How Haiti is Uniting to Build a Healthier, Independent Nation
By: Emily McIntyre
Produced and Edited By: Sam Campbell
When a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Haiti’s capital
Port-au-Prince in 2010, the population was pushed deeper into its battle with
extreme poverty. Thousands of people died, families were separated and the
country’s free market economy plunged. Nonprofit organizations, charities and relief
efforts flooded into Haiti for support, and though six years have passed since
the earthquake, the country is still picking up the pieces.
Before the Children’s Nutrition
Program of Haiti (CNP)/Kore Timoun (which means caring for
children) was established in 1998, the acute malnutrition rate was an alarming
24 percent for the region of Léogâne, located in the Ouest Department of
Haiti.
Today, that rate has
dropped to approximately less than 3 percent, said Taryn Silver the country
program director of CNP. Focusing on the Léogâne area, CNP depends on female
leaders called monitrices to teach the local communities how to be
self-sustainable via Women’s Groups and Health Committees. Silver explains that
monitrices play an especially instrumental role in treating women who are
malnourished, pregnant or lactating.
“They’ll talk about, like,
‘OK you basically need to eat an extra bowl of rice, or basically eating a
little bit extra’ to get those extra calories while they’re pregnant,” Silver
said.
Exclusive breastfeeding is
also an issue in some communities as well, because not all mothers are
well-nourished enough to do so.
“It’s not like they’re
supplementing with formula or anything. They’re using food, or baby powders,
and just regular powdered milk,” Silver said. “So what our monitrices will
tell the women is ‘If you’re buying milk for your baby, no, you drink
that milk. Use that extra money to buy extra food for yourself, especially
while you’re breastfeeding.’”
In March 2014, CNP also
started promoting the growth of Moringa trees, which have nutrient-dense
leaves. Monitrices show mothers how they can incorporate them into their diet,
such as adding them in soup.
Malnutrition affects Haitian children
to the point where often times their hunger distracts them from learning at
school. In Ouanaminthe, located in the Nord-Est Department of Haiti, is Institution
Univers, one of the top ten ranked schools in the country. The Coalition of
Children in Need Association founder Hugues Bastien started a
farm to operate in tandem with the school’s lunch program.
The local crops
grown there include sweet potatoes, mangoes, coconuts, cashews and limes, and
they are harvested to feed more than 2,300 students ranging from preschool to
high school.
“They were seeing not only
kids who were malnourished, but even just because they were so hungry, they
couldn’t learn. They couldn’t concentrate in class, and they didn’t have the
energy to do what they needed to do,” said COCINA Communications Director Anna
Lile.
COCINA also funds and
supports Univers Medical Center in Ouanaminthe, which has become one of the
biggest health clinics in the area.
Aside from the wreckage
following the tragedy, Haiti has suffered from massive deforestation within the
past two decades. Part of the reason for this is producing and relying on charcoal
for fuel, which requires cutting down trees Deforestation has also forced
farmers to abandon or give up agriculture, because not enough profit is being
collected from their crops.
“With deforestation,
there’s more malnutrition and… there’s often no rain because there are often
droughts,” said CNP Program Manager Rose Elene Veillard.* “Locals grow gardens,
and the gardens can’t produce anything."
When it comes to a balanced
diet, the best recommendation for Haitians with limited access to a variety of foods
is to choose the right foods based on what is available. Cost has been a major
setback when it comes to shopping for meals at the markets or grocery stores in
Haiti.
“They’ve almost created this generation of ‘We live off of aid.’ The people don’t want that. They want to be a strong, proud country.”
Silver explaied that Haiti
is frustrated with the food shipments that constantly pour in from
other countries. “It puts a lot of people out of business,” she said. “When you
go to the market in Haiti to buy rice, you can buy a bag of American or
Taiwanese rice for maybe half the cost of Haitian rice.”
Cassandra Jean François, a
member of SOHASAN (Solidarité Haitienne de Sécurité Alimentaire et
Nutritionnelle) stressed that a major challenge with external aid is that there
are no laws for food regulation in Haiti.
“But everyone needs access
to food,” she said.*
Tania Bernard, Accounting Manager and official of Haitian Ministry of National Education and Professional Training (le Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale et de la Formation
Professionnelle, or MENFP) agrees; she thinks that instead of the U.S. and
other countries shipping metric tons of food as a form of aid, they
should lend assistance in helping to reform the nation’s economy.
“So the help we need in
Haiti by precisely related to this issue of food insecurity is first domestic
production,” Bernard said. “I think the development of our country must first
go through projects… agricultural reform projects, projects that are
taking shape in the rural section, with farmers and with communities in order
to arrive at large-scale development of our national economy.”
Lost in the whirlwind of
governmental reform, the Haitian population can only hope to make steps
toward becoming a more sustainable nation once their new political leaders take
office.
“They want to have hope for
their future. They know that their country is broken, and they want to be able
to take care of themselves,” Lile said. “They’ve almost created this generation
of ‘We live off of aid.’ The people don’t want that. They want to be a strong,
proud country.”
*Some quotes translated by the author.
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