More Needed
People around the world as well as down the street felt the impact of last year's earthquake in Haiti.
For a sizeable portion of those who responded directly to the need there, the draw to help the Haitians began long before Jan. 12, 2010, when a 7.0 earthquake devastated the small Caribbean nation.
And for many, that desire lives on.
Dr. Rosemary Edwards, for example, had been lending assistance in Haiti since 2001.
She's returned four times since the earthquake, including a recent visit that coincided with the anniversary.
She's planning to return, again, in March.
“I agree that there are people everywhere who need help ... some people don't need to look any farther than their immediate family. I feel fortunate that I'm able to help on a global basis,” Edwards said. “That is where I feel compelled to work.”
Edwards, a pathologist who works as consulting staff at Butler Memorial Hospital, leaves the comfort of her Gibsonia home multiple times a year to wash her own clothes in a bucket, sometimes living in a tent and witnessing unending extreme poverty in the name of helping Haitians.
“I have many, many friends there,” she said.
Twice in her life, Edwards has made a home of the country, and she's now on track to divide her time equally between assisting others and employment here in the states.
Over the years and visits, she's bonded with many colleagues there and feels fortunate that none of them was killed or seriously injured in the earthquake.
The United Nations estimates the quake killed more than 222,000 people, although the exact death toll will never be known.
However, the physical structure of Edwards' home base clinic in Port-au-Prince, the country's capital, did suffer a blow in the earthquake. About three-fourths of it collapsed.
And her first visit after the disaster, last February, had her working from a tent.
On her most recent visit, a 10-day trip which ended Jan. 13, she noted a sort of return to routine in the country.
Many Haitians still live in the tent cities, but they are developing a sense of community, Edwards said.Children have returned to school. Services are regular at churches and boutique-type shops are peddling candy and crackers.But still there are structural, physical and emotional scars like rubble in the streets where buildings once stood and a raging cholera epidemic brought on by a lack of clean drinking water.The tent that replaced the clinic has since been reinforced with plywood and tin, “but it's nowhere near a permanent structure,” she said.A permanent building is in the works.“I see evidence of things getting better, but there's still much to do,” Edwards said. “I see progress every time I go back, but it's slow.”As an example of that progress, an orphanage near Cap-Haitian opened just this week.Although he wasn't there to welcome the first children, Jayson Samuels, a pastor at North Bridge Community Church in Cranberry Township, had reason to take pride in the development.Samuels has worked with missionaries in Haiti for more than a decade, specifically giving help to a group of people who were raised in an orphanage.Those people, now in their 30s, wanted to build a similar orphanage to give back to the community the type of assistance they received as children.The orphanage, which will eventually hold 40 children in its first phase, was about 10 percent complete when the earthquake hit.The structure was not damaged by the quake and has since been completed to the point of accepting its first children.Samuels, who has returned to Haiti twice since the earthquake, said if there was a silver lining to the disaster it is a raised awareness of the need in the country.“Haiti has been a great passion for me for many years,” he said. “It's great to have other people be as aware and as passionate about that need.”You can count Cecelia “CeCe” Peterson among them.Peterson, a 54-year-old LifeFlight nurse from Cranberry Township, lent her first worldwide assistance for two weeks in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake.“I'm not really a go-out-on-a-limb person,” she said. “But I took a leap of faith to go and I met such wonderful people.”Peterson still gets regular reports from the health clinic she helped start while there, and she hopes to go back someday “if all the stars align,” she said.If not, she would love to host her 26-year-old Haitian translator, Shilo, here. Haitians speak French or Creole.Peterson said her visit to Haiti changed her life, and she took from it much more than she gave. “I'm so much more thankful for the things I have,” she said. “The health of my children, a stable roof, an income. Everything I need to survive,” she said“This made me want less and appreciate more.”
