Foreign Affairs committee  We hire people primarily through the Haitian Red Cross. When we put our plans in place, the construction crews are all Haitian; the supervisors are all Haitian. We also get the communities involved in the construction. We select people from their own communities to do the digging

Foreign Affairs committee  We work with a German organization called Diakonie. It's a Lutheran church organization from Germany. They are building permanent shelters in an area in one of our districts. There's a shelter cluster that decides the Canadian Red Cross can work here or there, so in the part wher

Foreign Affairs committee  It's 7,500.

Foreign Affairs committee  We have 1,200.

Foreign Affairs committee  Slightly more. It's the logistics chain that is the problem—the buildup, and then you can implement.

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes.

Foreign Affairs committee  In Haiti 70% to 80% of the people are renters, so what we need to find is a balance to strike between the landowner and the tenant, because the shelter that we build is given to the tenant, but it is on the land of the owner. Our shelters can actually be taken apart and moved, bu

Foreign Affairs committee  We are doing an enormous amount of work on shelters. We are spending about $60 million dollars to build shelters. There is also the water and the purification of the water. We are working very closely with the Netherlands Red Cross, which is doing that part of the work. As for h

Foreign Affairs committee  An analysis was recently done. Several funds have not yet been paid out. A number of donors seem to be waiting for a new government to be created before advancing these funds. According to the UN report I recently saw, several billions of dollars have not yet been paid.

Foreign Affairs committee  I can speak only for the Canadian Red Cross. There really are safety problems in Haiti. I think that, on average, two police officers are killed each week in Port-au-Prince. The political situation also sometimes prevents us from doing our work. So, last year, we stopped our work

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes. We kept meeting with them. We met with the executive director, Gabriel Verret, through the federation. We kept them informed of the progress we were making. We're still in the emergency recovery stage, so we're still providing them with the information. Shelter was one of t

Foreign Affairs committee  We have our local humanitarian organization, which is the Haitian Red Cross, so we coordinate our work through them for everything. We don't face the same dilemma that way. We work on the higher levels through the federation, and on the local stuff, the Haitian Red Cross already

Foreign Affairs committee  The big question was whether this was going to be a parallel structure to the government in place. That's still not resolved, you see. The political instability in the country has made it even more difficult, because in the last few months very few decisions seem to be coming fro

Foreign Affairs committee  Thanks. Until yesterday I was the country representative of the Canadian Red Cross in Haiti. The year 2010 in Haiti reminds me a bit of the old country and western song that went “If it weren't for bad luck, I wouldn't have luck at all”. Haiti was hit by an earthquake, a cholera