Our Progress & Immediate Needs
We have come a long way since our first visit to Haiti in 2018. At first, with the help of generous students and volunteers, we raised money to buy the children at an orphanage in Leogane, Haiti a few months’ supply of food.
We gave them seeds to grow vegetables.
We repaired all their toilets (none of them were functional).
We had their dorms painted.
In 2020 we paid for emergency medical care for one of our Haitian interpreters and we provided 3-4 months salary for the teachers at the elementary school that the orphanage manages. In 2021-22, we have been able to provide up to $800 a month to the orphanage in Haiti for food and supplies. The twenty children (several of whom are now teenagers who have lived most of their lives in the orphanage) are now mostly healthy and no longer starving. However, the children were sleeping on cot mattresses that were as flat as pancakes with the metal from the cots sticking through.
Due to generous donations to the charity, we were able to purchase the much-needed 20 cot mattresses at a cost of $2,200. We are so grateful for your help getting the mattresses replaced and replenishing the food supply each month.
Hait has experienced the lion’s share of tragedy, violence, poverty and pain. However, the world is finally starting to respond to the gang violence in Haiti that is destroying this country already plagued with natural disasters, civil unrest, lack of free schooling for poor families and lack of gainful employment opportunities for adults. Although Haiti is functioning in crisis mode due to the civil unrest, gang violence and now Cholera, we have gotten the orphanage to the point where they are ready for us to initiate a five-year plan to help the orphanage to become self-sustainable, and we are all excited about helping to make this a reality. The orphanage will continue to need our financial help while they are moving toward sustainability, however, they are now in a more stable place than many of the poor families that surround the orphanage. Many of these families do not have access to adequate food, shelter, clean water and education, and the orphanage does.
U.N. secretary-general proposes ‘rapid action force’ in Haiti
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres proposed in a letter to the U.N. Security Council that one or more countries send “a rapid action force” to help police in Haiti battle gangs that have taken control of much of the capital, Port-au-Prince, Reuters reported Sunday, citing a copy of the letter its reporters reviewed. Haiti’s government last week said it would request a “specialized armed force” to contend with gangs that have blocked the Caribbean nation’s main fuel port, bringing transport, businesses, and hospitals to a halt. The crisis also has hit as the country reports its first cholera outbreak in years. Benoit Vasseur, Haiti head of the aid group Doctors Without Borders, cautioned an armed foreign force could deepen the crisis, saying, “This means more bullets, more injuries, and more patients.” [Reuters, The Guardian]
So, I am excited to tell you that we have already started to address our long-term goal of providing free school for poor families in the Leogane area. We have partnered with the Lenns Foundation that is run by one of our Haitian interpreters and his wife for this project. Herold speaks excellent English, French, and Hatian Creole. He is college educated with a teaching degree and his wife is a professional cook. We will start our first school on a very small scale. We will be supporting the teaching of bread making to poor adults so that they can feed their families and sell the excess for income. We have already started to support the teaching of basic safety skills, first aid and English-speaking skills to children.
Eventually, our plan is to have a free K though 12 school that provides all the basic courses that children need to learn, with daily school lunches and health care. There will be separate training programs for parents teaching marketable skills. We want to eventually build several schools in various communities around Leogane. We want to build the schools close enough to poor families so that the children can live with their parents as opposed to having to live at school.
Please support us in this effort. We need committed, monthly supporters to make this a reality for poor families in Haiti.
