Haiti Connections

Wooden carvings, bright paintings and other mementos from Haiti adorn Jeannine Coreil’s office walls and shelves. Today, she is just hoping to hear from her long-time research colleague in Port-Au-Prince, whom she hasn’t been able to contact since a catastrophic earthquake hit the impoverished Caribbean country Tuesday.

"She just emailed me Tuesday morning to ask how I was and wish me a happy New Year, and a few hours later the earthquake struck. I don’t even know if she’s alive,” said Coreil, professor of community and family health in the USF College of Public Health.

Coreil is one of several USF public health faculty members who travel to Haiti to teach or conduct research and community development. They continue to monitor news about the disaster – anxious for the safety of friends and colleagues there. Widespread damage has been reported, with many buildings near the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, including a hospital, collapsing due to poor structural design.

Jeannine Coreil, professor of community and family health (second from left), with some of the women she worked with in a Haitian filariasis support group.

Since 1996, Coreil has worked on several research projects in Leogane, Haiti, including cultural factors impacting the mosquito-borne parasitic disease lymphatic filariasis (commonly known as elephantiasis) and the social stigma of tuberculosis. The town is about 15 miles of west of Port-au-Prince, near the epicenter of the 7.0-magnitude earthquake.

"The news of the earthquake was devastating. It doesn’t seem fair for a country that has had to endure one disaster after another, from multiple hurricanes to political coups, now must recover from a major earthquake,” Coreil said. "I have strong ties with the people of Haiti, and I am very concerned about the impact on Leogane. The hospital there, Hopital Ste. Croix, serves a large population and includes a TB clinic.”

One of the major roads to Leogane runs along a fault line. If the earthquake destroyed the route, access to the area by vehicles would be cut off – delaying much needed food, supplies and medications, said Coreil. A consultant to the National Filariasis Elimination Program in Haiti, she went to Leogane this spring to help program leaders design a new intervention to increase community participation in mass administration of anti-filarial drugs. She worries that the preventive program would be dealt a serious setback if roads are impassible.

The epicenter of the earthquake struck about 10 miles southwest of Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti.

Wayne Westhoff, assistant professor of global health, just visited Port-au-Prince in November as part of a team conducting an assessment of Haiti’s disaster preparedness. He went as a consultant for the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) Humanitarian Assistance Program, meeting with officials from Haiti’s Ministry of Interior and Civil Defense as well as personnel from the United Nations Development Programme, USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster and U.S. embassy personnel.

"It’s an extremely poor country with few resources, not even a functioning emergency operations center,” said Westhoff, who has had extensive experience as a humanitarian relief coordinator to Caribbean Basin countries, including Haiti.

Emergency operations centers, or EOCs, manage responses to public health emergencies such as natural disasters, including coordinating communications and the logistics of deploying staff and equipment. SOUTHCOM was in the process of constructing three EOC facilities in Haiti, including one in Port-au-Prince, Westhoff said. "Who knows if the buildings are still standing?”

Westhoff had planned to return to Port-au-Prince in March with SOUTHCOM to conduct disaster management training. "Now, it depends on the situation there.”

Wayne Westhoff, professor of global health (center), with a group of students from the USF College of Public Health and University of Quisqueya in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Westhoff teaches courses for the College of Public Health’s online MPH in Global Disaster Management and Humanitarian Relief and its graduate certificate programs in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance. Ironically, for the last eight years, he has put students through a tabletop exercise featuring a disaster scenario in Haiti. The exercise has hundreds of thousands of Haitians migrating across border to refugee health camps in the Dominican Republic -- a fictional scenario capable of becoming harsh reality in the aftermath of Tuesday’s earthquake, Westhoff said.

Jaime Wilke Corvin, assistant professor of global health, has tried to contact by email several doctors and nurses she taught in Haiti – but so far no response.

"My heart goes out to the Haitian people. The absolute magnitude of the disaster is hard to comprehend,” Corvin said.

Since 2002, Corvin has worked with the U.S. military, International Red Cross and non-governmental organizations in Haiti and the Dominican Republic on issues relating to humanitarian assistance and disaster management. She first visited Hispanola when she was a USF doctoral student in public health investigating how organizations collaborate to respond to disasters.

In the aftermath of a devastating flash flood in Haiti in 2004, she collected data in Jimani, a border town in the Dominican that was one of two main thoroughfares to Haiti. The town was completely washed away by the flood at night, killing many people in their homes. There were not enough citizens trained as first responders to deliver emergency services, Corvin said, so small groups of neighbors banded together to help one another the best they could.

"I recall one story about a little girl who was washed away from her bed and later found clinging to her grandmother’s tombstone,” Corvin said. "The resilience of people who had everything wiped away and were still determined to rebuild was amazing.”

Coreil, Westhoff and Corvin hope that media attention on the earthquake’s destruction and human tragedy serves forces other countries to take a closer look at Haiti’s dire poverty and political turmoil, which have been aggravated repeatedly by natural disasters. "Maybe this will be a catalyst,” Coreil said.

"Rather than responding with a quick outpouring of relief and then leaving Haiti,” Corvin said, "I hope the whole international community moves from immediate disaster response to a long-term disaster relief effort focusing on rebuilding, prevention and sustainability.”

For those in the USF community wondering what they can do to help the earthquake victims in the aftermath of the disaster , Westhoff, who knows a thing or two about the logistics of humanitarian aid, strongly suggests: "Send money.” In particular, he adds, send money to reputable organizations, like the Red Cross and Partners in Health, which will quickly mobilize relief efforts inside Haiti.

"Unless you are part of a team of recovery or medical personnel, stay away,” Westhoff said. "Until logistical personnel begin a coordinated effort, do not try to send goods like food, clothing and tents,” Westhoff said. "It will only disrupt the situation worse by ending up on the black market, where it disrupts an already struggling economy… If you want to volunteer contact local organizations like the Red Cross to see how you can fit in.”