LONDON (AlertNet) - A day after the Haiti earthquake destroyed her home and killed her best friend, aid worker Marie Andree was back at work in the capital Port-au-Prince, trying to mobilise help to others caught up in the calamity.
"I was lucky enough to be alive, so I have to continue working constantly to help other people," said ActionAid's Haiti manager Andree, who's been sleeping in her car since the Jan. 12 earthquake.
More than two weeks after the worst quake to strike the Caribbean country in 200 years, Haitian aid workers face a delicate balancing act -- of carrying out their professional duties while coping with their own loss, injury and search for missing family, friends and colleagues.
"I cannot see how anybody who was there could remain unaffected because everyone there knows someone who is suffering or injured or dead,"UN OCHA spokeswoman Stephanie Bunker told AlertNet.
While national staff can often be directly affected when disasters strike, especially in underdeveloped countries, the scale of loss among the aid community in Haiti was virtually unprecedented.
The loss and trauma experienced by so many field and local staff -- usually the first to begin emergency relief operations -- was one of many factors that made mounting an initial response difficult.
The United Nations, which has kept a peacekeeping mission in Haiti since 1994, suffered its "gravest and greatest single loss" in the history of the organisation when its headquarters in Port-au-Prince collapsed, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said.
A total of 61 UN staff have been confirmed dead so far, including U.N. mission chief Hedi Annabi and his deputy Luiz Carlos da Costa, with 179 still unaccounted for.
The loss of such senior U.N. staff was critical.
"The decision-making process was clearly damaged," David Wimhurst, chief of communications for the U.N. peacekeeping force in Haiti, told The Washington Post.
Aid workers have long played a crucial role in Haiti and have for many years had a strong presence in the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere.
Half Haiti's population lives on less than $1 a day, infant mortality is poor with 60 deaths for every 1,000 births, diarrheal illnesses are the second-leading cause of death and it suffers frequent natural disasters -- which means Haitians have often relied on aid workers to deliver basic services.
"Haiti unfortunately gets hit by disasters on a regular basis, in 2008 it was hit by four hurricanes and what we do is put stock in for something like that happening so we can respond as soon as possible," said Oxfam's Senior Press Officer Ian Bray.
"Of course with this one, that was severely hampered with our staff being quake victims themselves and losing stock in our warehouse."
Like other aid agencies, the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) was mindful of the emotional toll the quake would take on its frontline field staff and was quick to dispatch counsellors and an Italian doctor to attend to their needs first.
WFP had 225 staff on the ground before the quake struck -- two-thirds of them were Haitian nationals.
"I would equate it with that safety message you get on the plane, you are always told to put on your own oxygen mask on before you put one on your child," said WFP spokeswoman Caroline Hurford. "Essentially youÂ?ve got to look after your own staff before they will be of any use before they will be of any use to the poor and suffering people of Haiti."
(Editing by Katie Nguyen)
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