Provide Medicine to Earthquake Victims in Haiti

Heavy rains pelting Haiti in early June triggered flash floods and mudslides, leading to the deaths of at least 25 people. The rains came just a week into the official start of the Atlantic Hurricane Season on June 1, and demonstrate the severe devastation this hurricane season is likely to bring.

Haiti is still reeling from last year’s earthquake, which displaced millions, killed hundreds of thousands and severely damaged the country’s infrastructure. Millions still live in displacement camps, with nothing more than plastic tents to serve as shelter from the torrential rains. Dozens had to be evacuated as their camps flooded.

These rains and the upcoming hurricane season are also likely to worsen the cholera epidemic in the country, which has already affected 321,066 people and killed 5,337. Cholera is a water-borne disease caused by bacteria that breeds in dirty, standstill water, which in the aftermath of the rains blankets many of Haiti’s displacement camps.

MADRE has been working with KOFAVIV, a local Haitian grassroots women’s organization before and since last year’s earthquake. A few days ago, they updated us on the situation on the ground, calling it “critical” and reporting that many KOFAVIV agents living in the camps have lost their homes in the flooding.

The rains have subsided for now, but as we look ahead to the devastation that this hurricane season may yet bring, it is important that we support relief efforts that include women and listen to their demands. As pillars of their communities, women know how best to rebuild. And as they continue their tireless work to rebuild neighborhoods and deliver lifesaving aid a year and a half after the earthquake hit, no one is better prepared to spring into action when the next disaster strikes.

Links:

• KOFAVIV
• It's Hurricane Season Again, But This Time It Can Be Different

On a recent trip by MADRE staff, we visited our partners at KOFAVIV.

KOFAVIV and MADRE have co-founded “The KOFAVIV Women’s Center” a refuge  that provides essential services for rape survivors. The center has become a critical resource for the women it serves. Women who arrive at the center traumatized by an attack immediately are cared for by KOFAVIV members, who accompany rape survivors to urgent medical care and legal services.

Many of the girls who use the center are orphans and are forced into survival sex to provide themselves with the most basic daily necessities, such as food or a sliver of soap. With even a little support, like a pair of flip flops or the promise of a meal, KOFAVIV is able to pull these girls out of that cycle. KOFAVIV also provides counseling, human rights trainings and arts programming, to help women and girls on the path to rebuilding their lives.

Since the earthquake, Haitian women have faced an epidemic of sexual violence in the displacement camps of Port-au-Prince. Every day, new women who have survived rape arrive at the KOFAVIV Women’s Center. Over half of these cases of rape involve girls under the age of 17—the youngest rape survivor we met was 4 years old. Since September, the KOFAVIV Center has treated more than 350rape survivors, and every week, 400 women come for peer-to-peer counseling sessions.

But many obstacles remain. Malya Villard-Appolon, one of the leaders of KOFAVIV, told us that one of the young girls had stopped attending the peer-to-peer counseling sessions. Concerned for her well-being, they sought her out in the displacement camp where she lives. She told them that she had stopped coming to the trainings because she had lost her only pair of shoes and couldn’t make the walk to the Center.  For other women and girls, the inability to afford the cost of transportation throughout Port-au-Prince keeps them from visiting the center, and KOFAVIV has launched a concerted but difficult effort to help cover these costs.

To help bring their services to women and girls, KOFAVIV is hoping to move more of their workshops into the displacement camps. The plan is to start new workshops in seven camps with 40 girls in each.  Eventually, as they grow through the mentorship of KOFAVIV’s leaders, these girls will also become role models for other young girls struggling to heal from rape.

Your support helps make KOFAVIV’s life-saving services possible – thank you.

Links:

• Visiting KOFAVIV
• Human Rights Advocacy Training for Grassroots Women

Zanmi Lasante staff continue to work around the clock to provide care to the many injured and sick still arriving at Port-au-Prince's General Hospital (HUEH), as well as at their clinics and at field hospitals they set up during the first week after the earthquake.

MADRE has been working with Partners in Health to provide Zanmi Lasante with medicine and medical supplies.

Andrew Marx, Partners in Health's Director of Communications, recently returned from Haiti. In his words:

"...inspired is what I felt upon seeing our Haitian partner organization Zanmi Lasante spring into action, doing what they do best—what they've been doing for over 25 years—working in partnership with the residents of destitute communities to provide quality health care and essential social services."

Staff at the clinics and the hospitals have noticed a change in the type of injuries they are seeing. Many people who sustained non-life-threatening injuries during the earthquake are now coming in to seek treatment. Doctors are very worried about the high numbers of people who are at risk of infection from untreated wounds. MADRE will continue to work with our partners in Haiti to respond to the needs of people affected by the earthquake.