Dear friends and family:

I do have not time to write, so this will be rushed. First thanks for your thoughts and prayers. Haiti has suffered a tragedy of Biblical proportions with over 100,000 dead and many, many injured. Whole sections of town that were marginal anyway, are largely flattened.  People are coming out of the initial shock but are still grieving. I love this poor place and the people and it breaks your heart.

I am in charge of the US relief and recovery effort.  USAID is the lead agency with all other USG agencie working with our lead and thru the coordination we provide. We have a trained disaster response team from USAID that coordinates initial responses on food, water, health, shelter and logistics. We link with all the other players like the US, EU and NGOs that we depend on. The key link in this is the US military who have the assets to help us with security for distribution sites (along with UN) and a million other tasks and issues we confront every day. I have a helicopter at my disposition and depend on it.

We have had seven US rescue and recovery teams here—from VA, FL/Miami, CA/Los Angeles, NJ, NYC, etc.—-some at the Montana Hotel.  I know that place well and was staying there myself seven weeks back.  I am friends of the owners—one of the owner sisters was pulled out of rubble after five days—hurt but alive and recovering.  Her 7-year old grandson’s body has not been recovered. The parents of the Massachusetts college kids lost in the Montana arrived here yesterday.  Once they saw with their own eyes the damage and saw our incredible rescue teams at work, they finally had closure.  The family that critized us and the military the most on US TV was the most emotional, apologized for past remarks and praised our rescue folks and USAID to ABC as they departed. We pulled out all the stops for them and we are proud of our teams. Over 135 live rescues were done in Port-au-Prince and the US teams did 45 of them—a record for any disaster.  Incredibly, there was another one yesterday—12 days after the earthquake.

We are scrambling to get in more food, shelter and meds.  We have spent about $200 million total of which about half is for food. We have provided 2,000,000 rations with our partner the WFP and our food NGOs CRS, World Vision and ACDI/VOCA.  We are soon getting the GOH reinstalled in two new US owned buildings and possibly additional temp quarters as they decide.  We are now clearing streets and rubble and will have created 25,000 jobs by February 1st with many more to come.  We are structuring a bigger humanitarian relief cell to house US/UN/other donor/military operations to improve coordination.

We get incredible cooperation from the US military.  Unlike the case in early Iraq days, we are on the same page.  This is a humanitarian mission and we are working extremely well together.  These are very capable men and women and it makes you proud to see them at work.  They are “squared away” as they would say in military parlance.  They are smart and know their mission.  God bless them all.

The response of the international community is amazing—Spanish, German, French, Chilean, Canada, Phillipines, Iceland (!), Norway, Colombia, etc. etc.  We are working with the French to feed, water etc. a tent camp of 10,000 near the collapsed Presidential palace and are getting surgical equipment to a Spanish medical team. And many, many more.  Via a UN-sponsored “cluster” system, we coordinate our efforts on water, health, food, shelter, logistics, airslots (landings) at the airport which is run by the US military.  I am mobilizing our people to work with the GOH on planning reconstruction—power, building, water infrastructure, telecoms etc.  We in USAID may not have the lead on this ultimately but it is for sure we will plan and carry out much of the work (with much help from other nations) but we have to plan ahead and we are doing so.

We are swamped by celebrities, special requests from Congress etc, a zillion volunteers and church groups and trying to respond. It has been nuts.  BTW, the news you see on TV—particularly CNN—is a tiny snapshot of the worst things possible.  This is how they operate and do not give you an accurate overall picture. No one should shape their views based on this kind of coverage. I have seen the “CNN effect” and I don’t like it.

We have so much to do but we get better and faster every day. I have a great and growing team of good people helping the effort. We have issues and a thousand problems to deal with—like 500 emails a day, many from DC and many with tasks and reporting we are supposed to do.  Increasingly I have more skilled staff I can delegate to.  We are receiving help from FEMA, HHS, FCC, State, White House, Treasury, DHS and more.  We will soon have a mechanism to coordinate all the corporate contributions and offers we get every day.

The Haitian people are resilient but nobody should have to be this resilient. They are scared to go into ruined and damaged buildings.  Schools cannot open and so forth.  Some 250,000 people have moved to “spontaneous camps” around Port-au-Prince and we are scrambling to service them.

But the streets are also full of life, markets, gas and water trucks.  Some stores are reopening.  My own staff has MREs to eat—I don’t like the idea or them—and many are sleeping on the floors of their little cubicle offices.  I should have cots for everyone today and a tent camp is being set up on the Embassy compound.  Everyone works 18+ hours a day.  It’s the job.

I have to run. We appreciate your support. Please help by providing monetary support to the Clinton-Bush group for Haiti or other groups like Red Cross, CRS, CHF Internatonal, Catholic Relief or US groups/universities/hospitals already working in Haiti.  And send us a thousand nurses.

Thank you & again I appreciate your support.

Ambassador Lewis Lucke
Coordinator for Relief and Recovery—Haiti
Port-au-Prince, Haiti

Ambassador Lewis Lucke with Pastor Chavannes Jeune and JL Williams at the former location of the Montana Hotel last year.