HAITI: 100 DAYS SINCE DISASTER

Israeli-born Sharona Nathan Elsaieh, one of the few Jews living in Haiti, celebrates with children during the opening of a school built by Israeli volunteers. PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Amir Kashi, a 34-year-old social worker from Ma’ale Adumim, and Yehonatan Abraham, a 30-yearold medic from Beersheva, knew nothing about Haiti before the earthquake in January.

But both Israelis felt compelled to act after the disaster struck.

“I felt impotent in Israel, sitting in front of my big-screen TV,” Abraham said. “I said to myself, I have to help them.”

He and Kashi joined Natan — Israeli Coalition for International Humanitarian Aid, a Tel Aviv-based relief organization founded by the late Israeli peace activist Abie Nathan.

Abraham now spends his mornings vaccinating quake survivors in Haiti against infectious diseases at a clinic in the sprawling tent city of St. Marie. In the afternoons, he helps the World Food Program hand out meals to 1,000 children a day.

At right, children raise the Israeli and Haitian flags as the national anthems of both countries are played at a refugee camp on the edge of Port-au-Prince in March. “My mom didn’t want me to come here because of all the diseases,” Abraham said, “but I’ve done some amazing things in Haiti. Last week I saved a person’s life, a 29-year-old man with severe pneumonia.”

Natan is one of several Israeli groups working in post-earthquake Haiti. Its volunteers come for threeweek stints, living as a group at the Park Hotel in Port-au-Prince but fanning out all over the devastated city on specific medical and educational missions. Natan already has sent five groups to Haiti since the quake; 11 more are planned over the next year.

Daniel Kedar, an Israeli businessman who’s lived in Haiti for many years, helped Amos Radian, Israel’s ambassador to the neighboring Dominican Republic, coordinate Israel’s rapid initial response to the January earthquake. Within 48 hours of the quake, two El Al cargo jets, filled with 250 doctors and nurses, food, water, tents, medical equipment and essential supplies, arrived in Port-Au-Prince.

The field hospital, set up by the Israel Defense Forces, closed down after two weeks, but Natan has remained in Haiti, along with another group called IsraAid.

Natan already has opened several schools in the city’s squalid refugee camps, using military tents from the IDF field hospital, that were intentionally left behind for such purposes.

At one of those camps, Route de Batimat, not far from the airport, 500 homeless adults and children gathered on a recent Friday morning to thank Israel for building a tent school. In a ceremony that lasted more than two hours, kids in blue and yellow T-shirts emblazoned with the Haitian and Israeli flags made speeches in French and Creole, read poetry and sang both countries’ national anthems. The Haitian marching band played Hatikvah.

Kedar says the hardest part of Haiti’s reconstruction is only now beginning. The foundation Kedar runs, ProDev, is partnering with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and its Jewish federation partners to provide clean drinking water and operate temporary schools for displaced children, including the one at Route de Batimat.

“We don’t have the ambition to replace the national education system, but there’s a big gap between what is announced on the radio and TV and what’s actually happening on the ground,” Kedar said. “I spend a lot of time in the camps, and the reality is that kids psychologically will not go back to concrete buildings, even if they’re intact. I just don’t see it happening.”