Giving Back

Throughout much of our service project (mainly conducting surveys), it felt like our immediate influence always consisted of taking and never giving anything back. When taking part in civic engagement, I’d say the majority of people want to feel as if their time is being spent well and effectively, and it is definitely tough to measure your effect without something concrete that you’ve shared with the community. Of course it always helped to take a step back and realize the focus of our project was on research, information that will ultimately be brought to use in the future once the new FHM health center is built. But I found this to be one of the hardest things to grapple with at times; the realization of the differences between short-term and long-term impacts and how tangible they are.

I think that research is great and necessary and all but since our specific service won’t directly help anyone out till a few years down the road, all of us in the Maternal Mortality group decided that we should do something to have a more immediate positive influence. There's only so much we can do as undergraduate college students, so we decided it would be most effective to target the lack of education on maternal mortality. We then went to work developing an educational brochure on pregnancy and delivery complications, how to know if you might have one and if so what you should do. We collaborated with Dr. Delson from the ob-gyn clinic and also Dr. Chakhtoura, both of who gave us valuable advice on what specific knowledge to share and how best to phrase it so it would translate easily and understandably to Creole. We eventually finalized the brochure during the last week with FHM’s permission and then printed a preliminary 200 copies, which we handed out in tent cities and Dr. Delson’s ob-gyn clinic the following days. Now that FHM has the template saved they can continue printing and handing those out in future years.

Copy of the brochure before being translated. We tried to keep the language level as low as possible for the many uneducated women in the community



other events/activities during the last week

teaching our lessons at English Club

teaching all the students the cha cha slide. we also taught them the cupid shuffle and some bhangra and they loved all of it!

we painted and put together a sign for FHM's new health center. Thank god for the local Haitians who randomly stopped by to help us cement it in the ground. still not entirely sure why we were told to paint it mostly in English but apparently the phrases don't translate into Creole very well, and the average Haitian will still understand the gist of it

papier mache shop in Jacmel

Bassin Bleu. Bassin Bleu has three basins and the last one has a beautiful waterfall

We climbed up through that waterfall to jump off ledges

The Cyvadier hotel in Jacmel where we stayed for a beautiful relaxing day and night

View from the hotel

There are countless other memorable experiences from the trip that have defined Haiti’s influences on me, but I guess if I had to narrow it down to a few they would have to be the exposure firsthand to many global health problems, intricacies involved with NGOs and other healthcare issues, and the wide array of beautiful Haitian culture and lifestyle.

Thanks for everything Haiti