June, 2011

Dear Friends,

2011 has proven to be an extraordinary year for Healing Art Missions’ medical work in Haiti. Having recently returned from there, I witnessed first hand the impressive return on the investment you and I have made in delivering health care to the impoverished rural community of Dumay. It was exciting to see that the Centre de Santé Communautaire de Dumay has truly become the center of the community, as demonstrated by the largest moto-taxi stand in the area that now resides in our front yard. It is compelling to know we are true to our mission as we empower Haitians to help themselves.

During our most recent trip in May, we were able to live for the first time in the newly completed volunteer quarters at the clinic, an important step in fully gaining the trust of the community. This also gave us the opportunity to see the full impact our clinic has on individuals and families we serve. I watched as fearful parents brought children feverish and dehydrated from cholera into the care of our staff, how mothers and fathers held and comforted their children while nurses inserted IV lines, and how those parents helped clean and care for their children, as pictured here. Most gratifying was to watch those same parents leave the clinic with their successfully treated child. Without Healing Art Missions and the Dumay clinic, these families would have no such option. Many would die before they could make it to a cholera treatment facility in the city.

This was both an exhilarating and challenging trip. Our final night in Dumay, a nine-month old girl was brought to the clinic in her mother’s arms, listless and weighing under fourteen pounds, all too close to death. The clinic nurses were unable to find a vein to insert an IV line, so they came to us for help. I was grateful to have with me, Dr. Leslie Mihalov and Dr. Marlie Dulaurier, pediatric emergency physicians. Within thirty minutes, an IV line was successfully placed in the little girls scalp and an NG tube, improvised from IV tubing, was inserted in her nose. By morning the child, pictured left, was animated, had gained significant weight, and looked nothing like the emaciated child we found the night before. It was through these doctors’ experience and expertise that this young girl’s life was saved. While the timing of the stay and composition of our team was fortuitous, thankfully, the need for such a dramatic intervention is extremely rare. The trained staff of the clinic has been most successful in handling the many cholera patients they encounter each day.

In the past year, we have expanded services at the Dumay clinic to include an on-site laboratory, the beginnings of an eye clinic, family planning and pre-natal care programs, a filiriasis prophylactic program, and the crucial cholera clinic. In February Healing Art Missions became an official Haitian Non-Governmental Organization. We now receive direct support from the Haitian Ministry of Health and are creating partnerships with major international aid groups including UNICEF, OIM (Organization of International Migration), Plan International, and Direct Relief International. Through such partnerships, we are now receiving thousands of dollars worth of donated medications and supplies.

For all of this we thank YOU! It is through your financial support that we pay the salaries of dozens of Haitian staff and keep our clinics operating. Whether you have given $10, $100, $1000 or more, that money has been successfully leveraged to yield many times more in value. We are proud of our accomplishments, but our work together is far from over. By January we hope to have the equipment purchased for the eye clinic to be fully functioning. We are in the early planning stages to convert one of the rooms at the clinic into an operating suite so that we can fully utilize the skills of our Medical Director, Dr. Jacques, one of only 100 Haitian general surgeons. We plan to continue to offer the cholera clinic’s life saving care as long as there is need.

To sustain all this, we need your continued financial support. You can send us a check made out to “HAM” in the enclosed envelope (don’t forget to add a postal stamp), or you can donate safely online at our website, healingartmissions.org. Make sure you provide us with your email address so you can get regular updates on our activities. I also ask for your support in sharing our story with others you might know who care about making a difference in the world, as you and I do. Please share our website, healingartmissions.org, with others, and “Friend” us on Facebook so you can follow our work even more easily.

Your investment in Healing Art Missions provides direct, people to people aid, a community-to-community connection with the population we serve in Haiti. Together we make a direct difference in the lives of the Haitian people.