Albertans anxious for family, friends in Haiti

Albertans with friends and relatives in Haiti were desperately trying to reach them in the wake of a devastating earthquake that struck the Caribbean country Tuesday.

"I try to talk to my family. My sister. My brother. My friends. Nobody answer," said Sauveta Melay, who watched TV coverage of the quake along with about two dozen others at the Haiti Association of Calgary on Tuesday evening.

Melay's anxieties were shared by Melissa Joseph, a Montreal native who lives in Edmonton. Joseph's family was able to reach some aunts and uncles Tuesday evening but no one could contact her father, Pierre Leonard, who works with Haiti's Culture Ministry.

"I believe he's doing OK. But also you see what's going on on TV and you wonder if something happened to him, because apparently there's a lot of bad things that happened ... houses going down, buildings going down. You never know," she said.

"Going through the images that you see on TV, you can't stop worrying."

Adopted girls worry about family

Dana Marquardt of Okotoks, Alta., adopted two girls from an orphanage near Port-au-Prince. The girls, who are 11 and 12, still have family in the area.

"They want more information and there just isn't anything to give them right now," said Marquardt. 

The family has managed to contact the orphanage, and knows staff and children there are OK. But they are worried about the rest of the Haitian capital area.

"Like the size of Edmonton living in like shanty-town homes, and they're very fragile, flimsy little homes built almost one on top of another," Marquardt said. "So any kind of an earthquake would be quite devastating."

 In Calgary, Phillipe Pierre-Pierre was able to contact two of his three brothers by cellphone.

"Both of them were downtown. We have two houses in downtown and both of them went down, like, completely," he said.

RCMP officers missing

RCMP Staff Sgt. Mjr. Ian Ferguson of Edmonton recently returned from a five-month mission in Haiti.

"When we were taken to our hotel, the St. Louis Hotel, right in the inner city very close to the UN headquarters building, I remarked to one of my colleagues from Switzerland, I said, 'If there's an earthquake here, these people are toast,' " Ferguson said.

"Because it looked to me at first blush that the way these buildings were constructed, there was no code, there was no town planning if you will, and it just seemed to be a mishmash of buildings put together."

Ferguson is worried about two RCMP colleagues missing in Haiti, Supt. Doug Coates of Ottawa and Sgt. Mark Gallagher, from Nova Scotia, two of 82 RCMP members working in the country.

Local fundraising efforts planned

The 7.0 magnitude quake struck Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, on Tuesday afternoon.

Thousands of people were killed, and the city of Port-au-Prince is in ruins, Haitian President Rene Préval said Wednesday. Haiti Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told CNN he believes the number of dead could be more than 100,000. Schools and hospitals have collapsed, as has the country's parliament.

An International Red Cross official has estimated about three million people may have been affected by the quake.

Calgary's Haitian community will likely raise funds to help victims, said Urbain Louissaint, president of the Haiti Association of Calgary.

"Things like that will take a few days to put in place ... but we're looking into that. We're meeting with our members and see what we can do as soon as possible," he said.

At this point, it is hard to plan because the extent of the devastation wasn't clear Tuesday night, he said.

In a northwest Calgary coffee shop, Central Blends owner Elaine Muller set a donation bucket on the counter. She is tossing in her tips and plans to give all the money collected to the Red Cross.

"I can't imagine ever living in a country where it would come to that, where you would be totally destroyed, and that's what it seems like to me," she said.

After buying a coffee Wednesday, Tyrrell Clarke tossed in her change. "My heart just goes out to those poor people in Haiti. It's just awful, it's touching, it's tragic and everybody has to participate," she said.

Muller is challenging all bars and restaurants in Calgary to set up similar donation buckets.