When the rain comes.

There was a somber mood in our work tent this morning.

The day started early for many who are sleeping at “log base” (short for logistics base, where I am housed). There was a torrential down pour at 1 AM and then again at 3 AM. Rain in the tropics isn’t like rain in the northern reaches of world. The rain is wetter here, that is the only way I can describe it and it comes down hard and faster than you realize, and soon everything is wet and flooded. That was the case of most of the camp this morning. Several of my colleagues had leaky tents, I was thankfully not one of them. But still the noise of the rain on your tent was fairly impressive and everyone spent a restless night. The office tent flooded too, anything left on the ground was soaked and there was a dampness to it all.

That said I think most people could have shaken the wetness and a bad nights sleep off but each of us knew that we were still the lucky ones.

That even if our tents had leaked we had tents.

That even if our tarps fell down, we had tarps.

That even if the camp management had failed us in some sense, we had options.

Everyone was thinking of the people in the camp settlements here, the people we have come to assist. The people who have no tents or tarps or camp management. Who sleep under a sheet or under the stars. This is even the case of many of the national staff for UNICEF and something like 500,000 Haitians.

My team has been working on getting tents to orphanages for the last week. I was in charge of the “orphanage” phone for awhile this afternoon and was at a loss to what to say to a women who called asking when we would deliver tents for the children in her care. I didn’t know what to tell her. I know that a logistics team is suppose to go out tomorrow to set up 30 tents but I also knew that her orphanage wasn’t on that list. I know that we are short on tents and so it was possible it would be another week before she received her tents. In the mean time rains threaten everyday if not actual downpours and this is just the beginning. The rainy season calls for 2 to 3 torrential downpours a day of the magnitude of the ones I hear last night. That means a lot of wet, unhappy people, not just at log base but everywhere.

I remembered distinctly two lessons I have learned in my short time here. Don’t promise anything you aren’t delivering yourself and don’t speak about the future but only of the here and now. We are setting up tents today, not we will set up tents next week. The later we know will happen, the former you risk having angrier phone calls then the one I took today. So I told the woman that I understood her worry and that she was on the list but that I didn’t know when her tent would come. That she would receive a call the day the tents were to come and that I was deeply sorry but I couldn’t do more.

This being my first “emergency” experience I don’t know if the rate of relief flow is normal or lower than usual. I don’t understand the bureaucratic complications that mean that although I have the tents and I need the tents, I can’t take them yet to be set-up. So tomorrow I am hoping to have tents, I am hoping to be able to make some phone calls and make the day of a few orphanages, yet knowing that some 100 or so will spend the night under the stars or rain again tomorrow.

We are now in a race against time, the way things are going the rains will come early this year. Early march instead of late march, and there is still a lot of work to be done. Work that will be make more complicated by muddy roads and dampness. So we are in a race against time and I only hope we can win.