Welcome to Hawaii for Haiti!
Haiti Earthquake Relief
Aloha! Haiti has been hit by the first large earthquake in 240 years. The enormity of the effects of this devastating 7.0 quake will unfold overtime. Thousands may have been killed and tens of thousands left homeless. This is a moment in which your Aloha is of critical importance. Haiti's grassroots movement - including labor unions, women's groups, educators and human rights activists, support committees for prisoners, and agricultural cooperatives - will attempt to funnel needed aid to those most hit by the earthquake. Grassroots organizers are doing what they can - with the most limited of funds - to make a difference.
To offer support Please visit the Saint Boniface Haiti Foundation (www.haitihealth.org). I traveled with them last November 2008 after the devastating hurricanes. I saw the hospital they built through donated funds over a 25 year period of time. I witnessed the stream of patients with my own eyes, met the doctor and the nurses, and witnessed the contribution of medications we brought unpacked and added to some of their almost empty shelves in the pharmacy. This is a worthy organization that needs your support.
Haiti will be a Shining Pearl
Haiti reminds me of Hawaii…with its mountains, rolling grassy hills, soft sand beaches, pristine ocean, and warmth of its people!
I returned to Hawaii Saturday evening November 8th after spending a week in the island nation of Haiti. Haiti is located 90 minutes from Miami by air and is the poorest country in the western hemisphere.
Minutes before leaving for home, we heard word of the school collapse in Port-au-Prince only blocks from where we were…perhaps many dead and counting. We had just returned from the Mother Theresa orphanage where close to some 200 children reach for love, die of AIDS, and cry for attention.
As part of a humanitarian team bearing medicines and medical supplies from the St. Boniface Haiti Foundation, We traveled to the island nation of Haiti in light of their ongoing poverty and recent hurricanes.
Within my work and studies in psychology, I focus in Health psychology. Health Psychology is concerned with understanding how biology, behavior, and social and environmental contexts influence health and illness. Dimensions within health psychology such as clinical and critical health psychology cover areas from nutrition and disease prevention to catastrophes and service delivery infrastructure like energy to run generators, sanitation, and passable roads.
While in Haiti we visited mountainous regions in the countryside, villages along the coast, and traveled through slums in the cities, I saw extended bellies ballooned from worms, large heads and little bodies distorted from hunger and malnutrition. Some men, women, and children reached for us with hands clasped pleading for money to buy food. Others, many others smiled and waved “Bonjour!” in bare feet and tattered clothes. Others dressed for school or work in clean uniform, and most returning to homes in card board boxes, a patch of land with sticks supporting a tin roof, on street corners sandwiched between others, in thatched roof one room huts with dirt floors, or unsafe dilapidated buildings without electricity, indoor plumbing, or clean water.
Even with 70% unemployment and 20% of children dying before age 5, I heard “Bonjour!” repeatedly from wide smiling faces of men, women, and children crowded in slums and from moms and dads taking sugar cane, papaya, and banana to market on donkeys.
How can this be? I thought. The warmth in their eyes, their readiness to help strangers and speak to visitors, the Haitian people remain a resilient and self-determined people, committed to dignity in current maze of mounting losses and tragic poverty.
My visit to the island nation of Haiti is life altering. I aim to bring Haiti to the attention of others around the globe including Hawaii. Bonjour! This is their Aloha.
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