NGOs

Before this Haiti trip I kind of had the idealistic perception of most Nongovernmental organizations as an effective serving entity because we’ve learned that they usually provided free or cheap aid and could do so with limited governmental bureaucracy crap interfering.

But now after 2 months here and various visits to diverse NGOs accompanied by dinner conversations with people working there, many of the other complexities involved with these organizations are so readily apparent. Its revealing to hear the employees’ transformations from idealistic beliefs in the great services of NGOs turning into realistic hardened outlooks on the extents of aid once they’ve been working for a couple months or so.

Johanniter delivers free prosthetics to

amputees and offers psychological counseling

It seems like the biggest mistake many NGOs commit is to come in to the country with their own goal in mind and persistently try to implement that without responding to specific community needs. Or coming in with the belief that you can fix all the problems you see. Serena from Johanniter illustrated this perfectly by saying when she first came she saw like 20 large problems, but realistically learned that to accomplish anything effective, she with her NGO would have to be flexible and could really only focus on 2-3 problems and just hope other organizations take care of the rest. Other NGOs are just not understanding of the community culture and values. An example of this deals with a group here (whose name I’ll leave out), whose volunteers apparently showed up at the earthquake anniversary march dressed in old dirty unwashed clothes in an attempt to “be like the people.” This was obviously insulting to most of the Haitians who were clean and dressed up in their best clothes for such an event. MSF, while providing free healthcare, also has some faults of its own. We’ve noticed many times from our surveys that people are becoming impatient and sometimes annoyed with them because of the long lines they must wait in to be seen and then being subjected to very impersonal exchanges with some of the doctors, no doubt due in part to many of the doctors coming from foreign countries.

MSF! they didn't let us take pic of the inside

but it was a huge complex, very well-organized

For some of those reasons I was at first a little skeptical of Family Health Ministries and the new health center they're planning to build. Of course the plans were decided with good intentions, but it has become visibly evident how that is never quite enough. Yet upon further inspection I’ve realized there's more to the FHM plan than I originally thought. For starters they’ve been sending students like us out in to the field to conduct surveys and assessments of the real community needs instead of already assuming what the needs are. FHM is also partnering with Dr. Delson’s ob-gyn clinic here and have established their
cervical cancer program, which shows connection to the local healthcare and working alongside it. FHM is also implementing a policy where the health workers at the new hospital will only be Haitian. I’m not sure how feasible it is to stay faithful to this model in the beginning stages but the commitment to employing only Haitians is commendable and will definitely be favored by the local community.

Gadyen Dlo, an organization that gives out water-containing

buckets engineered to prevent contamination

an NGO called Fish Ministries that raises chickens fish

and goats used to feed schoolchildren in the community

other random pics from visit to the Sri Lankan UN compound