WSPA - Animals in Disasters Blog

21 Feb: ARCH’s mobile clinic offers primary vet attention in the streets of Port au Prince

This weekend we’ve been working in the Pelerin area, where children, women and men queued to have their pets vaccinated.

Ten year old Kenny brought his dog Vito, who had an infection. “It has been sick for a long time, but I don’t know any vets and don’t have any money to take it to one”, said Kenny. We gave the dog antibiotics and vitamins, and we’ll come back next week to check its progress.

Now we’ve got the mobile clinic, we can have two lines of people waiting: one outside for dogs, aggressive animals and farm animals, and one inside for cats and wounded animals.

19 Feb: ARCH’s mobile clinic arrives to Haiti

The mobile veterinary clinic donated by the Human Society of Antigua and Barbuda finally arrived in Port au Prince, after more than a week dealing with red tape to bring it in from the Dominican Republic. It crossed the border around five o’clock in the morning with a WSPA team directed by Sergio Vasquez, our disaster management officer from Costa Rica.

Today was also the first day of work for the local vet team hired by ARCH. We treated 189 animals in Lilavois in Port au Prince; mainly dogs and goats, but also pigs, chickens, cows, ducks and cats. They focused on deworming, vaccination and vitamin supplies.

People are coming from everywhere, bringing their animals. It’s clear that a lot of these animals have never been treated by vets before.

Treatment of Haiti's animals continues...

A few days ago we drove out to Lougane to run a temporary clinic. Driving out of town, the landscape becomes calmer. There are fallen buildings here and there, but the greenery tries to compensate for it.

We set up camp under the trees, surrounded by a half-fallen house, a bush full of thorns, a few banana trees and a big mango tree facing a dusty road. A man with a bike and a loudspeaker went around the village announcing our arrival and urging people to bring their animals.  Soon, the first wave of goats arrived, followed by pigs, cattle, dogs, more goats and some of the wildest cats on earth. Our team got busy administering anthrax and rabies vaccines, vitamins and specific treatments for specific cases.

After noon, when everybody returned from praying, there was such a huge influx of people that we could not cope, so we promised to come back the next day.

At the end of each day, we have to look around for ice for the vaccines and gasoline for the vehicles and generator, secure the vehicles, close the gate, bring buckets of water for the toilet (it makes you appreciate running water!), wash, eat, sort out the equipment, plan for the next day, count the day’s output, discuss lessons we have learnt, have a beer, turn on the emergency generator to try and send messages to our loved ones and go to bed early, as a similar day awaits early in the morning.  Falling asleep is easy.

The Haitian Ministry of Agriculture has sent us two Haitian veterinarians to add to our team. We are Haitian, Dominican and American, speaking French, Creole, English and Spanish, so communication is interesting!

It rained in the morning, so the streets surrounding emergency shelters and fallen buildings look like bean soup. There are still lots of broken pipes causing little streams everywhere, which people are jumping over and dogs are drinking.

Tomorrow we’re heading into Port au Prince to treat as many dogs as we can. There are no reliable records on how many have been vaccinated against rabies, so we’ll have to do a bit of our own research. We’re stocked with about 3 months worth of medicines, so I hope we’ll get to Port au Prince safely.

Hope for Haiti one month later

The ARCH team has helped nearly 2,000 animals in the weeks following the devastating earthquake.

It’s been one month since the earthquake in Haiti and WSPA and the ARCH coalition went in to help. In those days we’ve remained focused on our mission, and together we are helping make a difference for Haiti’s animals. The outpouring of support we received has propelled us.

I arrived in Haiti just six days after the earthquake hit, and even after being involved with 36 disasters for WSPA nothing could prepare me for the destruction that I would see. My memories of the city of Port-au-Prince are basically all that remain.

When I first arrived to assess the impact the earthquake has had on Haiti’s animals I saw little difference from my previous visits to Haiti — until we arrived in the epicentre of the quake. People were begging for food and for help, living in tent cities and tent camps. The human side of this disaster touches me deeply. What allows me to go on, in this and every disaster, is the knowledge that no matter how bad I feel focusing on my mission will help both people and animals.

After our assessment was complete, WSPA left Haiti to focus on the long-term plans. Our ARCH partners remained to respond to the immediate needs of animals on the ground with an eight-person team of trained experts who have been on a rotation in the field.

Over the last few weeks, the ARCH field team has been moving from neighbourhood to neighbourhood doing vaccinations, de-worming and providing treatments. Our other partners from IFAW, SODOPRECA and Best Friends have been part of this rotation, working together day and night. The collaboration between animal welfare groups has been vital to ensuring the immediate needs of Haiti’s animals are met. So far, that dedicated team has come to the aid of nearly 2,000 animals.

Early on, we mentioned a mobile clinic that had been so generously donated by the Antigua and Barbuda Humane Society. You may have wondered what happened to it. The mobile clinic arrived in the Dominican Republic via ship this week. Dr. Sergio Vásquez, WSPA’s Disaster Management Veterinary Officer is in the Dominican Republic managing all of the logistics relating to the mobile clinic and the purchasing of medicine and supplies for our entire mission.

The mobile clinic is in the process of being cleared by customs. We expect it to be cleared in the next few days, and we are making every effort to get the mobile clinic into Haiti by the end of next week. Once it arrives, the primary focus will be to continue to do vaccinations and prevent disease outbreak in Port-au-Prince.

There are two parts to what WSPA and ARCH need to do in Haiti: first to respond to the here and now, and then to make sure that the future is better.

With the collapse of the city came the collapse of the veterinary system. Our mission in Haiti is also to ensure that we rebuild this fragile country’s veterinary services for the long-term. We must help to establish an infrastructure for animals that keeps one important thing at heart: animals matter.

As I write this, Gerardo Huertas, WSPA’s Disaster Operations Director is on the ground in Haiti working with the Government on a plan to provide long-term support for the country’s animals. This plan is so important — if we intend to spend over one million dollars we need to ensure that it’s done right. As you can imagine, when a country is in ruins and government officials have no offices, these things take time.

As we move forward on our mission in Haiti, it is these long-term goals that we keep in mind, and it is what guides our work at WSPA. We will be working alongside the Haitian government, the Haitian vets and the Haitian people so that Haiti’s animals have a better life. We will make sure that long after WSPA has gone, Haiti has the skills and the resources to carry on without us and help its animals.

For everyone that has helped us to achieve so much in just one month, I thank you. There are many more days ahead of us, and your support helps so very much.

Haiti's animals thank you

We can’t thank you enough. The outpouring of supportive feedback and donations towards our disaster relief fund to help animals in Haiti has been absolutely remarkable. We’re in a great position to deliver the long-term rehabilitation that the animals and citizens of this grief-stricken, battered country are so desperately depending on.

In the first days following the earthquake in Haiti, WSPA and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) came together to set up the Animal Relief Coalition for Haiti (ARCH) so that animal welfare organizations wanting to help the animals of Haiti could work together and take joint action for maximum impact. ARCH now has 19 member organizations acting together in Haiti. The coalition has just completed an assessment of the animal welfare situation in Haiti in order to develop an effective course of action for the coming weeks and months.

The ARCH coalition plans to spend in excess of $1.2million in Haiti on short and long-term initiatives that will not only help Haiti’s animals but also the people who rely on them. Some coalition members (including IFAW) are currently in the field treating anywhere from 50 to 100 animals a day and others (including WSPA) are preparing for the long-term rehabilitation efforts from the safe corridor – Santo Domingo. The WSPA staff plan to return to Haiti in about a week to begin carrying out the formalized long-term plan that we’ve been frantically working on.

It may not seem exciting that we’re currently in the background working out the long-term course of action. However, it’s important work that must be done and when we return to Haiti we’ll do our best to share the first-hand accounts of what we’re witnessing on the ground. In the meantime I thought you would appreciate seeing this video from our coalition partner, IFAW. Watch as Dr. Dick Green recounts some remarkable stories from the front lines of the disaster.

As with any recovery operation that WSPA undertakes after a disaster, we are working in close consultation with the government and international agencies. At present we are in the process of working out a Memorandum of Understanding with the government of Haiti, in order to plan the most effective way to rebuild and reinforce the country’s veterinary infrastructure. Although we are working with a proposal that could cost in excess of $1.2million, working together with our partners in ARCH means this financial challenge will be shared amongst us.

Donations you contribute to WSPA’s Animals in Disasters fund will be used to finance both the immediate and long term recovery work for Haiti and, if we raise more money than is required for our Haiti relief effort, we will keep these donations in our disaster fund to prepare for any future disasters.

Once again, thank you for supporting WSPA’s work and the ARCH coalition enabling us to respond to crisis with the urgency required. We’ll continue to update you as this critical mission progresses.