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January 20, 2010
Haiti’s ’Shunned’ Disabled Kids Cope With Loss of Their School
The following news was downloaded from the mailing list of "Disability and Development" with a cooperation of the publisher, Mr. Soya Mori.
Jan. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Susan Nelson’s emotions run from relief to fear as she wonders about the 170 disabled children at a Haitian school where she volunteers.
The Memphis, Tennessee, doctor left Haiti in December after spending part of the month at St. Vincent’s School for Handicapped Children, in Port-au-Prince, the capital. Her initial fears lifted when she learned that a Jan. 12 earthquake that killed more than 100,000 people in Haiti spared most of the kids. Their future is what frightens her now.
“What is happening to my friend Frenel, the six-year-old blind boy who sang to me while I bandaged a cut on his head?” Nelson, a 50-year-old family practitioner, said in an e-mail yesterday. “What about Judith who has the biggest smile and sweetest face? She only weighs 70 lbs at age 12. What is she getting to eat?”
Six children and staff members died at the school when the ”boy’s foyer,” a residential section, collapsed, said Leon Sadoni, the Episcopal-run school’s head priest, in an e-mail yesterday. The survivors are living in a tent city in an empty lot where they used to play soccer. They are under the protection of Zache Duracin, the Episcopal bishop of Haiti.
Church officials are trying to move the pupils to Montrois, a city north of Port-au-Prince, to house them temporarily in a former Episcopal seminary, Sadoni said. The Rev. Lauren Stanley, Episcopal missionary to Haiti, said by telephone today from New York that Duracin confirmed the information provided by Sadoni.
“The urgent now is to feed them,” Sadoni wrote. “And we don’t have any materials (cloths, toothbrushes and toothpaste, soap).”
‘Very Scary’
Even then, the struggle is far from over, Nelson said.
“Most of the kids there are in wheelchairs, blind or deaf, and much of the staff is handicapped, too,” she said in a telephone interview last week. “But it’s not just the physical problems. Handicapped children are also shunned by society there. It is really very scary.”
St. Vincent’s is the only school in Haiti for disabled children, said Nelson and Kenneth Quigley, program director for the Episcopal Church Foundation in New York. The school was founded in 1947 by the Sisters of St. Margaret, a religious order, and is an institution of the Episcopal
Diocese of Haiti, Quigley said in an e-mail today.
Before the quake, St. Vincent’s had one of Port-au-Prince’s better-equipped health facilities, which included its own clean water source and a new operating room, Nelson said. Everything left inside the school was stolen after the quake, Sadoni said. People took materials from the pharmacy and the operating room as well as food, Sadoni wrote.
The president of the church-sponsored Children’s Medical Mission of Haiti, Bill Squire, traveled to Haiti on Jan. 16 to deliver money and find ways the American group can help. Quigley said the Episcopal Church is waiting for an update from Squire to determine how to respond.
Remembering Names
Nelson volunteers with that mission was one of a group of 15 people who visited the school last month. She has traveled to the school four times over the past couple of years and brought her 17-year-old daughter, Sienna, along the last time. Sienna had photographed each child, saying “she wanted to remember the kids and their names, rather than just ‘the kid with one leg or the kid with no hands,’” Nelson said.
For two days after the initial news reports about the quake, a scrapbook containing the pictures sat unopened on Nelson’s coffee table. She had feared for the student’s lives after hearing that the presidential palace and the city’s largest Episcopal church, both within blocks of the school, had collapsed. One news report said St. Vincent’s had been leveled.
“The photo album has been a treasure to all of us for many weeks,” Nelson said. “ When we got the news the school had been destroyed, I unable to look at it. I could not stand to look at the faces of the children who might be injured or even dead.
'No Hope’
“We figured there was no hope,” she said. In December, the doctors found that “most people were drinking water from the same source as the bathrooms, and a lot of people were already sleeping in the streets,” she said. The earthquake left thousands more homeless.
When she received confirmation in an e-mail from Sadoni about survivors, she and Sienna finally decided to look through the photographs.
“That night my daughter and I sat with the photo album, turning the pages and looking at each face and name with joy and relief,” Nelson said. Now, she wants to return soon to Haiti to do what she can to help.
“I want to put myself on a magic helicopter and land on that soccer field in Port-au-Prince,” Nelson said.
--Editors: Andrew Pollack, Robert Greene
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-01-19/haiti-s-shunned-disabled-kids-cope-with-loss-of-their-school.html
Posted by jicafriends at January 20, 2010 11:11 AM