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Haiti aid still necessary, say Calgarians

People should continue to donate to Haiti even though it's been more than six months since an earthquake devastated the country, say Calgarians who are distributing aid there.

The 7.0-magnitude quake, which struck on Jan. 12, killed more than 200,000 people. More than a million people are currently living in tent cities.

The Canadian Red Cross alone raised $200 million, while the federal government has pledged $600 million for reconstruction efforts. But even with that funding, there's still a long way to go, said Glen Sharegan, a disaster response manager with Samaritan's Purse.

"The need is huge. It is just huge, and there are cases where the need just has not been addressed by all the NGOs [non-governmental organizations] at this point. It is true. But every person that has been helped is a good thing," said Sharegan, who is in Haiti distributing food, seeds and gardening tools.

He said government policies are slowing the movement of aid to regular Haitians, and a lot of rubble still has to be removed before rebuilding can begin.

Shawnee Griscowsky, who just returned from distributing aid with God's Littlest Angels in Haiti, said she hopes Calgarians will recognize there's a need even though the earthquake has faded from the headlines.

"It's going to be a slow-go. I mean it's easy for people to forget. You know, they see it for a couple of weeks on the news and they figure oh the UN's in there, the governments are in there, it's a done deal," said Griscowsky, who travelled to Haiti with one of her children who she adopted from the country years ago.

"It's not even close for what the reality is for these people. They're living day to day, if you can imagine living your life every day in a tent."

Griscowsky said worse than the physical destruction were the emotional scars; she remembers meeting a woman who lost four of her children in the earthquake.

"She said to me, 'We are all absorbing each other's grief,' because it's so overwhelming. Everyone you talk to, there's no one free from what's happened."

With files from the CBC's Jennifer Lee