LES CAYES, Haiti (CMC) — The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) will this week begin sending disaster relief to Haiti, which was severely impacted by Hurricane Matthew earlier this month.

The supplies come as the Barbados-based Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA), moves into its second week of on-the-ground response in Haiti.

CARICOM will focus its efforts on Les Cayes and Jeremie, two communities in the south of Haiti that were most severely affected by the category four hurricane, which also devastated parts of the Bahamas, another member of the community.

CDEMA’s operations specialist, Retired Brigadier General, Earl Arthurs, who is leading the CDEMA team here, told the Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC) that CARICOM is hoping that its supplies will begin arriving in Haiti on Wednesday.

“I think it would be more food and water and things for the children. And then, after that, the next consignment will be some building supplies and so. But we have people from the regional co-ordination centre in Barbados who are actually doing all the planning and stuff like that,” Arthurs told CMC after meeting with his team.

“My job on the ground is to give support to the emergency operations centre in these two devastated township,” he said.

The CARICOM Operation Support Team (COST) arrived in Haiti on October 8 and has spent the last week visiting and assessing the affected areas and meeting with all the key operators in Jeremie and Les Cayes.

This week, the CDEMA team will be responsible for helping CARICOM to identify one of the communities that was badly affected within the Les Cayes area — where Hurricane Matthew has affected 110,000 persons, according to official figure.

Haitian officials have called a coordination meeting of all responders in the southern area for Monday.