SEQUIM — Ask Tom Schaafsma how his Easter was, and you hear in his voice weariness and gratitude.
“It was a wonderful day,” he said the morning after the holiday; three of his four children were home, and aunts, cousins and a grandmother came from Seattle to celebrate with him and his wife, Jacque.
This Easter, they rejoiced too in Schaafsma’s homecoming. He returned the previous Sunday from a 2 ½-week mission in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a experience he called “the most impactful of my life.”
Schaafsma, 61 and a semi retired carpenter, is a member of the international ShelterBox USA response team.
For the latter half of March he coordinated the distribution of ShelterBoxes, crates containing 10-person tents, blankets, cooking equipment and other essentials that, he said, “provide shelter, warmth and dignity to the most vulnerable.”
It’s been more than two months since an earthquake ravaged Port-au-Prince and its neighboring communities, and it is still a challenge for Schaafsma to put into words what he saw.
“It’s hard to get your head around the amount of human suffering,” he said. “I’m still processing it.” Schaafsma kept going, he added, by concentrating on how his work was helping one family at a time.
He was thankful, too, to take his morning and evening meals at the nearby United Nations logistical center.
“That really allayed a lot of health concerns. You’ve got to keep yourself healthy,” he said.
“One mistake and you’re out of commission.”
A member of the Sequim Sunrise Rotary Club, and Sequim’s 2009 Citizen of the Year, Schaafsma has also worked alongside fellow Rotarian Jim Pickett to raise money for ShelterBox through presentations across the Pacific Northwest. Last year the pair were the top fundraisers for ShelterBox, bringing in $64,000 in donations to pay for 64 of the crates to be shipped to disaster-stricken places around the globe.
Response team
As a member of the ShelterBox response team, trained for deployment to towns and cities, Schaafsma has volunteered in earthquake-stricken Peru, Mexico after Hurricane Jimena and Honduras following major floods.
He spent his “vacation” last January working beside his 25-year-old son, Torin, building a playground in Colombia. Torin is in the midst of a two-year service project, so was the only Schaafsma child not home for Easter.
In Haiti, Schaafsma the rest of his eight-member response team lived in tents beside the University of Miami’s field hospital, where the daily patient count was in the hundreds.
“The doctors and nurses would come out just fried,” Schaafsma said. “They would say, ‘I lost five kids today . . . I’ve never lost that many in my life.'”
Schaafsma’s team worked furiously to supply the Red Cross, Oxfam, Save the Children and others with ShelterBoxes; some 10,000 had been shipped to Haiti by the time he arrived March 11, and another 6,000 were on their way.
At the U.N. logistical center, Schaafsma met members of the Jenkins-Penn Haiti Relief Organization run by Sean Penn, and met Penn himself when the actor took over a meeting in which his organization, known as J-R HRO, was preparing to move a large refugee camp from a low-lying golf course to higher ground.
Such relocations were urgently needed, with spring’s hard rains on the horizon.
“You usually think of a celebrity as the promotional face,” of a relief effort, Schaafsma said. “But [Penn] had an amazing command of what was actually going on on the ground. He knew the issues; he knew what was at stake.”
It rained for a couple of days while Schaafsma was in Port-au-Prince; he called that a foretaste of what’s to come during the wet season.
Weight of water
Refugees living under tarps saw them collapse under the weight of the water, Schaafsma said.
In recent weeks Penn’s organization has stepped up its efforts with a “beat the rain” campaign.
“This is an emergency that is just beginning. Flooding and outbreak of communicable diseases are certain if shelter and relocation are not achieved,” Penn writes on his Web site, www.JPHROdonate.org.
In Sequim, Pickett said his work for ShelterBox USA is progressing.
The Sequim Sunrise Rotary Club is ready to order its 32nd box for this fiscal year, Pickett said Monday.
That’s half as many ShelterBoxes as were funded last year by his entire Rotary district, which stretches from Vancouver Island to southwestern Washington.
To make a donation toward ShelterBox’s work in Haiti and other nations across the world, contact one of the Rotary Clubs in Port Angeles, Sequim, Port Townsend or Chimacum, or visit www.Rotary.org and www.ShelterBoxUSA.org.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
