samanta’s picture encouraging young kids at the tent cities, Port-au-Prince Haiti

The Samanta’s project
For those who want to make a difference in this world, there seems to be no end to the charitable organizations looking for their help. Big or small, domestic or international… how do you find the right one for you to support? Samanta Patino, a high school student from Palmetto Ridge High School in Naples, Florida, found hers in October 2011. Along with her fellow Community Mission for Hope volunteers, Samantha traveled to Verrettes, Haiti and started a project to restore the facilities of Providence Christian School. Having been in financial crisis for years and set as emergency camp to the 2010 earthquake Victims, Providence School was in danger of closing its doors for good.

But for Samantha, fixing the school was just not enough. What of the students who would attend the school? Samantha and her mother Ana Patino decided to sponsor 100 elementary school age children to attend Providence School. They will soon travel to Haiti where they will screen and select children for sponsorship, with emphasis on families who were financially unable to send their children to school this year.

The cost to sponsor each child for one year will be one hundred and twenty five dollars. That will pay for textbooks, school uniforms and tuition. Samantha’s fundraising efforts is on today January 12, 2012 as a reminder of what happened to Haiti that same day in 2010; and she is looking forward to your personal support and the support of the community.
If you would like to learn more about “Samantha’s Project” and Providence Christian School, contact Community Mission for Hope at 239-601 5052 or 239-348-5096 (Spanish)
From today, any donation of $125 on this website goes automatically to Samantha’s Project.

FYI…. Letter to President Obama from Congress Urging Haitian FRPP
http://library.constantcontact.com/download/get/file/1104029799985-136/881.pdf

Let’s save the work of Dr Harold May in Haiti.

The 2010 Haiti earthquake that hit Port-au-Prince on January 12, 2010 caused more than 200 000 deaths with the number of people injured measuring over that number, and either partly or completely destroyed thousands homes and hospitals with the main damage occurring in the Haitian capital and Leogane the south part of Port-au-Prince according to the figures reported by the Haitian government. While the international community has been providing emergency disaster supplies and assistance since the earthquake struck, due to the amount of damage caused and the need for more assistance in these areas, almost all the support was focused only to Port-au-Prince. Meanwhile the vulnerable cities that used to receive some support from international or local organizations are being completely abandoned. As a result some basic needs for education water or nutrition for the most vulnerable are jeopardized and in some cases shut down. This is the situation of the “Providence” school in Verrettes a little town in northern part of Haiti. Situated at about 100 miles from the capital, this Christian school was a gift of an American Physician Dr Harold May from Massachusetts to the community he had served for more than 15 years of his life as a medical doctor.

Dr. Harold May has spent a lifetime saving lives and transforming communities. We all applaud him for his commitment to the advancement of the disadvantaged in under developed countries and beyond. Dr. May’s life story winds through the hallowed halls of Harvard, the ranks of the Tuskegee Airmen, and missionary service in Haiti, where he opened a school (the Providence School) and served as Chief of Surgery at a an understaffed hospital (Albert Schweitzer Hospital of Verrettes) for 15 years. It continues back to Massachusetts where he most recently was the Medical Director at Wrentham State School, retiring after 19 years from a medical center that bears his name

In his career and in his life, Dr. May has been concerned about the needs of urban youth. Disturbed, by stories of teens and violence in places, like Verretes, free of drugs. He quickly realizes that the most effective intervention in the life of a teen was to give him access to a good education. He committed himself to finding a way to break the cycle of poverty and crime that plagues urban communities. Dr May is an inspiration to this community of Verrettes and the Providence School is a live testimony of his work for them. Verrettes is today the safest place of Haiti, with about 62000 people and sometime an empty jail.

Today desperate in the fight to keep the school opened to serve the community of Verrettes, and to honor the wishes of Dr May to contribute to the education of those of underdeveloped countries, the staff of the providence school has transformed part of the soccer field and other play areas into land farm, rented to pay the teachers ‘salaries already behind by two months. The physical structure of the buildings have deteriorated (rusty cage, painting, cracks in the building structures etc.), the school is unable to replace the broken seats, or maintaining its landscape etc. At this point the ultimate decision would be to completely shut down its activities as an elementary and junior high school but to keep for a while the professional teaching for cuisine, sewing and nursing assistant classes in order to pay the teachers pass due.

Community Mission for Hope during our last support visit to Haiti to help save lives; have met with the staff of the Providence School and some community leaders interested in keeping this school opened to serve the community. As a result, we have come up with this project of rehabilitation of the providence school. This project aims to rehabilitate the educational facilities of the providence school (classrooms, kitchen, conference rooms, bathroom etc) at a highest priority, in order to rehabilitate the function and capacity of public services to at least pre-disaster levels.

The scale of rehabilitated facilities shall be sufficient enough to provide at least the same level of function and capacity as pre-disaster conditions. As a direct effect of this project, the providence school (10 classrooms, 1 conference room including the library and the administrative offices and toilets) will be rehabilitated, providing a safe and suitable education environment to approx. 550 students. The drainage system around the Providence school will also be rehabilitated.

Furthermore, as an indirect effect of this project, the rehabilitation of educational facilities will improve the safety and the functionality of the providence school. It will also improve the capacity of the people to come together to address the problem of their community, and finally improving the effect of education. On top of this, improvements are expected to be made on the management strategy to build institutional capacity for planning, to stimulate efficient use of fiscal resources to make this school a self sustainable institution to prevent it in the future to scale back in this situation, and to assure quality of learning outcome. In other words, this project will contribute in providing hope and a sense of well being to the local community by lessening the extent of damage caused to this community indirectly in times of disaster.

Restructuring Status: Active
Restructuring Type: Level 1
Last modified on date : 06/14/2011

1. Basic Information
Project ID & Name School Rehabilitation
Country Haiti
Location Verrettes
Task Team Leader Pastor Solange Joseph
School Director Daniel Lundy
Community coordinator Haiti Ing Rosemond Pierre
Community coordinator US Marie Rochasse
Current Closing Date 08/19/2011
Organization / Group Community Mission for Hope
Category Non for Profit
Website www.communitymissionforhope.org

Contact HT (509) 3713-7858 Haiti
Contact US (239) 692- 2232

Project Development Objectives/Outcomes
The Project’s development objective is to assist Verrettes Community in restoring and improving access to basic education in selected destroyed or impacted primary schools.

As required by our new strategy, community Mission for Hope will take care of all activities that need to be done in order for the Providence school to open next year. No money will be given to the school, but together with the people of Verrettes we will rehabilitate the school. We appeal to all students that attended the Providence school in the pass to come forward to help, to all the Haitian community in USA or anywhere in the world to join, to anyone that is interested in making this world a better place, to those willing to support Dr Harold May’s work in Haiti, and finally to those that care enough about children and want to provide them with the means for an education. A special call is also addressed to handymen and people with construction skills to be part of the team going to Haiti this summer. Please sign up on our website by living a comment to this post. To all of you that prefer to donate materials instead of money can do so by giving one of these items listed below:
Teacher chair (20 needed)
Teacher desk (10 needed)
White board (10 “ “ “ )
Generator 16+KW (1)
School supplies
Kitchen supplies
Paints (Blue and white)
Tiles, enough for at least 600 sf.
Lawnmower (1)
Water pump (1)
Pressure pump (1)
Please contact: Marie Rochasse (239) 692-2232 (English) or Ana Patino (239 352-4099 (Spanish) for donation of materials or to sign up to be on that trip to Haiti. Any other donation can be made securely online at: www.communitymissionforhope.org or PO BOX 12195 Naples, Fl 34101.

Our group is divided in two teams. Samanta Patino, a high school student from Palmetto Ridge High School in Naples, Fl. went with Dr Joseph Claudia and Dr Remy Maritza to do community visits. Their mission is to inform people about how to protect and prevent the spread of the Cholera in their community. They went to an Elementary tent school in Port-au-Prince where they distributed preventive kits with demonstrations of how to use them. They also instructed the students on the basics of hygiene including hand washing, the sanitary conditions necessary to cook and prepare fruit and salads, etc. These kits contain: treatment for about 25 gallons of drinking water (aquatab), tooth brush, hand soap and sanitized towel. About 325 kits were distributed to the students. They visited about 10 different classes. Later Samanta went to a kindergarten with Dr Remy where she brought joy to the kids and talked to them about diversity. They wanted to touch her hair, see the color closely, trying to make sense and understand her language. It is so good to see these kids laughing like kids.

Dr. Raymond went to the University Hospital (general hospital) to assist at the emergency room. There things are terrible. This emergency department is overflowed beyond the capacity of people it can treat; only two doctors, two nurses and a pharmacy technician were on site. A fight broke out at the gate where security guards are trying to prevent more patients from being admitted to the emergency room. Trauma cases, cholera cases, active tuberculosis, cardiac patients etc. are everywhere. The scene is of unimaginable chaos. There is no triage possible at this point. One dead patient was just pushed to the side in the corridor and his cardboard bed taken away to be used for another patient. Free medical supplies are not available for the admitted patients. The pharmacy technician runs a small pharmacy inside the emergency room where patient’s relatives that can afford it can buy supplies and hand them to the doctors. The supplies that were provided by Community Mission for Hope were used in one day. We were exhausted! During a brief break I asked the chief resident of internal medicine, Dr Dary, about the reason for so many cases. I also asked about the fate of the patients that could not make it to the emergency room. He answered “It has been raining for the last three days in Port-au-Prince and since the sanitary condition of the people, mostly from the tent cities, is very poor, we are expected a large augmentation of Cholera cases. But the hospital is not in measure of making any staff adjustment for that unless people like you come to volunteer to help, that makes a difference. So thank you for what you are doing. For the people that cannot make it to the emergency room today, some will die and some will be back tomorrow, we are trying not to think of that since we can’t do anything about it, but we stay focused on those we serve in the Emergency room”.

Our heart goes out to them and to other victims of disasters in the world, particularly the people of Alabama, and Missouri, devastated by the recent tornados. We invite you to get involved in support to them; we invite you to the 1st annual benefit concert with “V-Gang a.k.a. Vibeline” for “Community Mission for Hope inc.” at the Florida sport Park located @ 8250 Collier Blvd Naples, Fl 34114 on Sunday May 29th, at 9:00 pm. A minimum of 5$ is require for admittance. All the proceeds will be used to send a medical team to Haiti on June 5th 2011. Call (239) 692-2232 for more information.

Less than one year ago a small group of friends in Naples, Florida gathered to discuss the possibility of putting a mobile medical clinic in Haiti to benefit the survivors of the earthquake. A few months later Community Mission for Hope, a 501 (3) (c) not-for-profit organization was born. In the months that followed, Dr. Raymond Pierre and a small group of doctors, nurses and supporters traveled to Haiti to render whatever aid they could.

Read full article here:

Naples community looks back on their efforts to support Haitians affected by quake

We are looking for anyone who might want to volunteer to sign up with us for our next visit.

Dr Raymond Pierre
drraymond77@hotmail.com

We are honored to report to you that we are recognized in Haiti as one of the local non for profit organizations that have tremendously contributed to make a difference in the lives of the survivors of the earthquake disaster and the cholera outbreak in Haiti. Our initial dream of buying and placing our first mobile clinic in service in Haiti seems to be a little bit long way away than previously thought because donations have been slow. This New Year we have decided to do and consolidate even more our impact in the country by building a community center that will include also the mobile clinic unit.

We count on you to be proudly part of this venture with community mission for hope. Thank you to take time to visit and to read our blog post and to request a copy of our community center proposal. Have a wonderful holiday. Best wishes on a happy, healthy, and joyous new year.
Dr Raymond Pierre
CMH