Tevel B’Tzedek: Live Blogging from Haiti

by shamirpower [➚] · Friday, April 23rd, 2010

Tevel B’tzedek is on the ground supporting communities and even running a school in the Petitionville refugee camp. Below are some selections from recent blog posts from our friends over at Repair the World:

There are thousands of children in the camp, but only one school, run by volunteers from the Israeli non-profit Tevel b’Tzedek, and funded by IsraAID, an umbrella organization of Israeli groups working in the developing world. I founded Tevel b’Tzedek, which has been working with poor and marginalized communities in Nepal for the past three years through its service learning programs that combine volunteering with the study of poverty, Jewish social justice values and globalization. The nine Israeli and US Jewish volunteers of “Tevel” have been here for the past two months. As I walk through the camp with them, they seem to know everyone, from the children to the U.S. Marines providing camp security. There is an amazingly unlikely moment as we climb the steep hill towards the school—we meet a group of Nepali UN soldiers, and the Tevel Nepal graduates chat with them in Nepali—it seems like the harbinger of a new world.
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My job is to figure out what to do next. With the rains and then typhoons coming, the camp is not safe, especially for those on the bottom of steep hills. The camp will empty out over the next few months. Should we go to work in the next phase of semi-permanent camps? Should we move to one of the villages, where we can also use Israel’s agriculture expertise to boost food production, a major priority in Haiti even before the earthquake?