REPORT FROM Gressier, HAITI May 9, 2010. Anitra Thorhaug (Laureate 1987) Greater Caribbean Energy and Environment Foundation. GCEEF.org and Andrew Oerke CEO partners in Haiti with Organization Rome Haiti.
http://www.mediafire.com/?gzymjwnzojz
This is the link to an original health song, which Jack Allison has written for the Haiti Flood Crisis. It is orchestrated by J. Hunt and T. Marshal and sung by Jack Allison in English and Pierre Beaubrun in Creole. We are please to announce it is going on many radio stations from this week end onward in Haiti before the heavy rains come and while tent cities are still in the flood zones. Tod Landress from the University of Miami communications department is flooding Haitian radio starting this week with this message. Please help us save lives from the floods. Last time severe floods hit, there were thousands killed. The US Soldiers who helped move tent cities have departed as of this week.
This link is the second step in starting a preventative public health program in the poorest of the poor nations in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The first step is that we have been lecturing in schools and orphanages, and churches and women's groups about the upcoming rainy season in Haiti and its diseases such as malaria and dengue fever and its preventions such as boiling water and mosquito nets. We now have a regular radio program at 91.6 FM in Haiti at 4 pm on Saturday in Haiti where we make health announcements, discuss health problems in Creole, and play our health songs.
This is the latest report from Physicians on the ground in Gressier:
So far have helped 15 to be treat for prosthetics- Dr. Kamil needs to make a fiberglass cast of the limb in order to get an exact mold for the foam material. This means a trip to Gressier from Wyoming. He has run out of money as have we. There are 375 more earthquake amputees in Gressier and 3000 in nearby Leogane, which got no treatment in the first two weeks after Jan. 12. We have 5 other children identified and will upload the pictures soon. We need people to donate for fitting the children's new limbs. Artificial limb companies in the States give free prosthetics. These have to be refit and maintained for the recipient, then sent and finally the recipient trained to use them. Funds are badly needed.
Ryan Jackson along with Dr. Barry Hughes, Dr. Tom Powers, Dr. Alex Santos, and several Haitian doctors plus many other medical staff have personally treated about thousands of patients since Feb 7th and over that since we began on Jan. 12, 2010.
We have mounted preventative public health sessions in Gressier at our location where we see patients with Dr. Powers’s group- a series of sessions on women's medical issues including pregnancy and child birth as well as child care and STD's for women's groups, a separate series for the general public. We also visited 4 schools to talk about water borne diseases, insect vector diseases and other transmittable disease problems with symptoms and cures. We hold these on Wednesdays last month to talk about keeping the garbage out of the drainage ditches, wash your hands, boil the water and the public health and doctors answer questions.
Radio has played brief 30 spots about keeping trash out of the drainage to prevent mosquitoes, rats, disease and flooding since Saturday. I will begin talking about all of the public health issues every Saturday in the 30 minutes allotted to me as well as the sanitation and environmental issues and the official premier of the song this week.
About 20 tons of garbage has been removed from the streets and drainage ditches in Gressier and progress has been made to clean up the beaches and restore them to tourist standards of cleanliness as well as drain the stagnant pools formed by garbage blocking the flow out of back dunes and estuaries into the sea. We feared the garbage would act as dykes to the rain water flow and create floods.
We have mounted a committee (priest, minister, local officials, teachers, women's group leaders) who have driven up and down the hills in Gressier looking for people in the danger areas with our USGS MAPS constructed with love by Jim Malone and working with the local leaders to ensure the safety of the people instructing them about the risks and where they should move. Miraculously, after the first heavy rains, the people got our message and all moved to dryer spots and no one appeared to be in the high risk areas JIM MALONE had made for mud slides and debris slides. However, there may be some people higher up still who run risks. We are trying to get to them.
We continue to assist in orphanages in Gressier and Port au Prince and the new medical group Dr. Tom Powers group will visit those. We help one of the orphanages to get in touch with the companies responsible for emptying the port-a-potties around the tent cities in order to drain their septic tank before the rains come.
We are working with the two senators and Dr. Christian Sanon to find money I believe that the radio program will help raise awareness and help some of the funding possibly find its way home to us.
Contributions to help us obtain physicians’ airfare to give treatment the injured and suffering for the relief necessary for large scale flooding not to occur can be sent to our web site on GCEEF.org utilizing our "donate button". We also need money for medicines, simple medical supplies including old glasses. These contributions are the sole source to help all this effort. Our efforts get matching labor of physicians and nurses and now geologists and materials and medicines result in getting help to the suffering Haitians of at least 3.5 times more than your dollar. We need funds for generators, latrines, cots for patients, and food and transport for doctors. Rehabilitation is also commencing with farmers obtaining seeds and farm implements destroyed in the earthquake so food production can commence. Please help the Haitians. Contact Anitra Thorhaug or Andrew Oerke. andoerke@gceef.org; athorhaug@gceef.org See our web page to donate www.gceef.org.
Our partners in Haiti are Organization Rome-Haiti
Best wishes
Anitra Thorhaug
Andrew Oerke