Leah So­rias

Med­ical sup­plies from the T&T Red Cross So­ci­ety to help treat 300,000 peo­ple ar­rived in earth­quake-rav­aged Haiti yes­ter­day. Di­rec­tor gen­er­al of the so­ci­ety, An­gela Gou­veia, said yes­ter­day the sup­plies, which in­clud­ed ban­dages, nee­dles, san­i­tary pads, splints, burn kits and de­liv­ery kits for preg­nan­cies, ar­rived in Haiti and were re­ceived by the Amer­i­ca Red Cross there. She said the so­ci­ety re­ceived a "slug" con­firm­ing that at 5 pm yes­ter­day. The sup­plies left T&T on an of­fi­cial Red Cross air­plane at Pi­ar­co at 4 am yes­ter­day. "That was ac­tu­al­ly the on­ly plane from the re­gion that got in (to Haiti)," Gou­veia said.

Mean­while, the so­ci­ety said do­na­tions to its Hait­ian Ap­peal Funds reached $1,020,351.31, as of 9 am yes­ter­day. That mon­ey, the so­ci­ety said, would be for­ward­ed to the In­ter­na­tion­al Fed­er­a­tion of Red Cross (IFRC) and Red Cres­cent Head­quar­ters in Gene­va. Gou­veia said it formed part of the US$100 mil­lion tar­get­ed to as­sist 300,000 per­sons in Haiti for the next three years. The IFRC on Sat­ur­day raised its Haiti-help ap­peal from US $10 mil­lion in Swiss francs to US$103 mil­lion (105.7 mil­lion Swiss francs).

The ap­peal, IFRC said, maps out the re­sponse of the world's largest hu­man­i­tar­i­an net­work. The IFRC said in the com­ing days and week, sig­nif­i­cant fo­cus would go to try­ing to re­duce the risk of wa­ter-borne and wa­ter-re­lat­ed dis­eases. Gou­veia re­it­er­at­ed that the main ar­eas of fo­cus for the IFRC was shel­ter, liveli­hoods, wa­ter and san­i­ta­tion, health and psy­cho­log­i­cal care.

She said the so­ci­ety's com­mu­ni­ca­tions of­fi­cer, Genikke May­ers, was in Haiti as­sist­ing in re­lief ef­forts.