Four-year-old Sylvie Woodjina arrived in Canada two years ago. She was an orphan from Haiti, adopted by Alice Hutton.
After the island nation was devastated by an earthquake earlier this year, Hutton started collecting supplies to send back to her daughter’s orphanage, God’s Littlest Angels, which is located just north of Port-au-Prince.
“It was hard. She heard about Haiti in the news and all it was, was people dying,” said Hutton. “This is a way of showing that people are rebuilding their lives and we can help them by giving them tangible things.”
Since Jan 12, Hutton and her family have been working with the orphanage to co-ordinate the collection of donated goods like tarps, bedding, blankets, building supplies, clothing, shoes, medical supplies and diapers.
Yesterday, Alice, Sylvie and a team of volunteers from A.Y. Jackson High School and as far away as Belleville helped organize donations and pack them onto skids at the Canpar warehouse in southeast Ottawa.
Canpar donated the storage space and picked up donations at various drop off sites that were set up across the city, said Ray Derouchie, the terminal manager for Canpar.
The goods will be shipped to Toronto to be loaded into a shipping container and taken to Haiti, where it will be distributed by the orphanage.
“So far, they’ve been distributing to rural communities that haven’t received as much support since the earthquake, but had a lot of devastation,” said Hutton.
