Feature Article

Haiti: the recovery

After the earthquake

The plight of the people of Haiti following a huge earthquake last January has slipped from the headlines, but the relief effort by their compatriots in Florida continues undiminished. A shared language, culture and spirituality is proving invaluable in understanding and meeting their needs

On the outer wall of Fr Reginald Jean-Mary’s church, Notre Dame d’Haiti, on Miami’s shady 62nd Street, a bright pie chart displays the many efforts by Miami Diocese to help the Haitian community back home: donations to Haitian dioceses, construction of a permanent shelter, youth scholarships, transportation for priests.

“We can’t compete in funding with international organisations,” says Haitian-born Fr Jean-Mary, parish priest in Miami’s Little Haiti. “Our advantage is that Haitians are used to the Church being the mainstay in their lives, so that is where they turn in time of need.”

Within days of the magnitude-seven earthquake that devastated Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, and much of the Caribbean island’s infrastructure, on 12 January this year, Notre Dame d’Haiti became the hub of an important relief effort for the stricken island. The Diocese of Miami, well versed in helping refugees since the days of the first Cuban boat people, was quick to organise container shipments of food and medical supplies, set up kitchens and tents, and put in place a rotation of doctors, nurses and priests.
Four months on, world interest in Haiti may be waning, but for south Florida, the critical situation in the western hemisphere’s poorest country – no homes, no schools, no hospitals, no roads – is only 700 miles away. With the area’s estimated 200,000 resident Haitians, the aftermath of the earthquake still understandably hits the local papers.

“Our churches, convents and schools have collapsed,” says Fr Jean-Mary. “But we have the land they stood on, so we were able to provide shelters. We take in all Haitians, whatever their faith, and cook them meals. We don’t believe in dry food handouts, we have to give people back their dignity.”

By the second week, St Vincent de Paul had set up mobile clinics for 4,000 people and supplies were arriving via Catholic Charities and Caritas Haiti. However, a container shipment from Miami to Haiti costs $3,000 (£2,000), provoking Fr Jean-Mary to recall: “When the Chicago Fire Services sent us two ambulances recently, we had to turn to the local Rotary Club to ship them for us. We no longer have the means.”

Now well into stage two of the earthquake mission, he pinpoints current priorities – housing, education and orphanages – saying: “The US Episcopal Conference has earmarked $32 million for construction work. For the rainy season, we urgently need prefabricated housing. As for orphanages, we are taking our time, visiting them one by one, and drawing up a specific budget for each.”

Asked how many orphans there were on the island, Fr Jean-Mary shook his head, smiled wistfully and replied: “I don’t think anyone has any idea how many. There were 60 orphanages in Port-au-Prince alone.”

Fr Jean-Mary, who hops between English, French and Creole in his charismatic sermons and in everyday conversation, is concerned that few local Haitian American nurses are volunteering. Many work at the public-service Jackson Memorial Hospital, itself in dire financial straits, with job and salary cuts imminent, so people are afraid of risking their jobs. In addition, families have taken in refugees from the earthquake, and are finding it hard to make ends meet. Giving up vacation time or paying the airfare to Haiti are not always options. But they need diaspora Haitians, if only to solve the translation problem in a country where 80 per cent of people speak Creole, and French is limited to the big cities.

Diane Poirier, a registered nurse at the Jackson Memorial Hospital and representative of the large American-based Service Employees International Union (SEIU), says Haitian nurses were volunteering to go from week one, and 17 from her hospital went in the first three weeks. Conditions are so harsh that stays were limited to three days initially, now to one week, but with the crisis in Jackson, they are looking elsewhere. SEIU has 170 nurses about to leave from Pennsylvania, with fares paid by the union as far as Florida.

The Miami Diocese is investing $200,000 in vocational training for the student population, which has migrated out of Port-au- Prince to Cap Haitien in the north.

“We’re not handing out money,” says Fr Jean-Mary. “We’re providing training, so they can earn a living. We’re hoping for offers of textbooks and computer software from France and Canada, but so far we’ve had nothing.”
The University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine has been closely involved in the relief effort from the outset. Dr Arthur Fournier, professor and vice chairman of family medicine and community health there, is co-founder of Project Medishare, a local non-profit organisation in Haiti since 1994.

“We were there the next day, working in minimal conditions: no beds, no medicine, nothing. The whole south Florida community rallied round us immediately. Private citizens offered planes to ferry supplies and bring back the wounded. Local stores and firms organised collections. By day three, we had supplies and donations, by day seven, 2,000 volunteers,” says Dr Fournier.

“Local doctors, nurses and students gave up vacation time to work with us. More are coming from the rest of the country. Project Medishare pays for their fares. We started on an empty field lent by the UN. Then veteran National Basketball Association player Alonzo Mourning, with the local Miami Heat basketball team, set up a Haiti fund for professional athletes. With these funds, we now have a fully equipped and running field hospital.”

Dr Fournier’s Project Medishare has advantages, as he explains: “We’re local, and we’re small scale. We’ve been in the Haiti countryside since 1994, training doctors, setting up community health centres in the remote country areas. People know us; we work at grass roots, often with the Catholic Church.

“Haitians are an extraordinarily spiritual people, much closer to Africans than to other Caribbean peoples. They were the first to obtain independence, in 1804, so they kept their original identity. Many aid workers appear clueless about the islanders’ spirituality, but that’s the key to understanding them. It makes Haitians suspicious of the larger NGOs, who seem to be following agendas that don’t always address the quake victims’ specific needs. We’re starting to see ‘Down with NGOs’ graffiti in Port-au-Prince.”

With so many people trapped under fallen masonry by the earthquake, the medical priority for years to come will be rehabilitation, with a massive need for physical therapy units. Artificial limbs are being made in an international collaboration between two old family firms. Blatchford, in London, manufactures prostheses. Finniestons, a third-generation Scottish firm in the Miami borough of Hialeah, makes sockets. Haiti has lost all its workshop facilities, so Blatchford has just flown the first batch of 500 discounted dark-brown legs direct from its Indian factory to Miami. On Haiti, Adam Finnieston’s team uses his own invention, a hand-held “BioSculptor” scanner, that sends 3-D imaging of residual legs direct to south Florida, where the prostheses are fitted to customised sockets. So far, Medishare has financed 500 of these.

“We fitted the first 12 legs last week,” said Adam Finnieston, himself a clinical prosthetist. “We now have eight of those in Haiti. When I fitted a little girl of five, I was filled with an overwhelming feeling of commitment. This problem is not going to go away. We need to train locals to continue the work.” 

For doctors and nurses, the shock of visiting Haiti will remain with them for a long time. As Dr Fournier says: “In Western society, doctors no longer come in contact with people actually dying. Nurses do, but doctors only make fleeting visits. In Haiti, many of us suddenly realised we were at last doing what we had trained to do, getting into the thick of it and saving lives.”

Jackson Memorial Hospital registered nurse Karen Chamuel, one of the first to volunteer back in January, and with 18 years’ experience in trauma nursing, says even she passed out cold when she took part in the amputation of a 23-year-old woman’s arm.
“In the midst of all this,” insists Fr Jean-Mary, “We mustn’t forget that the Church has above all a spiritual role. People need counselling, both here in Miami and on the island. And there is an enormous increase in burials, as the elderly are dying from pneumonia and other illnesses related to living outside. Our priests go over by rotation to Haiti for a maximum of three weeks. In exchange, we bring exhausted Haitian priests back here to Little Haiti to rest. After what they have been through, many are in need of psychological care themselves.”

For the future, Nurse Chamuel is optimistic: “The Haitians are a resilient, humble people. They know how to face adversity. I treated one 12-year-old with a broken bone sticking out of his ankle. He was smiling at me. These people are fighters. They will pull through.