Haiti Days 1 - 3

It’s coincidental that two non-profits of which I serve on the board are interested in working in Haiti, so I’m here doing a little of work for both of them. My primary focus is working with Worldwide Orphans Foundation http://www.wwo.org/ and I’m also representing the Institute for Urban Design http://www.ifud.org/. WWO is interested in forming partnerships to care for orphans in Haiti and IfUD is working to ensure that the rebuilding of Haiti is done in a smart and sustainable way.

I’m traveling with WWO’s founder, Dr. Jane Aronson, an amazing woman with whom I would accept an invitation to spend a week traveling just about anywhere, as well as four others. I am the lone rep for IfUD.

On our first day, we visited the Love A Child Medical Clinic, which is funded primarily by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. We were given a tour by two American volunteer doctors. The clinic was clean, organized and seemed incredibly well run. They claimed it was the best run emergency clinic in Haiti and we all believed them. The tents were all new and high quality, they seemed to have ample medical supplies and equipment and the children were playing with a variety of new toys.

The clinic was set up to treat those injured from the earthquake and a significant number of them had missing or injured limbs. This was not an orphan clinic specifically, but had a high proportion of orphans given the number of children whose parents were killed by the earthquake.

It felt positive to see that people had committed money to the clinic, and while it was sad to see the amputees, it was also great to know that they had access to effective medical care. But I experienced a particularly sad moment when I saw a young child who looked about eight. He was delivered to the clinic without a family, and nobody knew who he was or what happened to him. He had sustained a leg injury, but could walk with crutches, hunched over with a vacant look in his eyes. He was physically alive but looked mentally and emotionally void of life. The doctor said that the child was his favorite patient. (Maybe he was the patient this doctor cared about the most?) I’ve visited other third world countries and have witnessed extreme poverty and people with severe disabilities but I think he was perhaps the saddest looking child I had ever seen. I will remember him.

We then went to visit two affiliated orphanages that Jane had visited on her first trip to Haiti. On Jane’s last visit, she noticed that the kids were playing soccer with a ball made out of rags held together with tape and rubber bands. She promised them that she would come back and bring them some new soccer balls. So before leaving I bought ten soccer balls.

We arrived at the first orphanage and I pulled out two soccer balls and gave them to the kids, who were thrilled. Jane found a boy with stitches in his head on her last visit that had not been taken out and had caused a severe infection. She took them out for him and was now happy to see that his head had healed.



We played for a little bit with the boys and then walked inside. I was taken aback by the unsanitary conditions. Additionally, the whole operation dealing with forty children seemed to be run by one guy (from Brooklyn). There were other Haitians sitting with the children and helping out, but I had the impression that they didn’t have any actual clinical experience. We walked into the “baby room” and was shocked to see more than a dozen babies sharing a small room. Some were crying but most were just hanging out with that vacant look I kept seeing. I wondered if few of them were crying more because crying probably didn’t do much for them if there was nobody there to pick them up. It was the Ferber technique at its extreme.

I spoke with a seventeen-year-old who told me that all of the children there were learning English, French and Creole. I was impressed by how together he seemed, and he kept telling me how lucky he was to be alive, and how it was God’s will and how wonderful God is. This orphanage, like most in Haiti, is run by a Christian organization. He had two years of school left, and I asked him what he would do after that. "God’s work," he replied.

We took a ride to the second orphanage and were again a big hit with the soccer balls. I busted out three of them and the kids went crazy. They set up a couple of goals in the concrete yard and started playing a game. I jumped in and had a great time. They were happy to pass to me, despite my being the weak link on the "field."

Day 3
We woke up and drove to downtown Port-au-Prince. There are no places without collapsed buildings. PaP reminds me a lot of India. There are thriving vibrant markets everywhere and all manner of things are sold not in stores but right on the street. There is nothing here that feels either Caribbean or Latin. Despite its geographic location I feel much more like I’m in India or Africa. And similarly there are a lot of things missing. Land lines don’t work right now. Cell and internet service comes and goes. There is only electricity provided for part of the day and right now there is no gasoline. It ran out yesterday and supposedly a new shipment will be arrivingin three days. Luckily our drivers were well prepared with full tanks.

Before coming, I wasn’t sure what to expect in terms of the effects of the earthquake. I still had images stuck in my head of dead bodies and open wounds. The city has been cleaned up to an extent and recovery mode is much different than emergency mode and there are two obvious effects—there are tent communities and rubble everywhere—and it is the same in downtown as it is in all of the surrounding areas.

I expected the damage to me more limited to the shoddy buildings but there is damage everywhere in buildings made of concrete and rebar. They were seemingly well constructed but I wonder if the massive damage (particularly relative to Chile) is not because they were made of shoddy materials but simply because they weren’t properly engineered. There don’t seem to be many rules here, so I doubt there is much in the way of building codes.

We stopped at the Presidential Palace—probably the grandest building in Haiti—which was severely damaged on an equally grand level and will unfortunately need to be demolished. We took some pictures and some kids from a nearby tent city came up to talk to us. We are lucky to have two among us that speak French. They asked the kids a bunch of questions to ascertain where they lived, whether they had parents and whether they went to school. They lived in the nearby tents. Some had parents and some did not and none of them went to school.

I thought it would be nice to give them a soccer ball, since they seemed to have nothing to play with and nothing to do. Jane nodded that it was a good idea. I grabbed one from the car and you would have thought I was holding a bag full of money. They were jumping up trying to grab it and I tossed it out to the group of them and a melee ensued. This was not what I had expected. I failed to realize that the kids in the orphanage shared everything where the kids on the street are individualistic. Watching the kids fight over who would get the ball, made me feel terrible. The kids then went away following the lucky one that managed to steal possession of the ball.

A few minutes later, a bunch of them came back looking for more balls or anything else we might give them. A few adults began approaching us as well so we had to jump in the car and head out.

We then went to La Maison des Enfants de Dieu orphanage. The place seemed better run, more organized and most of all more sanitary. All of the children currently sleep outside in tents. The building wasn’t meaningfully damaged by the earthquake, but the kids are completely terrified to be inside. But they are starting to occasionally make their way back in, and the director feels that within a few months they will move back inside.

We went into the baby tent, greeted once again by a dozen babies sitting on a smooth concrete floor. It was hard but clean. I sat down in the middle of them and they were pretty open to playing and letting me pick them up and most were not crying. We saw one that Dr. Jane diagnosed as having clubfeet. Apparently this is not uncommon and treatable with some sort of casting regimen. The director said that the boy (Ben) had casts when he arrived, but the doctors took them off for some reason. When we left I had to be careful not to step on any of them because they were all over the floor, making a baby obstacle course.

One thing I noticed about all of the orphanages is that you would often see infants unattended. There are simply too many of them and not enough adults to watch them. So a couple of times I was walking somewhere and would find a two-year-old all by himself, making his way in the world.

My employee, Sara, had given me tzedaka box, which belonged to Marin, her five-year-old daughter, who had wanted me to give to the orphans. I gave it to the director and asked specifically that the money be used for Ben to get him back to the doctor to get his feet fixed (feet photo below).



We left and went to our hotel to clean up and then to dinner. A friend of one of my fellow volunteers brought us to a lovely French restaurant, which seemed surreal after experiencing so much poverty. It was hard to believe that this restaurant even existed amid such misery. The proprietor rang off the specials and the first one was a prime rib imported from Madagascar. It sounded delicious but I decided I preferred to eat something that was local. Then I realized that all of their food was imported.

It was yet another paradox of this country. I had experienced two long two days that were both physically and emotionally exhausting, and I’m all for culinary therapy. But having a decadent meal in such a poor place just didn't feel quite right.

That’s all for now. More to come tomorrow!

Bonswa (thanks for the Creole lesson, Caroline),

Matt