Provide Medicine to Earthquake Victims in Haiti

On a recent trip by MADRE staff, we visited our partners at KOFAVIV.

KOFAVIV and MADRE have co-founded “The KOFAVIV Women’s Center” a refuge  that provides essential services for rape survivors. The center has become a critical resource for the women it serves. Women who arrive at the center traumatized by an attack immediately are cared for by KOFAVIV members, who accompany rape survivors to urgent medical care and legal services.

Many of the girls who use the center are orphans and are forced into survival sex to provide themselves with the most basic daily necessities, such as food or a sliver of soap. With even a little support, like a pair of flip flops or the promise of a meal, KOFAVIV is able to pull these girls out of that cycle. KOFAVIV also provides counseling, human rights trainings and arts programming, to help women and girls on the path to rebuilding their lives.

Since the earthquake, Haitian women have faced an epidemic of sexual violence in the displacement camps of Port-au-Prince. Every day, new women who have survived rape arrive at the KOFAVIV Women’s Center. Over half of these cases of rape involve girls under the age of 17—the youngest rape survivor we met was 4 years old. Since September, the KOFAVIV Center has treated more than 350rape survivors, and every week, 400 women come for peer-to-peer counseling sessions.

But many obstacles remain. Malya Villard-Appolon, one of the leaders of KOFAVIV, told us that one of the young girls had stopped attending the peer-to-peer counseling sessions. Concerned for her well-being, they sought her out in the displacement camp where she lives. She told them that she had stopped coming to the trainings because she had lost her only pair of shoes and couldn’t make the walk to the Center.  For other women and girls, the inability to afford the cost of transportation throughout Port-au-Prince keeps them from visiting the center, and KOFAVIV has launched a concerted but difficult effort to help cover these costs.

To help bring their services to women and girls, KOFAVIV is hoping to move more of their workshops into the displacement camps. The plan is to start new workshops in seven camps with 40 girls in each.  Eventually, as they grow through the mentorship of KOFAVIV’s leaders, these girls will also become role models for other young girls struggling to heal from rape.

Your support helps make KOFAVIV’s life-saving services possible – thank you.

Links:

• Visiting KOFAVIV
• Human Rights Advocacy Training for Grassroots Women

Equipping Medical Staff in Haiti

MADRE has been working with Partners in Health to support Zanmi Lasante as they continue providing emergency care for the earthquake survivors in Port-au-Prince and for those who have managed to flee the city.

Through the support and cooperation of many aid agencies, within the first days after the earthquake, the general hospital in Port-au-Prince (HUEH) was equipped to receive survivors. Since then, medical staff has been working around the clock to treat the many severe injuries people sustained during the disaster.

Zanmi Lasante medical staff has also been receiving patients in their clinics and at field hospitals around Haiti to deal with the flow of patients fleeing Port-au-Prince. Medical staff has reported that the need for orthopedic surgeons is dropping, but that there is an increased need for post-operational care.

Ophelia Dahl, Executive Director of Partners in Health, reported from her trip to Haiti this week that the hospitals and clinics are still receiving people with untreated injuries, a full two weeks after the disaster.

Women's Health Delegation Responds to the Most Pressing Health Needs in Haiti

MADRE partnered with Circle of Health International (COHI) to send several teams of women's health workers into Haiti over the last two weeks. Seven volunteers are now on the ground in Haiti, working out of Fond Parisien, a Haitian town on the border with the Dominican Republic. Every day, more earthquake survivors arrive in packed buses as they flee the devastation of Port-au-Prince. In addition to serving the general population of survivors, the volunteers are caring for pregnant women and victims of sexual abuse.

One team member has begun the Rapid Health Assessment, an assessment to identify the most pressing women's health needs. To this end, a group of Haitian women have been hired to conduct interviews and they are currently being trained in interviewing skills.

Providing Medical Care to the Most Vulnerable

MADRE is working with SOFA, a national Haitian women's organization, to provide medical services to earthquake survivors. SOFA and MADRE partnered in 1996 to build Klinik Fanm, the first Haitian clinic dedicated exclusively to women's health and human rights. Though the clinic building was damaged in the earthquake, the doctors and women's health practitioners have managed to set up a temporary clinic for survivors, and they are treating a steady stream of patients every day.