Helping Haiti heal

Since Jan. 12 when Port-au-Prince, Haiti suffered an earthquake at a 7.0 magnitude, many GCSU students and faculty have been personally responding – either trying to gather funds for medical needs and desperately needed water, or to raise awareness in the general public.

According to a university e-mail sent by Vice President for Student Affairs, Bruce Harshbarger, one student has already raised over $2,000 for the relief fund at the Exchange Bank, located at 250 Hancock St., through organizing student efforts.

In an effort arranged by junior Hillary Daniel, the GCSU Student Health Center is accepting sealed donations of Tylenol, Motrin, aspirin, vitamin C and multivitamins until February for a team of medical professionals from Georgia set to go to Haiti in March.

For some students, the earthquake has been an even more personal investment.

Katie Hanna, a junior special education major, knows intimately the fear of having a loved one in the midst of that disaster as her mom ventured down there as a volunteer nurse a week ago.

“I knew it was a traumatic event that happened in Haiti, but until my mother decided to go to there as a trauma nurse it did not become real to me and my brother,” Hanna said. “From hearing her stories of people and faces, I can connect personally with this disaster.”

Hanna and her brother, Will Hanna, who is a GCSU freshman pre-middle grades education major, continue to pray for their mother as the aftershocks continue.

“(My family) received a text message from her telling us she was okay after the 6.0 aftershock,” Katie Hanna said. “After that I was relieved that she was safe. Yet, there are still daily earthquakes and no one can go inside buildings.”

Unimaginable to many here on campus, Katie and Will Hanna feel how dire this situation is every day. On Jan. 23, Katie talked to her mom, and one story has particularly stuck with her.

“There was a patient yesterday that (my mom) found in the tent cities,” Katie Hanna said. “She could see a hole reaching all the way into his brain, and yet he was still alive after a week of no treatment.”

Like the Hannas, Hannah Callaway, a junior early grades education major, is also personally connected with the disaster in Haiti. Callaway went down to Haiti last summer for a mission trip in a city 40 minutes north of Port-au-Prince. While there, she worked with 15 others to run a vacation bible school for orphans. The group worked to deliver shoes to impoverished villages in the mountains and to pave a road so that trucks could deliver packages of food to people.

“Personally, my heart was heavy upon hearing about the earthquake. As soon as the news broke I just wanted to be there with the kids,” Callaway said. “I wished I didn’t have school so I could be with them.”

Callaway hopes to return to Haiti to continue mission work in the next year. She was encouraged by all the relief organizations and people giving aid, but hopes it does not fade out with time.

“We don’t need to move on and forget in the next couple months. The news will move on, but Haiti will still be suffering and need relief,” Callaway said. “I would love to see students from this university go down there and help (and) for us to donate money from here.”

Yves-Rose Saint-Dic, Director of Institutional Equity & Diversity at GCSU, agrees with Callaway that college students have a responsibility as the “future leaders of the world.”

“Since the recovery is going to take decades, the students can prepare themselves for how to enter that,” Saint-Dic said. “I would encourage a student to be culturally conscious and to form a partnership with Haiti, maybe a Haitian university for example.”

Gregg Kaufman, instructor and coordinator of civic engagement, feels Haiti needs to take measures to continue rebuilding.

“Haiti needs to take stock of the government leaders who survived this earthquake, then move forward with the help of the U.N. delegation,” Kauffman said. “As for GCSU students, a number want to go and help rebuild. Yet, right now medical teams are needed. Money is needed. Maybe students can organize tables to help raise money.”

These past two weeks since the initial earthquake has raised a lot of concern for Haiti on the GCSU campus. It is the hope of many that others will get involved in sending aid to Haiti and uniting to bring the country hope in the next few hard months.

Posted by Chelsea Thomas on Jan 29 2010. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry