What’s going on?

The working pace of the people here is different. After just one day I understood that there are several reasons why it's not possible to work as fast as we do in Europe. It's very warm here, for one. And people work very long days. Trying to help them by doing it ourselves is not the solution, as this will make sure that the locals will lose their jobs. For this reason, WFP uses a much local staff as possible to do the work. 

And because the salaries over here are not so high we use a lot of people, which is very good for the local economy.

 

When we transport high energy biscuits we load them on a truck and cover them up with a tarpaulin, and then sent them to drive to the border of Haiti. This takes them up to 6 to 8 hours. At the border they need to wait for the next slot to pass the border, which is only twice a day. After this they need to drive for  two hours to reach Port-au-Prince.

 

But loading is different here; no rolling beds in the trucks, no correct levelers, no good trained people, and loading at a Tapa A level (security requirement) is not possible because a lot of the packing material we are using is what they call flatbeds (see photo). 

Before the earthquake, only two cargo planes a day came into SDQ (Santa Domingo). Right now, four or more planes a day fly in just for WFP. But we are not alone, there is the Red Cross, Unicef, etc. Yesterday there were nine planes to handle and that is the reason why there are not enough people around with the right knowledge to handle this material. Next time I will tell you some thing about the air handling.
 

Greetings Michael.