Oxfam aid worker Jenny Lamb from Aberdeen tells how the aid effort has saved lives on the ground, but more work needs to be done to get people out of camps and into homes and jobs.

Jenny, from Blackburn near Aberdeen, is a Public Health Engineer for Oxfam and has been working in camps around the Haitian capital Port-Au-Prince, providing clean water and toilets for survivors of the earthquake and raising awareness of the importance of public heath.

Jenny is part of a team of Oxfam staff, 80 per cent of whom are Haitian, reaching more than 440,000 people with a range of assistance including clean water, sanitation, shelter and cash-for-work programmes.

Jenny said:

"The outpouring of support from Scotland for the people of Haiti has allowed aid to get through and made a vital difference to people's lives.

I have been working as a public health engineer in Corail, a temporary camp on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince where people have been relocated from more congested areas.

Every day, myself and our team have been working around the clock to improve conditions there, providing access to clean drinking water, building toilets and speaking to people about public health - one of the best ways to combat outbreaks of disease, which has been successful so far.

The scope of the disaster has been unlike anything I've ever seen. But despite that, Oxfam has reached over 440,000 people with our work on sanitation and shelter and, in metropolitan areas, we have helped make the sanitation better than it was prior to the earthquake.

With the arrival of the monsoon and hurricane season, the people of Haiti have a fresh set of problems that we cannot ignore and many tens of thousands of people are still living in tents. We're already taking precautions to minimise the risk of a further disaster on exposed areas and we've been working hard to protect existing shelters from the threat of heavy rainfall and flooding. I think we are getting it right here, although the focus now must be on long-term recovery.

There are no short-term solutions for Haiti. It is one of the most complex challenges I have ever worked on. Much more needs to be done to get people out of temporary accommodation and back into work, with a return to anything approaching a normal life still a long way off."

Head of Oxfam Scotland, Judith Robertson, said:

"Thanks to people in Scotland and across the world, hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti are being given a fighting chance to get their lives back on track.

In the last six months Oxfam has been working tirelessly to improve sanitation and public health in camps. In some of Haiti's urban areas today people actually have better access to sanitation and water supplies than they did before the earthquake.

Looking to the next six months, the focus has to be on recovery and in camps we've already given people access to work programmes as a starting point to rebuild their lives. But this is only the beginning and the aid effort will continue for years to come so it's important that the world does not turn it's back on a country that still needs our help."

Jenny Lamb is part of Oxfam's Water, Sanitation and Public Health (WASH) team. Over the course of a month long fundraising campaign, Standard Life raised £75,000 to support Jenny's team and their response in Haiti.