Anne Touissant is a Protection Advisor & Program Development Manager for CRS in Haiti.

Hanna wasn't something that we saw coming. It was supposed to be a small storm that was just going to pass by the southern tip of Haiti. But it changed direction and lingered for several days. Many of my colleagues were caught in the field, caught in the flooding of Gonaives.

In Haiti the streets are not closed like they are in the States. There are big potholes, open sewers. When the streets are completely flooded, and you're tying to wade through the water, you can fall into these holes, or be taken away by the current.

I was fortunate that I got to wait out the storm from the safety of Port-au-Prince. It felt like a stormy day in the U.S. I had no idea how bad it was in the rest of the country until I started getting reports from the field. The things my colleagues saw were very graphic, people getting caught in the currents in Gonaives.

My first thought was for the safety of women and children. Shelters are overcrowded. People are housed in churches and schools, neither of which is really equipped to house the number of people in need. With this level of overcrowding women and children become more vulnerable to violent attacks and sexual abuse. There are questions that we have to ask ourselves; are the men and women separated in the shelter? Are the shelters well lit and do they have separate bathroom facilities?

A colleague of mine was in a shelter-in a room with 400 people cramped together: women, men and children, with no access to hygiene. They have a little bit of food with nothing to do. It's misery.

These questions arise after things die down a bit. It's hard to do psychosocial work until the shelters are stable, and people have their basic needs met.

Food distributions are difficult. People can become very violent because the level of desperation. A woman walking home with a food packet becomes a possible target for a violent attack. Everyone is preoccupied with responding to basic necessities. But we need to think about the security of our beneficiaries. We ask that an adult male accompany a woman picking up her relief supplies. We ask that children not be allowed to go and pick up the packets. These are difficult issues to organize.

Children are particularly susceptible in a crisis. We have street children, orphans, a lot of children whose houses have collapsed, who have seen their parents or siblings die in the storms, who have been separated from their loved ones. Schools are closed. There is no outlet for them to express themselves, what they've seen and lived through.

There are kids who are going to stay in the shelters and orphanages for months, and others who have gone back home to poor conditions. They both present different problems. We have to look for something for the children to do. They need occupational activities—arts, story telling, and songs. In the next few months we'll motivate them to express themselves and their fears. Through these activities we'll be able to detect who has been traumatized, who needs help. It'll also help us reach out to the parents and teach them how to support and help their children cope with their traumas.

Locating and assisting these kids is not something we can do by ourselves. We've partnered with around 14 other aid organizations. We've banded together to coordinate, to pinpoint who knows what, who does what, to figure where the orphanages are that have been inundated with children or even water. We've been getting calls from orphanages about flooding, calls about their kitchens being washed away.

I know that there is a lot of work to be done. But we're working with a team of amazing organizations. We can make a difference. There are a lot of children who are going to need our help. This is a month's long process. It's a big task, but I think together we have the means to make a difference.

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