Life Spring, Inc.
Ten months ago I met Dr. Roberta S. Van Dine when she and her husband, Neil, passed through Cleveland on their way back home to Haiti. Roberta's husband is Founder and Director of Haiti Outreach, a construction and community development organization in Pignon, Haiti, a city in the Central Plateau on the road between Hinche and San Raphael. I visited the Van Dines last fall in Pignon.
In our initial conversation, Roberta outlined a vision she had for a medical practice that would treat people with respect, that would be sustained primarily by patients' fees, and that would be accessible to people in rural villages needing both preventive care and medical treatment. Now, ten months later, a nonprofit corporation named Life Spring is in formation. It has a website to show and tell the progress being made to realize Dr. Roberta's vision for how health and medical services should be provided by Haitian medical practitioners in response to the health needs in rural communities.
The Challenge
In a conference call conversation just a few days ago, Dr. Roberta repeated something she said nearly a year ago that challenges me. Here it is: There are trained doctors in Haiti just like her who want to practice medicine but whose efforts to set up a practice and make a living at it are undermined by the competition from providers of free medical services who drop in for short visits. Haitian doctors cannot compete with free services, so stabile clinics operated by Haitians to provide continuous, community-based, preventive care and basic medical treatment cannot grow and survive. We heard another version of this about mid-wives when we were in Hinche in 2013. Desperately needed midwife nurses were unemployed because local clinics could not afford to give them jobs.
Described this way, the development of health care in Haiti suffers from the same problem as food development. Large donations of free and government subsidized rice from the US puts Haitian rice farmers and marketing systems at a great disadvantage. When Haitian farmers, wholesalers and retailers have to compete on unfair terms, they can't develop their own country. In colonial times, European slave-masters in Haiti produced and exported to Europe and the US huge quantities of coffee, sugar, fruit and other products that resulted in very little benefit to Haitian people. Now that Haiti is an independent nation, Europeans and the US are "helping" Haiti meet urgent needs but doing so in a way that frequently leaves Haitians out of the process and subservient to the vision and will of those with resources to give.
In a blog posting last year I mentioned two challenging books -- When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert, and Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It) by Robert Lupton. These books echoed the criticism of my dear friend, Ralph Jean-mary, who lamented how often relief and development aid to Haiti ignored the Haitians who were supposed to benefit from it and its harmful impact on others.
But this challenge is not easy to resolve. When confronted by desperate poverty and curable disease, how can one say "No, first we must develop a Haitian means of relieving poverty and preventing disease." Aren't we supposed to help the poor and heal the sick? How can one justify charging poor people for food, clean water and health care needed so desperately by persons right in front of us?
I would suggest, as we proceed in building relationships in Haiti, that we keep the discussion of this question open along with our eyes and our minds. We would do well, I think, to make sure our discussion includes those in Haiti permanently engaged in the liberation of people there from the confinement of poverty and disease. We need the guidance and awareness of Haitians who are helping other Haitians to build community infrastructures locally in Haiti. We need to consider ourselves as their partners first and providers only as necessary.
What do you think?
