After a month of quiet, we are moving forward with some concrete actions to help in Haiti. We raised close to a thousand dollars over the spring and summer, in addition to the commitment of airmiles which we are still holding, and are now affiliated with the Oregon-Western Washington Chapter of Healing the Children. A core group of us — Terri Spigelmeier, Sue Wohlgemuth, Brett Glidden and I, have taken preliminary steps to move Homer Helping Haiti to nonprofit status (501c3) to enable future fundraising and projects, but for now we’ve agreed that we should go ahead and spend the money we raised so that it is put to good use immediately. We have made arrangements to fund a hematocrit centrifuge with Dr. Don Van Nimwegen, who is organizing volunteer teams for with two clinics in Haiti through Healing the Children. One clinic is serving approximately 10,000 people in a tent camp on the edge of Port-au-Prince, and the other is further north, serving remote communities without other healthcare resources. He got an excellent price on the centrifuge, for $650, and the company donated several other items to go with it. We’d also like to make a donation of $100 to Erica Wells, experienced nurse, for her October trip to Haiti to volunteer with Project Medishare in Haiti’s only trauma and critical care hospital. This is Erica’s second trip to Haiti. She is the daughter of Kachemak Bay Campus librarian Chris Thorsrud, who has been an interested supporter of our Homer Helping Haiti group since the beginning. Sue Wohlgemuth, acting as our accountant-treasurer, and I will enact these donations by Friday, unless we hear a major objection from our group. We believe we can fundraise more as needed. You should see a letter thanking all our sponsors in the Homer papers by next week!

We are also pursuing other options with Dr. Don Van Nimwegen. Homer residents can put their names in a pool for the volunteer teams which spend a week to ten days in Haiti, two teams per month on average. We are also working to help bring a nine year old boy to the Northwest and possibly Alaska for needed surgery and recuperation. The process of providing adequate medical care to Haitian children, both here and in Haiti, has turned out to be much slower than we would like, but at least we are making progress.

We have an opportunity to learn about recent conditions in Haiti from Cedric, a Haitian young man who grew up in the U.S., but visited Haiti to help with relief work this spring. He is visiting Homer, playing violin with the Kenai Peninsula orchestra, and staying with Terri Spigelmeier and family for two weeks. Lunch is TUESDAY AUGUST 10  AT 12 noon at COSMIC KITCHEN. At that meeting I’ll also share some interesting updates from Healing the Children, our medical team connection there, and an opportunity to help purchase a vital piece of equipment for one of the clinics there that is working with Healing the Children. It is a good opportunity to help with funds we have aleady raised, and there will be more.

In the meantime, Healing the Children is managing to bring Haitian children to the U.S., usually one or two at a time, and we are definitely on their list of possible placements. We are now part of their Northwest Chapter — an addition to the Oregon-Western Washington group. The director is also Returned Peace Corps Volunteer from Liberia, and made the connection to our group instantly! She really appreciates our high level of preparedness. The medical director is requesting special help from psychologists and counselors, and there are opportunities to do one or two week stints in Haiti for volunteers in this category. We may have at least one person in our Homer group going to participate in this program.

Since our HHH families were already prepared to host international visitors and since we will not need as many families simultaneously for Haitian kids, two of our families who live further from the hospital and other services in Homer, my family included, have opted to host  foreign exchange students who still didn’t have host families as of a few weeks ago. We hope to see them arriving in Homer in about a week! More about that later . . .  We will still have three to four families on call for any Haitian recuperating patients that may come our way, including two families with the highest ability to host children with special medical needs.

Some news at last! Healing the Children has successfully transitioned to expanding their Northwest chapter and will be able to work with us as partners and/or as a subgroup. They are making headway with accepting several children, including four Haitian children to the Portland Legacy Emmanuel Hospital although it may yet take several months (yes, you read that right) for the children to get out of Haiti. These kids may also not be bound for Alaska (we don’t know yet), but it sounds like eventually some Haitian children should be able to get to Homer! The reasons that everything is taking so long seems mainly to do with immigration procedures in the U.S. and we have requested both our senators to look into the process through the State Department and to provide us with clarification. If it is any consolation, the painfully slow process, which has to date admitted very few Haitian children since the beginning of February, is affecting all unaccompanied Haitian and Cuban children equally, since they (alone out of all nationalities) are required to go through Homeland Security, ICE, the Office of Refugee Resettlement under HHS, and an additional special branch of the Office of Refugee Resettlement that deals specifically with unaccompanied children. Adult Haitians are being allowed to come to the U.S. on an extremely limited basis, which means that most parents are not able to accompany their children. What may have started as a well-intentioned process to help children with little to no documentation  has become a tangle of red tape, and we are just going to have to wait for the governments of the two countries to untangle it.

The better news is that Healing the Children, which also hoped to bring many more Haitian children to this country for treatment sooner, has found an excellent way to help in Haiti through a medical and educational program in which we can participate! They are working with Don Van Nimwegen, head of a large medical and health group, who is leading teams of medical personnel to Haiti for week-long volunteer work, just outside Port-au-Prince. He should be contacting us next week, and will spell out requests for assistance. Anyone with medical training or psychological or counseling background who would like to go on one of these trips should let me know. Don Van Nimwegen is working closely with Haitian Hearns Eugene, Director of the non-governmental organization (NGO), Foundation for  Humanitarian and Educational Development, and there should be additional opportunities for us to help with school and educational programs through this organization as well. Hearns Eugene recently received a large grant from the World Health Organization for his medical programs. I will be learning more about his organization next week, and will let everyone know, so we can decide what avenue to follow to best use the resources that we have available.

Thanks again for all your patience, and let us work to keep our hope for Haiti alive!

There is not much news this week for Homer Helping Haiti, but I hope everyone saw the article in Tuesday’s (July 13) Anchorage Daily News about Christa Brelsford (the young woman from Alaska caught in the earthquake when she was volunteering in January). Her organization, Christa’s Angels, is doing a great job with raising money for a school, and she is trying to bring the young man who helped rescue her to Anchorage to attend high school. Unfortunately, it sounds like she is running into the same kinds of paperwork problems that VIDA and the Healing the Children are dealing with, and it is very slow to get through the immigration requirements even for short visits. I have contacted the organization and spoken with the assistant director for Haiti Partners, which is the umbrella organization for Christa’s Angels. They did not know anything about bringing Haitians to the U.S.,  other than the fact that it is very difficult now, but they are involved in rebuilding schools in Haiti. Their organization is Evangelical Christian-based, so it would probably not work as a partner for everyone in our group, but has given me some additional thoughts along similar lines about helping schools in Haiti.

We are waiting to hear back from Healing the Children on options for working with them. In the meantime, Terri Spigelmeier, Sue Wohlgemuth, Brett Glidden and Cathy Knott got together to do the paperwork to turn BRIDGES International and Homer Helping Haiti into a 501c3. We got the first big part done, and are on our way to real nonprofit status! This is a good thing because it allows us to go after grants, get matching funds, and have recognition and independence in decision-making as we work with other nonprofits. I will forward information as soon as we hear more from Healing the Children.

There is an interesting and exciting turn of events, even while we are waiting patiently to help children in Haiti. We hope to be  affiliated very soon with Healing the Children, a national organization doing just what we want to do! You can check out their website at www.healingthechildren.org. They are also now sending medical teams to Haiti, so if you are interested in volunteering for a week or two at a time, and have some medical training, you can contact them, or let me know and I will forward your interest to the Director of the Oregon/Washington Chapter of Healing the Children, which will be the chapter we will be connected to. I have spoken with several Chapter Directors in the organization, as well as the National Director, and the Oregon/Washington Chapter Director will be presenting our case at a meeting tomorrow.

The less happy news is that things are taking a long time. Nationally, after January and the slowdown in immigration after the missionaries were arrested, there appear to be just 16 Haitian children who have gotten visas to the United States for medical care — the eight we already know about through VIDA, and another eight, most placed individually through Healing the Children.
But I am certain we are on the right path now. While VIDA hasn’t been able to get visas cleared through the new complex Homeland Security/Office of Refugee Resettlement process, our experience and preparation has paid off — Healing the Children has just raised their expectations of host families’ preparation and clearance to include home studies — and we already did them!

Three of us, Adam Bauer, Sue Wohlgemuth, and Cathy Knott, met with the field representatives from Senator Begich and Senator Murkowski’s offices, to let them know about our concerns with the lengthy immigration process delaying the medical treatment for some Haitian children coming to the U.S. We will continue to put pressure on the U.S. government to streamline the process.

Homer Helping Haiti has received a request to disseminate a note from one of the clinics that Shriners has been working with in Haiti. Some of the children who may come here are currently living in camps in Haiti. These camps have medical clinics that are working with the Shriners.  Staffing these clinics is been difficult. One specific camp urgently needs volunteer doctors who may be interested in a unique “vacation.” If anyone knows a doctor (or is a doctor) who has the ability to assist, please consider passing this along. The best contacts that Homer Helping Haiti has is either:

Catherine Knott

P.O. Box 1226

Anchor Point, AK  99556

Tel. (907)226-1102

Email: sansanding@hotmail.com

DeGuerre Blackburn

VIDA

354 Allen St

Hudson, NY 12534

USA

518-828-4527 (phone)

518-828-0688 (fax)

www.vidaadoptions.org

Letter from Haiti:

Subject: Help needed in Haiti

Hello my Milot team and more,

I am in Haiti again at the J/P camp.  We are running daily outpatient clinics for the 50,000 displaced people living on the golf course.  I came through IMAT.  I am writing because next week they really need docs.  They can get by with 4 docs, 6 is a comfortable number, right now I am one of 2 and we are pretty swamped.  I came last minute because IMAT sent out word they needed people.  Apparently next week when the present Canadian doc and I leave, there will be only 1 doc (although lots of good support staff, both international and Haitian).  Any takers?  You will be in a place where you are needed.  The work is hard but wonderful.  ER is a particularly good background to have (which I don’t) but any hands helping are good.

Thanks for considering.  Ann

Things are progressing, though it may seem slow. DeGuerre Blackburn wrote me two days ago from Boston where she is meeting again with people from the Haitian consulate, and asks us to be patient. I know, I know, we have been trying already! Good news is that Karen Ferguson, representative for the Office of Refugee Resettlement in Anchorage (our last hurdle) is meeting with the D.C. office of Office of Refugee Resettlement next week, and will bring our case to their attention as well. Still a few things to sort out, but people are working on it from several different agencies now.

In the meantime, in case they start slowing things down again, we are going to consider some leveraging of influence on this end. So keep your calendars open for Friday, June 4 at 10:00 a.m., when representatives from Begich and Murkowski’s office will be meeting with Homer citizens about issues important to us, I believe at the Homer Post Office. More on this later if we need to do some talking –I’d like to have a good number of us show and talk to them. What we know at this point is that the U.S. Government is requiring Haitian children, but not children from any other nation, to go through this extra Office of Refugee Resettlement before receiving health care and surgery at Shriners Hospitals in the U.S., unless they are accompanied by family members. But the U.S. is not allowing Haitian adults into the country except under extremely limited circumstances. Hence the slow-down for kids with or without family accompanying them.

Also, good news — our 6th family is now finished with their host family home study, certified and ready to go! Kate Rich is back and will continue with home studies during the next couple weeks. And we have an awesome medical training possibility for any older teens or accompanying adult from Haiti.

Meanwhile, while we are waiting, and everyone is switching into summer schedules, I’d like everyone to really consider how to get more French, start familiarizing yourself with French if you haven’t had some, and Creole, too, as soon as possible. Send me an email if you want to attend  French conversation group. In addition, now is a great time to do some reading and additional learning about Haiti. The best book to start with is probably Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, which is mainly about Haiti, and about Dr. Paul Farmer and his work there. I will post a list of other books later this weekend. I have looked for good movies on Haiti without much success (let me know if you know of any) but here are a couple that are good ones for us about crossing cultural divides, and dealing with some issues that Haitian children deal with.  These are both suitable for watching with your children, at least 10 and up.

“Blindside” is about a white family that takes in a young black teenager from the projects in Memphis. Deals some with what it means to be in a different culture altogether, and a very minor amount with race relations, and what it means to be black in a white affluent community.

“Beat the Drum” deals with South African communities coping with AIDS from the perspective of a very enterprising young boy who is an orphan because his parents died of this illness. It is a difficult, at times sad story with a happy ending and a very positive approach. Good for the whole family to see.

This week DeGuerre Blackburn, Director of VIDA, is meeting with Shriners and the doctors, as well as the Haitian Consulate. We look forward to some news soon! Terri Spigelmeier, Kate Rich, Jim Henkelman, and  Cathy Knott put in many hours this past weekend to get all the paperwork ready for the complete host family studies for five families, answering extra questions from VIDA as well. Copies of the AFS paperwork, host family home studies, and all that paperwork  got sent to VIDA on Monday, May 17. A huge thank you for the donated professional time, Terrie, Kate and Jim! And thanks to the families for taking time out of busy schedules to answer the extra questions promptly! It is hard to be patient, but we are making steady progress, and VIDA is supporting us 100% in negotiations with Shriners, the Haitian consulate, and the American agencies. She is a great advocate for us as well as for the Haitian children.

DeGuerre Blackburn at VIDA is ready for the host family placement studies and all accompanying paperwork; we are mailing the first batch of 5 host family packets to VIDA on Monday!

Fingerprints and Pet Certificates need to be done! Greatest needs right now are fundraising and additional medical support. If you know of any medical people in the area who are willing to help out, please contact Cathy Knott (sansanding@hotmail.com) with their name, contact information and what services they can provide.