Grace Children's Hospital Open for Business!

Life continues to press on in Haiti. More information about the condition of Grace Children’s Hospital is coming in, and our friends there are working hard to establish order and reach out to the community.

The eye clinic building, which is still safe and usable, opened Friday morning as a surgery and treatment center, staffed by a team from Germany. A large tent has been set up in the open area behind the building with cots where post-op care will take place, and nurses from the German team are being mobilized to work alongside Haitian staff.

The usual outpatient clinics that operate at Grace Children’s Hospital should be back on schedule by Monday, although most will be held in the clinic courtyard instead of inside the buildings. Some of the buildings on the campus of the hospital will be temporarily reinforced by crews so that items can be safely retrieved.

ICC Haiti hopes to address the mental and physical needs of the community, as well as its staff. There is a plan to offer some counseling services to those who have suffered tremendous loss. Most of the staff has little to eat at home, and often no way to cook or heat food, let alone shop for more, since most stores are closed. ICC Haiti hopes to offer at least one meal a day to staff.

On Friday, the hospital senior staff will meet with community health workers who are part of  the TB/HIV program to try to begin establishing what happened to patients under treatment, and how to get them back on track with their treatment before they develop drug-resistant strains of the disease.

In short, Grace is trying to keep up the work that’s always been done there, to take on the new challenges posed by this tragedy, and to keep guiding the staff and the community back to healthy, both physically and emotionally. It is devastating, but our ICC Haiti staff members, like the Haitian people as a whole, have the spirit and the attitude that can, with your help, get through these times and make life even better for those whom we serve.