Deployment diary day 4: Thursday 21st January

The feeling of being the new kid on the block very quickly starts to fade here. It's the end of only my second day in Haiti but I feel like I've been here weeks. Yesterday was spent trying to create an organisational system and asigning roles to team members. My good friend John Berglund (from New York) and I are sharing the management of this programme. He's bringing his knowledge of the Incident Command system used across North American Emergency Disaster Services to help shape our organisational structure. I hope I can contribute lessons learned from various international disasters to help shape programme element.

The 6 new team members arrived early this morning (2am) but reported for duty at 8am. They were assessed and interviewed in order to appoint them to their roles. This team have been released for 2 weeks - but delays in getting over here mean we have them in the field for just 11 days. We;ll be going through the same process of evaluation and assignment in less than 2 weeks.

The second half of the new team arrives tonight - they will be slotted into their roles tomorrow.

The clinic here continues to go well - seeing over 250 patients each day. The medical staff are doing a great job with limited resources.

This afternoon we put together a team of 25 young adults to help us with assesing the community. They helped design an assessment form and will launch out tomorrow to find out just how many people we have settled in the camp behind our compound.

Tonight's team meeting was intense. We have our first chartered cargo plane arriving tomorrow in Dominican Republic. Carrying food and water the cargo will be transferred into two trucks and driven across to Haiti. We haven't yet found a warehouse - there are non available here - so we will have to get these goods out almost immediately. That's especially the case as we are receiving two more planes during the next week carrying 1.3 million pre-prepared meals and 3,000 tents. The challenges involved in distributing them are enormous but, if we can get the distributions completed effectively, will mean a huge amount of aid reaching our local community.

Today we have again been reminded of the vulnerability of this part of the world. I counted 4 aftershocks today which were sufficient to have us all running out of the room into the open air. I really dislike these and pray they will ease off quickly.

Have heard that I will be doing a round of BBC radio interviews again this Sunday morning live from Port au Prince. Unfortunately, doing the breakfast show at 8am in the UK is only 3am here - so not much rest saturday night, eh? Thanks for checking in on the blog from time to time - and for the helpful prayer support.