It’s been a year and a half since Haiti was devastated by a massive earthquake. Linda Bradford just returned to Delaware from a week in Haiti with a simple message from its people: “They don’t want to be forgotten.”
[caption id="attachment_15015" align="alignright" width="287" caption="HFI volunteer Linda Bradford.Photo courtesy: Haiti Family Initiative"]
Bradford, an X-ray technician at Christiana Hospital, is a volunteer with the Haiti Family Initiative (HFI), a Delaware-based organization that is doing its best to make sure that Delawareans, and people throughout the Delaware Valley, realize that Haiti is still far from recovering from the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that rocked the country in January 2010.
“There’s a lot of pain and suffering that goes on for months and years,” she said.
Bradford was one of 34 volunteers who devoted a week or more in July to work at the summer camp HFI has established in Jacmel, a city of 40,000 about 30 miles south of Port au Prince, Haiti’s capital and largest city. It operates alongside a medical clinic set up by the Delaware Medical Relief Team, a group of Delaware health care professionals.
HFI was founded in the spring of 2010 by Lynn Shapira and Carole Downs to parallel the efforts of the Delaware Medical Relief Team, whose members include Shapira’s husband, Nadiv, a thoracic surgeon who helped organize the group.
Both are nonprofit organizations. HFI focuses on providing a holistic approach to the health, education and welfare of families in Jacmel. Its camp, which ran for seven weeks in the summer of 2010 and for three weeks this year, provided a nutritious meal and an array of educational, recreational and arts and crafts activities for about 100 children and a variety of wellness programs for women in the community.
Local Delaware group continues its work in Haiti
Excerpts of interview with Haiti Family Initiative co-founders Carole Downs and Lynn Shapira.
[flashvideo file=http://www.wdde.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/haiti.xml width=680 height=680 playlist=bottom playlistsize=280 /]
Shapira developed the idea for HFI in March 2010, while flying back from a “fact-finding mission” to Haiti. “Once I saw the kids, with nothing to do there, the poverty, the people in tent cities, living with nothing to eat, my heart just went out to them,” she said. “I thought I would try to do something for them, to help the women and children who had nothing, and who had nothing to look forward to.”
Shapira said she had once participated in a medical aid mission on the Caribbean island of Grenada, which was struck by major hurricanes in 2004 and 2005. “After I went to Haiti, Grenada seems like paradise,” she said.
She called Downs, one of her friends, and they reached out to others. Quickly the summer camp advanced from idea to reality, with 75 volunteers spending a week or more in Haiti and more than 25 others helping with logistics and fundraising. “We had one woman who stayed all summer, the whole seven weeks, and kept things together,” Shapira said. “We put a lot of smiles on the children’s faces.”
That woman was Duyen “Zu” de Gain of Chester, Pa., who learned about Shapira’s project through a friend of a friend, called Shapira and was invited to attend an organizational meeting. De Gain, a kindergarten teacher in Philadelphia, is a refugee from South Vietnam, having fled her homeland with the fall of Saigon in 1975.
“Vietnam is very poor, but Haiti is much worse,” she said simply.
She recalled the group’s arrival in Haiti in 2010, and their trip from the airport in Port au Prince to Jacmel. “We were shocked. All those kids running around, asking for money and food, people selling stuff right off the ground, tents all over the place, sewage really thick and smelly. Nobody was talking. We were so stunned we couldn’t say anything,” she said.
[caption id="attachment_14981" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Dr. Nadiv Shapira, an HFI volunteer from Wilmington and founder of the Haiti Delaware Alliance Foundation, examining a patient with the help of HFI translator, Guitho Mede. Photo courtesy of the Haitian Family Initiative."]
This summer, conditions in Haiti have improved, but there is still a long way to go. Piles of rubble are shrinking, some roads are being repaired, and some Jacmel residents who were living in tents last summer are now housed in simple wooden structures with tin roofs, Shapira said.
But, she added, only half of Haiti’s children attend school, and literacy and education rates for women are even lower. That’s why camp organizers this summer offered the women educational programs on HIV/AIDS, personal hygiene, cholera prevention, good nutrition, and how to organize a support group. In addition, de Gain taught basic sewing techniques to a group of women and children.
“If, God forbid, there were another earthquake or natural disaster, at least they will have each other to rely on,” Shapira said.
HFI’s concern for the Haitian people extends beyond the operation of its summer camps. Last month, when officials of a similar Pennsylvania-based organization, Helping Hands and Beyond, called their attention to the plight of a 19-month-old girl with a large cancerous tumor in her left eye, Shapira and Downs contacted the Alfred I. du Pont Hospital for Children and Christiana Care Health System and convinced them to treat the child (in collaboration with the Wills Eye Health System in Philadelphia) as a charity case. The child died Tuesday night in a Port au Prince hospital, before visa and passport approvals could be completed, Shapira said.
Related story: Learn more about HFI's effort to help Melissa here.
The organization is already making plans for a third year of summer camp in Jacmel. Collecting donations of nonprescription medicines, clothing, school and arts and crafts supplies is an ongoing operation. Members regularly contact restaurants, asking them to donate a portion of a day’s receipts as a fundraiser. Artwork created by women in Jacmel will soon be sold through the HFI website. They’ll also be applying for foundation and government grants, Downs said.
Related story: Learn more about HFI's fundraising plans here.
Health care providers are among the group’s strongest supporters, Downs said. Christiana Care permits its employees to take up to two weeks of administrative leave a year, with pay, to participate in HFI’s relief efforts, spokesman Bill Schmitt said.
Maintaining a high level of community interest year after year, however, is a significant challenge, especially for small organizations like HFI.
“There’s always more interest from donors immediately after a major disaster, when there’s a media spotlight,” said Donna Porstner, communications manager at AmeriCares, a nonprofit disaster relief and humanitarian aid organization which provides immediate response to emergency medical needs based in Stamford, Conn. “When the spotlight fades, the pace of donations becomes difficult to sustain.”
For example, Porstner said, of the $16 million in donations AmeriCares has received to support relief operations in Haiti, more than $6 million came in the week following the earthquake. To sustain its efforts in Haiti, AmeriCares developed a plan to phase its spending over three to five years, she said.
Smaller groups may not have such flexibility, she added.
“The economic situation affects people’s ability to reach deeper into their pockets,” said Gov. Markell’s communications officer, Felicia Pullam, who worked extensively on Delaware’s effort to assist Miyagi, Japan, after an earthquake and tsunami disaster in March. “But the amount of energy people are willing to contribute is really impressive. People who have experienced hardship themselves can sometimes relate better to how hard it is for other families.”
Related story: Learn more about Delaware's effort to provide relief in Miyagi, Japan here.
“We’ve been lucky to have had two summers when people have gone to Jacmel, and the people who live there are counting on us coming back,” Shapira said.
“Everybody’s schedule changes, and so does the amount of their involvement, but we haven’t had anybody who has gone to Haiti say they wouldn’t go back again,” Downs said. “Everyone who has been there is a changed person.”
[caption id="attachment_14977" align="alignright" width="270" caption="HFI Volunteer, Kira Burt from Mississauga, Canada playing a game of checkers with an HFI camper. Photo courtesy: Haiti Family Initiiative"]
Linda Bradford, the X-ray technician, is already thinking about returning to Jacmel next summer. In her third summer, she said she would like to devote more time to working with the camp’s college-age Haitian counselors/translators.
The counselors sought an increased role in the camp’s operations this summer, and Bradford wants to build on that. “To me, that’s the next generation. We need to teach them to have the confidence that they can do things, that they can become leaders,” she said. “They know what needs to be done to move their people forward. They have high aspirations.”
Zu de Gain plans to return to Jacmel next summer, and the summer after that. She has her own dream too — a dream of somehow raising $40,000 on her own to build a schoolhouse.
“I love the people, and I feel for them,” she said. “I look at what I have here, and they have nothing there. I feel very happy helping them. And I think I get as much joy as they get from me, or even more. I don’t need that much to live.”