are canceled, and communications remain difficult.

Crespo planned to take the team on a flight Wednesday night to Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. From there, they hoped to find ground transportation and a route through the devastation.

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