By Jennifer Browning

Between now and midnight, each new person who joins iGive using this link right here and does just one web search on the iGive site Project Medishare will receive a dollar.

Join iGive between today and noon tomorrow, conduct one search on iGive and Project Medishare receives one dollar.

Just think, 5,000 sign ups and a search gives Project Medishare $5,000. While there is no purchase necessary, if you search more or buy something through one of the many participating stores, Project Medishare earns more.

Right now, iGive donates $.02 per search and offers a $5 bonus for the first purchase plus the usual percentage the participating merchant offers.

Click here to become a member of iGive, make one search and earn Project Medishare one dollar. One dollar goes a long way in Haiti.

Tell your friends to do the same. It is a free and easy way to raise a little money for Project Medishare and the people we serve in Haiti.

By Jennifer Browning

Two grants approved by the World Bank Board of Directors totalling $24.5 million will go to support Haiti’s economic governance reform agenda and rehabilitation of key roads and bridges.

The first grant for the Third Economic Governance Reform Operation (EGRO III) for $12.5 million seeks to improve the effectiveness, transparency and accountability of public sector institutions by consolidating economic governance reforms and strengthening core institutions.

A second grant approved today provides $12 million of additional funding for the Transport and Territorial Development Project, which will replenish the project for road and bridge reconstruction undertaken following the hurricanes and tropical storms that struck Haiti in 2007 and 2008. The grant will also cover additional costs related to the road rehabilitation works.

Read more.

By Jennifer Browning

From now until December 11, each time you give $25 or more to Project Medishare, a holiday greeting will be mailed to the person of your choice. Give $50–send a greeting to two friends. Give $100, Project Medishare will send a greeting to four people of your choice.

And as always, your gift is tax-deductible.

When your friend, family, colleague and/or loved one receives their greeting they will know that you gave a gift in their honor in an effort to combat malnutrition in Haiti’s Central Plateau…..a place where every gift, no matter how great or small, is always appreciated.

To ensure your greeting arrives in a timely manner, Project Medishare must receive your tax-deductible gift by Friday, December 11.

Click here to give $25, $50, $75, $100 or more. Once you have donated, email Jennifer Browning (jbrowning@projectmedishare.org) with the addresses of those you are honoring so they may receive their special holiday greeting.

Thank you again, and Happy Holidays from Project Medishare and the people of Haiti’s Central Plateau.

By Jennifer Browning

For World AIDS Day today, Project Medishare will have a memorial in remembrance of those who have succumbed to the disease. The memorial will take place in Casse/Lahoye. Following the memorial, four small group sessions will be held in four densely populated areas. This afternoon various youth groups will perform presentations involving theater and dance. The youth presentations will focus on the stigmatization of HIV/AIDS, as well as abstinence and faithfulness. Education materials will be distributed throughout the day.

Last year during World AIDS Day, Project Medishare received a $1.25 million grant through the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The award, which focuses on HIV/AIDS prevention activities, is part of a $4.8 million grant to Cross International, a South Florida-based interdenominational Christian humanitarian agency.
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Project Medishare, as part of the PEPFAR program, has enrolled 250 children from all regions of LaHoye. The children receive health services, psychosocial support, birth certificates to orphans and vulnerable children, as well as training for caregivers on parenting, health and other topics. In addition to providing these services, through the PEPFAR grant, Project Medishare provides financial support for People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) in order to help them start micro enterprise and other income generating activities.

Thus far, we have provided 49 children with primary school tuition and 34 children with birth certificates. Thanks to the PEPFAR program, 10 individuals have publicly declared their HIV positive status. In response to this, Project Medishare has started a PLWHA support group with these individuals which is slowly growing to more members.

In order to provide education regarding HIV/AIDS, Project Medishare hired and trained 16 peer educators to educate and mobilize the local youth. In addition, 10 health promoters from various locations in LaHoye have been trained to educate, mobilize community members as well as elected officials in the fight against HIV/AIDS.

**This report is made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The contents are the responsibility of Cross International and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government.

By Katie Lee

HICAGNE, Haiti—While I haven’t spent Thanksgiving at home in quite a few years, this was the first that I’ve spent in a country that doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving! Today was the last day of clinic, and it was a perfect end to the week: I got to follow a patient from triage to transfer. She was a 17-year-old girl with a tiny lethargic five-month-old baby. The baby’s lethargy scared me.

If there’s one thing that’s been reinforced this week, it’s that screaming babies are a good thing-it means they have enough health to realize when they’re not feeling well. This baby was listless, merely staring at us through eyes covered in a white film as we took her blood pressure, temperature, and pulse. Her mother’s chief complaint was that her daughter was vomiting so much that she couldn’t eat anything, and she was losing a lot of weight. When we asked her if she breast fed, she said a doctor said she couldn’t because it hurt her too much. Physical exam revealed lethargy, no tears when crying (a sign of severe dehydration), and a couple of rashes on her cheeks and buttocks. The doctor working with us discovered that the mother was HIV positive. This could have been the reason the doctor told her not to breastfeed, since the HIV virus can be transmitted through breast milk. The mother was a restavek, an orphan who relied on strangers to take her in, and it would have taken her eight hours to walk to the nearest hospital. We decided to take her to Cange at the end of the day.

The hospital in the town of Cange was started by Paul Farmer, an American most famous for the book Mountains Beyond Mountains about the creation of Zanmi Lasanti (Partners in Health). This organization strives to improve overall health conditions in Haiti through acute hospital care, community health care workers who directly observe therapy at the home, and preventative services. After spending the past five days in Haiti, walking into the Zanmi Lasante compound was like walking into Disneyland. Everything was clean, concrete, and huge. Inside the infant unit, the walls were painted white, there were hand sanitizer pumps at every bedside, and in the corner I even saw a television.

We presented our case to the doctor working the unit, who agreed to admit both mother and child. We had to leave after she was admitted, and I’ll never know what happened to that mother and that baby. Zanmi Lasante is known for their social support network, and hopefully they can provide some assistance to a girl who literally has no one. All I know is that although this one case obviously did not change the dire state of health in Haiti– or maybe even changed the course of this woman’s life, we were able to help her as much as we can for as long as we saw her. That individual attention to care is why I’m a part of Project Medishare, and eventually part of the international health community.

Katie Lee is a first year at Emory Medical School. This is her first trip to Haiti with Project Medishare.

By Woon Cho Kim

BATILLE, ,CASSE DISTRICT, Haiti—Three whole days of rural outreach clinics and couple of hundreds of patients later, my mind is absolutely overwhelmed with too many thoughts, reflections, and emotions. Coming to Haiti as a young medical student in training may just be one of the best decisions I have made in my academic career so far.

As soon as we set up the clinics this morning, an 80-year-old woman stumbled into the OB/Gyn clinic, moaning in pain. Sameer had spotted her from the crowd in the waiting area and quickly referred her to the clinic. She was in so much pain that she could not walk on her own. After getting her trembling body on the bed and going through the translators, we learned that she hasn’t urinated in the past three days. This is how the next hour panned out: after a quick pelvic exam, the attending diagnoses her with final stage of cervical cancer.

She only has a few days to live.

Through a translator, the attending delivers the grim news to the family members. While the family listens to the doctor, I feel a weak squeeze on my hand. The old lady, too exhausted to move, had reached out to hold my hand.

I will never know why she did that. Perhaps she needed to communicate, or maybe she wanted a human touch at the moment. I have never been so appreciative of the scorching heat—I think my sweat masked my tears pretty well.

In the end, she is sent back home with a packet of Tylenol to relieve her pain. I watch her leave the dusty compound with her family, transported on a horse.

Not that modern medicine could have cured her cancer; plan for treatment and care would have been very different for someone in her situation back home. Extreme poverty, lack of access to medical care, and inequality in health resources are all scary realities here in Haiti. And many other parts of the world, U.S. included. The amount of injustice is an unsettling feeling for me. It is even more disturbing to be reminded how easy it is to forget what it is like for the majority of the people in this world.

I am grateful for the opportunity to be here, to be part of the reality of the people. The reality that we should face as medical professionals is a grim one, but it is a noble task. My trip to Haiti is making me realize just that.

Woon Cho Kim is a first year student at Emory Medical School.

By Constance Harrell

HINCHE, Haiti—Meeting the Hinche commune’s minister of health was both inspiring and revealing of how much of the international medical work connects with the local health workers. Kathleen, Jen, and Matt, three Gyn/Oncology doctors from MD Anderson who have been running our OB/Gyn clinics on this trip, are starting a new trip in conjunction with Project Medishare to focus on obstetric and gynecologic surgical and clinical needs. It’s been tricky setting up the trip to figure out what the community needs, and what is currently available so that we can best work within the local health system and expand their potential from within as much as possible. Costs are a big factor too; if we bring our own anesthesia machine, CONE or LEAPS machines, and nursing assistants, we need start preparing yesterday.

The Health Minister, Dr. Raphael, ushered us into his sparse but nonetheless clean and air-conditioned office to discuss why we came. A posh fellow in a suit, drastically different from the often half-clothed patients we see just 30 km away, Dr. Raphael spoke to us in perfect French and Spanish, which was eloquently translated by Project Medishare’s Program Coordinator Gaby into English to ensure we could all understand. Our conversation, which was a repeat of conversations held yesterday with other Hinch VIPs, confirmed that we would be welcome to work in their hospital for a week this spring.

But to put together a surgical trip, we can’t just know we’re welcome – we need to know every detail in advance to ensure that when we come, we do good, not harm. How many patients with cervical or breast cancer do they see, who treats them and where, what screening is done, what instruments and machines are used, what are the conditions in the operating room? To figure out these details, we met with the hospital’s medical director, Dr. Prince. We found him in the hospital seeing patients in clean but crowded and poorly lit rooms ventilated only by fans and windows. He gave us a better sense of what is needed and what is available, but still more needs to be learned.

I write this post in order to raise awareness about how hard it is to pull this kind of trip off. One week takes hundreds of emails and telephone calls, and months of hard work in addition to the thousands of dollars to treat the patients we see who are so desperately in need of care, and expanded access to care.

Constance “Bene” Harrell is a first-year medical student at Emory. This is her first trip to Haiti.

By Sameer Kapadia

CASSE, Haiti—First day of clinic and I started off in pediatric triage. It was wild. I have never felt as much anxiety taking a blood pressure reading as I did taking the first one of the day.

Let me set the scene: it was really hot, me, another med student, and about 25 Haitian children and their parents crowded around us to watch what was about to be done to them.

I’ve worked in low-resource clinics before and triage always seemed like the most simple and often, least significant part of a person’s care. This is absolutely not the case in Haiti. Triage gives us an indication of distress, malnutrition, anemia, and dehydration. These factors are incredibly important here and are signs of the most prevalent causes of illness. With that said, I have also never been this pressed for time in taking these measurements, appropriately called “vitals.”

My colleagues and I had to develop…a dance, a perfect balance between time, rhythm and specificity. Like any dance worth learning, we tripped and fell for a while until we worked out a system that worked for everyone. In this case, that meant adding another person to our two-person team. By the end of the day, by making this a trio instead of a duet, we had figured out a rhythm that would ensure that our patients got the care they deserved.

This experience showed me that above all, global health demands flexibility, patience, and persistence.

Sameer Kapadia is a first year medical student at Emory Medical School. This is his first trip to Haiti with Project Medishare. Emory Medical School takes a yearly medical trip to Haiti every November.

By Jennifer Browning

Because Rome’s U.N. Food and Agriculture offices are unheated at night, U.N. Food Chief Jacques Diouf bundled up with a hat, scarf and overcoat over his pajamas and spent the night on a makeshift mattress in an effort to draw attention to the 1 billion chronically malnourished people before next week’s U.N. food summit. Diouf began the 24-hour strike at 8 p.m. Friday in the lobby FAO offices.

Diouf along with the FAO hopes to raise awareness about the plight of the world’s hungry as well as put pressure on world leaders to help combat malnutrition.

The Akamil Production Facility sits behind a new generator, the first piece of equipment to be installed for the facility. The Akamil Production Facility will manufacture and distribute Akamil, a mix of locally-grown products such as cereals (rice, corn, millet, wheat) and vegetables (beans) all blended into powder. The finished product will be fortified with a mix of important vitamins and minerals such as iron, zinc, and Vitamin A.

On the heels of the upcoming UN Food Summit, Project Medishare has been working toward specifically solving the malnutrition problem in Haiti with the construction of the Akamil Production Facility and Nutrition Complex. Construction of the facility began over two years ago and despite severe hurricanes the Akamil Production Facility is finally complete. Currently, equipment for the production facility is being installed. Project Medishare is expecting to conduct trial runs of the Akamil product in December.

The Akamil Production Facility will manufacture and distribute AKA1000, often referred to as Akamil, a mix of locally-grown products such as cereals (rice, corn, millet, wheat) and vegetables (beans) all blended into powder. It is a product of great nutritious value containing building and energetic nutrients, and is affordable to poor families. With the expert consultation of a nutritionist, the finished product will be fortified with a mix of important vitamins and minerals such as iron, zinc, and Vitamin A.

Having been introduced in the 1970s, Akamil is well-known and accepted in Haiti. AK-1000 is an energetic and constructive food with a satisfying nutritional value that fills the deficits currently observed among children, pregnant and breastfeeding women and TB/HIV patients in Haiti.

By Jennifer Browning

Don’t miss out on hearing Edwidge Danticat read at the REBUILD HAITI: MISSION POSSIBLE event. Today is the final day to RSVP.

The fundraiser will feature Haitian-American writer and 2009 recipient of the MacArthur “Genius Award,” Edwidge Danticat. Danticat is known for her contemporary work of Haitian heritage writing in English from her award-winning 1994 debut, Breath, Eyes, Memory and her equally lauded 1995 short story collection Krik? Krak!.

This will be the second year Coral Gables Congregational Church will sponsor REBUILD HAITI. The event will also include a silent auction, wine reception, entertainment, and Haitian crafts display. Monies raised will go directly toward Project Medishare, Haitian Education Leadership Project, the Lambi Fund of Haiti, and FAVACA.

Please come help REBUILD HAITI and support Project Medishare Friday, November 13; 7-10 p.m. at the Coral Gables Congregational Church. Please RSVP TODAY at (305)448-7421.

Can’t join us but still want to help us in our mission? Click here to make a tax deductible donation to Project Medishare.