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Hampton Roads to Haiti

The 7.0 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince on Jan. 12 brought world-wide attention to the beautiful – and often troubled – nation of Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Even before that, thousands of people in Hampton Roads – through their churches and nonprofit groups -- have been connected to our neighbor in the Caribbean. Now a strong military presence in the disaster relief effort strengthens the connection between Hampton Roads and Haiti. This blog dates back to April 2009 when Pilot editor Nancy Young tagged along with a Catholic missionary group to Haiti and has since visited the country five times. In January, Pilot military reporter Corinne Reilly and photojournalist Steve Earley traveled to Haiti with the amphibious assault ship Bataan and their posts and photographs describing earthquake relief efforts are still available. Look here, and in The Virginian-Pilot, for ongoing updates.

 

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■ 25 January 2010 | 4:07 PM

Are you a nurse? Do you speak Haitian Creole?

From Nancy Young

While there are now reportedly plenty of doctors helping out in Haiti, the need for nurses who speak Haitian Creole "is off the chart in demand," according to Partners in Health (www.pih.org), an organization that has been doing health care work in Haiti for more than two decades.

A few days after the earthquake, I got a call from a nurse in Norfolk. She and a couple of other nurses and a doctor speak Haitian Creole and were eager to get to Haiti to put their vitally needed skills to use there.

I forwarded their info onto Partners in Health -- and would be happy to do the same for other nurses who speak Haitian Creole. Best to send me an email rather than comment on the blog -- nancy.young@pilotonline.com.

Speaking the language is not only helpful for the technical, medical stuff. As you can imagine, it would be of great comfort to patients in pain to hear their own tongue and be understood.

There has, for a long time, been a severe shortage of nurses in Haiti. During the earthquake, a nursing school was destroyed while class was in session and many nurses -- and nursing students -- were killed.

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