Since our founding in 1998, Healing Art Missions (HAM) has been based in the small village of Granville in Central Ohio. It’s not often that here in Granville we simultaneously share a common disaster with the communities we partner with in Haiti. The Novel Corona Virus Pandemic has become the exception.
This past March, when the pandemic began shutting down the U.S., HAM’s U.S. leadership went into isolation in Granville. We cancelled all travel plans in and out of the U.S., and turned our attention to helping our Haitian leadership, and the communities we serve, prepare for the inevitable coming disaster. First, with staff in Haiti, we studied the evolving realities of COVID-19, so we could strategize on the best ways to educate the community on prevention. Equally important was building a stock of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), something we all learned was a major problem right here in the U.S.
Our home community of Granville responded in their own way to the shortage of PPE for local health care workers. Friend and neighbor, Cara Harasaki, a doctor at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, began working with another neighbor, Sarah Marks, a senior director of women’s wear at Abercrombie & Fitch, to address the problem. Together they formed a grass-roots group, to design and make PPE for healthcare workers across the state, calling the project Ohio Save a Hero. With materials and other resources donated by Columbus Industries, Kaiser Aluminum, Dublin City Schools, Past Foundation, Metrobots, volunteers under the leadership of from Granville community member, Susan King, and the local Owens Corning campus got to work. Cara, Sarah, and Susan rounded up hundreds of volunteers and together they created 2,118 face shields, 1,500 3-D printed reusable masks with changeable filters, and 2,500 protective gowns.
The project distributed PPE in 20 Ohio Counties, to local EMTs and hospitals, as well as EMS first responders in rural areas and some skilled nursing facilities. And, as is often the case when communities come together in times of crisis, they reached out to other communities needing help. In this case it was to Healing Art Missions to supply our programs in Haiti. Once the bulk of the PPE had been distributed in Ohio, there were a few face shields and face masks remaining, which Ohio Save a Hero offered to HAM, if we could get the equipment to Haiti.
HAM has been actively working on that logistical bit of the process, shipping PPE to Haiti, since March. It has been an expensive and inconsistently successful endeavor. Without going into the frustrating details, we are happy to report all the facemasks and face shields have arrived safely and are being used daily by the Dumay clinic staff. We received enough reusable face masks to be able to share the bounty, by sending 77 masks to St. Damien’s pediatric hospital in Tabarre, Haiti.
It has always been our philosophy at HAM that we can accomplish so much more when we partner with like-minded individuals and communities. As it says in HAM’s Mission Statement, “We are committed to fostering the dignity of the individual, respecting the ways of the community…” It is especially gratifying to directly connect the communities where we work with the community where we live, 1600 miles apart.