Haiti

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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

http://www.realmedicinefoundation.org/video/can-i-see-your-place

http://www.realmedicinefoundation.org/video/on-the-way-to-evens-home

http://vimeo.com/12389131

The man being interviewed is Edwin, he’s in his early 20’s, originally from Carrefour, which is a poorer neighborhood nearer to the coast, but had moved to Petionville when he was younger. Edwin has finished high school where he learned English (spoke fluently) and had done apprenticeship training to be a mechanic. He said he wasn’t working because there were no jobs available if you don’t know someone or aren’t connected to someone in a position to hire you – kind of the extreme of our unemployment situation here in the US.

Edwin said his time is now focused on taking care of his family, with 6 brothers and sisters. They all live in the tent shown in the final clip, which is small to say the least. He didn’t mention how many family members had died in the disaster, but did say that his entire extended family was living in the tents and therefore homeless: aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. As you can hear in the clips, he references the government as the source of most of the problems, and does not hold out much hope for their ability to lead in the reconstruction. One surprising thing was that he didn’t seem to hold any complaints for the international community, which was found to be pretty common. When Kevin asked him what he would say to America, he simply thanked the US for our support.

Life in the community

All the people were very welcoming and friendly, which was a little surprising, given their predicament. The community had truly carved out a life in that square and things appeared “normal” for them, which really highlighted their adversity/resourcefulness, but also their general acceptance of the dire situation around them. They were mostly busy doing laundry or taking care of their kids. Many of the kids were studying out of textbooks. They all lit up when Kevin said he was from America – they apparently have high hopes for our role in the reconstruction.

Tags: Disaster Relief, earthquake, Haiti, Lambert Santé, Port-au-Prince, tent city

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)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti–July 12 marked the six-month anniversary of the devastating earthquake here in Haiti that killed as many as 300,000 people and left much of the country in ruins. Up to 1.8 million people are living in squalid tent cities, with inadequate sanitation, if any, no electricity and little security, or any respite from the intense heat and the worsening rains. Rape, hunger and despair are constant threats to the people stranded in the camps. Six months ago, the world seemed united with commitments to help Haiti recover. Now, half a year later, the rubble remains in place, and misery blankets the camps, layered with heat, drenched by rain.

After landing in Haiti, we traveled to one of the more than 1,350 refugee camps, Camp Corail. It is right near Titanyen, which was used as a dumping ground for bodies during the first coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and which, after the earthquake, was used for makeshift mass graves.

Corail is on a flat expanse of white gravel, with orderly rows of tents. During the day, the camp becomes searingly hot, with no trees for protection.

Corail resident Romain Arius told me: “In the situation we’re living here in the tents, we can’t continue like that anymore. We would ask them as soon as possible to give us the real houses that they said they were going to give us so that our situation could improve.”

Soon after we left, we heard that a storm collapsed at least 94 tents and sent hundreds of residents fleeing to find shelter.

Haitians are angry, questioning where the billions of dollars donated in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake have gone. The Disaster Accountability Project found that of the 197 organizations that solicited money following the earthquake, only six had publicly available reports detailing their activities.

From the “international donor community,” the wealthier nations, more than $9 billion was pledged, but to date, only Brazil, Norway and Australia have paid in full. Most of the U.S. pledge of $1.15 billion is now being held up in Congress.

Patrick Elie, a longtime Haitian democracy activist and Haiti’s former secretary of state for public security, spoke with me, about land ownership and the earthquake’s enormous toll:

“Land tenure in Haiti is in total chaos. This is also the result of the behavior of the Haitian elites over centuries. They appropriated land, especially after independence and the end of slavery, which would have been common property. And now, there is a lot of discussion about who owns what piece of land.”

Elie said that in this time of emergency that gives the government the power of eminent domain, the key question is whose land will be seized — communal land that peasants have used for centuries, or the vast tracts of land owned by the elites.

I also spoke with Sean Penn. The two-time Oscar-winning actor came to Haiti after the earthquake. Having just been through a medical crisis with his own teenage son, who underwent major surgery, he was horrified at the stories he was hearing about the amputations being performed in Haiti without anesthesia. Penn founded the J/P Haitian Relief Organization (jphro.org) and has been in Haiti for five of the past six months, managing a refugee camp at the Petionville Club golf course with 55,000 Haitians displaced by the earthquake. Sitting in a large tent, Penn was frustrated. Comparing the U.S. resources being spent in Afghanistan (which he called “a ludicrous exercise”) with the U.S. spending in Haiti, he said,

“You have a war here, you’ve got a surge coming with storms, but no face to hate, no country to rail at, no natural resources, and the faces here are black.”

Penn says J/P HRO will be in Haiti for the long haul: “We plan to adapt, to adjust. I think our next major new push for us will be rubble removal and working with partners to get people returned into neighborhoods and to again work with partners. Take camp management into community management and advocacy.”

Patrick Elie advocates for popular Haitian leadership in the reconstruction: “We are a people who can fend for ourselves. We have a vision of where we want to go. So we do need friends, but we don’t need people to think for us, or to pity us.”

According to the Washington Post, only 2 percent of promised reconstruction aid has been delivered. The hurricane season is upon Haiti, and millions there are counting on all of us making good on our pledges.

For all of Democracy Now!’s coverage of the Haiti earthquake’s six month anniversary, including an exclusive, hour-long interview with Sean Penn, visithttp://www.democracynow.org/tags/haiti_earthquake

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 850 stations around the world. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,”recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

© 2010 Amy Goodman

Tags: earthquake, Haiti, huffingtonpost.com, RMF

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.

Little Chon’s Story

RMF’s Operations Director for Haiti, Alex Areces, has been very busy directing our initiatives in Haiti and had come across Chon part of our work with Lambert’s Santé’ Hospital. Chon lives in one of the tent cities for Internally Displaced Persons (IDP). His mother was preparing a meal on a “Chien Jambe”, a makeshift stove on the ground, which roughly translates to ‘food cooked so low a dog could cross over it’. It’s basically a pot sitting atop three stones, with a fire lit below.

As mom prepared the evening meal little Chon found his way to the Chien Jambe and toppled the pot burning both his hands nearly to the bone! Having been treated at other facilities, he was eventually referred to one of the finest (once private) facilities in Haiti that in the past he could never have afforded. When first seen at Lambert Santé, Chon had severe retraction of all fingers of both hands forming a permanent fist of scar tissue, commonly found in this type of burn. Grasping objects becomes all but impossible.

On June 15th, Chon underwent a contracture scarring removal and skin grafting of all his fingers in both hands. This lengthy procedure is known for a high degree of failure during the post operative period. Delicate skin grafting has to be protected from retracting again, so each of little Chon’s fingers are fixed in an extended fixation with specialized pins. Frequent follow-up care is critical with meticulous attention given to his wound dressings. Each session lasts more than 30 minutes to each hand! Now just 4weeks following his surgery, the grafted skin on Chon’s hands have almost completely healed with no retraction and a very satisfactory extension. He will shortly start a regimen of applied physical therapy to restore the maximum of mobility to his little fingers.

With a comprehensive rehabilitation program, Chon will recuperate much of his hand function, ensuring that he will be able to thrive and pursue a life without the limitations of the scarred hands from his horrendous burn trauma.

Moving forward

Thanks to the loving and dedicated care of the medical personnel at Lambert Santé and generous support of our donors, Chon and countless others can have fruitful and productive lives. While much of the donor money raised by the international community during the initial weeks of the crisis is still sitting on the sidelines, RMF continues to assure that any funds raised are spent in a timely and highly effective manner and accountable manner where they are needed most.

More information about our initiatives in Haiti: http://www.realmedicinefoundation.org/initiative/haiti-earthquake-relief-projects

If you’d like to donate to this or any of Real Medicine’s causes, you can click the donate button on this page or through our website at realmedicinefoundation.org

Tags: charity, children, Donate, earthquake, Haiti, hospital, Lambert Santé, Port-au-Prince, Real Medicine, rebuilding, RMF

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.

With so many still living in harms way, still dying from diseases caused by dirty water alone, Alonzo Mourning hopes that by remaining active in his local community and by telling these stories of success, that he might inspire others to play a part.

To Mourning, a better Haiti isn’t good enough

By TIM REYNOLDS (AP)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — As the charter jet began backing away from the terminal, Ginel Thermosey slowly turned around to shake hands with the medical student seated one row behind him.

Had he not made the trip from Port-au-Prince to Miami, Thermosey would have died within two weeks of leukemia. In a few days, with some donated treatment and medication, the 20-year-old will have a new lease on life.

These are the stories Alonzo Mourning insists the world needs to hear, the success stories from Haiti, where the earthquakes that struck 4 1/2 months ago took everything from people who had nothing to begin with. No one knows for sure how many people died, how many were never found, how many could have been saved.

Deep down, Mourning fears the world has already forgotten.

The work isn’t complete in Haiti, he says. It’s only beginning.

“These are human beings,” Mourning said, overlooking the tent hospital at the edge of Port-au-Prince’s airport. “These are children that are suffering, that need help. That’s what moved me to come, to do this, to continue to provide help as much as I can and continue to reach out to others, so others can be made aware that they, too, can play a part.”

For that reason, every couple weeks, Mourning makes the short flight from Miami to Port-au-Prince. The retired Miami Heat star is among the many spreading the tale of Project Medishare, the not-for-profit group from the University of Miami that already had spent nearly two decades trying to improve the quality of health care in the impoverished nation.

Millions have been raised.

Many millions more are needed. Things are better in Haiti, for certain — yet still terrible. Haitians are dying daily from drinking filthy water, or from hunger, or disease. Some parts of the city are so gripped by crime and desperation, visitors are told not to even think about venturing that way because no one’s safety is guaranteed.

“There still is a need for major help,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said. “It is our responsibility.”

On Mourning’s latest trip, a down-and-back jaunt Saturday, Spoelstra, former Heat guard Tim Hardaway and Memphis Grizzlies star Rudy Gay made the trip with him, along with several other members of the Heat organization.

None had seen Haiti before.

Nothing could prepare them, either.

“Even flying in on the plane, seeing the devastation shocked me,” Gay said. “It’s easy to just hear about it, but to see it firsthand, it’s really humbling.”

Spoelstra held a premature baby in his left hand, the child so tiny that it rested its head on the tips of two of the coach’s fingers. Gay was approached by a woman at the tent hospital, who invited him to hold her newborn daughter — then begged him to take her back to the U.S., saying she lacked the means to give her child a life in Haiti. Hardaway was overwhelmed by the sight of ailing children.

“We are the luckiest people on earth,” Hardaway would say softly later, sunglasses hiding the emotion welling in his eyes. “We should be counting our lucky stars every day. This is tough.”

Somehow, among the Project Medishare staff, morale remains shockingly high.

Volunteers get shuttled in every Saturday for a seven-day stay. Anything longer, Medishare staff has learned, becomes just too tough for many to bear. Upon arrival, they are greeted by Tom Koulouris, who has run the tent hospital since its very first days after the earthquake.

“We have some of the best food in Port-au-Prince catered twice a day,” Koulouris is saying to the new volunteers. “At lunchtime, it consists of beans and rice. In the evening, it’s rice and beans.”

The hospital is not just for those affected by the earthquake. When people need medical attention in Haiti, they are usually taken to Project Medishare’s facility. Twenty-three American visitors were treated recently for trauma injuries after their truck toppled. Machete wounds, premature babies, mothers in desperate need, disease, all part of the daily lineup.

“We are the safety net of Port-au-Prince,” Koulouris said.

Koulouris goes home this week. His mission will be complete. The tent hospital is closing, thankfully. Patients began being moved about 15 minutes away Sunday to a more secure structure — an absolute necessity now that hurricane season has arrived in the Atlantic. Any storm with tropical or hurricane-force winds hitting the tent hospital would have almost surely destroyed everything.

He rattles off the stats, proudly: The tent hospital has treated over 20,000 patients, performed more than 1,500 major surgical procedures. It’s so high-tech, they can even fit people for prosthetic limbs; 37 of those have been issued so far, another 500 are on the way, as many as 4,500 are needed.

Through it all, Koulouris has not stopped to reflect on what’s transpired.

“I’m afraid if I do that here, I’ll probably fall apart,” he said. “I’ll wait until I get home.”

Soon, Thermosey will be back home as well. He can thank Anika Mirick for that.

Mirick is a first-year medical student from the University of Central Florida, who just finished her one-week stay at the tent hospital. Thermosey was one of her patients.

“I was crying every day,” Mirick said.

Desperate to find a way to save him, Mirick made calls and pleaded with doctors in Orlando, Fla. to save his life. They agreed without hesitation. And within one day, Thermosey had his 30-day visa allowing him to enter the U.S., a minor miracle in itself.

When that plane was leaving, Mirick was the person Thermosey thanked first, extending his hand, intravenous tubes protruding from it.

“He will survive,” Mirick said. “We just saved a life.”

It’s the moments like those that Mourning comes to see.

Perhaps the signature moment of his career was a blocked shot against Dallas in Miami’s title-clinching Game 6 of the 2006 NBA finals, when he flew over two people to slap Jason Terry’s layup away, fell to the floor, got up and shouted at teammates — with an expletive tossed in — “What are we doing?”

He’s shouting the same now.

He wants Warren Buffett to listen. Bill Gates, too. Anyone, anywhere, Mourning wants to tell them all, Haiti needs help more than they probably realize.

So he comes back, vowing not to stop until he has nothing left to offer.

“Things have progressed tremendously since Jan. 12,” Mourning said. “But there’s so much more work to be done.”

RMF:Haiti

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?”

In this episode This American Life seeks to understand what is happening in Haiti: why aid money seems frozen and what is needed to make sure that once released, every Haitian, rich, poor, urban, or rural, will benefit.

Broken into four main parts, their call for action could have been taken from Real Medicine’s mission statement: the need for capacity building with a long-term focus.

Based on our founding principals of staying to support long term growth and our successful track record of training and hiring local staff to create sustainable systems, capacity building is something Real Medicine not only believes in but it is something that we do. In fact, it is part of what we are doing in Haiti today: paying the salaries of local staff so that local people are employed in the greater task of helping their neighbors.

Our hope, like that of This American Life, is that world leaders will choose to support local efforts and plans for local capacity building. After so many years of failed attempts to help Haiti, attempts that have in fact made things worse even before the quake, it seems time to take the road less traveled, long as it may be, and to use the aid money supplied by the people of the world to give the people of Haiti a real lasting chance.

Listen: Island Time

Find out about Real Medicine Haiti

Island Time:

Prologue.

Four months after the earthquake in Haiti, Ira Glass talks to Haitian reporter Joseph-Romuald Felix while Romuald tours a tent camp in the Petionville suburb of Port au Prince. Romuald talks to four children — two of them have eaten this day, two have not. Nan Buzard, who heads the American Red Cross effort in Haiti, tells Ira that relief agencies have to walk a thin line between helping too little and helping too much.

Act One. 10,000 Brainiacs.

Adam Davidson and Chana Joffe-Walt from Planet Money follow one Haitian farmer, with the modest crop of two mango trees, through a byzantine system of aid agencies, NGOs, and government bureaucracy as the farmer tries the impossible — to get some plastic milk crates to store and transport her mangoes. Planet Money is a co-production with NPR News. Check out their blog and podcast. (25 minutes)

Song: “Machann Mango”, El Manicero

Act Two. Compound Fracture.

Apricot Irving grew up on a missionary compound in Limbe, in the north of Haiti, and visits the missionary hospital there. It’s pretty well stocked and staffed but, oddly, kind of a ghost town. Meanwhile, a rural Haitian-run clinic 5 miles away, without anywhere near the resources of the missionary hospital, is packed with people. Apricot spends time with the American doctor who used to head the missionary hospital but left in order to help foster a “new” Haiti at the Haitian-run clinic. Apricot Irving is writing a memoir about her experiences growing up on the missionary compound. She’s currently looking for a publisher. (13 minutes)

Act Three. Haiti is Destiny.

Short story writer Ben Fountain tours Port au Prince with his best friend — one of the few eye doctors in the country — and glimpses a cautionary future for us all. Ben Fountain is the author of the short story collection Brief Encounters with Che Guevera.

Tags: This American Life

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.

Quickly becoming a go-to destination for fracture-repair (through what is called external fixation), reconstructive surgery and post-operative wound care, her small 14 bed facility rose to the challenge, treating more than 1200 patients since that first day and performing more than 820 surgeries.

Dr. Degand, who was a highly-regarded surgeon before the crisis, has recently earned praise for her efforts in post-earthquake healthcare delivery. As noted in the article, she received an Honorary Certificate of Merit last month from the Haitian Ministry of Health for her efforts, an award which she has proudly hung over the hospital’s entryway. Dr. Degand is quite proud of what she has been able to accomplish for the Haitian community in the past four months, and her success in responding to the need is only enhanced by her hope to help transform the quality of care given to the Haitian public permanently through continued partnerships with the international community and the Haitian government.

She works around the clock at that dream, often taking patients in for emergency treatment in the middle of the night or performing as many as 23 surgeries on the same patient to ensure best-practice results for everyone—regardless of their means. Her hospital has relied on the generosity of the international medical community and Dr. Degand’s wide-network of friends in Europe, highly successful surgeons, anesthesiologists and other medical professionals, who continue to volunteer their valuable time to fly to Haiti and serve in her hospital.

However, the resources are not as available 4 months after the crisis as they were at the height of the crisis, and Dr. Maggie, like so many health directors at hospitals throughout Port-au-Prince, is anxious about the future. She knows first-hand the need for restructuring in the healthcare system, which has been ravaged by the widespread destruction. Since January 12th, private hospitals have stepped in to fill the void in available health infrastructure (due to the earthquake’s destruction) to meet the heightened need for treatment around the country. However, many hospitals are straining to meet the public need without sufficient external support from the government or from international donors. Some are even closing under the financial pressure, as was the case with RMF partner hospital, CDTI.

Dr. Degand sees the need to support public/private hospitals with funding not just as a short-term solution to save the country from a protracted health crisis, but as an opportunity to improve the quality of public healthcare in Haiti for good. In the article from Le Matin, Dr. Degand says (translated from French):

“All these people who died must not be for nothing; we must ensure something comes out of it. Public health, good or bad, is too expensive in Haiti because of a lack of resources, unlike in the Dominican Republic where [even] the private medical sector is generally subsidized by the state or banks”.

Dr. Maggie believes that the outcome of the health crisis in port-earthquake Haiti should be the formation of a new public health system built in partnership with private hospitals and clinics to ensure quality healthcare for all, rich or poor. At Real Medicine, we couldn’t agree more.

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.

The same frustrating lack of coordination that has plagued relief efforts in the initial weeks is still evident in these critical gaps in program funding and medical supplies, vaccinations and treatment distribution—holes that continue to claim lives while the decision-makers deliberate the best way to plug them. While there is a strong argument to be made for exercising caution and thinking long-term, the international community should keep in mind that some problems—like ensuring basic healthcare in a city largely destroyed by a natural disaster—don’t wait for a convenient time to be fixed.

In his point on Wednesday, Mr. Penn was dead-on. We can only hope that someone up in Washington was listening.

A transcript of the speech is available here.

Tags: Haiti

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

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.

As the rainy season began, photographer Jake Price travelled to a number of the many camps that house some of those left homeless and presents his impressions of those struggling to rebuild their lives.

“There is an undercurrent of vibrant life in Haiti that the waters cannot wash away. After hurricanes, floods, years of domestic and foreign misrule, and the devastating earthquake, a sense of life still runs through peoples veins”

Four months after ‘the catastrophe,’ Haitians still in emergency mode

By Moni Basu, (CNN.com)

“Despite the efforts and good intentions of a host of foreigners and a government that got a wake-up call, progress has been timidly slow.”

‘We’re always fresh in Haiti’

A day in the life of a barbershop owner in Port-au-Prince since the earthquake (guardian.co.uk)

“You can’t let tragedy sweep you away. Looking after yourself is a big part of that”

Child’s eye: Haiti’s humanitarian aftershock

As the aid effort continues in Port-au-Prince, Andrise, a nine-year-old Haitian, describes family life since the disaster (guardian.co.uk)

This video, posted in January, could have been posted yesterday with families still living in the same make-shift tents as they were weeks following the quake.

Find out about Real Medicine in Haiti

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.

The Director of the hospital, Dr. Margaret Degand Dutour, has been busy ever since. While the crush of January is behind her, she continues to perform surgeries, consultations and follow-up care all day into the afternoon and evening, stopping only to drink a cup of espresso or smoke a cigarette before diving back into her tremendous responsibilities. She and her staff of well-trained Haitian medical professionals are on the leading edge of an effort in the private healthcare community to meet the challenges of a broken public health system until that system can be fixed.

The transition has not been easy. Most of these new private/public model hospitals have met with difficulties financing their continued aid of the community, and the international community’s response in bolstering these commitments has been tepid thus far.

Real Medicine has stepped in with an initial commitment to support the primary healthcare component of Lambert Santé’s public health provision. We plan to hire a small staff of newly-trained Haitian medical professionals, including General Practice Physicians and Nurses, to provide a core primary health capacity at the hospital throughout the day. This will ensure the hospital’s ability to continue to provide basic healthcare to the community on a more stable and reliable basis, freeing up the resources of the hospital’s main staff to perform the advanced care services they were trained for. In addition, the structure of the primary health project within an advanced care facility will ensure that patients accessing basic public healthcare at Lambert Santé will also have access to the tertiary care services that the hospital provides, including X-Ray, laboratory testing and general surgery. Finally, Lambert Santé will be able to act as a key referral link for our smaller clinic operations in the community, acting as a “hub” for advanced care. We believe this partnership will be very successful in meeting the holistic healthcare needs of the Haitian community in Port-au-Prince.

Patients aside, the project will also provide much-needed training and supervision for recent medical graduates. The staff will work under the guidance and oversight of Dr. Degand, attaining valuable experience that will empower them to become the next generation of Haitian leaders in healthcare. Real Medicine is exploring the potential to have Lambert Santé approved in the residency process of the local University system to formalize this component of our project.

As with all of its initiatives around the world, Real Medicine works to be flexible to the specific healthcare needs of the community it is serving. The case is no different in Haiti. We’ve seen the need to support hospitals in meeting the large-scale needs of the community and we’ve stepped in, utilizing the same principles for sustainable, best-practice healthcare you will find in any of our projects worldwide.

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.

One tangible thing I have noticed is that much of the rubble that once clogged the streets downtown has been removed or neatly pushed into corners. However, I do not see many trucks carrying wood or hear the sound of hammers, drills or saws in the distance. Most people have yet to see the temporary housing structures being built that were so central to the reconstruction plan. The UN had put together an elaborate strategy to carve out zones in each neighborhood to move the original residents of those neighborhoods back into while the surrounding buildings are rebuilt. It seemed like a very sensible plan—preserve the social and familial networks while making room for the reconstruction. However, like many of the plans for this country post-earthquake, we are still waiting to see them actualized.

As a somewhat-related side note, I just read a security brief from a friend in the business here that left me very concerned about the stability of Haiti in the near future. The 4,000 criminals that escaped from jail when the national prison collapsed have reportedly been rebuilding their criminal organizations alongside the reconstruction efforts, and it’s feared that there may be a rise in rioting/crime on the horizon, particularly if the aid/reconstruction funding continues to go unseen. One piece of news that was particularly startling was that some of these gangs actually have training camps in certain areas of the city where the work to prepare for kidnappings, robberies, etc. With the 2 MSF employees kidnapped in March, it seems the stage may be set for more clashes between the relief efforts and the inner-city’s criminal element.

Despite these challenges, Real Medicine has continued to push forward with its plans to continue to build sustainable primary healthcare in the communities that need it the most. We are currently discussing project plans with key partners in Haiti. One of which involves being the implementing partner for a new primary health clinic in a neighborhood to the north end of the capital that has very little access to basic healthcare. Our team has been performing due diligence on these partnerships, the proposed communities involved and the project itself to ensure that all three meet with our standard of expectation. Funding remains a key concern for this and other projects, as we work to access the unprecedented amount of funding that was raised in the initial weeks after the disaster.

Part of me is happy with the delays, recalling that the ~$9B was given to this country’s development over the last decade had yielded a corresponding drop in GDP of 25%. Clearly, we need to be careful with our aid and development budgets. But then I think about those people living under sheets amidst the monsoon-like rain we had tonight—so bad that it was difficult to drive through the runoff on the road. And I wonder what all this time is really adding to the decision-making—shouldn’t the risk/reward of a development project be clear enough after 8 weeks of review and analysis? It leaves me wondering if that money will make it to the efforts on the ground after all. Until then, the development community (Real Medicine included) will continue to hurry-up and wait for continued progress in Haiti. I only hope that the locals living out in the mud can do the same.

Tags: Haiti, Port-au-Prince, White House

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