Haiti

Clinique de la Sante Familiale

Clinique de la Sante Familiale in Fonds des Blancs, Haiti.

In a country with the highest infant mortality rate in the hemisphere and a maternal death rate of 5/1000, where AIDS is an epidemic and malnutrition is the rule, the Clinic in Fonds des Blanc is a ray of hope on an otherwise bleak horizon. SAA support started for this clinic in 1997. Ms Sarah Ann Hackett, a retired nurse started the clinic in 1995 and with ongoing support from organizations like ours and individual donations she has kept it going.  In a recent letter to us, Sarah reports that everyone knows about the clinic now and even the Ministry of Health has started to compliment them on their success.

While general healthcare, public health education and crisis treatment is offered at the clinic, the backbone of care is family planning. The clinic provides birth control pills, Depoprovera injections, Norplant implantations for long term birth control, condoms, tubal ligations, vasectomies and education. The clinic is staffed six days a week by a nurse practitioner and a midwife. On Sundays they have mobile clinics in 6 outlying villages.

The family planning clinic is just one of the many projects that Sarah helped develop.  There is a women’s sewing cooperative, a tool bank where men and women can rent tools to cultivate their land and a seed bank where members can borrow seeds for crops and pay back the bank  in new seed at the harvest.

St. Anthony’s contributed $7500 to Haiti Projects in 2009, part of which was used to relocate their new Clinique de la Sante Familiale to the site in Fond des Blancs.