Marylanders continue to mobilize to join the massive relief effort heading toward Haiti and try to establish contact with colleagues and loved ones in the earthquake-stricken country.

Douglas Bright, IMA World Health Vice President, said Thursday that he still had no word from the Carroll County-based relief agency's senior staff members who were in Port au Prince this week, nor have they heard from the five Haitians who worked at IMA's offices in the capital.

Three senior staffers, including two Marylanders, had just concluded a meeting at the landmark Hotel Montana in Port-au-Prince when it was destroyed. Officials with the New Windsor-based coalition of faith-based relief groups have been unable to reach President Richard L. Santos of Silver Spring, program officer Ann Varghese of Baltimore or Dr. Sarla Chand of New Jersey.

"We are going over everything we know and contacting other relief organizations to make sure we have not missed any bases," Bright said. "We are calling continually our office, the families of our people here and every contact number we have. We certainly are not giving up hope and we are preparing for our folks return so we can care for them here."

IMA has partnered with a team from the University of Notre Dame on combating lymphatic filariasis, a tropical disease that affects many Haitians. Santos, Varghese and Chand were meeting with several from the university shortly before the quake, Bright said. Several of the Notre Dame group were en route to South Bend today, he said. But they had no information about the IMA people.

A group from International Resource Development in northern Virginia planned to leave for Haiti this afternoon and have assured IMA that they will search for Santos, a former IRD employee.

"IRD has assured us that they are going to actively search for our people," Bright said. "Several know Rick and would recognize him."

IMA is waiting to send any of its own people, he said. "IRD has an emergency response team and equipment to handle this situation," he said.

IMA, which is celebrating its 50th year in global relief work, is also discussing what immediate steps it will take to provide aid to Haiti.

"We are talking with our pharmaceutical suppliers to see what will be available quickly so we can get help there as soon as possible," Bright said. "Almost anything we send will have to go by air."

It may be too soon to send too much, he said.

"This is a country without resources or infrastructure and it is coping with a disaster that will exceed Hurricane Katrina in destructiveness," Bright said. "It can only handle so much right now with what little there is left. But we are definitely in this for the long haul."

Siblings OK in Haiti

Lani Bersch is breathing a little easier now that she's learned that her daughter and son both survived the earthquake in Haiti uninjured. Her 29-year-old daughter, KC, runs a mission for disabled children just outside Port-au-Prince, and her 21-year-old son, Alec, was visiting while on semester break from his studies at Towson University, she said.

"As awful as all of this is, my kids are alive and I'm grateful for that," Bersch said by telephone while taking a break from her job at a hearing and speech agency in Baltimore. She had just received an instant message from her son, the first word she'd received from or about him since the disaster.

"There are tons of people trying to find out if their family is alive," the northeast Baltimore resident said. "At least I know my kids are live. So I'm grateful for small things."

Bersch, 57, was within days of traveling to Haiti herself when the earthquake struck. "I have my tickets, I was headed down this Sunday," she said, to join in a celebration of the 25th anniversary of St. Joseph's Home for Boys, an orphanage in the Haitian capital that has grown over the years into three separate charitable institutions, with the other two outside the city.

The boys' home in Port-au-Prince was devastated by the temblor, Bersch said, and two people were hurt in the building collapse. The school for disabled where her daughter works, Wings of Hope, is in the mountains outside of town, at Fermathe. Part of that building was damaged, too, but a portion remains habitable, and the youngsters from St. Josephs have taken shelter there, about 60 people crowded into a building that normally houses about half that many.

None of the Bersch family had heard directly from KC, said another brother, David Bersch, 26, of Baltimore. "We've been receiving emails from people that have been able to access computers," he explained. "We've not physically talked to her." With telephone service down, the sporadic Internet communications are all that have gotten through, he said.

In a Facebook message sent out late Thursday to his family, friends and other contacts, Alec Bersch wrote that Tuesday night was "definitely the scariest night of my entire life." Even after the major ‘quake, he said that there were tremors every 20 or 30 minutes through the night. The city is in "a shambles," he wrote, and there were still dead bodies on the streets Thursday when he returned to help salvage things from the rubble of the orphanage.

Even so, the uninjured youths and adults are in good spirits, he wrote.

"Luckily, we have drinking water, food, and our water sisterns are still working so we have water to wash with," he wrote.

Lani Bersch said her family's connection to Haiti began when she and her daughter, then a teen-ager, went there for a week to visit a child at a different orphanage that they had been sponsoring.

"It's just the kind of place that gets into your blood," Lani Bersch said. Her daughter went back frequently while in college, and when she was a senior, "she informed me she was moving down there."

Her son, Alec, was visiting on break from his studies at Towson University, where he's majoring in occupational therapy. He had taken a drum set to Haiti to work with the children on drumming. She said he's just informed her he plans to stay there for now, because the need is so great.

While the celebration she'd planned to attend obviously is off, she said she's confident that the U.S.-based nonprofit supporting the three institutions there, Hearts with Haiti, will rally to rebuild. In the meantime, Bersch said, "If I can be of help, then I'll be on my way, too."

But Bersch said she knows from her own time in Haiti that rushing clothing, food and other goods there may be a waste, unless there's an organized relief effort. "You can send resources by the carload, but unless there's an infrastructure, it's going to sit on a a dock and rot, or get sold into the black market."

For now, she said, "I'm just going to be watching CNN like everybody else and praying and waiting for my son to hop on the Internet – and talking to friends of Haiti and comforting each other and figuring out what to do next."

For more information on Hearts with Haiti, St. Joseph's and Wings of Hope, go here: http://www.heartswithhaiti.org/page3/page3.html

Govans Church awaits contact from orphanage

The Rev. Tom Harris, pastor of Govans Presbyterian Church in north Baltimore, was planning to go to Haiti next weekend with a small church delegation to spend time helping at an orphanage in Port-au-Prince that the church adopted two years ago.

But Harris said since the earthquake they've been unable to contact the orphanage, Kay Papa Nou, which in Haitian Kreol means "Our Father's House."

"We have heard nothing," Rev. Harris said in a telephone interview. "We've been trying the past few days and can't get through to anybody."

The orphanage, run by a local man, David Guillaume, had been sheltering about 40 children in all, the pastor explained, with boys and girls living separately in two houses not far apart. The Baltimore church began to mission to the orphanage after learning about it during a church group visit to Port-au-Prince in early 2008, he said. The orphanage was threatened with eviction at that time because Guillaume had been unable to pay the rent – church members donated enough to cover the rent, and have made several other trips there since.

"We had a trip planned for the 23rd, so that's really up in the air right now," Harris said. "There's a lot of obstacles now. We don't know if the hotel we were planning on staying at is standing. We don't know if commercial airlines are going to be going into the airport at that point, and we need to get hold of (the orphanage director) and see if we would be helpful at this point."

For information on the orphanage, go to http://www.govanspres.org/govanspres/haiti_trip_2008