Haiti Community Support looking beyond emergency services
Grass roots effort working to implement sustainable systems
Maura Curley
Haitian born Mathilde Aurelien Wilson and her husband Bruce have been running the grassroots non profit Haiti Community Support, with an office in St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands and a sister non-profit organization (in Haiti known as Group de Support a la Communaute Haitienne) since 2003.
Mathilde was booked on a flight to Haiti from St. Croix the week of the earthquake last January. She was on her way to work on a water program in the mountains and help build a road, near the school Haiti Community Support had a created, in the village of Au Center, an isolated region in Southern Haiti.
This remote settlement, impoverished even by Haitian standards, had no potable water, electricity, school or medical facility before Haiti Community Support arrived.
Haiti Community Support built a school and provided teachers for 200 children. It has also completed planning for a community water system, initiated a medical clinic and scheduled doctor’s visits to the village.
The philosophy of Haiti Community Support is to create sustainable systems that island people can eventually manage on their own.
The Wilsons and their small staff in St. Croix and Port –au- Prince had made remarkable progress despite great odds.
But now their challenges are more daunting.
Less than 48 hours after the devastation from the earthquake on January 12, Mathilde Wilson and Peter Dybing, a first responder from St. Croix, boarded a flight from St. Croix’s Henry Rohlston Airport, hoping to make the trip to Haiti. They flew to the Dominican Republic and boarded a bus from Santo Domingo to Port -au- Prince.
In the first few days they set up a clinic in La Plen, a section of Port- au- Prince, six miles from the airport. They worked without any other support and without the proper supplies. Mathilde called her husband, who stayed in St. Croix, and told him. " The people of Port au Prince have suffered a terrible loss, and they are confused why the aid is behind fences." She asked why she, a Haitian woman, organizing her people, was forbidden access to supply depots. She said people needed to stop worrying about security when survivors were dying of thirst, starvation, of simple fractures and deep cuts.
Haiti Community Support in St. Croix enlisted the help of first responders from the Virgin Islands and some doctors from the states. Two teams comprised EMT’s, air medics, and field doctors. Mathilde recruited Haitian nurses, medics, clinic staff, cooks, guards and more. Haiti Community Support's quake response supports Haitians insolving their problems, so that the solutions are sustainable.
Reports of desperation in Haiti are not new to anyone who has been watching CNN or reading newspapers. But the Wilsons and Haiti Community Support are looking beyond caring for the injured and sick.
“We’re basically trying to build new communities around clinics," reports Bruce, an environmentalist. He says HCS's multi faceted strategy now includes a mobile response to the refugee situation, creating fixed location clinics, and developing teams of Haitian people to take care of the neighborhoods.
Wilson says natives like Mathilde, who has a masters degree in agronomy and knows her way around the island, are needed to mobilize others.
The website for Haiti Community Support, created before the earthquake, indicates that it is “ more efficient than the typical international aid organizations for the island, which often run an expensive office in the USA or France or in Port au Prince." At HCS there are no middlemen, no finance authority holding money and taking their piece.
Donations can be made directly to the Haiti Community Support website at the click and pledge button or by sending a check to Haiti Community Support P.O. Box 696 Frederiksted, St Croix 00841.
Photo courtesy Haiti Community Support
Maura Curley is publisher of virginvoices.com
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