UPDATED: Haiti Earthquake Jolts Local Charity

A scene from LW's "Women helping women" program

​Jon Pace, a boardmember of local charity  Living Water Ministries of the Palm Beaches told us by phone this morning that Executive Director Pastor Etienne Jacklin's house in the Bon-Repos area north of Port au Prince was destroyed, and his wife's arm badly injured by a falling block, when the 7.0 quake hit their area yesterday. "He said the place is utter chaos," Pace told us .
 
Living Water distributes hundreds of thousands of meals to schoolchildren in the northwest section of Haiti, at schools built and run by Fred Chalker's 20-year-old charity.


Pace said Pastor Etienne had relocated his family to a 60-acre compound, 25 miles outside the epicenter of the quake, run by David Heady of Global Outreach, a charity which drills wells and runs burn clinics on the island. Pace said he wasn't sure yet if any of the board members would be travellng to Haiti immediately as the situation there is so chaotic. "Pastor Etienne is still in shock," he said. "Many people were killed in his neighborhood."

Living Water founder Fred Chalker was on a cruise with his family when the quake hit. He told us by email that members are still planning to make a three week trip to the country to help build new housing in the northwest area of the country, where the ministry owns land and works with local villages.

Living Water Ministries has no office or paid staff in the states. It does employ dozens of Haitians to run its programs, including a large staff of nurses,  teachers, and people to oversee distribution of the children's meals.

Haiti's 7.0 earthquake yesterday was its largest in over 200 years. It's reported that three million people may have been injured and a more than a thousand killed.