Accounts of Gressier and Crochu

We still haven’t received any word from our partner congregation in Gressier, but the Boston Haitian Reporter ran this account from Patrick Jean-Louis, who lives in Boston but has a grandmother in Gressier. He had arrived in Haiti the morning of Tuesday the 12th, and twenty-four hours later, running short of food and with no way to let his grandmother know that he and the family members he was staying with were okay, set out for Gressier.

When Jean-Louis and his family arrived at Gressier, however, they found no one there. Many of the residents had moved to the mountains for fear of remaining near unstable structures or for fear of an oncoming tsunami. Jean-Louis joined his family. [...]

Jean Louis promised the citizens of Gressier, now living in makeshift shelters on the district’s mountainside, he would help raise funds for basic needs like tents, medical supplies, and water.

full story

We have received word from Crochu, a small mountain village (and also, I believe, an arrondissement) where St. John’s has done several mobile clinics with Carmel Valdema. Burt Purrington reports:

I was especially worried about Berline (“Méla”) Vètinèl, a recently-graduated nurse and the daughter of Elinèl Vètinèl, the head lay leader at St. Alban’s, Crochu. [...] Last Friday, Berline’s niece, who lives in Atlanta, called to say she’d talked to Berline and her mother and they were all right although they were staying outside their home because of the fear of aftershocks.

She also told me that there had been some damage at Crochu but that Berline’s sister, Tazia, and her family were OK.

This morning, after 10 days of unsuccessful calls from both ways, Tazia and her husband, Louis-Jacques, got through—and I was able to call them back when their calling card got low. [...]

Today I learned that some people in Crochu were injured by the quake, and a cousin of Louis-Jacques was killed (though he may have been in [Port-au-Prince] at the time of the quake). There was considerable damage at and around Plaisance (and I assume most of southwestern Crochu and perhaps all of Crochu). The damage was especially bad in the poorest communities on top of the mountain above Plaisance and Bouzi. Vètinèl’s home collapsed, so Berline doesn’t have a clinic any more. Tazia & Louis-Jacques’s home is badly damaged, and their kitchen & twalèt (probably the best in all of [southwest] Crochu) collapsed. Same with [Louis-Jacques'] mother’s home on top of the mountain. The sewing machines that Tazia and the young women in her sewing co-op use are badly damaged. A generator that [Louis-Jacques] just bought was damaged too. Thankfully, the spring at Plaisance is still flowing, and people can still go down the mountain to buy rice, cooking oil, spaghetti, canned fish, sugar, salt, etc. at the markets in Bon Repos & Croix-des-Bouquets which is good. The people of Crochu, like most people in rural Haiti, depend on store-bought goods from the cities, and they would be in big trouble if supplies of these staples weren’t maintained. Because prices for these goods are considerably inflated now, people in poor areas like Crochu will have even greater difficulties keeping their families fed.