Story and photos submitted by Mary Forhan
I just returned from a trip to Haiti where I had the amazing experience of teaching summer school to 29 eager children in an orphanage in the small coastal town of Jeremie.
The Kiwanis Club Denver Tech Center generously donated $400 towards the teaching materials for the orphanage project. Jeremie, Haiti is worlds away from my home in Greenwood Village but children are the same all over the world, and these children, ages 4-17, were hungry to learn. Together with
Deborah Hage from Silverthorne, we spent two weeks teaching science, art, English, music, and math in the Haiti Children Project orphanage.
We were surprised to see that the children had never seen or put together a puzzle and had no picture books of their own. They loved the magnets, paints, and electricity experiments. We also worked with the older children to paint a world map on the school courtyard wall. It will serve as a reference for the over 400 children in the elementary and high school. These students currently have no library and little access to books and computers.
Haiti, with a population of about 9,000,000, lies 400 miles from the US and is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. The island is very rugged and mountainous with rocky coastlines and little flat arable land. Eighty percent of the population lies below the poverty line with an average annual per capita income of less than $450.
Hunger and malnutrition are widespread and 60% of the population lacks access to basic health care services. Haiti has less clean water than Ethiopia. This is evident from the constant stream of men, women, and children hauling water in buckets and jugs from public access points, open for limited hours daily. Education is important in Haiti. However, parents struggle to meet the minimal costs necessary to send their children to school. Sixty-five percent of the children will never finish elementary school and 80% will never attend high school.
The children in the Haiti Children Project orphanage are well cared for through donations, but many children in Haiti are not so fortunate. There are an estimated 163,000 AIDS orphans in the country.
The Haiti Children Project is in the process of building a new orphanage that will house 50 or more children with its own school so that it can expand to reach other children in need. For information on the projects in Jeremie, Haiti, and how you can help, visit
www.haitichildrenproject.com and
www.jeremierelief.com.
For information on the Kiwanis Club DTC which meets Tuesdays 7-8 am at Mimi's Café, 9155 Park Meadows Drive, in Lone Tree, contact President Frank Zieg,
fbzieg@aol.com or 303-796-1213.