Contextually Relevant Healthcare
Consistent access to culturally relevant healthcare is one of the biggest hurdles facing Haiti today. Around half of Haiti’s population does not have consistent, reliable access to healthcare. As a response to this crucial, ongoing need, we partner with several Haitian healthcare professionals who provide routine, affordable, culturally-relevant healthcare in several of our partner communities in rural Southeast Haiti.
Love Haiti has been partnering with Grassroots Community Voice (GCV) since its inception in 2015. Through our partnership with GCV, we employ a traveling Haitian nurse to host health clinics in 2 rural southeast communities. Our nurse, Nurse M, has been partnering with us to do this work since 2016. M loves to work with pregnant mothers and has three beautiful daughters of her own. Between M’s weekly clinics and our “Big Clinics” held once a month with a Haitian doctor, Love Haiti helps Haitian medical professionals provide healthcare to hundreds and hundreds of patients each year. To support Nurse M and her practice, we have also built two community health clinic buildings in Southeast Haiti where she hosts her clinics.
Like most of our projects at Love Haiti, these health clinic buildings are not owned by Love Haiti. Instead, these buildings are actually owned by the community in which they are located. We help each community we partner with establish a community Federation.
Through these Federations, our partner communities are able to own property, collect communal donations for projects, and facilitate decision making on behalf of the community. The collective, local ownership of these health clinic buildings builds pride and sustainability within each community; allowing and encouraging the community to view the ongoing development work as their own!
We have also been involved in other miscellaneous healthcare endeavors over years, many of them in partnership with GCV.
We organized a COVID-19 Mitigation Team in 2020 at the height of the pandemic, implemented a Child Malnutrition Project in the Southeast Haiti community of Baie d’Orange in 2021 & 2022, pulled together a small medical team to respond to the earthquake in Les Cayes, Haiti in 2021, and have been hosting intermittent mobile-clinics in the remote community of Baguette since Summer of 2022. All of these projects have been comprised of Haitian medical professionals helping Haitians in need.
Our Earthquake Response team tending to wounds inflicted by the 7.0 Magnitude earthquake in Les Cayes, Haiti in August 2021. By the end of this project, they helped care for 784 patients affected by the earthquake
Nurse N distributing nutritional supplements to families with severely malnourished children in Baie d’Orange at the beginning of 2022.
Our mobile clinic team on their way to Baguette by boat!
Our COVID-19 Mitigation team, they engaged with more than 1,300 households during the pandemic
Medical Volunteer Trips
Our Haitian healthcare professionals run everything on the ground. This means that our beneficiaries are not dependent on international volunteers coming to Haiti to receive consistent access to healthcare. However, when possible, we do love sending international teams down to our clinics in Haiti simply to support and learn from our Haitian staff; and so that our friends can experience this beautiful country and culture!
