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Haiti Video Interviews: Living in a Tent Camp

July 19, 2010 in Disaster Relief, Haiti, In the news, Initiatives, Rebuilding Communities, Videos by Jonathan White | Comments closed

By Kevin Connell and Jonathan White

This series of video clips was shot by RMF’s Kevin Connell in the St. Pierre Square tent camp in Petionville, an upper-class neighborhood of Port-au-Prince.  This is a small tent camp set up in a public square but one of the largest tent camps in the city is located on a nearby golf course with an estimated 50,000 people occupying.  Voluntary settlements like these were setup in virtually every square or open space in the city after the disaster.  These clips gives you a little more insight into the living conditions that most of the Haitians displaced by the earthquake are still dealing with.  Little has been done to create any longer term housing solutions, but as you can see from these video clips the Haitian’s are still making the best of a very tough situation.

http://www.realmedicinefoundation.org/video/interview-with-evens

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Amy Goodman: Haiti, 6 Months After the Earthquake (huffingtonpost.com)

July 14, 2010 in Disaster Relief, Haiti, Rebuilding Communities by Jonathan White | Comments closed

In this article posted on Huffingtonpost.com, Amy Goodman, the renowned host of Democracy Now!, echos much of what we’ve heard from our staff on the ground, and points out that according to the Washington Post only 2% of the promised reconstruction aid has been delivered, and much of the U.S’s $1.15 Billion pledge is still stuck in Congress.  It is also pointed out that they could only find 6 of the 197 organizations that solicited money having publicly available reports detailing their activities.

We at RMF are proud, as always, to have detailed every penny spent on our initiatives and ensure it’s effectiveness..

Here’s the article below, and the link to the original:  (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amy-goodman/haiti-six-months-after-th_b_645833.html)

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Real Medicine in Haiti: 6 months later and beyond

July 12, 2010 in Disaster Relief, Donate, Haiti, In the news, Initiatives, Providing Medical Support, Rebuilding Communities, Whole Health by Jonathan White | Comments closed

July 12, 2010

By Alex Areces and Jonathan White

As we pause to mark the somber six month anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti and the 230,000 lives lost, it is worth noting not only the significant achievements of the international aid community but also how dire the situation remains and the immense challenges that lie ahead.  Most of the 1.5 million Haitians that were left homeless are still living in the immense tent cities due to sheer scale of the logistical and legal challenges of rebuilding literally hundreds of buildings on mostly private property. The health care system is still in tatters, and struggling to keep up with the contstant flow of new patients from these tent cities.  Much of the money raised in the initial weeks for rebuilding is still sitting on the sidelines with no clear way to spend it.   With no easy solutions on the horizon to re-house this immense displaced population the repairing and re-growth of the health and education systems are more important than ever.  Knowing that it will take many more months for any kind of progress on the resettlement of these people living in tent cities, RMF is committed more than ever to concentrating on the rebuilding of a sustainable health care system to care for this immense displaced population.

The living conditions in many of these tent cities with rubble everywhere, limited sanitation options, and very little protection from the heavy rains common this time of year presents a variety of hazards for these people every day, resulting in multiple injuries and deaths.  Little Chon Oxius, 11 months old, is one of them, and a few weeks ago he came to see Dr. Margaret Degand, RMF’s partner doctor at the Lambert Santé Hospital’s free clinic, with severe burn trauma complications.

Dr. Degand or “Maggie”, as she is fondly referred to is Lambert’s Santé’s Medical Director and founder and one of nation’s top clinicians and plastic surgeon.  Dr. Degand spontaneously opened her private surgical clinic in Pétion-Ville to all the victims of the quake at no cost working tirelessly around the clock for days and weeks to hundreds that came to her clinic desperate for emergency care.   With continued financial support and volunteer assistance, she has been managing to keep her public clinic open. She shares RMF’s vision to increase the overall quality and accessibility of patient care to the public during this crisis. In May 2010, Maggie entered into official partnership with RMF to continue offering Public Care.

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Alonzo Mourning and Success Stories the World Needs to Hear (AP)

June 6, 2010 in Haiti by Real Medicine Foundation Staff | Comments closed

When Haiti struck we were all shaken. We all pitched in even in these hard times and we we made small donations add up to hundreds of millions of dollars in hours. In the face of devastation of this magnitude we said that we would not only build back, we would build back better.

Hundreds of blue and white tarp-covered shacks crowd a low-lying, flood-prone ravine at Marassa 14, a camp where 3,000 people live outside the capital of Haiti. But since January, we have seen little happen. Now, almost 5 months after the quake, only around 7000 people have been moved to safer housing while hundreds of thousands of families still live in 12000 tent cities across the country.

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Haiti: This American Life Seeks to Understand how 10,000 NGO’s can Exist in a Country That Keeps Getting Poorer

May 29, 2010 in General, Haiti, In the news by Allison Glennon | Comments closed

“Unprecedented amounts of money have been pledged to Haitian relief in the last few months. American households have given over $1 billion and in March, 120 countries pledged over $9 billion(!) to rebuild. The only problem is that – historically – blanketing a country in aid and money has never really worked so well. Is there a chance this time things could be different?”

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Haiti Update: Lambert Santé’s Director Honored with Award from the Ministry of Health

May 28, 2010 in Haiti by Kevin Connell | Comments closed

by Kevin Connell, RMF Program Director, Caribbean

Real Medicine has continued to push forward its strategy for healthcare in Haiti.  Our partnership with Lambert Santé has been building traction over the past few weeks.  The hospital has already hired 3 out of 4 new medical residents to join the core staff at the hospital and is working on hiring 4 nurses, which we expect to happen over the course of the next two weeks.

This critical increase in the rotating core medical personnel at the hospital will go to support 24 hour emergency care, continued post-operative care for earthquake-related injuries and general practice medicine.  The increase in manpower will begin to help replace what has been a steady but reduced flow of volunteers and ensure that the hospital always has someone available to handle cases, no matter when they should arrive.  Real Medicine plans to expand this program in the next few months as the hospital continues to transition away from disaster-related care.

The residents will train under Dr. Margaret Degand, the hospital’s Director, who was recently featured in the Port-au-Prince newspaper, Le Matin, as a leader and hero in the private Haitian community’s response to the health crisis.  Dr. Degand is a plastic surgeon by trade, who made the pivotal decision on January 12th to change her clinic into a hospital and begin offering a range of advanced care and treatment services to the surging patient population. 

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Haiti: Reacting to Sean Penn’s Testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

May 24, 2010 in Haiti by Kevin Connell | Comments closed

Sean Penn made a powerful point in his speech to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday in his update on the reconstruction efforts in Haiti.  He reported that the international community’s unprecedented support after January 12th has not made its way to the community fast enough, citing excessive caution at the hands of the decision-makers in writing the checks.  Mr. Penn said that the “bureaucracy of international aid is protecting people to death”, arguing that in trying to avoid the problems of aid to Haiti that have taken place in the past like corruption and aid-dependency, the international community is jeopardizing the current effort to save lives on the ground.

In the critique, he referenced a slew of other problems that have directly arisen through those cautionary delays.  Among them, Mr. Penn mentioned the 5 fully-functional hospitals “in this city of ruins” that have had to close since the disaster because they ran out of money and couldn’t meet the sniff-test of donor agencies quick enough.  He also discussed the children who have been allowed to die of simple but deadly diseases, including a recent 15-year-old boy with Diphtheria, because of a lack in supply of basic medical treatments.

Mr. Penn’s argument resonated with me because I’ve experienced them directly.  We worked to raise emergency funding for our partner, CDTI Hospital, before it was forced to close in March.  Our efforts and those of the international community proved to be too little and too late to save the hospital, but for some reason it seems that the reconstruction effort in Haiti is slow to learn its lessons.  Organizations continue to draw up plans to fund the construction of new hospitals that will take years to build while more of the remaining facilities—already providing public healthcare each day—continue to run out of funding.  Finally, I watched first-hand as the boy that Mr. Penn talked about was turned away from our other partner hospital, Lambert Santé, despite the staffs best efforts, because they, like all the other facilities Sean’s team visited that day, lacked the available treatment.

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Haiti: Four Months Later, Little has Changed, but Life Goes on (A Story in Videos)

May 21, 2010 in Haiti, In the news by Real Medicine Foundation Staff | Comments closed

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.bvblackspin.com/media/2010/04/women_in_haiti_food_rations.jpg

Audio slideshow: Life in a camp in Haiti

Recorded and photographed by Jake Price. Produced by Jake Price and Phil Coomes (bbc.com)

In January an earthquake in Haiti killed up to 230,000 people and left more than one million homeless.

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Supporting the Local Hospital System in Port-au-Prince

April 29, 2010 in Haiti by Real Medicine Foundation Staff | Comments closed

April 29, 2010
By Kevin Connell

May is almost here and Real Medicine’s projects in Haiti are moving forward into the second phase of the reconstruction efforts.

We’ve signed an agreement to begin supporting Hôpital Lambert Santé in Pétion-Ville, Port-au-Prince, a 14-bed private facility set in the upscale hillside suburb of the capital.  Six months ago the facility was a state-of-the-art clinic that specialized in plastic surgery, focused on serving the elective healthcare needs of this middle to upper class Haitian community.

But with the earthquake, the needs of the community permanently shifted.  Most of the public hospitals were destroyed or left inoperable by the disaster.  And while there might have been some capacity in Haiti to provide public healthcare before the quake, the sheer devastation to the public health system coupled with the surging needs of 300,000 injured Haitians, vastly overshadowed the government’s ability to intervene on its own.

In contrast to the destruction to the public health sector, private hospitals fared much better during the quake, having usually been designed, built and maintained to a higher standard.  Given the shifting needs of their Haitian community, Lambert Santé stepped in and answered the call, opening its doors on January 12th.

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Sleeping Giant – Port-au-Prince, April 18, 2010

April 18, 2010 in Disaster Relief, Donate, Haiti by Kevin Connell | Comments closed

After a three-week hiatus from Haiti to help present Real Medicine’s strategy for the country to key contacts in Washington, including a Director on Obama’s executive committee at the White House, it’s been very strange being back on the ground in Port-au-Prince.

I’m not sure what has specifically changed.  The crush of relief workers, military personnel and patients is less pronounced but still ever-present.  There is still unbearably bad traffic in the mornings and afternoons on the major arteries, UN peacekeepers / Haitian police continue to prowl the streets and setting periodic roadblocks, and the massive tent communities continue to loom, sweeping through the city’s interior up into the suburbs.  But overall, things seem to have settled down into an eerie sort of aftermath calm—a grudging acceptance of the new baseline—where the original problems persist, but have been allowed to recede just below the surface.

One of the topics of discussion you hear everywhere is the concern over where and how the money donated for the reconstruction is being spent.  A recent article mentioned close to $10 billion in aid that has been pledged so far for the long term rebuilding and development of Haiti.  But if you are here on the ground, that money is hard to see.  The tent communities are now getting drenched each night in the inevitable nightly monsoon that happens at about 7pm.  These rains are expected to get much worse as the season progresses.

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