St. Luke's Haiti Relief Committee -   St. Luke's has an active group of people who are working with Pere Michaud, of the Parish of St. Simon / St. Jude in Duny, Haiti. The goals, and the work to support these goals is detailed below. If you are interested in joining this committee we’d love to have your help.  Partnerships like this one work best when relationships are made with the people we are partnering with.  We need your help in doing just that.  Bob Hanson is the chair of the St. Luke's Haiti Relief Committee and can be reached at the following email address. [email protected]

Update from Karin & David Draper, 4/27/10:

Dear Friends,

David and Katrina and I are home from our trip to Leogane, Haiti.  This trip was rich in rewards, complex to experience.  We were part of a medical team assembled by World Wide Village. There were medical professionals from California, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Minnesota and Iowa. There was also a team from the Japanese Red Cross providing X-Rays services in a nearby building.  There were Haitian doctors, Haitian nurses and Haitian translators working with us.  Because the Hopital St. Croix was damaged in the earthquake, it was not usable for inpatient services.  We were located several blocks away, on the grounds of the nursing school.  A field hospital had been erected there and it contained 6 wings. There were the emergency room, the operating room, the OB/GYN room, and the ICU where inpatients slept overnight. The fifth was a supply room, and the sixth wing was a room for acute care for malnourished children.

The work we did was hard and much of it was outside of our comfort zone.  For example, I was in the triage tent of the outpatient clinic adjacent to the hospital.  I interviewed about 125 patients per day through an interpreter.  I wrote their symptoms on the intake form and if appropriate, I did urine tests for pregnancy and urinary tract infections.  Occasionally I was able to do some occupational therapy with patients (my profession). Katrina helped in the pharmacy.  She read the prescriptions, counted out medicine and instructed patients in how to take them.  David photographed the whole process, including surgeries.  In the US these activities would be unthinkable.  But in Haiti where people would have no healthcare otherwise, we did our best to make a primitive system workable.

 We met wonderful people who worked very hard to take care of one another.  There was a young woman named Maude who had adopted a little girl with cerebral palsy.  There was a young man with a damaged hip and his best friend carefully studied his exercises in order to coach him.  A husband traveled three hours to Port au Prince to bring dinner to his wife in the hospital there. There were nurses, specialists, and clergy who all strived to provide quality care in a field hospital where there was often no electricity and all the water had to be carried in buckets.

 On Sunday we hired a driver to take us to Trouin for a church service, as it was the feast day for their patron saint, St. Marc.  There were members of our own partner parish there and we were able to exchange phone numbers and do some quick planning after the service before they had to go home. The school in Duny is just starting to provide full day classes for the students again. Unfortunately, we were not able to visit St. Simon and St. Jude because of lack of time.  It would have been a difficult trip because the river was swollen and parts of the road were blocked off. However, the day was rewarding and we promised to come back soon to spend some quiet time in Duny.

Mission Work in Haiti

Haiti is listed with the UN as one of the 50 least developed countries in the world, the only country in Latin America to make the list.  Once a rich and fertile jewel of the Caribbean it has been devastated by dictatorships and bad government.  The trees and vegetation have been mostly cut and used for fuel so what was once a tropical paradise is now in desperate need of help.

The Parish of St. Simon / St. Jude in Duny, Hait,  have asked for our help with three things, the first of which is our present goal:

1. 1.A Daily Meal 
   

2. 2.Help feed a child in our partner parish at the St. Simon/St. Jude School with just a quarter!
   

    3.    Uniforms for the School  Children

School uniforms are worn with a sense of pride in many countries, including Haiti.  This community does not have the means to provide such uniforms.  It is a long term goal of our Cathedral community to help them meet this goal.

Our goal in Haiti is not to create dependencies but to help provide basics such as food and shelter so that the people of Haiti can move forward from a position of strength and dignity.

Quarters for Haiti is a simple program that works as follows.  Any quarter that is put in the collection plate each Sunday will go directly to feed the children of the St. Simon/St. Jude School in Duny.  We also have donation jars available if you would care to bring them to your workplace or put one on the kitchen counter as a goal to meet with your family.  Fill it, bring it back and put it in the collection plate.  We thank you in advance for your generous donations.  A  quarter will feed a child a meal in Duny.

A New Building for a Combined School and Church.

143 State St.

Portland , ME 04101 

Phone: (207) 772-5434

http://cathedralofstluke.episcopalmaine.org/service_in_the_community/ministry-with-duny-haiti.html

Source of information and photos for the information that appears on this webpage came from the following webpage found on website of the Cathedral Church of St. Luke in Portland:

Photos that appear below were taken at the Maine Walks For Haiti event

in Portland on June 5, 2010: