Foreign Minister Nikola Mladenov, responding to a call by Unesco Director-General Irina Bokova to Unesco members to help rebuild the education system in Haiti, announced on February 5 2010 that Bulgaria would donate $100 000.

The money will come from the Unesco/Bulgaria Trust Fund, and will be used to help finance three projects.

The projects are to support the resumption of education after the January 12 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti, and will strengthen national educational institutions and provide psychological support through training of teachers, the Foreign Ministry in Sofia said.

The Unesco/Bulgaria Trust Fund was set up in 2008 to provide funding for projects in education, cultural diversity and tolerance for sub-Saharan African countries, post-conflict and small island states.

On February 4, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) launched an appeal for $1.2 billion to help provide life-saving emergency support to women and children impacted by the most severe humanitarian crises around the world, including the Haitian earthquake, the UN News Service said.

The appeal is part of Unicef’s Humanitarian Action Report 2010, released in Geneva on February 4, which spotlights the desperate situation of children and women in 28 countries and territories facing deep humanitarian crises.

Unicef said that Haiti was one of the countries it classified as "
in crisis"
prior to the 7.0-magnitude quake, in which up to 200 000 people died, about two million were left in need of aid and which left much of the Caribbean country’s infrastructure reduced to rubble.

"
Faced with multiple hurricanes, in addition to civil unrest, the country was [already] in need of humanitarian assistance,"
Unicef Deputy Executive Director Hilde F. Johnson said.

"
The earthquake is a horrific example of another double disaster, destroying the lives and livelihoods of the Haitian people and crippling the very infrastructure and systems needed for humanitarian actions to be effective,"
Johnson said.

"
But we are achieving results,"
she said. "
This week, Unicef and partners will begin a campaign aimed at immunising 500 000 children under the age of seven against measles, diphtheria and tetanus."


In Bulgaria, Unicef was a partner of the bTV telethon on February 2 that raised more than a million leva for those affected by the Haiti earthquake.
On February 4, and independent United Nations human rights expert called for the immediate cancellation of Haiti’s external debt to allow it to recover from the earthquake and move towards reconstruction.

Haiti’s current external debt amounts to about $890 million, about 70 per cent of which is owed to multilateral creditors, mainly the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank.

"
Haiti’s remaining multilateral debt must be unconditionally cancelled as a matter of extreme urgency in order to afford the country the necessary fiscal space as it recovers from the recent devastating earthquake and moves towards reconstruction,"
Cephas Lumina, the UN Independent Expert on foreign debt and human rights, said in a media statement.

Lumina called for the provision of aid in the form of unconditional grants, "
not new loans whatever the degree of concessionality,"
as well as a moratorium on debt service.

While welcoming the recent announcement by the Paris Club – an informal group of 19 creditor countries – that its members would cancel the $214 million debt owed to them by Haiti, Lumina warned that more action was needed.

"
The decision is insufficient to assure the country’s sustainable recovery effort, given that the bulk of its external debt is owed to multilateral creditors."


Lumina also warned that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was ignoring its own advice by the recent approval of a "
highly concessional"
and "
interest-free"
loan of $114 million to Haiti, repayment of which is due after a five-and-a-half year ‘grace period.’

"
A new build-up of unsustainable debt must be avoided,"
he said, adding that independent assessments indicate that it will take at least 10 years for the country to recover from the quake.

"
It is unrealistic to expect that the people of Haiti can muster the resources to start servicing this debt in five years’ time. It is also inappropriate to make Haiti pay back its emergency assistance,"
Lumina said.

The UN News Service said that Lumina has been mandated by the UN Human Rights Council to monitor the effects of foreign debt and other related international financial obligations of States on the full enjoyment of all human rights, particularly economic, social and cultural rights. He reports to the Geneva-based Council in an independent and unpaid capacity.

Meanwhile, the UN International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) signed a grant agreement of nearly $5.7 million to support agricultural production in some of the poorest regions in the north of Haiti.

The grant will supplement IFAD’s ongoing project to increase agricultural production by modernising irrigation infrastructure.

Strengthening irrigation systems, including those reportedly damaged by the earthquake, will provide improved access to water resources for smallholder farmers.

On February 5, the Voice of America said that international aid was continuing to flow into Haiti, but residents of the Port-au-Prince slum of Cite Soleil say they are still waiting for tents and other essentials more than three weeks after a devastating earthquake.

Cleanup has begun in parts of Port-au-Prince, funded by international aid groups.

News from Port-au-Prince has been dominated by Haitian authorities charging 10 US missionaries with child kidnapping and criminal association for allegedly trying to take 33 Haitian children out of the country illegally.

Haiti's government has suggested the case could be transferred to the US but, for the moment, the 10 have been returned to a jail in Port-au-Prince where they have been held since their arrest on January 29.

These US missionaries never expected to find themselves in a Haitian jail, a Voice of America report said.

They are members of a Christian charity called New Life Children's Refuge. They say they are in Haiti to help orphans.

Laura Silsby heads the charity.

"
We came here with the intention of being able to offer and share God's love and share hope with these children,"
said Laura Silsby.

Some of the group members belong to Central Valley Baptist Church in Idaho.

The church's website says the missionaries were rescuing children from orphanages in Haiti and taking them to an orphanage in the Dominican Republic.

The missionaries were arrested as they tried to cross the border in a bus with 33 children.

Silsby denies her group did anything illegal.

"
Our understanding was that, we were told by a number of people, including Dominican authorities, that we would be able to bring the children across,"
she said.

But Haitian officials say the Americans did not get the required permission from Haitian authorities.

Silsby says it was a misunderstanding and her group had only good intentions to help the children who range from two months to 12 years old.

"
We came here to Haiti to help the children that have no one, children who have no mother or father, no hope of having someone to care for them,"
said Silsby.

But many of the children do have living parents according to SOS Children's Village, the aid group now caring for the children..

"
An elder girl, maybe eight or nine-years-old told us crying, 'I am not an orphan,"
said SOS spokesperson George Willeit. "
I do have my parents. I thought I was going to boarding school or to a summer camp."


Some of the parents say they chose to give their children to the missionaries.

"
They didn't kidnap my kid,"
said one of the mothers. "
I gave them my daughter because she was going to have a better life."


Haiti's prime minister sees it differently.

"
For me, it's not Americans who've been arrested,"
said Jean-Max Bellerive. "
It's kidnappers who have been arrested."


The case has ignited fears of children being victimised by child traffickers in a country with a weakened government.

Haiti has now suspended adoptions to try and protect its children who remain helpless in the wake of the earthquake