Members of the First Church of Christ in Longmeadow, American International College's nursing department and the CRUDEM Foundation of Ludlow are involved in the effort.
Villagers of Milot, Haiti help expand the Sacred Heart Hospital supported by the Ludlow-based CRUDEM Foundation.Two years after an earthquake devastated impoverished Haiti, two local organizations are working to improve the country.
Members of a Longmeadow church are rebuilding and enlarging a school which collapsed on Jan. 12, 2010, killing most of its nursing students.
At the same time, a Ludlow-based group is expanding the Sacred Heart Hospital in northern Haiti to offer better health care and many specialized services not offered elsewhere in the country.
“Every time I come down here it is amazing to see the progress,” said Mark H. Pohlman, of Longmeadow, referring to the rebuilding of the CONASPEH School in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince.
The four-story building that housed a kindergarten through grade 12 school and a nursing and seminary program collapsed during the earthquake. Children had been dismissed for the day, but at least 20 people were killed. Most were nursing students.
Before the earthquake CONASPEH, a council of about 5,000, ministries which helps fund the school, had purchased a plot of land to expand. The earthquake did not end the plans, said Pohlman, who has been involved with the school through the First Church of Christ in Longmeadow, which has been providing scholarships for the school for years.
Pohlman is in Haiti this week at the second anniversary of the earthquake. In a phone interview he said he was delighted at the progress the school has made in 11 months.
“In February (2010) they dedicated the new headquarters buildings on the grounds of the original school,” he said. “Since February they have put up the frameworks for two classrooms.”
All of the buildings are designed to withstand future earthquakes. The complex includes a library, computer laboratories and an auditorium, which were mostly lacking in the original school.
Within six months of the earthquake, the school re-opened under tents, where classes are still being conducted. Despite the conditions, enrollment has expanded from the about 400 before the disaster to at least 750 students this fall, Pohlman said.
The nursing school has also received one of the first accreditation from the Haitian government.
“There has been an effort to launch a standardized curriculum and upgrade health care in Haiti,” he said.
This year American International College’s department of nursing also started working with CONASPEH to develop help the nursing department.
“It has been an unofficial thing,” said Ayesha Ali, associate professor of nursing at the Springfield college. “We have taken a keen interest in the school in the hopes we will be able to develop something over time.”
The department recently raised about $1,000 to purchase copies of French language nursing text books in subjects such as pediatrics, psychiatry, and maternity. Because the books are so expensive, the school was given one copy of each to be used for the school, she said.
“They lost a lot of books in the earthquake,” Ali said.
Ali, associate nursing professor Elizabeth George, and two nursing students, including one who was born in Haiti but grew up in the United States, are now in Haiti with Pohlman. During the trip they have met the nursing school director and some of the students, are discussing their curriculum and comparing the different programs.
Eventually Ali would like to develop a stronger partnership and possibly an exchange program where students from Haiti, who have learned some English, can spend time at American International College.
Despite the encouraging signs that the CONASPEH School is progressing, Pohlman and other Western Massachusetts residents who frequently visit Haiti say the improvements seem like an aberration since so many people are still living in makeshift homes.
“We are seeing new construction but not a lot,” Pohlman said.
Pohlman said residents do seem more hopeful. One told him recently since the elections electricity is more reliable, more students have returned to school and the water supply is improved.
“I go in-and-out of Port-au-Prince all the time and the sense that I get is the rebuilding still has not taken root,” said Timothy Traynor, of Wilbraham, who is working at the Sacred Heart Hospital, operated by the CRUDEM Foundation based in Ludlow. “There is still debris around, it is a slow and arduous process.”
In the months following the earthquake, $486 million was raised through the American Red Cross. About $330 million has been spent in the last two years on emergency services and rebuilding, said Jana T. Sweeny, director of international communications for the American Red Cross.
Some of the money has been spent to rebuild businesses, improving the water, sewer and road infrastructure and repair homes. The American Red Cross has been working with a number of agencies to coordinate the efforts, she said.
Much of the remaining funds are expected to be used to create so-called integrated neighborhoods with good housing, water, sanitation and health care, Sweeny said.
That effort has been complicated by the lack of land records. An imperfect system in the first place, many were destroyed or lost in the earthquake and organizations do not want to build on property where the owner is in question, she said.
In the Pioneer Valley alone an estimated $408,000 was raised much of it through a canister drive from Big Y supermarkets and donations from the family of Chief Executive Officer Donald H. D’Amour. MassMutal Financial Group in Springfield also collected more than $200,000 partly by matching funds that its employees gave. Many organizations and individuals also donated smaller sums, said Richard A. Lee, executive director of the Pioneer Valley Red Cross chapter.
It is hard to tell how much money residents really gave because so many people followed a texting program where they could donate $10 to the national chapter, he said.
“The Red Cross money is being spent in a lot of different ways,” he said. Some of it is being used to provide financing to help people re-start businesses.
The international agency expects to be in Haiti for years. It is especially difficult since it is was already one of the poorest countries in the world and then it was hit with one of the worst catastrophes, he said.
“We know how difficult it was to recover from the tornado” that hit Western Massachusetts June 1. “Imagine the scale in Haiti,” Lee said. The Red Cross was also involved with relief efforts from tornado which hit six communities in Western Massachusetts.
Few donations are still coming for the Haiti relief, although the Pioneer Valley Chapter will accept them. Of every $1 collected 93 cents goes directly to relief, he said.
The Sacred Heart Hospital, operated through the CRUDEM Foundation of Ludlow, was not damaged in the earthquake but quickly became known as one of the places where people could get desperately needed medical care.
The hospital was inundated with hundreds of badly injured patients. It set up large tents as makeshift hospital rooms and took over a school building to help treat patients. Hundreds of trained doctors, nurses and physical therapists flew from the United States to augment its Haitian staff.
National media attention helped the CRUDEM Foundation to raise more than $1 million, most of which went to direct care. Other fund-raising efforts are now being operated to help expand and improve the hospital, located in Milot.
“We have done quite a bit. We have built a number of facilities and we are in the process of putting in a clinic that will serve children,” said Traynor, who travels to the hospital frequently.
Timothy Traynor, of Wilbraham, talks with residents of Milot, Haiti about efforts to expand the Sacred Heart Hospital. With the help of some major donations from the Philips Company of Andover, the hospital has been able to add high-tech equipment including medical monitors, a digital X-ray machine and a reliable Internet communications system that allows local doctors to contact specialists in the United States, including those at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, to seek information.
“We have become known for our ability to manage some pretty complex issues,” he said.
Since the earthquake, a fully-staffed prosthetic lab and a therapy center was developed to help people who were seriously injured in the earthquake and continue to need therapy, he said.
It has also added two large power generating systems that triple the electrical power generation since the Haitian electrical grid is unreliable and constant power is needed for critical medical equipment such as the oxygen generator, Traynor said.
Employees reconfigured the hospital to add a maternity and women’s wing to the space and is in the process of building a family center, crucial to the culture of Haiti because relatives stay with ill family members, cook for them and provide otherwise unskilled care such as helping the bathe, Traynor said.
“We need to raise $50,000 to $70,000 for the center,” he said.
Before the earthquake, the CRUDEM Foundation planned to expand the hospital and had purchased land to do so. When the earthquake hit, Traynor was visiting the hospital to begin planning that addition.
The project, estimated at least $4 million, is now taking shape and is expected to double the hospital size to about 150 beds, expand the operating rooms, provide an emergency center and a burn center, he said.
With the expansion of the hospital has come a number of benefits from the desperately poor residents who live around the hospital. Small farms and other businesses have sprung up as residents realize they have a place to sell their goods. Others have been hired to help with the hospital building and are learning a trade as well as earning a paycheck, Traynor said.
“If you take that disaster and you try to find a silver lining .¤.¤. it brought a lot of attention to the problems that are here and there are a lot of good people trying to help,” Traynor said.