School children in Haiti had a rough school year. Due to the socio-political turmoil in Haiti last year, schools did not open in September as usual. There were a few attempts to begin the academic year, but the political fighting and violence continued and schools quickly closed again. It wasn’t until late January that the Charles Salomon Primary School was able to effectively open the school to students. And then came COVID-19. On March 20th all school in Haiti closed again, for the remainder of the school year. The vast majority of student’s in Haiti have no access to the internet, or computers for that matter, technology-based distance learning was not a choice for students at the Charles Salomon Primary School. But Charles and the teachers asked the children, and their parents, to continue their bookwork at home.
Healing Art Missions (HAM) is the major funder for the Charles Salomon Primary School, and the school’s founder, Jean Herard Charles (who goes by Charles), has worked for HAM since the early 2000’s and has become an integral part of HAM’s leadership in Haiti. Charles started this school in his home neighborhood of Baudin-Gros Sable in the city of Port-de-Paix on the north coast of Haiti, because he worried about all the poor children who couldn’t afford school and could easily be caught up into gangs. Over the years the school has expanded to include Pre-K through 9th Grade with over 350 student’s and employing over 25 teachers and support staff. The school also offers adult education classes as many of the parents of the school children are illiterate.
Following the Haitian government’s closing of all schools because of the pandemic, we talked with Charles about what we could do to help the school children and their families in Baudin-Gros Sable who were impacted by the school’s closing and the health and economic repercussions of the pandemic. The starting point was community education about COVID-19 and how children and adults can protect themselves and others from the virus. Given the difficulty of social-distancing in Haiti, where it’s typical for large families to live with 8 to 10 people in a one room home, we decided it could be helpful if the school children and their families had cloth, reusable face masks. At this time, HAM’s Founding Director, Dr. Tracee Laing, had set up a group of local individuals at home in Ohio to make cloth face masks to give to local first responders, front-line workers, and retirement homes. She took the mask patterns and sewing instructions created for her local Ohio project and sent them to Charles, asking him to purchase the fabric materials and find someone there to sew the face masks for pay. Charles had 670 fabric masks made, funded by HAM, enough for all the children and staff at his school, and their families. Charles has set up a system where small teams of teachers from the school will visit the homes of each student to distribute the masks, teach them the proper usage and cleaning of the masks, as well as checking on how each student is doing with their academics.
Knowing the pandemic will continue well into 2021, we continue to work with Charles at the school, and Dr. Jacques at the Dumay clinic, to provide whatever possible resources we can in support of the communities we serve.