Some photos from our trip to Haiti

Hi everyone,

I quickly uploaded some photos of our trip to Haiti. Enjoy! More stories and photos and videos to come (promise! :)

Ben
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My Blog
http://haitimedical.blogspot.com/

Op-Ed piece by Ban Ki-Moon

I wouldn't normally send along an entire article, but I think this one is important.  This is an op-ed piece in the NYT by current United Nations General Secretary, Ban Ki-Moon.  You'll recall that he and former President Bill Clinton recently visited Haiti.  

I would encourage you to read this (hence, the reason I'm sending it  :)   

I was pleased, for example, with how things appeared (always a key word) in Port-au-Prince during this trip.  There are new street signs all over the place, at least one road has double-yellow lines (read:  a suggestion to not pass), more street lights, cleaner streets.  It's just noticeably not quite as bad.

And this op-ed piece raises the very real possibility of hope for economic improvement....See what you think.

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Haiti's Big Chance

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By BAN KI-MOON

Published: March 30, 2009

It is easy to visit Haiti and see only poverty. But when I visited recently with former President Bill Clinton, we saw opportunity.

Yes, Haiti remains desperately poor. It has yet to fully recover from last year's devastating hurricanes, not to mention decades of malign dictatorship. Yet we can report what President René Préval told us: "Haiti is at a turning point." It can slide backwards into darkness and deeper misery, sacrificing all the country's progress and hard work with the United Nations and international community. Or it can break out, into the light toward a brighter and more hopeful future.

Next month, major international donors will gather in Washington to consider further help for this unfortunate land, so battered by forces beyond its control. Outwardly, there seems little cause of optimism. The financial crisis has crimped aid budgets. Haiti's own problems — runaway population growth, acute shortages of food and life's basic necessities, environmental degradation — often appear insuperable.

Yet in fact, Haiti stands a better chance than almost any emerging economy, not only to weather the current economic storms but to prosper. The reason: new U.S. trade legislation, passed last year, throws open a huge window of opportunity.

HOPE II, as the act is known, offers Haiti duty-free, quota-free access to U.S. markets for the next nine years. No other nation enjoys a similar advantage. This is a foundation to build on. It is a chance to consolidate the progress Haiti has made in winning a measure of political stability, with the help of the U.N. peacekeeping mission, and move beyond aid to genuine economic development. Given the country's massive unemployment, particularly among youth, that means one thing above all else: jobs.

My special adviser on Haiti, the Oxford University development economist Paul Collier, has worked with the government to devise a strategy. It identifies specific steps and policies to create those jobs, with particular emphasis on the country's traditional strengths — the garment industry and agriculture. Among them: enacting new regulations lowering port fees (among the highest in the Caribbean) and creating the sort of industrial "clusters" that have come to dominate global trade.

In practical terms, this means dramatically expanding the country's export zones, so that a new generation of textile firms can invest and do business in one place. By creating a market sufficiently large to generate economies of scale, they can drive down production costs and, once a certain threshold is crossed, spark potentially explosive growth constrained only by the size of the labor pool.

That may seem ambitious in a country of 9 million people, where 80 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day and half of the food is imported. Yet we know it can work. We have seen it happen in Bangladesh, which boasts a garment industry supporting 2.5 million jobs. We have seen it happen in Uganda and Rwanda.

President Clinton and I saw many good signs during our trip, both large and small. One day we visited an elementary school in Cité Soleil, a slum in Port au Prince long controlled by violent gangs before U.N. peacekeepers reclaimed it.

It did my heart good to see these children. They were well-fed, thanks to the U.N. World Food Program. Even better, they were happy and they were learning — as children should. It was a sign of more normal times.

We visited a second school, as well — this one for gifted students called HELP, short for the Haitian Education Leadership Program. With money raised privately in the United States, it provides scholarships to the very poorest Haitian children who could not otherwise dream of attending university. All these young people go on to lead productive careers. They make good salaries. They embark upon lives of promise — and virtually all of them stay in Haiti.

I told these young people that I thought of them as "seeds of hope," for they represent a better tomorrow.

To an outsider, it is striking how modest the obstacles are in relation to Haiti's potential. Visiting a clean and efficient factory in the capital, we met workers earning $7 a day making T-shirts for export — vaulting them into the Haitian middle class. Under HOPE II, the owner figures he can double or triple production within a year.

All this is why, in Washington, we will be asking donors to invest in Haiti, to step beyond traditional humanitarian aid. This is Haiti's moment, a break-out opportunity for one of the poorest nations to lift itself toward a future of real economic prospects and genuine hope.

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My Blog
http://haitimedical.blogspot.com/

Haiti trip

Hi Everyone,

We made it back safe and sound. Lots more to come over the next
couple of weeks. I think (know) we have some really great photos and
video, but instead of blitzing all this good stuff (like I did last
time....sorry!) I'll be taking more time to push out stories, updates
etc to you.

But for now, here are a couple of photos of kids we've hosted for heart surgery:

Anderson with Nakesha at her house.
Nelson out in his village of Barna

Ben

Try it out here: http://picasa.google.com/

Haiti Photo from MSF

The caption reads: "A woman with her child in the remains of their house in Gonaives, Haiti. After the hurricanes Hanna and Ike hit Haiti, more than one million people were left homeless and in need of everything." Photo: Klavs Bo Christensen
The MSF (Doctors Without Borders) website has a Blog that has some touching photos. Here is one such example.

Re: Office of Global Health

YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!! So proud of you, Ben!!!!!! And so excited for you!!!!!!! Excited to see what God will do next!!!!!

Love,
MOM & DAD :-)

Office of Global Health

Hi All,

 

I just got out of my meeting with the Dean (and the Chair of the Department of Humanities). 

 

In short, despite the difficult economic times, the Dean asked me if I would be the Director for the Office of Global Health!!  Which, btw, is an entirely NEW office....didn't exist until just now!

 

The Department of Humanities is offering up an office and some administrative support to help develop an office of global health.  That's huge!  And my Department of Family & Community Medicine has been very supportive all along.  

 

This is really mind-blowing.  I spoke with my department chair who is very happy about it and supportive, but similarly shocked that a new position would be developed during these times. 

 

When God has a plan, Watch out!  Or rather, Hold on tight!!!    :) 

 

There's that verse that says that God's plans are better than our plans.   I would NEVER ever have dreamed this up.  This plan far surpasses any expectation or thought that I had.  

But this is not about me:   this is clearly about God's will becoming more evident and 'being done on earth'.  This is about how good and big God is, that He still moves in the hearts of Kings (and Deans) today to accomplish His purposes. 

By all accounts, this is not a time to expand and develop new official positions.  And yet that is exactly what is being done.

 

Thank you for praying!!

 

Ben

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My Blog
http://haitimedical.blogspot.com/

Prayer requests

Hi everyone,  

Please consider praying for the following

1.  The current director of the United Nations (Ban Ki-moon) and former President Bill Clinton recently wrapped up a visit to Haiti (!).  This helps to bring attention to the hard strain the people of Haiti try to live under.  You can read about it here .   In the article it also mentions that an international community donors meeting will be held next month for Haiti.  Haiti has been in a particularly vulnerable period with the food crisis and the 4 hurricanes that swept through last year.  They had made significant gains prior to this, and the international community is aware of the improvements.  But with a million people displaced by the hurricanes (over 10% of the entire population) and increasing desperation for the basics (food, shelter, water) all the good that has been achieved to this point may be wiped out quickly.   So we can pray for God's compassion to be evidently poured out on these people, and that He gets the credit for bringing this about.

Haiti's situation reminds me that all our good human work is fruitless unless it is done with God.

2.  I am meeting with the Dean of the medical school tomorrow to discuss the situation of global health at Hershey.  God is pressing more and more on my heart the need to work for the poor and needy through my medical center.  My sunday school just looked at Ezekiel 34:17-31  which examines the 'fat sheep' versus the 'thin sheep'.  I can't get this image out of mt mind and heart (which is a good thing!).  I know this meeting with the Dean is part of God's plan for me and my medical school.  Please pray that I would have the right words and that God would continue to move in the hearts of leadership.   (Remember how He used to work in the hearts of kings to accomplish His will?  He still does that!!).

3.  Our trip next week.  Jon and I leave for Haiti next Friday.  Please pray for safety and that our hearts would be moved to greater compassion.  These are very humbling experiences for me.  We will be meeting with a number of people on this trip and I pray that we would be an encouragement to them.

Thanks much!

Ben

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My Blog
http://haitimedical.blogspot.com/