8/5/2009 11:01:00 AM Bermudians' life-saving gifts for the orphans of poverty-stricken Haiti
Gift of love: Bermuda Sun reporter Helen cuddles baby Juno, who was a newborn when abandoned at Eden Garden by his teenage mother. He turns one later this month.
Generous: Bermudian Phillip Rego, the orphanage’s main sponsor, gives clothes donated by islanders to Haitian villagers.*Photos by Helen Jardine
How you can help Haiti’s orphans
• Mr. Rego's next trip to Haiti leaves on August 27 and returns on September 4. Flights cost a maximum of $700 and accommodation costs $300 to $400 for the week.
If you cannot fly out to help in person, you or your company can donate cash to improve facilities at Eden Garden. Here's what your money can buy:
• Solar panels to power the orphanage, school and medical clinic cost between $17,000 to $20,000.
• A water purification system with a holding tank of 600 gallons of clean water is $13,000.
• One teacher's salary for a year is $960.
• A school uniform costs $100.
• Shipping a container from Bermuda to Haiti costs $7,500 door-to-door.
• Sponsoring a child for year is $600. This includes housing, basic health care and education.
• Finishing the medical clinic will cost $3,000.
• Food for a year is $24,000.
• A transitional home is needed for the older boys. The land alone will probably cost between $30,000 to $60,000 and each of the six housing units will cost about $6,000 each.
• Hiring a doctor for a year costs $4,800.
• Paying the orphanage cook for a year is $360.
• Baby supplies cost $500 per month.
• Sponsoring the university fees of one of the older children costs from $1,000 to $5,500 a year.
• Installing four orphanage computers with Internet access will total $4,000.
Last month Bermuda Sun reporter Helen Jardine travelled to Haiti - the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere - to see how lives have been transformed by the generosity of Bermudians.
A team of local nurses, construction workers and students accompanied her to Eden Garden Orphanage, where more than $70,000 has been donated to house, clothe, feed and educate its 50 impoverished residents.
Most, if not all, of this money has been collected by Bermudian philanthropist Phillip Rego. He even sold his landscaping company Ideal Homes And Gardens so he could dedicate his life to helping Haiti's children.
Here, Helen reveals how she joined him on one of his regular week-long trips to the orphanage in the coastal region of Montrouis, taking vital clothes, medicine and love.
Three-year-old Steve was abandoned at Eden Garden Orphanage by his mother when he was just a few months old.
Today his mom lives only minutes away under a cocoa palm-thatched shack with a brood of other children, including a
newborn girl.
Looking into his big, sad eyes I questioned how a mother could give up one child only to keep the next.
Steve was one of the first children my group met at Eden Garden - but his story is just one of many heart-breaking tales.
As I got to know the name, face and personality of the orphanage's 50 children, I also learned their painful histories - childhoods of neglect and poverty rather than love and laughter.
Ismaylan, 12, was a child slave on the streets of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, until she was brought to Eden Garden. She had fallen ill after drinking Clorox and by the time she reached hospital, the doctors said it was literally oozing out of her pores and she was in serious respiratory distress.
They refused to treat her because the damage was too great and they did not want to spend their limited medication and oxygen on someone who, in their eyes, would not live.
Babies
Miraculously, Ismaylan survived and has lived at the orphanage ever since, with no further health complications.
She now helps look after the eight babies at Eden Garden, including gorgeous tots Reggie and Juno.
Juno, who will turn one this month, was left at the clinic by his teenage mother when he was a newborn. She then left for the Dominican Republic.
Little Reggie is also less than a year old and was abandoned as a newborn at Eden Garden by his father.
Eight-year old Yollnicka Joseph was left at the orphanage in 2007 after mother insisted she could no longer afford to keep her.
Yollnicka has two brothers and three sisters who still live with her mom, who makes a meagre living selling oranges, lemons and carrots in a nearby village. She has not visited her youngest daughter since she left her at Eden Garden.
But Yollnicka still wonders if she will one day.
Blind
Little Jean-Lee is blind but knows his way around the orphanage grounds better than most of the children, who all depend on him to guide the way when it gets dark at night.
Despite their tragic circumstances, these children are the lucky ones.
On my third day in Haiti, our group loaded up dozens of bags of rice and beans to take to families living in the surrounding hills. The Eden Garden children enthusiastically volunteered to come with us and balanced the black bags on their heads.
The deeper we got into the hills, the more desperate the poverty seemed.
The houses were just ramshackle huts, clothes were scarce and the children's bellies were puffed out from malnutrition. I could see why the orphanage's founder, Charles Le-Morzellec, said Haiti reminded him of the play Les Miserables when he first arrived more than a decade ago.
After we had given out the last bag of rice, we made our way back down the trails towards our bus, dodging human excrement as we went.
I saw one of the orphanage children take something from her pocket - a melted candy we had given her earlier - and give it to one of the pantless village children, who then ran off giggling and excited by the gift. Tears welled as we witnessed this child, one who has nothing, realize that there are others who have even less.
The next few days were dedicated to 'clinic duty' and nurse Beverley Brangman spent hours sanitizing and cleaning every inch of the medical unit next to the orphanage, plus prepare needles and sort out medication.
Emergency medical technicians Erin Lovell, 19, and Tiereny Gibbons, 21, took patients' blood pressure and medical information before they saw Dr. Francisco Noel.
A sign on the gate tells the residents of Montrouis when Dr. Noel is in but there is no need - word spreads and a mob descends on the tiny clinic.
Female infections, skin rashes, malaria, typhoid and iron deficiencies are most common and virtually every child left with amoxicillin, which we ran out of halfway through the last clinic day.
Disease
The ancient x-ray machine sits dusty and abandoned in a corner while the orphanage workers debate whether to spend $5,000 on having it repaired or $40,000 for a new one.
Dr. Noel talks enthusiastically about building an on-site laboratory that can test for HIV - an increasingly prevalent disease in Haiti - but local skeptics claim this is a pipe dream.
They reckon the clinic would be lucky to get enough money to build a lab to test for basic illnesses like urinary tract infections.
We all became experts at bottling medicine, recognizing rashes and infections and implementing the Haitian medical creed: "If you don't have the medication or time to get to the root of the problem, relieve the pain and symptoms with aspirin." Similarly, the Haitian dental creed goes like this: "If in doubt, take it out."
Mr. Rego hired a dentist for the day, who I watched pull the last two teeth from the mouth of a 70-year-old.
Bermudian contractor Pandora Moore was quick to decline when the dentist suggested an extraction as the solution to her persistent toothache.
After an exhausting day of clinic duty, Eden Garden founder Charles Le-Morzellec and I gave Dr. Noel a ride back to his hotel.
Sweating and nauseous, the doctor explained that he was suffering from malaria and that it was the time of day when the parasites came out of his liver and moved around his body, causing fever. As we rattled along the back roads of Montrouis - cars don't have a lengthy life span in Haiti - the doctor suddenly called for us to stop.
We pulled up next to a house and saw a body covered by a sheet being hauled into a rusty car.
Mourners explained that the man had died suddenly and that they were taking his body for burial.
Dr. Noel then explained to me that Haitians, in their haste to bury before the sun causes the body to fester, have been known to bury people alive, so he uncovered the dirty foot of the corpse and felt for a pulse.
Satisfied that the man was dead, we drove away.
One of the older boys at the orphanage, Kelly Guillaume, 23, hopes to become a doctor like Dr. Noel one day. He has been at the orphanage for nine years.
He said: "Before I came here I lived with my grandfather but when he died I came to the orphanage.
"My mother is alive and my father but they never took care of me.
"My mother wanted to kill me before I was born by drinking medicine but my grandfather said no.
Missionaries
"I decided I needed to learn English to get out of Haiti so I spoke to one of the missionaries who was here and he charged me $20 to teach me. I said 'no problem' because I knew I needed to learn English."
Kelly hopes someone will sponsor him to go to school in the U.S.
Boys like him are becoming more common at Eden Garden, revealed Mr. Rego.
They are no longer children but are unable to make a living in the outside world, so become stuck there, looking after the younger children and tending to the garden, where they grow pumpkin, potatoes, bananas, corn, spinach and papayas.
Mr. Rego hopes Bermudians will donate money towards a transition home for the older boys, where they can learn to be self-sufficient and tend to their own plots of land before selling their produce.
Mr. Rego sponsors the orphanage, clinic and school, which are all on the same grounds and run by Mr. Rego and Mr. Le-Morzellec.
Eighty per cent of all money donated goes to the orphanage, with theremaining 20 per cent being given to the surrounding community.
Bermuda has contributed $10,000 to the health clinic, $9,000 to a kitchen for the school and $17,000 for solar panels, plus thousands more for food, clothing and teachers' wages.
Mr. Rego hopes to return to Haiti in three weeks with enough money to complete all three of these projects.
As I flew over Bermuda, I admired her electrical lights and swimming pools glistening in the night and reflected on an old Haitian proverb, "Woch nan dio pa konnen doule woch nan soley".
Less fortunate
It means: "The rock in the water does not know the pain of the rock in the sun."
Now, some of us do. And hopefully will try to help those less fortunate than we are.
See Friday's Bermuda Sun for a double page photo spread of Bermuda Sun reporter Helen Jardine's time in Haiti. To contact Mr. Rego, you can email him at feedmylambsministry@ gmail.com or call him on 535-8934. You can also visit his website www.feedmylambministry.org or you can donate directly to the charity's Bank of Bermuda
