Home > News & Events
Back to Haiti: Students and Alumni Leap Into Recovery
As the eyes and hearts of the world turned to Haiti after the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010, the disaster brought into sharp focus the work of many SIPA students and alumni. Six students, a member of the faculty and two staff from The Earth Institute were in Port-au-Prince when the earthquake struck. The story of their work before the earthquake, the providence of their survival, and their humanitarian response in the aftermath were a testament to the ideals and values of the entire SIPA community. Today, as the people of Haiti continue to struggle six months after the earthquake, nearly 20 SIPA students and alumni are there for the summer or longer, helping to provide basic necessities like access to medical care and clean water.
Megan Rapp (MIA Candidate ’11),
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
Rapp was one of the six SIPA students caught in Port-au-Prince when the earthquake struck. This summer, she is working as a research assistant for the United Nations Environment Programme in Port-au-Prince.
Right: Megan Rapp and Gerald Stang (MIA '10) tend to young victims after the earthquake.
Megan Rapp recounts her reunion with a young man for whom she cared during the hours after the earthquake.
"As I drove up to the street corner where we were meeting, my heart raced with nerves and emotions. When I saw James, his little mother and older brother, I leapt out of the car. We hugged and our eyes were filled with tears. His mother could not stop hugging and kissing me. His brother kept saying thank you and that I was an angel. James was quiet, polite, and incredibly grateful. We exchanged stories and recounted the nightmare of January 12 and the events that followed."
Read her story here.
Wendy Carlson (MIA/MS Social Work Candidate ’11),
Restavek Freedom Foundation
Carlson is a research and development specialist with the Restavek Freedom Foundation in Port-au-Prince. She is writing policies and procedures for a transitional house for girls ages 12 to 16, most of whom are restaveks, or child domestic servants. The house is scheduled to open in September 2010.
Read her story here.
Emmett Fitzgerald (MIA ’09),
American Refugee Committee
Fitzgerald works as camp manager for the American Refugee Committee in a camp in Port-au-Prince. The camp, Terrain Acra, was an unused industrial wasteland beside a factory. When the earthquake struck, people ran from the densely packed surrounding houses and set up temporary shelter. Six months later, there are 15,000 people under plastic roofs and another 10,000 in the surrounding area who use the camp services.
Fitzgerald’s role as camp manager is to coordinate with all the international agencies who work in the camp and to act as a bridge between the international aid community and the camp community who are represented by a men and women's committee. He also coordinates all the American Refugee Committee interventions in camp: a health clinic; an informal school for 700 kids; a women's training and Gender Based Violence (GBV) team; Water, Sanitation and Hygeinea (WASH) teams; a Cash for Work team and a shelter team who are looking at how we can build simple wood and tin roof shelters which will last 3 to 5 years.
Duquesne Fednard (MIA ’08),
D&E Enterprises
Fednard is the founder and CEO of D&E Green Enterprises, an organization that focuses on finding creative ways to locally create sustainable economic, environmental and health solutions to benefit people in the developing countries. One of the first projects in Haiti is the introduction of more efficient cooking stoves to the local market. His goal is to provide a high-quality, affordable alternative stoves to replace inefficient traditional metal charcoal burners.
Marcy Hersh (MIA ’09),
United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM)
Hersh is a program officer at UNIFEM, focusing on gender mainstreaming the humanitarian response and recovery from the earthquake, along with building the capacity of grassroots women’s organizations in gender-based violence prevention and response.
Christopher Bodingham (MIA Candidate ’11),
J/P Haitian Relief Organization
Bodingham is an intern with J/P Haitian Relief Organization, an American NGO which provides medical and camp management services to 55,000 displaced people at Petionville Club Camp. His responsibilities include assisting in the coordination of a rubble removal project in Delmas 32, distributing tarps in anticipation of the rainy season, and representing J/P HRO at United Nations cluster meetings.
Peter Orr (MIA ’09),
Médecins Sans Frontières France
Orr has been alternating between deputy head of mission and acting head of mission for Médecins Sans Frontières France the last three months. Their main activity is running a big field, mostly surgery-focused hospital in Delmas, but his role is relational and analytical as opposed to medical.
Lillian Kastner (MIA ’06),
UNICEF Haiti
Kastner is an information officer for the education cluster with UNICEF Haiti. She is on extended mission from UNICEF Rwanda country office where she is a social policy specialist.
Stephanie Kleschnitzki (MIA ’03),
UNICEF Haiti
Kleschnitzki is a reports and contributions manager for UNICEF Haiti.
Brian Hoyer (MIA/MPH ’10),
AmeriCares
Hoyer has been working as an emergency response manager in Port-au-Prince for AmeriCares since January 16. His work focuses on coordinating and monitoring material relief for approximately 70 health care providers. Subsequently, for the past several months his duties have been to manage AmeriCares overall response in the country and establish a branch office in Haiti to carry out health programs during the next five years. He also works to establish partnerships with local health organizations and international NGOs to find the use of AmeriCares resources to improve health systems. These programs include malaria control, diabetes and cardiology care, community health programs, hospital relocation, patient transfer from hospitals to a new home, and more.
Alex Fischer (Earth Institute),
Haiti Regeneration Initiative
Fischer has been working with the Haiti Regeneration Initiative (HRI) since January 2009 as the project manager for The Earth Institute research and design team. The HRI is a platform for collaborative and strategic development initiatives to catalyze innovative efforts to restore the ecosystem and livelihood stability using a ridge-to-reef watershed approach. The model offers a holistic, cross-sectoral, and integrated approach to address key dimensions of the extreme poverty and increasing vulnerabilities—income, poverty, hunger, disease, gender inequalities, lack of education and shelter, and environmental vulnerability—anchored in science and evidence-based approach driven by community strategies. The initial work is being conducted in the Southern peninsula and Port-a-Piment watershed.
Joan VanWassenhove (MIA/MPH ’09),
Partners In Health
VanWassenhove is associate coordinator of nutrition for Partners In Health in Haiti, helping the local team in the production and delivery of a local-made ready to use therapeutic food used in the treatment of severe acute malnutrition. In addition she is responsible for the monitoring and evaluation of the nutrition and agriculture programs operating in the Central Plateau and Artibonite regions, as well as in four settlement camps in Port-au-Prince.
Allison Howard (MIA ’07),
Containers to Clinics
Howard travels to Port-au-Prince each month as director of operations for Containers to Clinics (C2C), an NGO that retrofits industrial shipping containers into maternal and child health clinics. The C2C prototype clinic operates at Grace Children’s Hospital (off of Delmas 31) in collaboration with AmeriCares and Management Sciences for Health.
Rachel Mikanagu (MIA ’91), InterAction
Elizabeth Jennings (MIA/MPH ’09)
Gabrielle Apollon (MIA ’10), Campus Crusade for Christ
Dorothy Louis (MIA Candidate ’11)
07/30/2010