Asheville Takes Initiative on Haiti Relief

Asheville takes up the initiative to provide relief in disaster-torn Haiti in various ways, which include providing medical care to orphanages, food, shelter and even yoga mats.

Mission Manna began in 1992 through an Episcopal work camp in Haiti and broke away from the church in 2003 into something broader and ecumenically based. They provide medical care to children from birth to 5-years-old. Clinics in Montrouis, located north of Port-au-Prince, remain a primary goal for Mission Manna.

“We go down there twice a year with teams of about three or four physicians and three or four nurses and lay people. We team up with an equal amount of Haitians, who we now pay and are doing more and more of the care,” said 72-year-old Tom Plaut, an active member of Mission Manna.

In addition to the bi-annual trips, a 12 month clinic, run by Haitians, takes care of monitoring and treating the children, according to Plaut.

“The dream was to build a hospital for sick children, and that proved to be too dreamlike and impractical and financially impossible,” he said. “So we worked with kids so they wouldn’t get sick to begin with.”

Mission Manna clinics provide worming medicine, vitamins and the supplement AK1000, a mixture of rice and protein.

“There are programs in the Carolina’s that package the stuff here and send it down,” he said. “But we buy it locally (Haiti) from local farmers and have them ground locally.”

AK1000 feeds three people for several days and costs less than a dollar, according to Plaut.

“We try to do as much as we can there. What we carry in are vitamins and medicine for the clinics and we try to leave as much there for our staff to work with,” he said. “What we are going to try to do in the future is put more and more in the hands of Haitians to administer themselves, rather than us doing it.”

Hearts with Hands, located in the Asheville area, began during Hurricane Andrew when Dr. Ralph Sexton, a local Baptist pastor, took a group to the affected areas and provided help, according to Bill Bradley, director of the program.

“It’s very much volunteer-driven, it just wouldn’t happen if it weren’t for the volunteers,” he said.

Hearts with Hands responded to every disaster since 1992, including 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing and the tsunami in Southeast Asia. Everywhere they go they leave with contacts and continuously create networks throughout the United States, according to Bradley.

“It’s a networking thing more than anything else, it gives us a lot of advantages, ears-to-the-ground a lot quicker,” he said.

Hearts with Hands focuses their efforts on a Haitian orphanage and hospital, located between St. Marc and Port-au-Prince, working with several missionaries stationed in the area, Bradley said.

“They’re screaming for medical supplies. This hospital is in an 11-acre compound and they only let a small number of people in at a time, treat them and let them back out,” he said. “They are having to do that right now because they don’t want to get too many in there and get taken over from the inside.”

Mission Manna collaborates with Haitians. They work in five surrounding areas each time they take a clinic down, Plaut said.

“We had a group in October and we saw 1,230 kids in five days,” he said. “We got doctors out of their offices for a week, so we have to hit the ground running.”

The Haitian people exercise their jobs efficiently and organize clinics so that people are lined up waiting when the doctors arrive, according to Plaut.

“I think one thing that always impressed me is these people will wait in the blazing sun, 100 degrees, and driving rain and just wait patiently for these doctors to see their children,” he said. “A degree of patience and tolerance you’d be hard-pressed to find here.”

The area of Montrouis, two hours north of Port-au-Prince, didn’t sustain damage from the recent quakes, though hurricane recovery from 2008 remains underway, including major bridge reconstruction, according to Plaut.

“All of our staff is OK and survived, but all of them lost family in the quake. The devastation is unbelievably huge,” he said.

The YMCA joined with Park Ridge Hospital’s attempt to get yoga mat donations to be sent to Haiti. Yoga mats offer a place to sleep other than the ground and can be used for meditation that often helps with trauma relief, said Lynn Trezise, group exercise coordinator at the Asheville YMCA.

“They were looking for mats, camping mats, for the people that were displaced by the earthquake,” she said. “Right now most of those people have nothing except what was on their back. And it just so happens that you could do yoga on it.”

The Mats for Haiti campaign accepts any type of mat or air-mattress, according to Trezise.

“They were hoping that we would have extra, or old, mats that we could donate, which we do,” she said. “And we took it a step further and started asking around for more donations.”

Cost of food and supplies tripled due to devastation, raising the cost from roughly $1,200 a month to $3,600, according to Plaut. Weakened infrastructure inhibits trips back to Haiti as well.

“We’re hard-pressed to get all that money, but we’ve got to do it,” he said. “In the meantime we’re going to be funneling money to our Haitian staff and families on the ground and keep them going.”

Hearts with Hands attempts to keep their orphanage and hospital running by taking financial donations from individuals and requesting medical donations from surrounding medical facilities, according to Bradley.

“This orphanage has about 65 kids now and didn’t sustain a lot of damage,” he said. “But the thing that is going to happen, and is already, is they’re bringing the evacuees into that area.”

Local community support allows organizations, like Hearts with Hands, to continue working according to Bradley. Hearts with Hands helps local residents with food banks and school functions and averages 35 volunteers on a typical day. When disaster strikes, volunteer counts rise to nearly 500 people.

“If you don’t have a strong community presence you probably aren’t going to survive,” he said. “Disasters come, but sometimes they’re sporadic.”

Mission Manna relies on donations and volunteers and raises money via their Web site and outreach.

“We diverted some of our fund raising to things like the shelter boxes that provide tents for people,” Plaut said. “But at the same time we have to keep ourselves going.”

The shelter boxes contain tents, mosquito nets and survival tools are dropped into disaster zones and roughly 1,500 are currently in Haiti, according, to Plaut.

Heart’s With Hands ships supplies to St. Marc instead of Port-au-Prince because it allows for more efficient movement to their site, according to Bradley.

“We’re going a few hours north. Problem is it’s a smaller port, you can’t take as big of ships,” he said. “I don’t know why anyone would send anything into Port-au-Prince right now. I know they need a lot right there but they can’t seem to move any of it.”

Shipping supplies and giving donations, instead of physically going, allows the people in Haiti to operate without volunteers getting in the way, and Mission Manna currently has one physician on site, Plaut said. UNCA alumni and students are already on the ground in Haiti, and others plan to go infrastructure allows travel.

“You don’t want to go down and provide them with more mouths to feed,” he said. “It seems to us like the best thing to do is work with other organizations that are already on the ground.”