Children's Respite Home & Outreach Project, Haiti

During the last year, we have been able to extend the reach of the respite home through a small team of Community Based Rehabilitation Workers (CBRW). They seek out families with disabled children and offer physical, emotional and practical support. This is part of our mission to keep families together despite the major challenges of caring for a disabled child in an extremely poor country like Haiti.

One of the children they are currently working with is called Wilson. He was born 17th March 2013 in the Dominican Republic (DR). His mother is Haitian and is called Jesula. She was looking for a better life in the DR but Wilson was born with an incomplete lower bowel and was without full rectal function. Jesula took him to a doctor in the DR, who performed a form of colostomy operation on Wilson, opening 2 holes in Wilson’s abdomen. This enabled the removal of waste from his body and this operation saved his life. However, when Wilson’s father saw the result of the operation, he left, abandoning the family. When post operative problems started to occur, Wilson’s mother returned to Haiti.

She left Wilson with his grandmother and he now lives in an area outside Cap-Haitian, near to our hospital. Wilson still has occasional checkups with a doctor as he regularly suffers from pain when he evacuates his bowels and has frequent infections. Despite all this, Wilson is active, able, and attends the 1St Grade class in school. But he is often withdrawn compared to other children around him, due to the nature of his disability and how he has to manage it. Wilson is in need of regular medical assistance, nourishing food, and continued education to ensure he has a reasonable standard of life.

Our CBRW’s regularly visit Wilson, providing training and encouragement to the family so they can care for him as well as they can. The CBRW’s also visit the school Wilson attends. They work with the school to create a positive environment for Wilson to learn well, despite his medical condition. Working with community institutions like schools and churches brings valuable awareness to the wider community on how to interact with those who have a disability or medical condition. It’s a really important part of the team’s work.

The CBRW’s are now planning a number of training days for the parents and carers of the children who are under the care of our respite home for children with disabilities (Maison de Benediction). These new training sessions aim to teach basic business concepts to help improve the possibility for parents to generate more income for themselves and support the needs of their family.

Thanks to your support, we are constantly able to improve the quality and reach of the care we can provide for children with disabilities in north Haiti. Thank you.

Links:

• HHA's disability care work